Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil, Love and Hope

by Jude Deveraux

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you why you have very little southern accent. In fact, you almost sound as though you came from this part of the U.S.”

  Taking her eyes off him, Darci turned around in her seat and looked out the window. “Okay, so you don’t want to tell me. Yet. You don’t want to tell me yet. I can wait.” She took a deep breath. “Elocution lessons. Mann’s Developmental College for Young Ladies had elocution lessons. I listened to tapes and imitated them.”

  “How interesting,” Adam said. “Why don’t you tell me all about your school?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “I’d rather hear all about what you’re after and why you hired me over all those other young women.”

  Adam let out his breath in a long sigh. “Aren’t the trees beautiful at this time of year?”

  After that there had been no more talk of any importance between them, and when they got to Hartford, Adam had gone into a hairdressing salon and ten minutes later came out and told Darci that they were ready for her. She didn’t ask how he got her into such an exclusive-looking salon without an appointment, but she’d already seen in Camwell that he was able to make people do things.

  So now, hours later, her hair was finished, and she thought it looked good. In fact, one of the other hair-dressers had said to the woman who did Darci’s hair, “I think that’s the best cut you’ve ever given.” “Me too,” the hairdresser had said in wonder as she looked at Darci in the mirror.

  “Do you like it or not?” Darci asked Adam.

  Adam was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before. Her lank, shoulder-length blonde hair had been cut short and layered in such a way that it hugged her face. And it had been dyed a strawberry blonde that perfectly complemented her pale skin. And her eyes were different, too. He couldn’t see any makeup on her face, but her eyes were definitely different.

  “It’s called a pyxie cut, with a y instead of an i; that’s how they spelled it. And my hair’s been downlighted. That means that they darkened parts of it instead of lightening it, which is what they usually do to women’s hair. Are you listening to me?”

  “Every word,” he said, still staring at her.

  “As soon as I got into the chair, I applied my True Persuasion to the beautician—I mean, the hairdresser— and I told her to give me the best cut she had ever given anyone in her whole life.” Darci ran her hand through her hair, and it sprang back into place perfectly. “I think maybe she did. She said that the long part of my hair, the part she cut off, was in poor condition, but that the new growth was thick and healthy. Feel.”

  “No.”

  Darci gave Adam a little smile. “Are you afraid that touching my hair will drive you mad with passion?”

  “Give me a break, will you?” Adam said, frowning; then as she continued to look up at him, he sighed in capitulation. Darci bent forward as Adam put his hand on her head.

  “Nice.”

  “You mean that?”

  Adam smiled. “Yeah, I mean that,” he said as he turned and started walking toward where the car was parked.

  But when he realized that Darci was no longer beside him, he halted and looked back. She was reading a menu posted outside an Italian restaurant.

  Adam didn’t bother pointing out that they could drive back to Camwell and eat there. Nor did he mention that it had been only three hours since they’d eaten breakfast. Besides, the truth was, he was feeling a bit hungry himself.

  Walking back to her, he opened the door to the restaurant and followed her inside. After they’d placed their orders (Darci ordering eggplant Parmigiana, saying that she’d never eaten eggplant before), she told him that she’d been told all the gossip at the hairdresser’s.

  “Everyone in this town and maybe everybody in the state, considers Camwell a scary place. And the Grove is haunted. No one who lives within a hundred miles of that town would stay there overnight. And the waitress in Camwell was telling the truth: Every year for four years now someone has disappeared.”

  Darci was keeping her voice so low that he could hardly hear her. When he asked her why she was speaking so softly, he was told that “big city” people couldn’t be trusted. It took him a moment to digest this statement. In tiny Camwell, a place that people called “evil,” Darci blabbed to everyone about everything. But here in “big city” Hartford, Connecticut, she acted as though everyone in the restaurant were a spy.

  Adam wasn’t going to try to understand her “logic.” Instead, he reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “While you were hexing the hairdresser, I went to the library and made some photocopies of articles about the four women who disappeared.”

