Something Most Deadly

by Ann Self

  Careful, she mentally shook herself.

  “Yes, Miss Husted, this is my daughter Olivia. She’s very excited to be here.”

  Was she wrong, or was there just of touch of irony in his voice?

  “In fact,” he continued, “she wanted to wear these riding clothes to school.”

  Jane laughed and knelt down to Olivia’s six-year-old level, partly to see her better, and partly to remove herself from the intense close-up inspection going on full tilt in Brian’s mind, before it threw him into total recall.

  “Hi there Olivia. I guess you’ve been ready to ride since this morning!”

  Olivia shook her head affirmatively and was smiling so hard her face seemed about to crack. She was all rosy cheeks and enthusiasm. A shy, quiet “yes” popped out of her.

  “Olivia has your newspaper picture taped on her wall.” Brian explained. “She’s convinced you’re a major celebrity.”

  Jane looked up at him, and for a split second, oceans of feelings washed over her and threatened the barriers. There was still a live wire of current between them, but she switched off her end and retreated safely behind the polished facade. His eyes seemed to want to sear a path to the back of her skull, but she abruptly cut off eye-contact—faster than he could even focus—and he ran up against a mental wall as hard and cool as a glacier. He went silent, and the look on his face was slightly grim.

  “We have a nice little horse for you, she’s very friendly and gentle and easy to ride,” Jane babbled to Olivia.

  The hour Jane spent with Olivia in an outdoor paddock passed quickly, and Jane had a feeling that Brian spent most of the time with his eyes glued on her, as if she was an aggravating enigma toying with his mind. He leaned against the fence in the cool shadows of a giant oak. A welcome breeze still wafted the branches, playing his intent face with dancing shadows. When Olivia rode by him he smiled encouragement and complimented her progress, but even she could tell her father was distracted. She wondered what he was thinking about.

  Brian smiled as his daughter rode by him for at least the tenth time. He was trying his best to be an attentive father—he had so little time to spend with her and he wanted to make it count. This preoccupation with a strange woman was driving him crazy. His mind would not let him rest, and every time he tried to concentrate on business or family, she’d pop right back in. Who is she? Who is she? Never in his life had he had such a problem mastering his mind. His brain seemed to toy with him, yet not provide the answers the way it usually did—and he knew the answers were in there somewhere, if he could only dig them out. His day was jam-packed with important business decisions, every minute accounted for and many people depending on him. He had no time for this frivolous game playing. He’d always been in control of his thoughts—able to focus and nail them down to the business at hand when necessary.

  The woman was actually robbing him of his ability to apply himself to daily tasks and he found himself getting unreasonably angry. Elliot had warned him the riding instructor was coy and flighty and prone to acting a little silly around men, and he was starting to believe it. Brian had always distrusted people who wouldn’t look him in the eye.

  And boy, she just won’t look me in the eye!

  After the lesson, Brian and Jane followed Dylan as he led Olivia on her horse back to the barn. Dylan conversed amiably with the small girl, but kept shooting sly glances at Jane, sometimes accompanied by subtle smirking. Sam had obviously been tattling. Jane did her best to ignore Dylan and turned her attention to Brian. “Olivia did very well today,” she chatted like a magpie. “Has she ever been on a horse before?”

  “No, she hasn’t,” he answered abruptly.

  So much for conversation. They walked some distance in complete silence. Brian looked as if he had questions sizzling just beneath the surface and was unsure of just how much to ask. She guessed that he had heard some of the lame explanations for her antics from Lucinda, but was too smart not to know there was more to it. She hoped Lucinda hadn’t yet figured out that they attended the same high school, that little tidbit would certainly blow her cover.

  Brian had a disconcerting way of looking at her, without comment, that made her feel like she should keep babbling her head off just to fill up the void. Jane firmly resisted the impulse, almost clamping her teeth shut to stop it. She noticed a slight smirk of amusement develop on his face that didn’t look much different than Dylan’s. Was everyone going to smirk at her? Did men have some kind of radar that let them know more than they were supposed to? She was beginning to feel very irritated.

