The Unforgiven

by MacDonald, Patricia

  “Well, don’t look at me like that,” she said sharply, getting up. “It’s not my fault he was slow. Besides, after what you’ve been doing, you have no right to look at me that way.”

  Jess stared at her bland expression in disbelief. He watched her uncomprehendingly as she leaned over him and pushed his hair back from his temples. He tried to pull away, but she clamped a hand down on his shoulder and examined the bruises on his head where she had hit him. The discolored bump was tender to her touch. Jess winced. Even in the stinking basement her breath had a sour odor as she bent over him.

  “That’s some lump,” she observed. Then she straightened up and looked at him appraisingly.

  “Yeah,” she went on disjointedly, “everybody’s wondering about you. They’re looking for you. The problem is that they’ve all got their eyes on her now. They’re watching her every minute. Now, that’s no good. I don’t want there to be a lot of fussing going on. Nice and normal. That’s how I want it. So I can get at her.”

  Maggie, he thought. But why? Jealousy? For a moment he remembered Maggie’s suspicion. And why did she kill Bill Emmett? Jess felt his brain reeling as he tried to make sense of what the girl was saying. All he could be sure of was that Maggie was in danger. And that his own life might end at any moment.

  “I’ll figure out a way,” Evy assured him. “I already got an idea.” Evy began to pace in front of him. Jess tried to follow her with his eyes, but she began to circle him.

  “You can’t figure it out, can you?” Evy taunted him. “You’ve been just lying down here not knowing what’s going on. You thought I liked you, didn’t you?” Evy hunkered down and squatted in front of him. “Well, what if I did?” she cried, her voice shrill with anger. “That didn’t matter to you. You went off with her anyway. You didn’t care. You went and slept with her.”

  The girl stood up abruptly and walked over to the washtub. She began to drag it closer to him. Jess watched her straining back as she struggled with the unwieldy tub. Pitted against it, she wore an expression at once pathetic and determined. It was a look he recognized on her. One that had often aroused his pity before. He had never had any idea about her. Never known what terrible thoughts bedeviled her, twisting her mind.

  “There,” she said. Apparently satisfied with the new location of the washtub, Evy straightened up and gazed at it for a moment. Then she turned to Jess. “This is for you,” she said.

  A sickening sensation of awe and fear churned inside of him as he looked into her pale eyes. She can’t really be doing this. Hunching over and pulling up his knees, Jess tried to crawl away. Evy started to laugh. Suddenly he felt her arms locked through his elbows, her legs straddling his body. Jess thrashed back and forth, trying to shake himself free of her. She clung to him tenaciously, with a strength that shocked him.

  “Hey,” she crooned, gripping him tightly. “What’s the matter? I’m just going to give you a bath.” She dropped him heavily to the dirt floor and reached for a towel that was hanging from the waist of her skirt.

  His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath, glaring up at her. He felt a giddy relief that she did not mean to drown him. At the same time he shuddered at the thought of her hands touching him. Evy bent over and dunked the towel into the tub. Then she leaned toward him and tried to wipe his face with it. Jess jerked himself away from her. The water splashed out over the edges. Her balance was upset by his abrupt movement. She grabbed at the tail of his shirt, but he twisted away from her, wrenching his torso so hard that he could feel a muscle sprain. She kicked out at him angrily, grazing his side.

  “All right,” she snarled, “be filthy.” She hurled the wet towel at him and it smacked him hard in the side of the face. Then she started up the stairs.

  “You don’t want me to take care of you. You’d rather be filthy. I should have known that. After what I saw you do with her. Well, that’s the last thing I’ll do for you. You can rot down here. You can just die as filthy as you are now.”

  He saw her legs and ankles moving up the stairs. When she reached the top she screamed back down, “Rot down there!” She slammed the cellar door shut. Once again, Jess lay in the darkness, gasping for breath, his body alive with pain. He gazed over at the corpse of William Emmett, her last words still ringing in his ears.

