Something was making him unhappy….
This thought made Steven realize just how much he loved his father, which was absolutely the worst thing to be thinking right now.
Because after tonight, he and his father would never be able to have a warm relationship again. Jon Campbell would certainly despise his son for what he was about to do.
Steven’s mouth settled into a desperate, stubborn line.
I don’t care if he hates me. He doesn’t understand anything. I’m doing this for the street kids, because somebody’s got to start redistributing the wealth. And if my father can’t understand that, I don’t need him in my life.
Off in the distance a car came winding down the approach road to the farm, its headlights glistening faintly through the storm.
Steven ducked back inside the stone barn, rubbing his hands together to warm them. He ran another brief check on the car, then glanced at his watch again.
Time crawled by so slowly tonight that he felt like screaming.
He didn’t want to leave too early and have to cruise the streets, since that would increase the opportunity for the car to be seen and remembered. But if he had to hang around the farm much longer, waiting and doing nothing, he was going to go out of his mind.
He took a cloth and rubbed the car furiously, polishing it to a high gloss. On a sudden inspiration he rushed outside, gathered a handful of mud from the damp ground and smeared it across the license plate, standing back to study the effect.
The mud obscured the letters and numbers quite effectively. He added another handful just to be sure, wiped and dried his chilled hands and checked his watch one more time.
Still fifteen minutes to go, but he couldn’t wait any longer. He’d leave now and drive slowly, taking the long way around to his designated parking spot near the liquor store.
If he was this scared, how must Zeke and Speedball be feeling? They were the ones who actually had to do the holdup. But at least there’d be no guns or knives involved, and no possibility of anybody getting hurt. Zeke had given his word to Steven that they’d do the heist without weapons of any kind.
He took a deep breath, opened the car door and began to slide behind the wheel.
“Steven?” a voice called from the doorway. “Are you in here?”
He stiffened and looked around, then climbed reluctantly from the car, trying to figure out who was standing there. It appeared to be a woman, darkly silhouetted against the faint light in the yard, wearing a long hooded coat and boots.
The person stepped inside, dropping the hood and shaking moisture from it. Steven gaped in surprise when he saw a flash of blond hair and recognized Dr. Pritchard.
“Margaret told me you were over here working on your car,” she said as casually as if they’d just met in the hallway at school. “It’s a pretty terrible night, isn’t it?”
“I…uh…If you came to see Dad and the kids,” Steven floundered awkwardly, “they’re all in town. They should be home soon.”
“I know. Margaret told me.” She shoved her hands deep in the pockets of her woollen coat and took a few steps toward him, “Actually, you’re the one I wanted to talk with, Steven.”
He had a wild urge to escape. It was so scary being alone with her in this isolated building.
“Sorry, I don’t have much time right now,” he muttered, reaching for the door handle. “I need to meet some friends in town. Would you like a ride back to the house, Dr. Pritchard?”
She was close to him now. In the glimmer of the outside light, he could see her halo of soft golden hair, the fine bone structure of her face.
“I don’t think you should go to town tonight, Steven,” she said.
He gripped the door handle and stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“Did you know that Zeke and Speedball have guns? Are you aware of what might happen if you get any more deeply involved in this?”
He swayed on his feet, thunderstruck, while his mind groped to understand.
Maybe this was a nightmare and he’d wake up soon and be safe in his bed.
“How do you—”
“Howie got a couple of guns for them. He’s very good at that sort of thing. Steven, could we sit down, do you think?”
She gestured at a bench along the wall. He shook his head and refused to move, still gaping at the woman in stunned astonishment. Finally she sat down alone, gripping her hands tightly in her lap.
“They’re vicious boys, and totally without conscience. But I don’t believe you’re like that,” she said. “I suppose they’ve told you all kinds of stories about how they’ll use the money for a good purpose and how there’ll be no violence under any circumstances. Is that right?”
He nodded, his mind still whirling crazily.
“But that’s all it is, Steven. The things they’re telling you are lies. These boys are using you. They want your car so they can get away safely, and apart from that, they don’t care about you at all.”
“That’s not true! They’re my friends,” he argued, afraid that he might be going to cry.
What she was saying was so awful, so unthinkable….
“No, Steven,” she said sadly. “There’s no honor among this particular pack of thieves. If they can find a way for you to take all the blame or lighten their own punishment, they’ll betray you in an instant.”
“Who are you?” he whispered, moving closer so he could see her face in the dim light. “Are you… like, a cop or something?”
“Me?” She glanced up at him, startled. “I’m an English professor.”
“I thought…” He looked away, kicking nervously at the floor. “I thought you might be working undercover or something, to know all this stuff. You must be spying on me.”
“No, I’m not spying on you. But you’re partly right. I do have some reliable sources of information, just like an undercover police officer.”
There was a long silence while Steven tried to figure out his next move. She wasn’t strong enough to hold him here. He could still get in his car and drive away to keep his appointment, and there’d be nothing she could do about it.