  Brian stopped walking, letting the horse and Olivia gain some distance, and Jane had no choice but to stop and look back at him. He was clearly exasperated, leveling his eyes squarely on her face. She was still gritting her teeth, holding on to the facade, like a person hanging on to the edge of a cliff—her eyes dancing away from his.

  “I do know you from somewhere. Where are you from originally?” he demanded, dropping any pretense of politeness.

  “New Hampshire,” she blurted, lying without thinking, her hand busy adjusting the bill of her cap.

  “And yet you have a Boston accent so strong you could be a member of the Kennedy clan.”

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave...

  “My parents were from Boston...they moved to escape the big city rat race and I spent most of my childhood in New Hampshire—we moved back down here eventually.”

  “Moved to where?”

  “Ah, Rehoboth,” she lied.

  Brian looked skeptical, and Jane turned to follow Dylan and Olivia into the barn before he could make any comment, or see the color flushing her face.

  Liar liar, pants on fire...

  “So she’ll see you same time next week,” Brian said as he got into the Mercedes with Olivia. His face was hard, cold and unreadable, a blaze of anger flashing over his blue eyes, and he no longer tried to look into her eyes, or at her face, or anything in her direction. His manner said that he had lost interest, he had wasted enough time trying to make sense of her. The game was no longer interesting; she could keep her secrets.

  This was what Jane wanted, so why did she feel so devastated?

  Olivia hung out the window of the departing SUV and waved and shouted “Good-bye Jane!” as long as she could before the electric window rose. As the Mercedes drove off and disappeared from her sight, neither Brian nor Olivia knew of the scalding tears burning the back of her eyes. She was sure he wouldn’t accompany Olivia to the barn again.

  “Oh my God, you said what!?”

  “I lied, Madeline,” Jane spoke into the cordless phone borrowed from Sam’s office, as she tossed a flake of hay into a paddock for General.

  “I told him I was from New Hampshire. Lied with a straight face, and once I started I couldn’t stop. Did you know my parents were from Boston, but moved to New Hampshire for peace and quiet? Then, according to me, we moved to Rehoboth.”

  “Well that was a pantload...”

  “I know it. Knew it when I was concocting the damn story. All the time I’m thinking, someone stop me before I lie some more!”

  “Doesn’t that little twerp Lucinda know where you’re from?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jane replied as she strolled between the paddocks. “I tell her as little as possible, but she’s really hooked into gossip. I just hope she doesn’t connect too many dots for him. The Whitbecks are aware that my parents were killed in a plane crash on the Cape, and that my father was a small time builder—not quite in Elliot’s league—but they were all far from interested in any details of my past. Or used to be anyway. All they know is that they hired me away from a stable in Rehoboth, and that I lived in a three-decker tenement somewhere with an aged aunt after my parents died, but they don’t really know the specific time frame or the exact details.”

  “Now Lucinda is digging for all the skinny.”

  “That’s what worries me, that she’ll put the puzzle together and figure out that I shared classes wit
h Brian.”

  Jane could tell the reception was breaking up, so she reversed direction and walked back towards the barn, as it glowed lavender and orange in the setting sun.

  Madeline continued: “...don’t...why you cut yourself...at the knees...this guy...he might really like you, and you’re trashing the relationship before it begins,” she complained.

  “Madeline...I have made up my mind to move on. I wasted three years of my life in slavish worship of Brian Canaday. How did that help me? Zip! Enough is enough. You shrinks know about closure. I have to leave my past behind if I am to function, and unfortunately—Brian doesn’t know it—but he’s dragging all my past with him like a tail of old tin cans.”

  “What if your past doesn’t see fit to leave you alone. Wouldn’t it be better to just face it head on and deal with it? I mean, my past sometimes embarrasses me too, but unless someone were to call me Fatty Maddy again, I don’t usually come unglued. One sight of Brian makes you a wreck.”

