“Rachel?”
The voice interrupted her thoughts, and Rachel looked up, her eyes going immediately to Grace, who stood next to the fire stirring the kettle of soup. But Grace’s back was turned, and she gave no indication of having spoken.
“Rachel?” repeated the voice, raspy and uncertain, rusted from disuse. Something in the sound of it snagged at a rough place in Rachel’s mind. She turned—slowly, unwillingly—and forced herself to look at the beggar woman’s face for the first time.
The long stringy hair, dangling in matted strands, might have once been blonde, but now bore the greenish brown color of tarnished brass. The eyes, what Rachel could see of them through the half-open lids, were blue, and the pallid skin was smudged with dirt and soot. But the most prominent feature of the face by far was the puckered scar that ran in a ragged line from the outer edge of the left eyebrow to the corner of the woman’s mouth. As Rachel watched, the woman’s lips moved, and that side of her face drew up in a grimace. “Rachel?” she said a third time.
Something in Rachel’s stomach jerked with a sickening lurch, an unsought and unwelcome recognition. “Yes,” she responded hesitantly. “My name is Rachel.”
Grace rose from the fire and came to stand next to the woman.
She reached out a hand and stroked the filthy hair with all the gentleness of a mother comforting a very young child. “Lord help us, deary! She spoke to you! She’s never said a blessed word in all these months. I don’t even know her name.”
“Cathleen,” Rachel said, her voice cracking. She tried to drag her eyes away from the filthy, haunted countenance, but she could not. “Her name is Cathleen and she—” She paused, summoning the courage to finish. “She is my sister.”
The scarred face twisted in a pitiful contortion, the grotesque imitation of a smile. Then, with great effort, she slid the Treasure Box from the table, balancing it precariously between her good right hand and her crippled left. She struggled halfway to her feet, deposited the box into Rachel’s lap, and sank into the chair again.
“It’s yours,” she said, the words slurring together. “I kep’ it for you.” She pointed. “See? The lil’ dragon with the smiling face?”
Rachel looked down at the box, then up at the once-familiar countenance, now so ravaged and filled with despair that it was barely recognizable. A single tear leaked from her sister’s left eye, following the jagged path of the scar until it dropped onto her bulging abdomen.
Yes, Rachel thought as she gazed at the ruined image of what was once her sister, there be dragons here. Here, in this place of peril, you could have your beautiful face mutilated by fire from the dragon’s breath, your dreams charred to ashes. Here, where the world ends, you could slip off the edge without warning and be lost forever.
18
A CRY IN THE NIGHT
Vita never had trouble sleeping, and she had little patience for those who complained of insomnia. The minute her head hit the pillow, she was gone, into a deep and usually dreamless slumber. It was, she always said, the gift of an unburdened conscience.
In the past week or so, however, she had begun to appreciate the problems brought on by sleeplessness. Her normal routine— in bed by ten-thirty, awake with the dawn—didn’t seem to be working any longer. She couldn’t manage to get her brain to shut down so that her body could rest, and when she did sleep, her overactive imagination conjured up strange and disquieting dreams. She would awaken in the middle of the night or the middle of the morning, dazed and disoriented, haunted by troubling images that came to her in the darkness.
Tonight she couldn’t get her mind off Rachel and Cathleen. She dozed a bit, but her subconscious reeled. Rats scrabbling in the alley. Something red, moving inexorably toward her like the molten flow from a volcanic eruption. Grace’s bright beady eyes peering out from a nest in the hedge outside her office window.
The dream shifted. She was in a dark, cold place, fettered hand and foot. She couldn’t move, couldn’t escape. And above her, staring down at her, a woman with a scarred face and a swollen belly and dirty blonde hair. Cathleen, at first, but subtly transforming into someone else. Someone familiar. Mary Kate, with Cathleen’s scar.
Suddenly she heard it: a sound in the night, like the reedy cry of an infant. Vita bolted upright in bed, but her arms and legs were caught in a tangle of sheets and blankets, and for a minute she couldn’t move. She kicked and thrashed violently until the blankets pulled free, and then sat panting on the side of the bed, clutching the clock and staring at it stupidly until its numbers registered in her brain: three-fifteen.