With sudden inspiration, he realized he could even close the door as he left, and lock Dr. Pritchard inside so she couldn’t stop the robbery. She’d be trapped in the barn, helpless to get out.
But the damn woman knew everything. Somebody would find her eventually, and then she’d go to the cops and give all their names.
While he was debating, she watched him quietly, her beautiful face looking sad and drawn.
“Why are you involved in something like this, Steven?” she asked. “What’s your motivation?”
He turned away, refusing to answer.
“You might as well tell me,” she said. “I already know everything else. I just want to understand why you’d choose to involve yourself in an armed robbery when you have every privilege a boy could dream of.”
“It’s not an armed robbery!” he said. “There won’t be any weapons involved. Zeke gave me his word, and I trust him.”
“I see. But whether or not that’s true, it will still be a holdup of a liquor store by two boys with long criminal records, and you’ll be driving the getaway car for them. Why would you do that?”
“I want to share the money,” he said after a long silence. “We’re giving it to the street kids so they can buy food, coats and warm blankets before winter comes.”
“You want to help the street kids?” she asked.
“Yeah, I do.” He looked up bitterly. “Is that so hard to believe? There’s a hell of a lot of homeless kids out there, you know, if you ever went downtown to see for yourself.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But there are other ways to help them.”
“How? They don’t need love and tenderness, or lectures about disease, or tickets to a free circus performance, if that’s what you mean. They need money.” He slammed the car door shut and leaned against it. “They need a share of what we’ve got, people
like you and me. My damn family spends enough during one week to keep one of those kids in comfort for a year.”
“So you’ve decided you’re going to help redistribute the wealth.”
“Yes.” Steven set his jaw and stared at the wall above her head. “That’s what I’m going to do.”
“And you have no other motivation at all?” she asked gently.
“Like what?”
“Perhaps you’re angry at the way life’s treated you, and you need to lash out and hurt somebody in return. Maybe you want your mother to—”
“Don’t talk about my mother!” he shouted. “What do you know about it, anyway? I’m sure your mother was a saint, and you grew up in luxury and never knew a minute of loneliness or worry about what was going to happen to you. That’s why it’s so disgusting when you go around judging other people!”
By now he was so furious that he didn’t even know what he was saying. His hands shook and his whole body was gripped by chills, though anger burned hot and strong at the center of him. He wanted to choke the woman, kick her, do anything to shake her from the cold, superior way she analyzed and passed judgment on others.
Steven actually took a couple of steps toward her, his hands raised as if to strike her.
When she lifted her head and looked at him, he stopped short in confusion. There were tears in her eyes. But the woman wasn’t afraid of Steven. She seemed to be far away—scarcely aware of his presence.
She clenched her hands together and reached up with a tense motion to brush one of her coat sleeves across her eyes.
“My mother wasn’t a saint,” Dr. Pritchard said at last, her voice low and halting. “She was a drunk.”
He paused in shock.
“My mother was a drunk,” the professor said again. “She drank every night until she passed out. There was…usually a boyfriend with her, and I lived in fear of those men. When I was your age, my existence was squalid beyond anything you could possibly imagine.”
“But I thought…” He watched her cautiously. “Everybody always says…”
“Nobody knows.” She took a deep shuddering breath. “I’ve never talked about this, Steven. For the past twenty years I’ve kept it a secret”
There was something so wretched about her face and voice that Steven’s fury ebbed rapidly. He sank onto the bench next to her, wondering if he should touch her hand or put his arm around her.
“We lived in a small prairie town,” she said, “in a horrible old house trailer. It was so dirty and awful, I could never have any friends. Other parents didn’t want their daughters associating with me, and I could hardly blame them. When I was a year or two younger than you,” she went on in a flat, toneless voice, “one of my mother’s boyfriends raped me while my mother was unconscious in the other room.”
“My God,” he whispered. It was so fantastic, listening to her. Could this possibly be his elegant, dignified professor? “What did you do?”
“I stabbed him in the chest with a hunting knife, took some of his money and ran away. I knew I could never go back so I wandered around for a couple of weeks, looking for a way to support myself and survive in the world.”
“How old were you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Where did you go?”
“I was heading for the city, planning to become a prostitute. I felt it didn’t matter what I did, and I was terribly angry. I wanted to punish the whole world for what happened to me.”
She looked up at him with a direct, searching gaze that made him flinch. But he couldn’t turn away. Instead, he found himself being drawn into the depths of her eyes, mesmerized by the story she was telling.
“What happened?” he whispered.
“I was still on my way to the city, starving and sick because I hadn’t eaten for several days. One morning I ran into a young man who was on a motorcycle trip. He’d camped in the ditch near me, sleeping in his little tent.”
“Did he hurt you?”
She gave him another of those sad, faraway looks that tore at his heart. “No,” she said. “He didn’t hurt me. He saved my life.”
