June

by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

  Afterward, he rested his fingers on the notch at her neck and grinned.

  “I’m coming with you to Los Angeles,” she whispered.

  He kissed her deeply, and she felt him harden against her all over again. But she needed to say what she needed to say.

  She put her hand on his chest. “I’m your only girl. From now on, Jack, I’m the only one for you.”

  “Adelbert,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Call me Adelbert. That’s my name.” His real, honest name—not pretty, just him.

  She kissed him and laughed and he frowned and then they laughed together. Was this really her life? Lying naked with this movie star with a secret name? Was he really going to be hers? But she had to make him promise, before she got carried away. “Adelbert, then. I mean it. No more Diane.”

  He lifted his hand in a scout’s honor. Then he lowered himself over her and entered her again. This time, she understood better how the act itself could be a pleasure beyond compare.

  They lay together for a good while after that. “I can’t wait to show you this country,” he said. “We’ll drive across the whole thing, and I’ll make love to you in every state of the union.”

  “I’m excited about airplanes too.”

  He kissed her. “We’ll take airplanes everywhere—Paris, Cairo, Florence.”

  “All right then,” she said, “but first I suppose we’ve got to get out of St. Jude.”

  They played like that for a while, until they were both tired out and June supposed Lindie, spying through the window, now knew all the gory details of the marriage bed. June wanted to stay here forever, but there were bags to pack, and good-byes to say, and only a few hours left in the night.

  “Eight a.m.,” Jack concurred, reluctantly drawing on his pants. “In front of Two Oaks. If I’m taking you away, I want your mother to hear it from the horse’s mouth. We’re doing this right, June.”

  A dull gnawing came at the mention of her mother, but June’s conviction was strong. She was going to go with this man who made her feel like no one had. She was going to leave this small world behind.

  He dressed. He kissed her. He had to pack. Could he drive her? No, Lindie was waiting; June wanted to break the news to her herself. He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her again. He made for the door, then came back, grinning, and kissed her. He forgot his hat, and came back and got it, and kissed her, and it fell on the bed and he left it there, until he made for the door again and then had to come back and kiss her all over again. It went on like that until she pushed him away, reminding him she’d be his, in his car, in only a few hours’ time. His eyes trailed around the little Idlewyld room, and she knew he had loved that humble place for bringing them together, and that endeared him to her even more. Back at the door, he gestured toward the painting. “Can I?” he asked. And she nodded and giggled, embarrassed, emboldened, amazed to still be naked on the bed and feel a movie star’s eyes all over her. He went to the painting and lifted it, and came back and kissed her, and went out into the night.

  June heard Jack’s footsteps across the porch, the jaunt of his gait, his pleasure, and she felt the warmth that was still between her legs and laughed to herself in the swoony light.

  Ah well, to home then. She had a suitcase to pack. Now that she had decided to go it seemed so obvious. She supposed she should tell Artie to his face, but a letter would have to suffice. He was a kind man, small in his ambitions, but good enough to make a life with; she hoped she wouldn’t be his only chance.

  And then there were footsteps again, back across the porch. Jack’s? Lindie’s? She felt guilty for making Lindie wait outside for so long, and for the fact that she was abandoning her. Oh well, June supposed everyone had to grow up sometime, and this would begin a whole new chapter; Lindie would visit her in Los Angeles. There were adventures to be had.

  The door opened. June turned with a bawdy smile, ready to tease Jack for wanting more again so soon. Oh, to be that irresistible. She supposed she’d have to get used to it.

  But it was Diane DeSoto.

  “Get dressed.”

  Outside, Lindie was crouched over Clyde’s lifeless body, but inside Idlewyld, only a few feet away, a thin line of disgust had formed between Diane’s eyebrows. She stepped into the little shack, but just that—only a step. Her eyes skimmed over every surface touched by the kerosene glow. Her mouth formed a knot as June pulled the sheet around herself, skin scarlet, stricken with disgrace.