Vita willed her heart to slow its painful throbbing. She was awake now. Back in the real world. It was only a dream. Everything would be all right.
The sound came again, a feeble wailing noise. A cat, probably, prowling around the back of the house. She shoved her feet into her slippers, threw on her robe, and went to the open window, but the only noises outside were the chirping of crickets and the distant echo of a dog’s bark.
Then she heard it a third time—not out in the yard, but inside the house. She started downstairs, belting her robe around her as she went. The sound came from her office—faint, but very clear. Vita reached the doorway of the sunroom and stopped. There it was again, emanating from the computer speakers on the shelf above her desk. Not the cry of an animal, but of a human. A person.
A person in pain.
Rachel lurched up from the sofa as the cry startled her to wakefulness. For a moment she sat there, squinting into the darkness, trying to identify what she had heard. Where was she? And what was that noise?
Her eyes focused on the hearth, where a fire had burned down to glowing embers, and she remembered. Grace’s place. The back room of Benedetti’s restaurant.
A gust of wind moaned around the corner of the building.
Rachel shivered. It must have been the wind; that was all. Just the howling of the storm that raged outside. She drew the ragged blanket closer around her shoulders, limped over to the fireplace, and added more wood.
With a little coaxing, the fire blazed up, and she stood there for a moment or two, letting the warmth soak into her. Then the cry came again, from behind her—a muted wail. Not the wind outside, but something inside, a sound almost human, like an animal caught in a trap.
She turned, and in the flickering firelight she could see movement— on the floor a few feet to the right of Grace’s pallet, a jerking under the blanket. Cathleen.
Wincing as the pain from her sprained ankle shot up into her calf, Rachel hobbled to the corner of the room and knelt beside her sister. “Cathleen,” she whispered, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“Cathleen, wake up.”
Cathleen rolled over and jerked upright. Her eyes, wild and white in the firelight, did indeed look like the eyes of a frightened animal, and her whole body tensed in terror.
“Hush,” Rachel soothed. “It’s all right. It’s Rachel, remember? You were having a nightmare. I heard you call out.” She stroked her sister’s back and felt a shudder run through her. “Are you cold?”
Cathleen nodded.
“Come over near the fire, then. Come on, I’ll help you.”
Getting an expectant woman up from the floor was no easy task, but at last Rachel managed to put an arm around her and help her to her feet. Together they lumbered over to the sofa and sank down in front of the hearth.
“Here, take some water,” Rachel urged, retrieving the bottle from the table next to the sofa and putting it to her sister’s lips.
Cathleen upended the bottle and drank deeply. “Better?”
Cathleen nodded again. “The dream—it was—” Her shoulders twitched violently, and she shut her eyes. “Shooting. Blood everywhere, an ocean of it. I was trying to get away, but—”
“But you couldn’t.”
She hung her head. “I—I should have died. I’d be better off.”
She laid a grimy hand over her swelling midsection. “We’d both be bett
er off.”
“Cathleen, you don’t mean that!”
Her head shot up, and her eyes bored into Rachel’s. “Didn’t you wish me dead, after what I did?”
Rachel hesitated. For just a moment, all the old anger came flooding back—the memory of Cathleen’s deception and selfishness, the shame of standing at the altar waiting for Derrick, that horrible moment when she pulled up the loose board in the barn floor to find that everything she cherished was gone. A hot stab of resentment knifed through her. She shouldn’t have to be here, in this hideous place, trying to comfort the sister who had betrayed her so terribly.
Then her eyes rested on the scarred and filthy face. Cathleen had never possessed Rachel’s intelligence or abilities or likable nature. She’d never had a friend like Sophie or a mentor like Elisabeth Tyner. All she ever had was her beauty. She had always depended upon her looks, upon her ability to attract the lads and manipulate them into doing what she wanted. Her only hope for a secure future had been to find a man, get married, and be taken care of. Even if she had to steal her sister’s fiancé and life’s savings in the process.
