Apprehended

by Jan Burke

  I didn’t bother to hide my shock.

  “She’s illegitimate,” he said, enjoying my reaction.

  “Eldon, you are such a little shit! I’ll bet she asked you to keep it confidential.”

  “Of course she did! Can you blame me for wanting to talk to someone about it?”

  “If someone asks you to keep a confidence, you keep it.”

  He shrugged. “I’m human. Besides, I thought you might already know.”

  “Why?”

  “You were the one who introduced us.”

  “That is such a lie. You saw a pretty girl and made a beeline for the table. For the record, yesterday at lunch was the first time I’d met her.” I paused. “I’ve never liked that phrase, ‘illegitimate child.’ Children aren’t to blame for what their parents do.”

  Eldon considered this for a moment, then said, “Never thought of it that way. So—I guess he doesn’t openly acknowledge her, but he was happy she was moving back here. Tough for her really, even with the money. Like he’s ashamed of her.”

  “He’s got to be seventy years old, right? That generation—his reputation in the community—he’s probably more ashamed of himself than of her. At least he’s helping her out.”

  “Yeah. You suppose he’s going to leave all his bread to her?”

  “Eldon, listen to me. You’ve broken her confidence by telling me. Fine, you’re human. Do not tell anyone else. Not anyone. It’s unkind to her and unkind to him. You’ll only embarrass her. Besides, do you want every creep who wants to marry money going after her?”

  He stood. “No way I want to increase the competition.”

  It belatedly occurred to me, as he walked off whistling, that he was probably one of those creeps.

  • • •

  Competition or no competition, it didn’t take long to see that Eldon hadn’t been able to keep his big yap shut. Donna had shown a strong preference for Mark’s company, so maybe Eldon decided to blab by way of sour grapes.

  Before the week was over, there was always a crowd of men around her, and any number of women ready to pick up the leftovers. It wasn’t just the guys who were broke who spent time with her. Families of the wealthy began to invite her to their parties, willing to overlook the sins of the father if the father was going to make her his heir.

  As for the father in question, no one was too surprised to learn that the day after Donna’s visit to his home, Homer Langworthy left town, reputedly for a long voyage on a cruise ship. Or an African safari. Or a European tour. The stories varied, but the bottom line was the same: Homer was unavailable to confirm or deny rumors.

  She ate at the best restaurants, sat in the best seats at any concert or play, and was offered extravagant gifts that she very properly refused, a fact which only substantiated, in some minds, that she was an heiress.

  She received no fewer than three offers of marriage within her first three weeks on campus. She graciously declined. Until Mark Kesterson asked.

  • • •

  I was sitting in the offices of the campus newspaper after everyone else had gone home, chewing on a pencil, when an ex-pirate who was dear to me walked in.

  The pirate tale was one of the many explanations Jack Corrigan, retired star reporter for the Las Piernas News Express, now journalism professor extraordinaire, offered to anyone bold or rude enough to ask him how he lost his eye. I never heard the same story twice whenever I was around to hear him respond to the inquisitive. I never asked him; I figured he’d tell me if he wanted me to know.

  He cocked his head, sat down near me, and lit up a cigarette.

  “Now, what has Ms. Kelly staying here late, I wonder?”

  “Well, we both know you’re trying to sneak in extra cigarettes before you go home.”

  “Not sneak, exactly. Just trying to be supportive of Helen. She quit ten years ago, but I don’t like to tempt her to go back to it. Nice evasion, by the way.”

  His wife, Helen Corrigan, another veteran reporter, only slightly edged out her husband as my favorite professor. Neither one of them went easy on their students. I loved them for it.

  But just then, I wasn’t sure I wanted to participate in the Donna Vynes rumor mill. Still . . .

  He waited. I wasn’t the first person to break under that patient silence of his. I would have loved to learn how he managed to keep a question mark in the air over such long stretches of quiet.

  “It’s like this,” I said, and told him the story of Donna Vynes.

  He raised his brows a couple of times, but didn’t interrupt the telling. By the time I had finished, he was on his second cigarette.

  “I’ve spent some time with Donna,” I said, “and she seems like a sweet person. None of it is really my business, and they seem to be in love, so I should probably adhere to Lydia’s Ax Murderer Rule.”

  “Ax murderers have rules?”

  “No, Lydia has some good rules. The Ax Murderer Rule is this: if your friend is in love with someone, and that someone is an ax murderer, and you have photographs to prove it, you can try to gently talk your friend out of staying in the relationship. But only if all three conditions are met.”

  He laughed. “Smart Lydia.”

  “It’s nice in theory, but Mark and I have been friends since high school, and I don’t want to see him hurt.”

  “Why should this relationship hurt him?”

  “Something about all of this—just doesn’t seem right. Eldon is a gossip and I wouldn’t trust him to keep a secret, but he’s not in the habit of making up whoppers. All the same, I think the whole ‘tripped as she got into the car’ business was a little hokey.”

  “What else?”

  “Married at sixteen, veteran’s widow? Farm girl whose mother died not long ago, and she dresses better than Alicia? I don’t know. But you can’t be suspicious of people based on their clothing.”

