Daughters of Eve

by Lois Duncan

  “Of course it’s not fair,” her father said. “Why should it be? Whoever said life is fair was a moron.”

  “What?” Ann said in bewilderment.

  “Nothing’s fair,” Mr. Whitten said briskly. “It isn’t fair for a man of forty-six to have a heart attack. There I was with everything—a good job, a happy marriage, all the makings for a great life—and what happens? Clunk! The old pump goes out on me. Suddenly I’m an old man whose feet are always cold. There’s half a lifetime that somebody owes me, and I’m never going to get to use it.”

  “Daddy, you are!” Ann protested.

  “Don’t give me that guff. I’ve got months left, a year maybe. I’ve been cheated out of what’s due me, and it’s not right. Do you know how many nights I’ve laid awake in my bed and cursed at God and asked Him, ‘Why? Why me? Why John Whitten who’s always tried to do good and live by Your holy laws? What have I ever done to deserve a blow like this?’ A thousand times, at least, that’s how many. And do you know what He’s told me?”

  “What?”

  “Not one word, that’s what. Whatever the answer is, it’s not for me to know it on this earth.”

  “I love you, Daddy,” Ann said.

  “And I love you. More than anything else in my life.”

  “And you’ll be okay—whatever happens? Whatever I decide to do?”

  “Whatever you decide.”

  They sat, staring into the fire, his arm still around her. The dry wood snapped, and the sparks flew, and the logs resettled themselves. Outside the den window the flakes of snow continued to fall.

  After a while, Mrs. Whitten came in with a bowl of stew and set up a TV tray so her husband could eat by the fire.

  “Well, Tammy, this visit is certainly unexpected,” Irene Stark said.

  “I’m sure it is.”

  Tammy had been in Irene’s apartment only the month before, when the Daughters of Eve had gathered there to work on posters for Madison’s campaign. At that time it had seemed like a pleasant place, warm and inviting and humming with happy activity.

  Today it was different, quiet and empty. The furniture looked as though it had never been sat on. Glancing around her, Tammy became acutely aware of the oil paintings that covered the walls. All were abstracts, done in dark, intense colors against a background of white. The size of the pictures and the starkness of the sharp, strong images crowded so close upon one another in the confinement of the small room made her oddly uncomfortable.

  “Won’t you sit down?” Irene asked politely.

  “Thank you.” She seated herself on the edge of the sofa and then hesitated, caught by the sight of a familiar jacket thrown across the back of a chair. “Do you have company?”

  “It’s only Jane. She’s asleep in the bedroom. The poor girl was at the hospital most of the night waiting for her mother to come through surgery.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Tammy said awkwardly. “I didn’t know. Is Mrs. Rheardon going to be okay?”

  “They can’t say yet. Her husband hurt her badly.”

  “That’s horrible,” Tammy said. “Jane can stay at our house if she needs to. I know my parents would be glad to have her, and we’ve got an extra room, with Marnie away at college.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Irene said.

  “I wish you’d tell her—”

  “Jane is taken care of, Tammy.” Irene paused. “You wanted to see me about something? It must be important if it brought you out in this weather.”

  “It’s about what happened in my dad’s classroom.”

  “The Pellet boy’s experiment—” Irene began slowly.

  “It wasn’t just Gordon’s demonstration,” Tammy interrupted. “It was everything! All the lab equipment! All Dad’s personal things! And the manure they plastered on his desk and on the walls! I knew something was going to happen when I left the meeting, but I never guessed it would be so bad—you called him a sexist pig!”

  “Peter was punished. Why shouldn’t your father be?”

  “My dad isn’t like Peter! He doesn’t go around hurting people! He had a good reason for rejecting Erika’s experiment—”

  “Don’t shout, Tammy,” Irene said quietly. “You’ll wake Jane.”

  “You can’t go on doing these things,” Tammy said, fighting to get control of her voice. “I have a terrible feeling about what’s going to happen. You’re making people do things that are wrong.”