  Darci smiled warmly at him. She liked that he said “photocopy” and not “Xerox.” She reached out to take the papers, but Adam drew back. “No, not now,” he whispered. “Our table may be bugged. You never know what these Hartfordites can get up to.”

  “Very funny,” she said, but her eyes glanced sideways for a moment. When she didn’t ask him for any more information about the papers, he put them away.

  Because of Darci’s belief that they shouldn’t discuss anything important in the “big city,” they confined their lunch talk to one of Darci’s favorite topics: food.

  “You’ve been to Italy?” she asked, and when he nodded, she fired off questions at him. How did the food in Italy compare to Italian food in the U.S.? Did he get to know any Italians? How did they differ from Americans? Her questions and his answers kept them busy throughout lunch.

  The only time there was a silence between them was when she asked him why he’d traveled so much in his life. “Didn’t you want to have a home? Kids?” she asked. But as so often happened, Adam stopped talking and looked down at his food in silence.

  She waited, hoping he’d explain something about himself, and twice he did look as though he were about to speak, but then he looked down again and said nothing.

  After several awkward moments, she asked him if he’d ever been to Greece.

  As for Adam, he was coming to the point where he wanted to tell her something about himself, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He liked the laughter they often exchanged, and he didn’t want to risk changing that.

  When she stopped staring at him and asked about another country, he smiled in relief, then lifted his head and looked at her.

  The clothes, the hair, and whatever she’d done to her eyes had changed her. He couldn’t believe that this pretty young woman was the same person who’d sat on the edge of her chair and swung her legs at their first meeting.

  Later, in the car on the way back to Camwell, Adam couldn’t keep himself from asking, “What did you do to your eyes?”

  “They dyed my eyelashes so they’re sooty black,” she said as she turned and fluttered her lashes at him. “Like them?”

  “They’re artificial looking,” Adam said stiffly. Her manner was playful, but at the same time it was seductive.

  His coolness hurt Darci’s feelings. “Oh?” she said, her lips tight. “And I guess you like natural women: the outdoors type with scrubbed skin, a fishing pole over one shoulder and a shotgun over the other.”

  Adam smiled at the image she conjured. He couldn’t imagine a type of woman he liked less. “That’s exactly my type. How did you guess?”

  “Is that what Renee is like?” Darci shot back.

  At that Adam nearly swerved off the road. “Where the hell did you hear her name?” he said when he got the car under control.

  “Don’t curse. It’s not nice.”

  Adam glanced at her, then back at the road. “Where did you snoop out her name?”

  “You talk in your sleep.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  “You talk in your sleep very loud.”

  For a moment Adam was silent. “What else did I talk about?” he asked softly.

  “Not much,” she said, smiling, obviously enjoying his discomfort. “Just Renee.”

&nb
sp; He glanced at her, trying to ascertain if she was telling the whole truth or just part of it. “What did I say?” he asked, very serious.

  “Well. . . . Let’s see. . . . If I remember correctly . . . you said, ‘Oh, Renee, my darling, I love you with all my heart, and I miss you sooooooo much.’”

  Adam’s lips twitched in suppressed laughter. “I’m sure you heard me correctly because that’s just the way I feel about her.”

  Darci’s enjoyment faded. “So what’s she look like?” Her arms were folded tightly across her chest and her lips were in a rigid line.

  “Long silky hair, huge brown eyes, cute little nose,” he said happily.

  “Educated?”

  “Better yet, she’s obedient.”

  “She’s what?!” Darci exploded; then, as she watched him, she smiled. “I see. So how long are her ears?”

  “At least half a foot,” Adam said, and they laughed together.

  “Your dog?”

  “Irish setter. And I do miss her very much.”

  “If you want someone else—besides your dog, that is— to keep you company at night....”Darci said softly.