  “Sure you can. You probably should not judge someone’s character by what they wear, but that’s not what I hear you saying. Your instincts are telling you something’s not right. So you think over things that don’t fit well with whatever message a person is trying to send to you and others—those things that seem incongruous can be clothing, the way a person carries himself, how they talk, and so on. That doesn’t mean whatever hypothesis you’ve dreamed up about him or her is right, or that they’ve done something wrong—just that you need to figure out what’s really going on.”

  “That’s why I’m in here chewing on pencils.”

  He took a drag, exhaled slowly. “I have an assignment for you.”

  I sat up straighter. “A story?”

  “Not exactly. A research assignment.”

  “Oh.”

  He laughed. “Spare me these transports!”

  “Sorry. I actually do like research. I’m just in a funk.”

  “This assignment will help with that. It may or may not help you decide what to do, but it will wear off some of that energy more productively, and at the very least spare the newsroom the destruction of all its pencils.”

  • • •

  The assignment was to go to the library and find a copy of The History and Story of the Doings of the Famous Mrs. Cassie L. Chadwick. Then I was to look through the New York Times microfilm collection for stories about her. He gave me a hint and said that early March 1905 would be a good place to start.

  “You’ve assigned this before?”

  “Oh yes. I’ll tell you why later. But you should find them especially interesting, I think. Unfortunately, my requests to buy copies of microfilm for The Cleveland Plain Dealer for those years have gone unheeded.”

  “Cleveland!”

  He smiled and put out his cigarette, then said, “Happy hunting,” and left.

  • • •

  I made sure we were alone. That was actually the hardest part. A
fter realizing that no restaurant in the city would be free of people who might know Donna, I ended up inviting her over for dinner on a night when I knew Lydia had an evening class. Until two months earlier, Lydia and I had shared the place with another roommate, but she had married over the summer. We had been putting off finding another renter, but tonight I was glad for the lack of a potential eavesdropper, enjoying the emptiness and quiet that usually had me thinking that I was going to have to move back home again.

  Donna and I made small talk until after I cleared the dishes. She seemed a little down. All the same, she was an easy person to talk to. I was fighting some very cynical thinking about that as I pulled out some photocopies I had made.

  I had thought of going all Perry Mason on her ass, cross-examining her until she wept and admitted her crimes. I couldn’t do it. The truth is, I liked her.

  “I had a special assignment given to me this week,” I said. “Do you know who Jack Corrigan is?”

  She shook her head. My tone must have hardened, or my look, or—somehow I tipped her off that the nature of our little dinner party was about to change.

  “Well, I suppose that doesn’t matter. I have a feeling that you do know who Cassie Chadwick was.”

  She, who blushed so easily, turned pale. She looked at me with such desperation that, for a full minute, I wasn’t sure if she was going to cry, run away, or punch me. But she just nodded yes and looked down at her hands.

  “If she hadn’t harmed so many people,” I said, “I could almost admire her cunning, not to mention her nerve. After running a number of other scams, she marries a naive doctor from Cleveland, just happens to convince him that they should visit New York at the same time a man from home is there—a man who is a high-society gossip in Cleveland. She asks that man to give her a carriage ride, and has him wait for her outside the home of Andrew Carnegie, a wealthy, confirmed bachelor. She goes into the house, comes out thirty minutes later, and—this part really interested me—trips as she’s getting into the carriage. Drops a promissory note for two million dollars—a note that appears to be signed by Andrew Carnegie, whom she blushingly claims is her father.”

  She stayed silent.

  “Too bad promissory notes aren’t what they used to be. Planning to borrow millions based on phony documents, and cause a bank or two to fail?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.” I let the silence stretch for a time, then said, “Who told you about Cassie Chadwick?”

  “Aunt Lou, my great aunt. She grew up hearing stories about her. Aunt Lou claimed to ‘admire her brass’ as she put it. Aunt Lou doesn’t think women ever get a fair shake in this world.”

  “Is Donna Vynes your real name?”

  “My married name, yes.” She was tracing patterns on the tablecloth with one of her perfect fingers, still not making eye contact.

  “So you’re really a war widow?”

  The finger stopped moving. She looked up at me. “Oh yes. And my mother is dead. John, my husband, sent home all of his pay—a little over a hundred and fifty dollars a month at first. It was up to about four hundred when he was killed. Just about everything he saved for us got spent on my mother’s medical needs. But John also bought some life insurance through the service. So I had ten thousand from that.”

  “That’s where the seven thousand comes from?”

  “Yes.” She sighed. “There was this neighbor of Aunt Lou’s in Cleveland. Her daughter was about my age. Despite all my other faults, I’m not like Eldon, so I won’t name her, if you don’t mind. Anyway, at the end of last semester, she dropped out of school here. Looking back on it now, I think she was just really homesick.

  “But what she told me was . . . well, once we got to know each other, she said the reason she left was because Eldon Naff slept with her and then told the world about it. She said she had been working as an assistant for Mr. Langworthy, or rather to someone on his staff. She said it was Mr. Langworthy who fired her, mostly based on Eldon’s gossip. I don’t know if that’s true, but I learned a lot about Mr. Langworthy from her. Including the fact that in early September, he was going on a Mediterranean cruise.