  “I did quite well today.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s just thrilled to the teeth with the sugary plastic-coated creature you presented him with.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about it now.” Jane sighed with exasperation before she continued: “It’s bad for my self respect, you know. It does a lot of damage to the way I see myself, a pathetic creature chasing after a man who’s way out of my league.”

  “You think he’s out of your league?”

  “Well, yes. Over-reaching a little don’t you think?”

  Madeline made a snort. “No! I think he’d be lucky to have you. I think he’d think he’d be lucky to have you if he could just break through the wall you’ve built around yourself. FortHusted.

  “Very funny. You must be a riot in therapy.”

  “I can be.”

  They were silent for a moment, then Madeline said: “Fly in the face of danger. Be honest with him.”

  “Oh sure, I can just hear myself. I’m sorry Brian, but I told you a pack of lies. I actually attended the same High School as you—I was that geeky, nerdy girl with the hacked hair that looked like a Halloween fright wig—remember the one who dressed out of the salvation army dumpster..?”

  “You didn’t look that bad,” Madeline insisted. “Like I said—you always had a beautiful face, and sooner or later his subliminal mind is going to cough up the information.”

  Jane was still walking back towards the barn to keep the phone reception but stopped dead in her tracks. “You can’t know that for sure...” she insisted.

  “Oh but I do know that for sure. The subliminal mind is like a big warehouse of information. It forgets nothing—especially not with the kind of photographic memory he’s supposed to have—but it has a poor connection to the wide-awake executive brain. If you prod the subliminal long enough, sooner or later it presents the pertinent information on a platter. Every time he sees you, his mind is being prodded. Course, you’re slowing the process down by fibbing and trying to disguise yourself, and irritating the living daylights out of the man.”

  “Oh no,” Jane moaned.

  “It’ll hit him out of the blue,” Madeline explained. “He’ll be sitting at a board meeting or something, or actually looking at you, when it strikes like a bolt of lightning.”

  “Great! I just wish I had known this before I told the mother of all fibs. He’s really going to think I’m nuts.”

  “Honesty, that’s the ticket!”

  “Good bye Maddy. Fatty!” she teased. Jane rang off and changed her direction, marching towards a block of wooden bleachers placed next to another paddock that would be used for the July show. As she stomped along she verbally castigated herself about how dumb she was to concoct such a lame background. She stepped up onto the bleachers—still ranting out loud about her stupidity—and sat down in the center of the empty rows of board seats, propping her feet up on the plank in front. Resting her elbows on her knees, she tapped her forehead with the back of the plastic phone, to repair her thinking and emphasize her words: “Damnit why can’t I simplify my life, focus on working toward success and eliminate obstacles?” She sighed heavily and sat thinking for a few moments, watching the sun melting into the horizon of rolling pastures and trees.

  “I have no control over my life,” she mumbled to the empty paddock. “That’s why I can’t direct it. Other people have complete control over me.”

  Jane concluded it was the price to pay for needing a paycheck, living hand-to-mouth, and not having the support of a family network. And now it was possible that someone meant her real harm. It was an outrageous thought—she couldn’t imagine anyone in the barn trying to cause her serious injury. It must have been a mistake or a bad joke. Jane had not mentioned the rooster episode to Madeline; she was already angered at how Jane was treated, and this information would have given her a royal fit. She absently watched a squirrel bounding through the paddock in the long shadow-stripes of late afternoon and thought about how her life was like a rubber raft careening down a water slide. The only control she had was in holding on for dear life.

  Dear life..?

  SIX

  The air was heavily salted with dust. Sunlight blazed through two dormer windows in the empty apartment across the hall from Jane’s room as she and Dylan were cleaning it out. It was early Wednesday morning—only seven AM—but the thermometer was already passing seventy-eight degrees on its way to ninety. The sun was a molten ball of blinding yellow, plundering its way into every break in the barn walls.

  Jane yanked a sheet off an old chair in the room and rolled it up.

  “AH....CHOO!”

  “Bless you,” Dylan said as he struggled to open a window that had been closed since the previous fall.