  “It’s quite simple,” Diane began, as though they were midconversation. “Jack will arrive to pick you up tomorrow morning, and you will not come downstairs. When he rings, you will tell your mother you are ill. You will draw your curtains and stay in bed. He will wait outside for you but you will not come down. Eventually, he will leave. He will find his way back to Los Angeles and you will not stop him.”

  At the first sight of Diane, June had let herself believe the woman had no idea Jack had just been there, couldn’t possibly know what he’d been doing with, and to, June. Of course, now June knew that was folly; Diane had likely heard—and maybe even seen—every moment of the most private thing June had ever done. Politely playing along would not stand. June opened her mouth to protest, moving toward the movie star, but Diane cut her off.

  “Oh I see!” Diane sounded delighted. “You were too distracted just now to notice any of what happened outside.” She leaned forward with a sharp, conspiratorial smile, as though they were confidantes. “It can be difficult to keep one’s eyes and ears open when a man is inside of you. But let me give you a piece of advice: I’ve learned it’s one of the best times to pay attention. One discovers all sorts of wonderful tidbits.” She hooked her finger and wiggled it to draw June closer.

  June stood her ground.

  Diane tutted. “Don’t you want to see? It certainly does change just about everything.” She sounded practically delighted. June gripped the sheet tighter across her chest as she watched Diane hold the door open to the night. A white moth flapped into the room.

  June didn’t want to follow Diane, not at all, but a part of her believed that if she acquiesced, Diane would leave her be. All she wanted was to relish the feeling she’d had with Jack. The future remained delicious. If she did what Diane wanted, she’d be rid of her. So June followed the movie star out into the night, which was surprisingly alive. Frogs and crickets, and something splashing giddily in the lake. Only a few moments before, June had forgotten there was a world beyond these four walls.

  Diane led her around to the side of the house. It was bright when they first stepped out, but the moon was quickly obscured as they made their way into the brush beside the small building. June became aware of someone else’s breath, ragged and just below her. Diane was somewhere to her left and fiddling with a zipper. Then a small circle of light, pointed at the ground, revealed two people—one lying, the other crouched over him. The flashlight showed Lindie to June.

  —

  June never told Lindie about the moment when she realized Lindie was the one making that animal sound, and that the person lying below her was missing a large bit of his head. June recognized the parts of Clyde that weren’t his face: his pressed shirt, his meaty hands, and the pistol clutched in one of them. By the time she got Lindie into the shack, and she could see that the girl was covered in blood, that she smelled of piss and had brains on her hands, that she was shaking and nearly catatonic, June knew that Clyde Danvers was really, truly dead, and that Lindie had killed him.

  “Don’t let her touch anything,” their guide instructed. Diane was a pale vision, out of place in that messy, warm room. But the girls needed her; she was the adult. It didn’t occur to them until much later that Diane had watched Clyde attack Lindie, then seen Lindie murder him, all the while spying on Jack and June together, thrilling with her good fortune as she honed a plan to use it all to her own advantage.

  June wrapped the top sheet around Lindie. She checked her face for injuries, pres
sed her limbs for broken bones.

  “Girls,” Diane said, “we haven’t much time before daylight.”

  June put her arm around Lindie. They turned to Diane like flowers toward the sun.

  “We have two choices,” Diane said calmly. “The first has me taking you both out for a midnight drive. We’ve grown close over the course of Erie Canal’s filming. You wanted to take me back to all my favorite spots, for old times’ sake. We lost track of time, I took you home, you snuck up through your windows, and that’s that.” She dusted off her hands. “That’s the story I will tell the police when this body is discovered. I’ll call the sheriff myself and say how dreadfully sorry I am to hear this horrible news, and tell him all about my lovely night with both of you. So sad how even the most perfect evening can be marred by tragedy.”

  June pursed her lips as though the story was ridiculous. “Why wouldn’t we just say we were asleep in our beds?”

  “Because you’ll need an alibi.” Diane’s words turned vituperative. “Your parents know you sneak out. You need something airtight, a reason you snuck out tonight. I’m airtight. They’ll believe anything I say.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” June asked.