  19

  For three days the sky had been threatening. Storm clouds rolled up on one another like tanks, amassing for an assault, turning the sky over the island to an ever-deepening gray. In the late afternoon the wind had begun its intermittent gusting and whistling. Now, as Maggie stood in the early evening darkness before the silent church at the end of Main Street, she felt the first drops of rain.

  Three agonizing days had passed since Jess’s disappearance. For Maggie, their torturous unwinding had been like a slow-motion nightmare. Each day she went into the office, only to escape the terrible silence that engulfed her at home. Jack Schmale dropped by every day to fill them in on the search for Jess. Each time she saw his worried face in the doorway, Maggie jumped, her heart thudding with hope and fear. Had he found Jess? Had he not found him? Did he know who she really was?

  A thousand times she wished that she had made her past no secret when she first arrived. Now her fears for Jess were compounded by the certainty that if Jack Schmale had uncovered her background, there would be no doubt in the mind of anyone that she was responsible for Jess’s disappearance. But Jack’s visits to the News offices were marked by no revelations. His terse reports did little to alleviate the gloom and frustration that permeated the atmosphere. Grace’s angry mutterings and drawer-slammings were interspersed with fits of weeping. Evy was often too jumpy and distracted to work. Maggie observed them warily. She knew they blamed her. She had overheard Grace talking to Jack.

  “What about her?” Grace had demanded.

  “We’ve been watching Thornhill’s,” Jack explained patiently.

  “She was trying to run away. Why was she in such a hurry to leave if she didn’t know something happened to Jess?”

  “Why was she stopping here to say good-bye to him?” Jack replied.

  Maggie walked away from the conversation. It didn’t really matter what they thought. Jess was gone.

  At night, her dreams woke her. Sister Dolorita loomed before her, castigating her, black eyes mad with rage. Bolting from her bed, bathed in sweat, she passed the remainder of her nights in a chair, rocking herself. The mornings found her listless, able to function at only the barest level.

  She did not know what had become of him, or why, but she had the absolute conviction that if she had left Heron’s Neck that first day, or never come at all, he would still be here, safe from harm.

  The wind was more insistent now, and the rain pelted her from all directions. It streamed down her face and under the collar of the old slicker she wore, which she had found in a Thornhill closet. Her head was bare, and she had no umbrella. For a few moments she stood there shivering, her head bowed to the wrath of the storm. Finally she decided to move.

  She looked up behind her at the massive oak doors of the wooden church. Carved into a wooden scroll above the doors were the words “Come Unto Me…”

  “And I will judge you, and punish you, and see that you have no peace,” she said angrily. She turned toward the street to resume the aimless wandering that had become her pattern for the last few nights. It was better than being alone in her empty house. There she would doze off in a chair, felled by exhaustion, only to dream of Willy barking, or Jess at the door. For a few moments the light, fitful slumber would be sweet, and then she would suddenly leap up from the chair, reality tearing through the blissful fantasy. She would fall back in her chair, heart thumping, wide awake, with misery at her elbow, like a valet, waiting to dress her in its gloomy garb.

  Maggie started down the path toward the street. She reached the hedge and hesitated, deciding in which direction to go. A gleam of white from under the bushes caught her eye. She bent down and retrieved a crumpled mas
s card, already soggy from the rain. She smoothed it out. The pastel-tinted card bore a prayer and the image of Jesus, mild eyes turned toward heaven. Looking at it, Maggie was reminded of the pictures in her childhood missal. The edges of the pages were gold, and a thin, purple ribbon was attached to it to mark the pages. It had been her most precious possession.

  She would sit with it open on her lap, even though she could not read the strange language on its pages. Her father would sit beside her, turning the pages when he turned his own. She liked to sit at the end of the pew and stick her small, white-shoed foot into the ruby shadow cast by the stained-glass window, turning her foot and leg pink with the glow. A soothing sensation of peace and safety stole over her now as she remembered how it once had been, before it had all changed.

  Slowly Maggie walked back up the steps and approached the oak doors. Her hand hovered uncertainly near the handle. Then she pulled the door open, crossed the vestibule, and looked in.