  “Thank you,” Jane gasped, dabbing at her nose with a tissue while holding the sheet in one hand. “Dust makes my nose run like a faucet.”

  They were preparing the room for the working students who would be arriving Friday; a job that a cleaning crew used to take care of. Now it was part of Jane and Dylan’s expanded duties. Dylan’s job as head stableboy included an ever widening array of jobs, and Jane herself wore many hats—coach, groom, trainer, cleaning lady. She guessed it wouldn’t be long before they’d try to pressure her into doing stalls again. She had also heard a rumor that the janitorial service taking care of the barn’s four rest rooms was being dispensed with, and she wondered who would fill in for them. Charmante, as beautiful as he was, was costing them all.

  She stuffed the tissue back into the pocket of her jeans and looked around the room with fresh interest. “This place doesn’t look nearly as spooky by daylight as it did when I stood here in the dark last Friday night—you know when Reggie was trying to get that idiot rooster out of my room.”

  Dylan stopped yanking the stubborn window up on its track and leaned his hands on the sill to rest. Sweat was sliding down his face. His gold-brown hair was pulled back in a small tail, and he wore baggy cut-offs and a black tank-top emblazoned with yet another heavy-metal band. He looked back over a leanly-muscled shoulder at her as he swiped at his face with the shirt hem.

  “You ever...” he asked, still mopping his face with the handy shirt hem, “stop to think that the sick puppy who tossed Chicken in your room might’ve hid in here to watch the results of his dirty deed?”

  Jane hugged the rolled sheet tighter as she ran her eyes over the room again, noting for the first time all the excellent hiding places it afforded; especially in the dark with amorphous shapes of shrouded furniture. The skin on her arms began to prickle, as if a dozen centipedes with their segmented bodies and hair-like legs were running over her flesh and down her spine. Her face blanched nearly white. Dylan stood up, aghast at her expression.

  “Jeez, sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you that bad...”

  She shook off the creepy feeling. “No...it’s okay Dylan—I’m just surprised I didn’t think of it myself. It was so dark and windy I wouldn’t have known if someone were standing right next to me breat
hing down my neck.”

  “Woooo! Stop!” Dylan shivered in feigned terror. “Now you’re scaring me!”

  Jane winged the bunched up sheet at him, and he snatched it out of mid-air with quick, strong hands. “You know,” he said, “for a second your face looked just like this sheet—as white as a ghost.”

  “It’s the heat...it’s not even eight o’clock yet and it must be close to eighty. This kind of heat could make a ghost sweat.”

  “Brutal,” he agreed as he stuffed the sheet into one of the two giant plastic bags on the floor, “but it’s better than freezing in the winter.”

  “True.” She tugged lightly at the neck of her tee-shirt to keep it from sticking, as she continued examining the room. “We really should vacuum this place.”

  “Man—that did it, now I’m really shivering in horror.”

  “What? You muck out stalls but you won’t vacuum?”

  “I have my limits,” he answered, yanking the drawstring bands tight on the bags.

  Jane frowned at the imprint on the tank shirt Dylan was wearing.

  “Do you ever listen to anything but rap or heavy-metal bands?”

  “No.”

  “No country music...classic rock and roll?”

  “God no.” His expression looked slightly ill.

  She laughed. “Do you have a skateboard in your trunk?”

  He straightened from tying the bags and now looked astounded. “How in the hell did you know..?”

  “Just psychic.”

  “Uh oh. Failed a test, haven’t I? The thing hasn’t been out of my trunk for a year. You must have x-ray vision if you know it’s in there. And I could listen to any kind of music if I have to.”

  “Sorry. This just proves you’re way too young.”

  “I’m aging rapidly working in this place,” he joked as he dragged the bags out the door. “Actually, I’ll be twenty in two months.”

  “My God, an old geezer.” Jane laughed, as she propped the apartment door open to get a cross-breeze. Dylan smiled as he hefted the bags of sheets over his back and started off down the hallway.