Wild Orchids Part 25

"Anyway, my uncles didn't know that the night before the robbery, my parents had crossed the state line and been married by a justice of the peace.

Three days before, my mother had told Toodles she was going to have me.

I believe her exact words were, 'Look what you did to me, you little cretin.'

But, as I said, my father doesn't seem to see things as other people do, so he was very happy that his girlfriend was going to have his baby, and he asked her to marry him. One of my aunts told me that my mother said she'd rather let a train run over her feet than marry him, but then my father told her he was going to buy her a house and a car and that she'd never again have to milk a cow."

"He was under a bit of pressure, wasn't he?" Jackie said. "He had a wife, a child on the way, and no way to provide for his new family. So there he was, sitting in the car waiting for his brothers to show up with the loot, but, instead, the police arrived. He must have been frantic."

"Yeah. By the time the police arrived, my uncles had already run out the backdoor, but my father didn't know that. And what my brothers didn't know is that Toodles had a gun. They never did find out where he got it, but between you and me, I think my mother gave it to him. She told the police she didn't know anything, but I think my dad had told her about the bank job. My mother wasn't one for taking someone's word for anything, so if Toodles told her he was going to buy her a house and a car, she'd want to know where he was going to get the money. I think Toodles told her what he and his brothers were going to do, and I think my mother had some suspicions about his brothers, so she gave him an old revolver she'd got from somewhere. She was going to see that she got what she wanted."

Jackie gave me one of "those" looks. "And what she wanted was a home for her child." When I didn't say anything to that, she said, "Did your father shoot someone?"

"Three people, two of them policemen. When the police went charging into the bank, guns drawn, Toodles thought his beloved brothers were still inside, so he went in shooting."

"In other words, your father risked his life to save his no-good, lying, double-crossing, rat fink brothers."

"That's the way my mother saw it, too. Toodles didn't kill anyone, but he wounded the two policemen and grazed a hysterical bank teller. Took off her left ear-lobe."

Jackie leaned back in the chair. "So your father went to jail, and after you were born, your mother gave you to your uncles to raise." Her head came up. "What happened to the money from the bank job?"

I smiled. "They didn't get a dime. One of the tellers, not the one who got shot, but another one, recognized my uncle Cal's voice and called out his name. They all panicked and ran out the backdoor."

Jackie got up and walked over to one of the bookcases along the wall. I knew she wasn't looking at the books, but was thinking about my family.

They did that to people. Hadn't that been proven when people bought the books I'd written about them?

I decided to change the subject. "Had any visions lately?" My intention was purely malicious. I wanted her to remember the fun she and I'd had when I'd been around to save the lives of the people she saw. Would this Russell Dunne have done that? Or would he have hesitated and told her that she'd just had a dream? Or would he have taken her to a doctor to be examined?

Jackie took a long time before she answered. "What would happen if I started seeing evil inside a person's head?"

Wow! Where had that come from? And what an intriguing question. It was one of those questions that could inspire an entire novel.

I started to answer, but then I sat upright. Was this question from the guy she'd picked up in the forest? If it was, then that meant Jackie had told him about her visions. Having s.e.x with someone else was one thing, but this...

this sharing of what was private between her and me was betrayal. When I didn't-couldn't-say a word, she kept on talking. It was a good thing her back was to me because if she'd seen my face, she would have run from the room.

"What if we were having dinner with two couples and I had a vision that one man and one woman, not married to each other, were having an affair and were going to kill her husband and his wife? How would you-or I- stop it?"

I liked the way that question made my mind work so I put aside Jackie's betrayal and thought about it. "Warn the victims," I said.

She turned to look at me. "Oh, yeah, sure, and people believe that their spouse is going to kill them. Don't you think that if a man was plotting to kill his wife that he'd be really nice to her? And he'd make sure that others saw how much he loved her, and that she was the most important person in his life? If you told her this darling man was going to kill her, she'd never believe you."

"You've done some thinking about this, haven't you?"

"Yeah," she said, plopping down onto the chair across from my desk. She hit the seat so hard that if it hadn't been padded, she would have broken her tailbone. "I, uh... I think I know why Amarisa was killed."

If someone had held a gun to my head, I wouldn't have let her know that I'd never heard the name "Amarisa" before, although it took only about a second to figure out who she was.

"Why was she killed?" I asked in a whisper and couldn't help a glance at the door. Please don't let anyone knock and disturb us.

"She had visions. At first they were like mine, but, gradually, they got stronger until she began to see what was inside people's heads. And she started to... to prevent the evil from happening."

Prevent, I thought. Was she hinting that this woman, Amarisa, murdered people before they did what they were just thinking about doing? But how could she be sure they were going to carry through? Didn't everyone at some time think of killing someone else? "This Russell Dunne tell you about her?" I asked, and hated the jealousy that was in my voice.

"Yes. I shouldn't be telling you this, but-"

"Why shouldn't you tell me?" I snapped. When had I become the enemy?

The outsider?

Jackie shrugged. "I don't know. Russell was telling me these things in confidence, but maybe if this story were brought out in the open, people would tell what they know. Maybe then this evil wouldn't hang over Cole Creek."