  “I hardly think it’s up to you to pass judgment,” Irene said. “I have never forced anyone to do anything. Daughters of Eve is a democratic organization. Every issue is decided by a vote of the members. As sponsor, I don’t even participate in the voting.”

  “Maybe you don’t exactly force people,” Tammy conceded, “but—you do something. You make things happen. I’ve known most of these girls for years. They’ve changed. You’ve changed them.”

  “By helping them face reality? By giving them courage to stand up for their rights?” There was satisfaction in Irene’s voice. “If I’ve brought about those changes, then I’m delighted. Men have to learn that we are a force to be reckoned with. I’ve lived longer than you have, and I know what I’m talking about. Men don’t know the meaning of words like ‘loyalty’ and ‘love.’ They care about nothing and no one except themselves. They view women as servants to be exploited. We have to rise up and overthrow them if we are to survive!”

  “Maybe there are a few like that, but—”

  “All of them! All of them!”

  “You can’t really believe that,” Tammy said incredulously. “If you do, you’re as prejudiced as you think they are.”

  “You truly can’t see the difference?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Then I think this conversation is over.” Irene regarded her coldly. “You are no longer one of us. You have disassociated yourself from the sisterhood. Our goals are not yours. There is really nothing more for us to discuss.”

  “Yes, there is,” Tammy said. “There’s my dad’s classroom. You led the girls into doing what they did there.”

  “There’s no way for you to have any idea of what went on that afternoon,” Irene said. “You weren’t even with us.”

  “It can’t go on, Irene! If it does, something terrible will happen! I feel it—I know it!”

  “You took an oath,” Irene reminded her.

  “I know that, and I’ll live by it. I will ‘divulge to no one words spoken in confidence within the sacred circle.’ But that doesn’t apply to anything else that might happen. From now on, I’m not a member of Daughters of Eve. I’m just me, Tammy Carncross, on my own, and I’ll do whatever I think is right.”

  “Are you threatening us, Tammy?” Irene asked quietly.

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Then I think I should warn you that threats have a way of boomeranging. It makes people very angry when they’re threatened. Emotions get out of hand, and regrettable things can happen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you remember what I told you about Robert Morrell?”

  “No. Yes—I mean, I think so.” Tammy was confused by the turn of the conversation. “Was he that PE coach at the school in Chicago?”

  “That’s right. He blocked my friend from her new position. Well, I may have told you, some students staged a demonstration. Emotions ran high, and somebody threw a bottle.”

  “Threw it at him?”

  “It undoubtedly was an accident, but the result was very sad.” She paused. “Your father isn’t as handsome as Morrell was, Tammy. Still, it would be a shame—” She let the sentence dwindle off, unfinished.

  Tammy sat staring at her, too stunned to speak.

  The telephone on the end table jangled shrilly. Irene leaned over and picked up the receiver.

  “Hello? Oh—Madison.” There was a moment’s silence. Then she said, “I see. Can you hold a moment?” She turned to Tammy. “I think we’re done, aren’t we?”

  “Yo
u’re insane,” Tammy said hoarsely.

  “Oh, no, my dear,” Irene said softly. “It’s just that I refuse to be intimidated—not by the men in this world, and not by you. And I won’t let my girls be threatened either. We are a sisterhood, and we take care of our own. Do you understand me?”

  Silently, Tammy nodded.

  “Then don’t you think you should be leaving? You have a long walk home through the snow.”

  Numbly, Tammy got to her feet. When she was standing, her eyes were even with the painting on the wall directly across from her. The images swam before her—black and purple and red—the red, thick and dark like blood; the black, like a heavy metallic object—strong, brutal shapes that were a silent cry of fury.

  “That picture—” She blinked, and the forms seemed to shift. There was no recognizable object there at all, only hatred. A canvas full of hatred.