  “The police, dear girl. The police, who will be very interested to discover Clyde Danvers lying dead only ten feet from this little love nest you’ve made for yourself.” She took stock of it, inch by inch, with her steady gaze. “We’ll need to put this back the way you found it.” But the girls stayed frozen in their spots. “Because if we don’t, dear girls, what do you think will happen?” She paused, but not long enough for them to answer. “I will go to the police and tell them I saw her”—and here she pointed toward Lindie with a shaking finger—“take a rock to that man’s head in cold blood. That is the truth. I like to tell the truth.”

  Lindie was making a terrible sound. June shushed her with her hot breath. One of them was crying.

  June turned to Diane. “What do we have to do?”

  “Why, exactly what I said at the beginning! You let Jack go. You just let him go. You never tell him why. You never see him again.”

  Lindie wanted to tell June she shouldn’t agree. Lindie hadn’t worked so hard to just see it all dismantled by Diane. But Lindie hardly knew how to say her own name, so she stood there helplessly inside her humming, numb mind.

  They set her in the corner. June dressed under the carapace of the sheet, while Diane piled Jack’s gifts to June on one side of the room. They filled milk crates with art supplies and then the books. Diane went back into the night and returned, twenty minutes later, with the car that Thomas had hidden somewhere off the road. How she knew where to find it, how the keys were waiting inside, was a question that puzzled them. But they accepted their luck because they needed it.

  They loaded up the car and tied Lindie’s Schwinn on top. Diane disappeared around the house, toward where Clyde’s body lay. When she returned, her face was red and her breath fast, but she said nothing. She had the bag of ledgers and Clyde’s gun. They got into the car and backed up the gravel drive to the main road. The girls kept their eyes on dark, lonely Idlewyld until it vanished into the night.

  The drive back to St. Jude seemed to last forever. They stopped once so that Diane could go into the woods and toss the gun off into the night. The moon had set. Morning stirred.

  Diane pulled the car up a few blocks away from Two Oaks’s property, in front of the Fishpaws’, because they were old and deaf and sure to be asleep. She turned to look at the girls in the backseat. She instructed them to go to bed. “Take your bicycle and your bag, Lindie. I’ll get rid of everything else.” A grateful warmth spread in Lindie’s stomach; she just wanted someone to tell her what to do. She was so far away from herself that the bag hardly weighed anything at all.

  Diane turned to June. “If you go to Jack, I’ll see to it that Lindie is arrested for Clyde’s murder.”

  “I know that.”

  “So we have a deal?”

  June put one hand on Lindie’s arm and opened the door into what remained of the night, pulling Lindie out behind her.

  “Do we have a deal?” Diane whispered after them.

  Out of the car, the near dawn was cool. The whole world seemed to be sleeping. June untied Lindie’s Schwinn and lowered it to the sidewalk; the tires bumped as it found the ground.

  “I killed him,” Lindie mumbled. Her mind was coming back.

  “Shh,” June said. She placed her arm over Lindie’s shoulder and drew her in.

  “I killed him, June.” It felt horrible to say.

  June was safe and warm. She was Lindie’s best friend and Lindie loved her more than the world. And she was talking just for Lindie now. “We’ll never speak about it, you understand? It didn’t happen.”

  “But—”

  “It’s nothing to do with us.”

  Diane whispered June’s name desperately. They were all on edge.

  But June held up her hand to the woman; she wasn’t done with Lindie. June pressed her forehead against the younger girl’s. “You’ll wake up tomorrow like it never happened.”

  “But you love Jack,” Lindie said. “You can’t give Jack up, not for me.”

  June’s hands on Lindie’s shoulders were firm, her resolve contagious, her voice calm. “All this time, Little Bear,” June whispered, “you’ve tried to make sure I can leave St. Jude. But I can be happy here. If I leave with Jack…” She shook her head. “I can’t do that to you.”

  “But I can’t stay in St. Jude with you,” Lindie whispered. “Not after what I’ve done.”

  “All this time,” June said. “All this time. We thought I was the one who had to leave. But I think it’s you.”