"I can't think of anything it would solve if this story were made public," I said firmly, my jaw rigid.

Jackie looked at me. "Do you think the people who killed that woman are still alive?"

"No."

"What makes you say that?"

It was my turn to reveal secrets. "I looked up some of the people from this town on the Internet. Several people died in freak accidents the year after the woman was crushed."

"How freaky?" she asked.

"You ready for this? Crushed. In one way or another, they were all crushed."

"So who did it?"

"That's just what I wondered. Think Russell would know?" I was being facetious, so I expected Jackie to rein me in as she usually did, but, instead, she got up and walked back to the bookcase.

"I think he probably knows a lot more about this than he's told me. It changed his life-just as it did mine. I really think that... that..."

"Your mother was one of the people who put rocks on... Amarisa?" The name sounded strange, but it fit her. Part of me wanted to show Jackie the photo of the woman's reconstructed face, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

First of all, I was sure that Jackie would see the resemblance to herself. And I was just as sure that she'd remember the woman. She remembered everything else in town, so why not her own relative? I'd heard that we never forget traumatic events in our lives, so I doubted if Jackie could look at that photo and not recall what she'd seen.

But I couldn't get past my hurt. I'd been honest with Jackie since the day I met her. I'd told her everything about my life. Well, okay, actually, I'd written my life story, sold it, and made a lot of money off it, but still, Jackie knew all about me. Maybe it was true that I'd not told her much about my dinner with Dessie, but then I'd not found out anything that I could share with Jackie. Except about the sculptures in Dessie's locked cupboard. And the fact that I thought one of the women in the sculpture was Jackie's mother. But still, I wasn't hiding anything as big as what Jackie was keeping from me. Except maybe the photo in the FedEx envelope.

"Jackie," I said softly, "if you had another vision, you'd tell me, wouldn't you? Me. Not someone you hardly know."

When she looked at me, she seemed to be trying to decide whether or not to answer me. And whether or not she should tell me first-or him.

What had this man done to win her loyalty so completely? I wondered.

She couldn't have spent too much time with him because she'd been with me nearly every minute for the last few days. Yet she was contemplating telling him and not me about something that I'd come to think of as a secret between us.

"Yeah, I'll tell you," she said after a while, and gave me a small smile.

"But what do I do if-"

"You see evil inside a person's head?" I had no idea. That was a question that would take a philosopher a lifetime to answer. I wanted to lighten the mood between us. "Look into my eyes and tell me what I'm thinking about Russell Dunne," I said, leaning across the desk and staring at her hard.

"That you want him to move in here with us, along with your father and cousin," she said instantly, without a hint of a smile.

Groaning, I leaned back in my chair. "Very funny. You should have been a comedian."

"I have to be around this house. What are we going to do with your family?"

"Why don't we ask Russell?" I said.

"Before or after we ask Dessie?"

I clamped my mouth closed before I let it out of the bag that there was nothing between Dessie and me. Right now I wished I'd not been such a great guy and smoothed things out between Dessie and her young boyfriend. I should have grabbed Dessie in front of the windows and kissed her. At least now I'd have a girlfriend to balance out Jackie's boyfriend.

I forced myself not to ask Jackie if she could repair her last wedding dress, and instead said that my father and n.o.ble absolutely, positively could not, under any circ.u.mstances in the world, live in this house with me. As I hoped it would, that set Jackie off and took her mind off Russell Dunne.

I got to practice my sleeping-while-sitting-up-with-my-eyes-wide-open again, and was on the verge of mastering it, when a delightful smell wafted up through the old floorboards. "What's that?" I asked and knew by Jackie's sly look that she was up to something.

"Did you know that your cousin can bake?"

I just blinked at that. It was certainly my day for shocks. If Jackie had said that n.o.ble was secretly Spiderman I couldn't have been more surprised.

"It smells like he's taken something out of the oven. Shall we go down and sample the wares?"

I wanted to be aloof. I wanted to tell Jackie that I had work to do and couldn't be bothered with something as lowly as doughnuts. Or cinnamon rolls. Or whatever was making that divine smell.

But I followed her like a dog on a leash all the way down to the kitchen.

The table in the middle of the room was loaded with baked goods, and from the sheer quant.i.ty of it all, it wasn't difficult to figure out where n.o.ble got his training. I was sure he was used to cooking for many men at a time, maybe a whole jail full of them.

Toodles and Tessa were already seated at the table, both of them with big gla.s.ses of milk and wearing white mustaches. Once again, my jealousy flared. First some stranger takes away the loyalty of my a.s.sistant, and now my own father was taking away my sidekick.

As n.o.ble dumped a bunch of fat, and extremely sticky, cinnamon buns onto a plate about four inches below my nose, he punched my shoulder and said, "It looks like it's just you and me."

The real trouble with relatives is that they know you too well. If you've grown up with them, they knew you when you were too young to have developed disguises. Maybe I could hide my feelings from Jackie, who hadn't known me very long, but I couldn't hide anything from n.o.ble. He knew that I was jealous as I watched my former buddy, Tessa, practically sitting on my father's lap.