  Adam didn’t dare look at her. The colorless little girl who’d sat before him in a New York warehouse held no interest for him. But between his memory of the sight of Darci in a cat suit and now her pyxie haircut, she was beginning to make him, well . . . nervous. He’d better get this back on the right track. “I have a little black book,” he said, “and you are supposed to remain faithful to the man you love with all your heart. Remember? I bet Putnam’s being faithful to you.”

  That statement made Darci laugh so hard that he thought she was going to choke. But, try as he might, he couldn’t get her to tell him what was so extraordinarily funny about what he’d said. His repeatedly asking, “Putnam isn’t faithful to you?” gained him as many answers as her earlier questions had elicited from him. It was annoying to think that she might have as many secrets as he did.

  A few minutes later, Adam turned off the highway onto a small country road. “I hope you don’t mind if we return to Camwell by the back way, do you?” he said in what he hoped was a normal voice. “These trees are just so beautiful that I want to see more of them.”

  But Darci wasn’t fooled. She looked at him in speculation. If she’d learned nothing else about Adam Montgomery, she knew that scenery did not interest him. “Did any of the women who disappeared do so around here?”

  At that Adam shook his head in disbelief at the accuracy of her guess. “If I ever want to get information out of anyone, I’m going to send you to do the interrogation. Yes,” he said with a sigh. “Two of the women disappeared along this road.”

  “Did you find this out before you went to the library today or after?”

  “Today. I haven’t known about the town of Camwell for very long or about what happened here. I—” He broke off because he didn’t want to tell her anything more than he had to. The less she knew, the safer she would be, he thought. “Look!” he said as though he were seeing an unrecognized wonder of the world. “There’s a store and I need . . . uh, toothpaste.”

  “You have a full tube,” Darci said before she could stop herself.

  As Adam turned off the engine, he looked at her. “And how do you know that?” He put up his hand when she started to speak. “No, don’t tell me. You can hear toothpaste talking in its sleep.”

  Darci smiled as Adam got out of the car; then he turned back and looked inside just as she was getting out. “Maybe we should get you the toothpaste. Unless you like using baking soda.”

  Feeling that he’d just won a game of one-upmanship, Adam shut the door and stepped onto the wooden porch of the tiny country store. There were a couple of weathered rocking chairs on the porch, plus some packing crates that looked as though they’d been there for a while. The back wall was draped with perfectly aged leather straps that looked as though they’d been hanging there since McKinley was president. But Adam could see that everything was actually new. In fact, when he looked harder at the quaint items on the porch, he could see that they were all reproductions, and it made him wonder if the store owner had hired some New York designer to create an “authentic” country store that would attract tourists.

  When Darci stepped up behind him, he said, “This look like a Kentucky store?”

  “Heavens, no!” she said. “If a store has a porch, the owner covers it with video game machines. And, in Kentucky, when the leather rots on a horse harness, we throw it away.”

  Chuckling, Adam opened the screen door and went inside, Darci close on his heels.

  “Good afternoon,” called a gray-haired man from behind a tall wooden counter. In front of the counter were open bins full of hard candies and dried fruit. To the right were barrels filled with apples and oranges. All the shelves in the store were rough-sawn pine, and modern items were interspersed with old-fashioned boxes of things like Mother Jasper’s Revitalizing Elixir.

  “Can I help you with anything?” the man asked as he walked from behind the counter. He was wearing a denim apron and had on heavy black boots, as though, at any minute, he planned to go back to plowing.

  “He probably ordered all this junk off the Internet,” Darci mumbled when Adam bent down to look at a box on the shelves.

  Smiling, Adam looked back at the store clerk. “Toothpaste,” he said.

  “And deodorant and whatever else you have,” Darci said quickly, then looked at Adam in question.

  He knew that she was silently asking him if he would pay for all of it. He gave a nod but reminded himself that he was going to have to ask her what her problem with money was. Was she just a tightwad, or did she have a reason for never spending a penny of her own money?

  “Right over there,” the man said, then handed Darci a basket that Adam was sure had been handmade in Appalachia and cost a fortune.