  Every sound echoed in the hush of the vaulted room. In the dim light Maggie could see the bent heads and huddled forms of a few parishioners, thinly scattered in the narrow wooden pews. She started as a woman near the back rose, dropped to one knee beside the pew, and then hurried up the aisle toward Maggie, still crossing herself. She brushed by Maggie, her eyes downturned and closed the outer door of the church behind her. Encouraged that she was not conspicuous, Maggie pulled open the door and slipped inside. She moved to the shadows on the side of the church and sat down in a pew not too far from the back. She wondered if the rapid beating of her heart could be heard by the faithful few, crouched there in prayer.

  She felt like a spy who had invaded an enemy camp. For a few moments she kept her head bowed, trying to still the sick turmoil that was inside her. The words and rituals of the church, once so familiar, were a foreign language to her now. She could not remember why she had decided to come in.

  A harsh, bubbling cough from a man near the front broke the awesome silence. Maggie raised her head and ventured a look around the cavern of the church. Above the altar a desolate-looking Christ hung from the cross. To the left of the altar was a statue of Mary, cradling a placid infant Jesus. The multicolored glow of the votive candles and a few dun gaslights provided the only illumination in the nave.

  Outside, the wind buffeted the island, and occasionally a branch snapped up against the rain-spattered stained glass in the windows. But sitting there in the silent church Maggie felt snug and vaguely comforted. Her mind wandered back to earliest childhood, when at Christmastime there would be boxes of ribbon candy piled high in front of the statues of Mary holding the baby Jesus, one for each child in the parish.

  A sense of longing and sorrow overcame her as she remembered the innocent joy she had felt. Maggie’s forehead dropped to her hands, which she had unconsciously folded on the back of the pew in front of her. She stared at her own fingers, locked tightly together, as if they did not belong to her. She was startled to realize that she had assumed an attitude of prayer.

  A tremendous gust of wind shook the building, and the gas lamps flickered. Two more people got up, perfunctorily crossing themselves, and made their way out. Maggie did not look around, but she felt as if she were the last person there.

  Maggie licked her lips nervously. Her hands remained clasped as if they were glued together. A draft in the church made her shiver as she slowly fell to her knees on the knee rail. For a few moments her mind was completely blank. Then, haltingly, she began to whisper the words of the Memorare, a prayer for mercy to the Blessed Virgin. Slowly the words came, dredged up through layers of denial and despair. “O Mother of the Word Incarnate,” she prayed, “despise not my petitions, but in your mercy…”

  Strong fingers curled over her right shoulder and squeezed. Maggie jumped and cried out, turning around to face the intruder. She looked up into the bearded face of Owen Duggan.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked angrily, ashamed at being caught in the midst of her abject plea.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said in a whisper, settling himself in the pew beside her and shaking out his umbrella. “I saw you coming in here. You looked like you needed some company.”

  Maggie pushed herself away from the rail and fell heavily onto the wood seat beside him.

  “Hey, I hope I didn’t come at a bad time,” he said. “You weren’t having a vision or some sort of ecstatic experience, were you?”

  Maggie shook her head and smiled thinly. “No. It’s just been a while since I came to church.”

  “Well, you don’t want to overdo it. You’ve got to take that Divine light in small doses at first.”

  “You think it’s stupid,” she said.

  “I think it’s fine,” he demurred. “If it makes you feel better, it’s fine.”

  Maggie nodded, and they sat in silence for a moment. “It helps a little. But it doesn’t…”

  “Hmmmm…?”

  “Make it hurt less. Nothing could, at this point. Except if Jess…”

  Owen shrugged. “Come on,” he said. “I know something that will help. I’ll take you out to dinner. I’ll bet you haven’t eaten.”

  She looked at him curiously. “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you being so nice to me? For all you know I could be responsible for Jess’s disappearance. That’s what everybody around here thinks.”

  “Oh? Did you liquidate him with a wave of your magic wand? No. I don’t believe in fairy tales, poisoned apple pies, or witches. Or any of it for that matter,” said Owen, glancing around the church.