Poor Cathleen. She had chosen so unwisely. And now, scarred and broken, she would bear the guilt of what she had done—to her sister, to herself, to her unborn baby. Was it so much to ask that Rachel should now give her the benefit of the truth, and a little compassion?
“I was angry with you, yes,” Rachel admitted. “Running away with Derrick was a terrible thing to do, although I suppose you got the worst end of that bargain.”
Cathleen acknowledged Rachel’s words with a crooked smile.
“And stealing the money I had worked for—well, I was furious about that, even though I was fairly certain Derrick had put you up to it. But it was taking Sophie’s Treasure Box that was the last straw. You knew how much I valued it—how important her memory was to me.”
“I know.” Cathleen averted her eyes.
“So yes, I was angry. I wanted not just to get the Treasure Box back, but to get revenge—or at the very least, retribution. To hurt you the way you had hurt me.” She paused, fumbling for words.
“But—but I never wished you dead, Cathleen. I never hated you.”
Cathleen peered through her hair at Rachel. “Never?”
Rachel thought about the question for a moment, and at last forced out a half-truth, the words she knew she ought to say but did not feel. “For a while I thought I did. But no, I don’t hate you. You’re my sister. I could never hate you.” She got up and went to the hearth, laying on more wood and poking at the embers with a broken chair leg. “Tell me about Derrick.” She kept her back turned toward Cathleen. “I want to know what happened.”
“I loved him,” Cathleen answered miserably. “At least, I thought I did. He told me he loved me—oh, Rachel, I was so stupid to believe him!”
“Until I was forced not to, I believed him, too,” Rachel said quietly. She faced Cathleen and raised an eyebrow. “So which one of us was more stupid for believing him?”
“That would be me.” Cathleen let out a pent-up breath. “He never even promised me the altar.”
“He didn’t marry you?” Rachel’s eyes went to her sister’s protruding abdomen. “I assumed—”
“I assumed a great deal, too.” She shifted on the sofa, trying to get more comfortable. “We honeymooned on board ship during the crossing. We just never got around to the wedding.”
Rachel looked around at the room, then back at her sister’s face. “Cathleen, what happened here?”
Cathleen shrugged. “The only thing I remember clearly was the front windows shattering. Upstairs, in our flat.”
“And Derrick was killed.”
“He was down here at dinner. Everybody downstairs was killed.” Cathleen turned and looked toward the back of the room, where Grace still slept on her pallet. “They shot up the second floor just for good measure. Two bullets hit me—one in the shoulder and one in the knee. The first one went all the way through; the second one Grace removed after she found me. I suppose I kept hidden; I don’t recall. I do remember falling.” She raised a hand to her face and traced the puckered scar that ran down the length of her cheek. “I may have struck something when I went down, or been hit by flying glass.”
Rachel bit back tears—not only at the account of her sister’s ordeal, but at the matter-of-fact way Cathleen spoke about it.
“But you survived.”
“Grace says it’s a miracle.” Cathleen frowned. “I’m not so certain of that myself.” She drilled her forefinger viciously into a hole in the sofa—a perfectly round hole, Rachel noted for the first time, a hole that might have been left by a stray bullet.
“And you never spoke about it—even to Grace?” Rachel fixed her eyes on Cathleen’s finger as it ground into the bullet hole.
“When I first came to, I was out of my skull with the pain,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Even talking—or attempting to—hurt. Then, as my body healed, I couldn’t bear to think about what had happened, and—” She cleared her throat. “After a while, it just seemed easier to keep silent.”
Cathleen laid her head back against the sofa. Clearly, talking had depleted her, and Rachel felt the exhaustion in her own body as well. For a while neither of them spoke. They sat side by side, staring into the fire until finally Cathleen’s voice broke the silence.
“Rachel, I’m—I’m sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”
Without looking at her, Rachel reached out and patted her sister’s hand. “It’s all right. I understand.”