  “That day—at the initiation,” Tammy said haltingly, “something was wrong. I knew it—but I didn’t know what. I got scared—I ran—but I didn’t know what it was I was running away from.

  “I know now. It was you. I was running from you.”

  The snow delayed the delivery of the day’s mail. It was 2:45 p.m. by the time the mail carrier had made it along the slippery roads as far as the Ellis house on Fourth Street. He brought an assortment of cards in square envelopes bedecked with Christmas seals, and a letter for Madison.

  The letter read:

  Dear Miss Ellis:

  It is my understanding that those citizens of Modesta who contributed so generously to the school athletic fund through the November raffle did so out of a desire to support the program as it currently exists. To use these funds for another purpose would, I believe, be unfair to the contributors.

  I appreciate your group’s concern for the future of the Modesta athletic program. Your desire for the development of a girls’ soccer team will be kept very much in mind in the future. However, at this particular time, I feel the donations from the community will be best used to further the sports activities the school already sponsors.

  I am grateful for the continued support and help of the Daughters of Eve.

  Sincerely yours,

  J. Douglas Shelby, Principal

  Modesta High School

  “That self-satisfied bastard!” Madison said softly when she’d finished reading the letter. “The nerve!”

  She took out her cell phone and made several short calls.

  Then she told her mother, “I’m going out for a while.”

  Hurriedly, before her mother could question her further, Madison put on her ski jacket and left the house.

  Throughout the town of Modesta, the doors of other homes were opening to spill an assortment of teenage girls out into the blowing snow. Some were on foot. Others borrowed cars from their parents. The ones with the cars collected those without.

  Paula Brummell stopped at the Schneider house to pick up Erika.

  To her surprise, she found her upstairs in her bedroom, doing homework.

  “I’m not going,” Erika told her. “I don’t think this is the way to handle things.”

  “We did it for you when you got screwed over,” Paula reminded her.

  “I know, and I wish you hadn’t. If I’d been at the meeting that day, I’d never have let you. You can’t go around destroying people’s property because you’re mad at them for doing things you don’t want them to.”

  “You think we should sit still for discrimination?” Paula demanded.

  “It wasn’t discrimination that kept me from going to state. Mr. Carncross knew my project would be disqualified. He told me about a student two years ago who trained a rat to run a maze by rewarding it with food. To get it hungry enough to perform well, the student didn’t feed it for twenty-four hours. The decision committee banned the project because they thought it showed cruelty to animals. If they’d do that, you can imagine how they’d react to a bunch of rats crawling around with the d.t.’s.”

  “He probably made that story up,” Paula said.

  “I don’t think so. I believe him.”

  “You can’t know it’s true.”

  “And you can’t know it isn’t true,” Erika said. “But if it wasn’t, if he was deliberately trying to keep me from going to state because he liked Gordon better, that still wouldn’t have been reason to smash up all that expensive stuff. I saw that place the next day. It looked like a bunch of animals went crazy in there.”

  “So what about punishing Peter? Do you think that was wrong, too? You were part of that as much as the rest of us.”

  “It didn’t seem wrong at the time,” Erika admitted. “Now, though, I think it might have been. I did take part in that, but I thought it was going to be a one-time thing because of Laura. I didn’t know it was just the beginning.”

  “We have to stand up for our rights!”

  “You sound like Irene.”

  “So what’s wrong with that? Are you turning on Irene now?” Paula regarded her incredulously. “I’ll tell you, Erika, you and I have been friends for a long time, but if you dare say one thing against Irene, our friendship’s over. Look at all she’s done for us, at all she’s taught us. How many teachers give their all for their students the way she’s done? If it wasn’t for Irene, we’d still be the same bunch of spineless nothings we were a year ago, rolling along without any real direction, doing do-gooder projects and having our little parties. It’s Irene who’s shown us what sisterhood can be.”

  “It’s gotten out of hand,” Erika said. “It’s gone too far. The basic premise is fine, but there’s so much hate, we can’t see anything clearly anymore.”