  “And I couldn’t help thinking about Mr. Carnegie and Mrs. Chadwick. Especially because I never knew my dad. My mother always said my father died while she was pregnant with me, but I think she was lying. Aunt Lou all but confirmed that my parents weren’t married. So I am illegitimate, just not the child of a rich man.”

  After a long silence, she said, “God, I don’t know how you did it, but I’m glad you figured it out. It’s a relief.”

  “I’m sure it is. So you were thinking about Andrew Carnegie and Cassie Chadwick—”

  “Yes. And I took a gamble. Bought some clothes and a bus ticket and went west. I just couldn’t be happy in Cleveland, living with Aunt Lou, hearing about this beautiful place from a neighbor girl who had no sense at all. There are some nice men in Cleveland, but I had too many bad memories associated with it, and going back to our small town—well, let’s just say that wasn’t an option. I couldn’t stand being under the microscope as John Vynes’s widow, with his mama harping on how it was my fault he’d been killed—which is just nonsense and the meanest lie, because I did not want him to go off to war! How we argued—” She halted, tears welling up in her eyes. She quickly brushed them away.

  “So I applied to the college and got accepted,” she went on, forcing a smile. “You know the rest.”

  “Not exactly. What the hell did you expect would happen when Langworthy returned?”

  “I hoped for two things. I hoped that by then I’d have met some nice college guy who would marry me. The other was I’d get a chance to pay Eldon back a little. He’s the only person to whom I ever told that story about Mr. Langworthy. No one else has asked me directly if I am his daughter. If they had, I was going to deny it, and swear to high heaven that I didn’t have any seven thousand dollars, and that he made it all up.”

  I shook my head. “He’s a jerk, and he gossips, but he’s not known for outright lying about his stories. People would probably be more likely to believe him than you.”

  “Yes, I figured that out. I also figured a few other things out, but . . .” She swallowed hard, took a halting breath and said, “Anyway, I was hoping Mr. Langworthy’s staff would back me up.”

  “What actually went on inside the Langworthy residence that day?”

  “Oh, nothing, really. I asked to speak to the person my neighbor reported to, and told her that she thought the world of the Langworthy staff and had asked me to stop by and wish them well. Naturally, they asked about her and how she was doing, and even said that Mr. Langworthy regretted firing her. Guess it has cost him some sleepless nights. They asked me to contact her to see if she’d come back, and I did, but she said she’s happier where she is.”

  “You know what, I don’t give a damn about any of that. I don’t even give a shit about all those stupid male gold diggers who were trying to get into your panties over the last few weeks. There are only two people I’m really concerned about here. God knows how Mr. Langworthy is going to react when he learns what’s happened to his reputation. So that’s one. But—”

  “Mark,” she said, looking forlorn. “I know you have no reason to believe a word I say, but it’s breaking my heart twice. I can’t stand hurting him, but I’ve realized for some time now that I made a bigger trap for myself than the one I built for Eldon. I hated hurting Mark.” This time, the tears flowed unchecked.

  I ignored them—her use of the past tense was another matter. “What the hell have you done now?”

  She looked surprised at my anger. “Didn’t he tell you? I thought you’d be the first person he called. I gave his ring back to him. I couldn’t live with myself if we married, knowing I’d tricked him into it.”

  “So what’s the plan now, Mrs. Chadwick?”

  “Don’
t call me that!”

  “What’s the plan? Do you go back to Ohio with your tail between your legs? Join a nunnery? Marry someone you don’t love in some act of martyrdom?”

  She looked stunned. “I thought—I thought you’d understand.”

  “Here’s an alternative you may not have considered: tell Mark the truth.”

  “I have thought of that. Of course I have. But how could he ever trust me again?”

  “If you ask me, whatever time and effort you spend earning that trust is bound to be a better penance than hurting him for the sake of your fear and guilt.”

  She looked down at the tablecloth again. Her hands were shaking, but she said, “I’ll do it.”

  “Good. The whole truth, right?”

  “Yes.”

  I brought her a box of Kleenex and called Mark.

  “Hi, Irene,” he said. He sounded awful. “I was just thinking of calling you.”

  “Tell you what, why don’t you come over instead?”

  “I don’t think I’d be good company. Donna gave me my ring back.” Utterly crushed. The boy had it bad.

  “Bring the ring over. Maybe you can put it back on her. But my unsolicited advice is that the two of you should take things a little slower.”

  “She’s there?” he said, with about a thousand volts more energy than I had heard in his voice a moment before.

  “Yes. Come over; I’ll see to it that you aren’t disturbed. But you have to be out of here by noon.”

  “Irene . . . I . . . I don’t know what you said to her, but—”

  “Just get over here.”

  “On my way.”

  Next I called Lydia’s mom.

  • • •

  I met Lydia on the front steps with an overnight bag already packed for her. “Come on, we’re spending the night at your mom’s place.”

  “What?”

  “An old-fashioned slumber party.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m exhausted.”

  “I’ll tell you all about it on the way over to your mom’s. I’d take you to Kellyville, but—”