“How?”
“By showing me more kindness than I’d ever known in my life. By making me understand that my life was valuable, after all, and it was possible to escape from the horrors and make something of myself. I can never, never repay that man.”
“Did you stay with this guy?” he asked, his own desperate plans forgotten.
She shook her head. “Just for a couple of days. Then I had to leave him behind.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d told him all about my past. I couldn’t bear to be with anybody who knew the truth about me. And there was another reason. He’d been so kind to me. He deserved much more than I could give him.”
“So you ran away again?”
“Yes, but this time it was different. I was determined to become the person he thought I could be. I went to the city and stayed at a homeless shelter for a while until I got a job and a room at an old boardinghouse. During the next few years, I worked my way through college, holding down two or three jobs at a time until I got my degree and was finally hired as a graduate assistant.”
“And you’ve never told anybody this story?”
“Not a soul. After a while, because I never shared any details about myself, people started making up stories. That suited me just fine. I let them do it, thinking myths would help to bury the reality of the past. But after a while the lies began to hurt even more. I really wished I could start over and be truthful.”
“But you couldn’t?”
“I could never bear to tell anybody. I knew people would be repelled, and I guess I was afraid their reaction might bring all my memories back somehow.”
Steven felt a hot flood of embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Dr. Pritchard. All that stuff I said, about how you couldn’t know anything about street kids…it was way out of line.”
She patted his knee. “Don’t apologize, Steven. I know your heart’s in the right place. But if you really want to help these kids, you’ve got to do it in constructive ways. You have to get yourself educated, find a job and give the street kids some of your time. What they need more than anything is people who care about them enough to get involved.”
“That’s how you know so much about Zeke and the other guys,” he said with sudden understanding. “You work with those kids, don’t you?”
“Every weekend. I’ve been doing volunteer work at one of the downtown hostels for more than five years.”
Again he felt that deep wave of shame. “God, I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I’m such a jerk.”
She put her arm around him and hugged him. “You’re certainly not a jerk. You’re a fine, sensitive, compassionate young man. If I were your mother, Steven, I’d be so proud of you that I’d want everyone to know how terrific you are.”
Her words were unbelievably sweet to him, flowing over his wounded spirit like a healing balm. “Really?” he whispered.
“Really.”
They sat together in silence for a moment. Steven realized that the time for his appointment had come and gone, but he didn’t care. Whatever was happening on that downtown street had nothing to do with him anymore. He felt free and unburdened, so relieved that he was almost light-headed.
“That guy,” he said awkwardly, “the one who… hurt you.”
“Yes?”
“Did you really kill him?”
She shook her head, staring at the glittering chrome on the car parked near them. “I went back a few years ago, hoping to make some kind of peace with the past, but it wasn’t possible. The trailer had vanished without a trace. I talked to a woman in the trailer park who didn’t recognize me, and asked her about the people who used to live there.”
“Did she remember?”
“Oh, she remembered my mother, all right,” the professor said grimly. “And she certainly didn’t have any kind words for her. Apparently, there was a house fire a coupl
e of months after I left, while my mother and her boyfriend were sleeping, and both of them were killed. It was the same man. I probably didn’t even hurt him all that badly, because the woman didn’t say anything about a stabbing.”
“I can’t believe you’ve never told anybody about all this. It must be so hard to…”
“To live a lie?” she asked when Steven paused. “You’re right, it’s the hardest thing a person can do. And it’s very self-destructive, because the hidden memories gain so much power they begin to destroy you. But still, I could never bring myself to talk about them. They were too horrible.”
“So why have you told me?”
“Because you’re too fine a person to throw your life away,” she said. “And because I still owe a debt of gratitude to that man who helped me.”
“So you think…” He trailed off, searching for words. “You think by helping me, you’ll be able to pay him back somehow?”
But she was no longer listening. She lifted her head and looked beyond him toward the door.
Steven followed her gaze and saw his father standing quietly in the shadows under the eaves of the barn, watching them.
She froze, terrified, wondering how much Jon had overheard. Did he know about the planned robbery, and Steven’s involvement?
“Oh, no,” he whispered in panic. “God, no….”
His father took a few steps into the barn. The professor got to her feet and moved toward the open door, edging away from the man as if he might be about to strike her.
Steven also watched him in fear. Surprisingly, though, Jon didn’t even seem to be aware of his son. Instead, he kept staring at the woman with such burning intensity that Steven found himself wondering why. Jon seemed to be gripped by some kind of powerful emotion, coupled with a strange look of wonder and joy.
“Callie?” he breathed, reaching for her. “Callie, is it you? Is it really you?”
She muttered something incoherent and began to run, stumbling out into the whirling snow. Jon started to follow her, then paused and glanced back at his son.
Steven could see the way his father struggled, looking first at the boy, then out at the darkness where the woman had vanished. Finally he drew himself together, shook his head and came into the barn.
Memories of You Page 21