  “Of course there’s hate! It’s normal to hate people who hurt you!”

  “I don’t hate Mr. Carncross, and I don’t hate Gordon. I like Gordon. He’s a cool guy.”

  “And I suppose you ‘like’ Mr. Shelby? Did Madison read you that letter?”

  “Yes, and I don’t like it, and I don’t like him. I think the letter was insulting, and there’s got to be something we can do about it. But not this. This isn’t going to get us anywhere. What good will it do?” Behind the thick lenses of her glasses, Erika’s eyes were solemn and worried. “Paula, this scares me. If things go on like this, somebody’s going to get hurt. Badly hurt.”

  “Mr. Shelby, you mean?”

  “I don’t know who, but somebody. Violence leads to more violence. You know Tammy’s ‘candle with the blood on it’? I don’t want to be there to see it burn.”

  “That’s your problem, then,” Paula said.

  “I guess it is.”

  Erika didn’t bother to go downstairs and walk Paula to the door. It wouldn’t have mattered. Despite the years of closeness between them, they were no longer friends.

  Chapter 19

  On Saturday, December 9, at 5:50 p.m., Jane Rheardon entered her home by the front door and went through the entrance hall to the stairway leading to the second floor.

  As she passed the door to the living room, her father called out to her, “Jane, is that you? Come in here.”

  Jane hesitated at the foot of the stairs, torn as to whether to obey the command or continue to her room. Finally, she turned and came slowly back to stand in the entryway.

  Bart Rheardon was seated in his accustomed chair with the evening paper lying open on his lap and a martini already in his hand.

  “Well, look who’s decided to come home,” he said, lifting the glass in a sardonic toast. “The wanderer has returned at last. Where’ve you been?”

  “If you’d been really worried, you would’ve called the police,” Jane said.

  “I wasn’t ‘really worried,’ as you put it. I was sure you’d taken off to the home of one of those girlfriends of yours. I wasn’t about to go calling all over town to find out which one. The question is, why are you here now?”

  “To get my clothes,” Jane said.

  “Oh, really? You mean you girls don’t share each other’s clothing? They
’re your soul sisters, aren’t they? I thought you passed around everything like you were one big family.”

  “I’m not staying with one of the girls. I spent the night with Ms. Stark. And you wouldn’t have had to ‘call over town’ if you’d wanted to find me. You know the number of my cell phone. You could’ve reached me that way when Mom had her ‘accident,’ too.”

  “Why should I? One more hysterical voice wouldn’t have added much to the occasion.”

  “Well, now you won’t have to listen to any voices at all,” Jane said. “You can have the whole place to yourself. I’m moving out.”

  “This teacher friend is planning to put you up indefinitely?”

  “At least until Mom gets out of the hospital.”

  “And then where will you be going?”

  “With Mom,” Jane said. “Wherever she wants to be.”

  “She’ll be here, with me, the way she’s always been,” Bart Rheardon told her. “Your mother wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she wasn’t here. The doctors think she’ll have to be in a wheelchair for a while. That means she won’t be able to do all the things she used to do. You’ll have to pitch in and help out a lot more than you’ve been doing.”

  Jane stared at him in amazement.

  “Dad,” she said softly, “sometimes I simply can’t believe you.”

  When he spoke like this, acted like this, he seemed so normal. He was a handsome man—heavy-jowled and beginning to gray a little at the temples, but still far better-looking than the fathers of most of her classmates. He had honest eyes with a direct, straightforward gaze—a strong, square chin—a wide, pleasant mouth. His was the kind of face that people liked and trusted. If you ran into someone with a face like that on a street corner and he asked you for directions, you wouldn’t think twice about standing there and giving them to him. If you found yourself sitting next to him at a lunch counter and he smiled at you, you’d chat a little. He was well-known in the community. People respected him. Her mother loved him. That was the ultimate mystery—the fact that her mom, who knew him at his worst as well as his best—continued to love him.