Once I'd eaten one or two of n.o.ble's baked goods-certainly not enough to warrant Jackie's remarks about Henry the Eighth being alive and well-I decided to keep my mouth shut and think about things for a while. I needed to see what was going on around me and make some decisions. And, no, I wasn't "sulking" as Jackie said I was.

I got a book, stretched out in the hammock in the garden, and watched the lot of them as they interacted. Okay, so what I really wanted was a reason to send my father to an old-age home, and to tell n.o.ble that he definitely had to make his own way in life. I'd willingly given n.o.ble's kids a start in life, but I didn't owe anything to my cousin.

But, oh, h.e.l.l, why did it all have to be so d.a.m.ned pleasant?

It seemed that my father had a thousand ways to sit in one place and occupy himself. I watched with fascination while he showed Tessa how to weave a cat's cradle with a loop of string. I'd seen that done in books but not in real life. With a twist of his wrists, he could make a swing dangle from the loop, then he'd twist again and make a rowboat.

What really fascinated me was when he said that my mother used to send him books that showed him how to do things. I knew my mother had never visited my father in prison. In fact, she didn't go to the trial, or, to my knowledge, had she ever seen him after their wedding night. To say that she'd discouraged me from wanting to visit him was an understatement. Pat had tried to get me to visit my father, but I hadn't even bothered to answer her.

But I heard Toodles say that his wife-and he said the name with great affection-had sent him how-to books, so he'd learned to do a lot of really interesting things. "She sent him kids' books," n.o.ble said softly when he saw me staring. "Get him to do some magic tricks."

I looked down at my book and pretended I wasn't observing the lot of them.

n.o.ble had always been one of those really useful men. From an early age, he'd taken to tools the way I'd taken to words. As pre-schoolers, I'd imagined things and he'd built them.

First, n.o.ble tore into the grapevines that had overgrown a rotting covered seat. Within minutes, he'd pruned the vines in what I was sure was a professional manner. Nate was there and he stood back in awe. "Where'd you learn to do that?"

"Worked for a landscape company for a few years," n.o.ble said as he wiggled the old wood that supported the vines.

"I'll help you tear it out," Nate said, but n.o.ble stopped him.

"There's good in it yet. You got any wood around here, something I could use to repair this?"

"Sure," Nate said. "There's a pile of boards behind Jackie's house."

"Jackie's house" turned out to be her studio. Looking over my book, I watched as Nate and n.o.ble disappeared behind the studio to look for wood that I didn't know was there. Meanwhile, my jealousy flared up again when I saw my father disappear into the tunnel that led into Tessa's "secret"

house. It wasn't very secret if she let everyone in the neighborhood in, was it?

Minutes later, Jackie came out of the kitchen with a tray holding tall gla.s.ses of lemonade and more things that n.o.ble had baked, this time savory, topped with cheese, onions, and rings of black olives. She handed me a plateful, and I had begun picking the olives off the third one when I heard a loud whoop that almost made me drop everything.

n.o.ble came out from behind the studio holding a big black portfolio and flipping through what looked to be photographs. "These are great!" he was saying, looking at Jackie. "These are the best pictures I've ever seen in my life."

Jackie told n.o.ble he had no right to look at something that she considered private.

But n.o.ble rattled off some long story about how he'd "accidently" opened a window in her studio when he'd picked up a board, then "accidently"

dropped the board inside. When he'd climbed through the window to get the board, he'd "accidently" knocked the portfolio down and "accidently"

seen the pictures. Two seconds after he finished this B.S., Jackie was asking him for praise. Begging for it.

n.o.ble couldn't stop himself from glancing at me, and under his skin, darkened from years in the sun, I saw a blush. We both knew he was lying.

How many windows had n.o.ble and I climbed through when we were kids?

Between my rampant curiosity and his inclination toward criminality, no one in our family could hide anything.

Nate called to Toodles and Tessa to come out of the house that I had heretofore thought was mine and Tessa's, to look at the pictures and have some food. I stayed in my hammock, the book in front of my face, as the lot of them oohed and aahed over photographs that Jackie hadn't shown me.

Were they of Russell Dunne? I wondered.

But after a while Toodles held one up beside Tessa, facing me, and I saw a knockout picture of the kid. I was several feet away, but even at that distance I could see that it was good. Jackie had shown Tessa as she really was: not a cute kid, but one who lived on another plane than the rest of us live on.

After the lot of them had run out of words to praise the photos, Jackie took the pictures out of everyone's hands, put them back into the portfolio and brought them over to me. Pulling up a chair beside the hammock, she handed me the portfolio as though it were an offering.

With great solemnity, I took it from her, and went through the photos one by one. Man, oh, man, were they good! I was really and truly and deeply impressed.

Even though I'm a writer, I couldn't think of anything adequate to say to convey what I thought of those pictures. I knew Tessa so I could tell how perfectly Jackie had captured her, but even if I hadn't known her, I could have written an essay about the child.

Closing the portfolio, I tried to think of how to tell Jackie what I thought.