  “You know what I mean,” said Maggie quietly.

  “Oh, I tend to doubt it,” Owen replied, examining his well-manicured fingernails. “You seemed kind of fond of him.”

  Maggie could feel her face start to crumple. She drew in a breath and spoke brusquely. “I am hungry.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  Owen got up and stood back to let her pass. Maggie walked out of the church. She did not look back toward the altar. Owen followed her out and closed the door behind them.

  A slim figure, dressed in black, straightened up from where she had been kneeling in the shadows at the back of the church. Alone now in the empty nave, Evy walked toward the altar, her face a dead-white oval surrounded by the folds of a black veil. She plucked one of the votive candles from the box where they rested in front of the altar and approached the rows of flickering flames already lit by the faithful. She tipped the candle into one of the flames and lit the wick. Then, clutching the slippery wax shaft in her hand, she walked over to the statue of the Madonna and child and stood before it. She stared into the chipped, rounded face of the Madonna, the chubby, open hands of the infant she cradled. Her own pale blue eyes were impassive. Beads of wax slid down the thin candle and hardened on the skin of her fingers. She stood stiffly, oblivious to the warm wax as it spattered her hands, and the flame, which burned ever closer to her skin. She remained, staring at the statue for a very long time. The candle burned lower and lower, until it licked her skin. She did not seem to notice.

  A howling gust of wind punched Owen’s umbrella inside out.

  “We’d better make a run for it,” he shouted at Maggie, gesturing toward the winking lights of the Four Winds.

  Maggie looked toward where he was pointing. “Do we have to go there?” she yelled, looking longingly toward the tiny coffee shop across the street, empty except for a teen-aged boy behind the counter. Her voice was lost in the wind. Owen was already striding toward the restaurant on the dock. Wiping the rain from her face, Maggie followed after him.

  Owen bounded up the steps and held the door open for her. She passed by him into the warmly lit foyer.

  “Why don’t you take off that wet raincoat,” Owen suggested, “and I’ll hang it up.”

  Maggie shrugged her arms out of the damp sleeves. Owen took her coat and his over to the coatrack. As an afterthought, Maggie ran her fingers ineffectually through the wet strands of
hair in a vain effort to pat them into place. From inside the dining room, the hostess, a girl with a long face and dirty-blond hair braided into a crown, glanced up at Maggie and then turned her back to her. Owen returned from the coatrack and took her elbow.

  “Let’s eat,” he said cheerfully.

  “The hostess seems to be busy.”

  “Oh, we’ll manage.” Owen spotted a table he liked by the window and started toward it, threading his way through the tables, greeting the few diners who were still in the restaurant. Maggie felt as if she were running a gauntlet of unfriendly eyes, but she stared straight ahead at Owen’s back, then slid into the chair he held out for her.

  “This is a helluva night,” Owen said pleasantly, studying his menu. “I’m surprised there’s anybody here.”

  Maggie watched him thoughtfully. “It was nice of you to ask me,” she said. “I’m just afraid I won’t make very good company.”

  “Better than no company at all,” Owen replied, returning to the menu. “Where is that waitress?” Owen looked impatiently around the dining room for the hostess with the braided crown.

  “She didn’t seem too friendly when we came in,” Maggie observed.

  “She never is,” Owen muttered. “Oh well, we’re in no hurry, right?”

  Owen picked up a packet of crackers from the wicker basket on the table and tore it open, crushing a few of the crackers near the top. He reached for Maggie’s hand and dumped several of the little crackers into it. “Have an oyster cracker,” he said. “Drink your water.”

  Startled into obedience, Maggie began to chew on the dry crackers and took a sip from the tumbler.

  Owen ripped open another packet of crackers. “So,” he said, “how are things at the paper?”

  Maggie looked at him incredulously. “They’ve been better,” she said.

  “Well, I meant besides the obvious problems.”

  “We’re still publishing,” said Maggie. “At least that’s the plan. Grace has sort of taken over until Mr. Emmett comes back.” If he comes back. But she let the thought fly away.