  And with that, June lifted her head from Lindie’s, dropped her hands, and looked Diane square in the eye. “Deal,” she said. And she walked off toward Two Oaks without a backward glance.

  The phone rang and rang. Life inside Two Oaks was almost as it had been: she did not answer the doorbell and she did not open her mail, which piled through the slot in the door into a great mound of disappointment. But the house had stopped dreaming.

  Elda had insisted on hiring roof repairmen, so they came and went from the side door, the footprints from their work boots muddying the brown paper they’d taped to the master stairs. Cassie slept in the maid’s room on the air mattress, which she had to inflate every night before bed, and which had her lying flat on the floor by morning. She kept to the back of the house: kitchen, dining room, servant stairs, which felt right somehow, new, and punishing. But still no dreams.

  Soon, the photographers figured out that Tate was gone for good. Cassie supposed they’d follow the trail of Jack’s money back to St. Jude eventually. But when would the millions find their way to her? It was a fun guessing game; she supposed other, more responsible adults would seek out the solution to it. She very much considered getting a lawyer, especially when she lay in bed and watched the moonlight fill the small pine box of a room. She’d probably have to pay a lot of taxes. So, then, also an accountant? Or one of those money managers or something? She meant to call the bank, really, she did. But it was so much easier to stay in bed. The executors and financial advisers and attorneys and accountants could come to her. Maybe if she stayed in bed long enough, Two Oaks would swallow her again in its velvety dreams.

  She didn’t know many, or any, people anymore, so she didn’t have to suffer advice. She didn’t talk to anyone for weeks, except for Elda, who left her with a cell phone and insisted Cassie pick up when she called, which happened every night between the hours of ten and one. Elda mostly blathered on about her grandsons’ swimming lessons and helping her twin granddaughters prepare for college in the fall, lulling Cassie into a false sense of security until she’d interject—“are you eating?” or “have you taken any pictures?” or “did you go outside today?”—and Cassie would resolve not to pick up the cell phone the next night, and then, the next night, the cell phone would ring, and she would, of
course, pick up.

  The truth was, Cassie did eat well, at least for the first few weeks, since Hank had left truckloads of food behind. But then Hank’s groceries dwindled to a small bag of French lentils and a single block of frozen spinach, and even Cassie couldn’t justify gumming frozen vegetables for dinner. Before, she’d enjoyed the walk to the Pantry Pride, but it felt like an epic journey now—her little old lady cart, the patch of town without a sidewalk, and, worst of all, the stares and whispers as she passed her neighbors’ homes. They held up their cell phones and took her picture. Soon, whenever the money came, she’d be able to buy herself a car and she wouldn’t feel so on display. Soon, she’d open her mail and she’d start answering the landline; maybe today was the day.

  They watched her in the grocery store—a round old woman picking up a birthday cake with fluorescent rosettes from the bakery counter, a teenage girl who snapped a picture in the cracker aisle—but at least they didn’t talk to her. Cassie supposed she should care what she looked like, since pictures were probably making their way onto the Internet, linked as she now was to Tate and Elda, but she found she didn’t much mind sullying the family name. And then she remembered that Tate wasn’t actually in the family, and that she, herself, was, and she felt guilty (three frozen pizzas) and mad at herself for feeling guilty (okay, fine, some zucchini).

  When she got up to checkout, all three tabloids above the conveyor belt featured Tate. TATE’S TANTRUM! TATE’S SCANDALOUS SEX TAPE! MAX MOVES OUT! Tate looked an absolute wreck in the pictures, even with her sunglasses on—her cheeks were gaunt, her mouth severe. Apparently she’d gotten into a drunken screaming match at someone’s party? And she’d fired Hank? And Nick was threatening to quit after a blowout over his paycheck? Cassie felt a stirring of sympathy, a tingle of curiosity. She grabbed a Twix and finished it before she got to the register. The girl pointed to the corner of her own mouth, and Cassie wiped away the chocolate with her sleeve. At least she’d made it past the magazines.