“It’s not all right, and you do not understand!” Cathleen snatched her hand away and lurched awkwardly to her feet.
“Rachel, look at me. Perhaps I deserve what I’ve gotten, to be living this way—” She waved a hand to indicate the darkened room. “Whatever I may have suffered doesn’t begin to make amends for what I did to you. I may not deserve your forgiveness, but—” She sank back onto the sofa. “But I don’t want your pity.”
The barb hit home, and Rachel closed her eyes against the sting of truth. She did pity Cathleen, but she had not even begun to forgive her. The anger she had harbored for so long had instead melted into a righteous condescension, allowing her to feel noble and compassionate toward her sister without really facing the hard work of forgiveness.
“All my life, I’ve been jealous of you,” Cathleen said in a more subdued tone. “Even when we were children, I envied your friendship with Sophie. I wanted someone to love me that much. It was my fault she died—that prank I pulled with the Treasure Box.
But even knowing that, I wasn’t sorry she was gone. I wanted something like the Treasure Box, something of my own—something I could look at and say, ‘This is a sign that someone really cares for me.’ But I never could manage to find it—not in friendship, not even in romance. The next best thing for me was to take what you had.”
A soul-deep weariness washed over Rachel as Cathleen was speaking—not just the exhaustion of being awake in the early hours of the morning, but the fatigue that comes with months, even years, of carrying a heavy burden. For over a decade, she had blamed her sister for Sophie’s death, and for so many other things that had caused enmity between them. But Cathleen hadn’t forced Sophie to go into the river when Rachel had fallen. Cathleen hadn’t forced Derrick to abandon her. Cathleen wouldn’t have even known where the Treasure Box and Rachel’s money were hidden if Derrick hadn’t told her.
Cathleen had changed. In more than twenty years, Rachel had never once heard her sister say, “I’m sorry.” Now she was not only apologizing, but taking responsibility for what she had done to hurt others. Perhaps the bitter disappointments she had faced had brought her to an understanding of other people’s pain. Or maybe she simply needed to unburden herself, to confess and find a measure of absolution. Whatever her motives, it hardly mattered anymore. What mattered was that she had asked a question, a question that still hung unanswered between them: Will you forgive me?
<
br /> Her sister had already faced the truth—now it was time for Rachel to do the same. Time for her to acknowledge the pain Cathleen had caused and release it. Time for her to stop mouthing facile platitudes and speak the words that would liberate her from the bondage of anger and vengeance. She needed to forgive, not for the sake of Cathleen’s freedom, but her own.
She never got the chance.
When she turned back toward Cathleen, Rachel found her sister doubled up in silent agony, her arms clutched around her stomach. Her cheeks had gone pale, and the ugly puckered scar stood out vividly against the ashen skin. Despite the chilliness of the room, a sheen of sweat covered her face. On the seat between them, something warm and wet oozed into the fabric of the sofa.
“The baby!” Cathleen gasped, reaching a hand toward Rachel.
“But it’s not time. Didn’t you say—”
“Whether it’s time or not, this baby is coming.”
Vita stared at the screen while dawn crept over the horizon and pierced through the high privet hedge, painting the sunroom in watercolor hues of pink and gold. Memories layered one upon the other like transparencies. Scenes from the past: Hattie Parker’s scarred face turning away for the last time. Rain pounding against the raw mound of earth at Mama’s grave. Gordon’s voice on the telephone, telling her that Mary Kate was in labor and was asking for her to come.
And other, more recent memories: Sophie lying in the shallows of the river. The weeping willow tree in the back garden, draping its branches over the wall. The little brown bird nesting in the hedge. Red wine flowing across a white linen tablecloth.
She closed her eyes, trying to shut off the images, but they wouldn’t go away. They pressed into her brain as if etched there with acid. Even more images came. Hap Reardon’s laugh. Jacob Stillwater in his workshop. The strange dark man in Pastimes. The Treasure Box, with its delicately painted maps and the little smiling dragon in the waters.
The Treasure Box Page 14