  While Adam waited, he wandered about the store, looking in bins and inside cabinets. When he opened a pine door, he was momentarily startled to find a modern refrigerator unit hidden behind it. He took out a couple of Snapple lemonades, then saw Darci standing at the counter, finally ready to check out. When he got to the register, he saw that she had purchased $58.68 worth of toiletries! They were mostly hair products, including a conditioner that cost eighteen dollars a bottle.

  “The hairdresser recommended all of these things to keep my hair in good condition,” Darci explained as she looked up at Adam, again silently asking him if he was going to pay for such expensive items.

  With a shrug, Adam handed the clerk a fifty and a ten; then he took the two big bags full of goods and held out his hand for the change.

  “Keeping the ladies beautiful costs a lot,” the clerk said, chuckling as he looked at Adam’s expression of resignation.

  But when the clerk had the change, Darci put her hand out too. At that, the store clerk laughed out loud. “She’s prettier than you are,” he said to Adam as he turned to give Darci the change.

  But when the man saw Darci’s left hand, all color left his face. His eyes widened and his hand holding the change began to shake. He seemed to want to say something, and even though he opened his mouth several times, no words came out. Instead, the shaking increased until the money he held fell to the floor, and when it dropped, the man turned and ran through a curtained doorway.

  It took Adam a moment to recover from his shock. He’d been watching the man’s reactions in astonishment, and when the man took off running, Adam dropped the bags and ran after him. But since he had to leap over two barrels and a stack of artificially aged orange crates, by the time Adam went through the doorway into the back storage room, the man was nowhere to be seen. There was a back door, but when Adam opened it, there was nothing outside but an empty gravel parking area, with acres of Connecticut woodland behind it. There was no sign of the clerk.

  Annoyed, Adam went back into the store; then he experienced a moment’s panic when he didn’t see Darci. Had she been kidnaped? was his f
irst, wild, heart-pounding thought. But his heart slowed its pace when he saw her on her hands and knees behind the counter.

  When she looked up to see Adam, she held out her hand, which had a quarter and two pennies in it.”You were certainly right to run after him,” she said angrily. “I think he shortchanged us a nickel. Or else it’s somewhere on the floor.”

  Bending, Adam picked up her left hand and turned it palm upward. As far as he could see, there was nothing unusual about her hand. It was as small as a child’s, and her palm was pink from having been pressed against the floor. The only thing distinctive that he could see was that there were several moles on her palm. “What are these?” he asked.

  “I think I see it,” she said as she pulled her hand from his and began crawling toward the far end of the counter.

  “Did you hear me?” he snapped. “What are those marks on your hand?”

  Darci stopped crawling, sat back on the floor, held up her left hand and looked at her palm. “Moles. Everyone has them. So do you. You have three little ones by your right ear and you have another one by your—”

  “That man looked at your hand, his face turned white, then he ran out of here. I tried to catch him, but—”

  “Could you lift your foot?”

  “What are you doing down there?”

  “I’m looking for the nickel,” Darci said. “Either he shortchanged us, or it rolled under something and—”

  Impatiently, Adam took out his wallet, removed a twenty, and handed it to her. “Now will you get up? And don’t you dare ask me if you can keep the change.”

  Tightly holding the twenty and the change she’d found, Darci got off the floor, but her eyes kept moving downward as she continued to look for the nickel.

  But Adam didn’t give her more time to search. Grabbing her upper arm, he practically pulled her out of the store, Darci clutching the bags containing his purchases and hers. On the drive back to Camwell, he didn’t say a word.

  Only when they were back at the Grove and inside their guest house did Adam turn to her.”I knew there was something that kept ringing inside my head, but I couldn’t remember what it was.” He took the bundle of photocopied newspaper articles he’d shown her at lunch from inside his jacket, then removed the garment and tossed it onto the back of a chair. Seconds later, he’d spread the articles on the coffee table, sat down on the couch, and had started rereading them.