Chapter 12
Neither Judy nor Mike said anything at first when they reached the library. Judy had been shocked into vivid recall of her near death by the sight of the shattered main door and she assumed Mike was preoccupied with whatever he was trying to prepare for Bentley. But when they reached the desk, he put his hand on her arm and grinned at her.
"Don't know what went on in here this afternoon, honey. I hope you can forget about it and just remember the other day."
She tingled happily. With a grateful smile, she nodded. "That's the way it's going to be Mike. I'll never forget that."
He kissed her and for a moment they clung together. Then he drew back and sighed.
"Got to find those journals. That guy's going to be here too soon as it is."
"What were they about, Mike?"
"That's the trouble! You know how Father wrote them. He didn't use names. The only way to pin down real people is by knowing how to get at the references he had in mind."
"Yes."
"Well, here's the problem. You know that box you were talking about? The one from Colleen's apartment?"
She started. "Of course! The one you said didn't exist!"
He chuckled and shook his head. "The one I said I'd deny existed if you made a big deal of it. Well, anyway, the instructions I got when Father died said there was a second heir in the direct line ... a blood son or daughter. It said the identity would be established by the contents of a portion of a journal. Colleen had that portion-would always have it in safekeeping-and would explain it so legal verification could be accomplished. Only Colleen isn't here to explain it."
"But that piece of the journal is in the box she had?"
"That and some documents we'll need. It's pretty clear from reading that one book-he hadn't written more than about twenty pages in it-that it tells what we want to know. But damned if I can even understand what it's saying without knowing something about what he wrote on that subject before!"
"And you don't even know the subject? How could that be?"
"Because the entries are so damn ordinary and seem to ramble so much! Hell, as near as I can tell, it's just about things around here! Ordinary, everyday life! Trouble is, I found that set of journals and there's nothing missing! This piece doesn't fit! It's got me snowed, baby."
"Life around here? I don't understand. How do you know that?"
"Well, for one thing he mentions looking at something he's seen over and over before, only seeing it in a new perspective. He'll do that about 'The Porcupine Ravine,' for example. Now the porcupine ravine isn't a place with a real name. It's not on any map or anything like that. It's just a little gully about six or seven feet deep down there in the woods where we found one of the dogs messing around with a porcupine one day. Okay? He just remarks on how he's seeing things a little differently from there .. . result of things that are happening, I suppose."
"And everything in that twenty pages is like that?"
"Well, it rambles, as I said. Lots of little notes about Colleen, for one thing. I mean, he doesn't ever write Colleen, but they're such normal things there's no way to miss who he's talking about."
"If you know Colleen and her habits," added Judy.
"Well, yes. That, of course." He opened the desk. "Here's the damn journal. You can see why it's so meaningless."
She took it from him and opened to the first page. The style had become so familiar to her it was like listening to an old acquaintance talking. As Mike had said, they were everyday events and thoughts noted in everyday language. Oliver had meant them for his own record; for the most part he hadn't intended that anybody else ever benefit by them-or understand them. But read in quantities, the way she'd been reading them, even a total stranger could detect a characteristic flavor in Oliver's terse prose that was distinctive from journal to journal. Given a single paragraph out of his "empire building" journal, as she'd come to call it, and a similar paragraph out of his "Sarah" set and she could instantly have put each paragraph with the proper set. Even if he'd described the same event in two different journals as she'd noticed he sometimes had, he'd clearly been seeing the event in terms of his "Sarah" life while he'd been writing that record and in terms of his "empire" life during the other writing.
A strange, delicious sense of fulfillment crept over her as she neared the bottom of the first page. She felt almost as if a door she'd had shut in her face had somehow been opened again.
"Mike!" She tried to keep the excitement out of her voice. "This woman is Colleen?"
"Sure is."
She looked up at him. "Sarah thinks Colleen was Oliver's daughter. A 'wild oats' days memento, she called her."
An expression of pain and bitterness flashed into Mike's face. "Wonder who else thought that?"
"Lowell, for one. At least, I think he did."
"That's why she's dead." But after a brief pause, he added, "Maybe."
"What was she, then?"
"A girl he hired and was loyal to."
She became extremely cautious. "Did he ... I mean, was there ever a romantic interest outside your mother and Sarah?"
He studied her quietly. "Of course. No other way there could be a second person in his blood line. There had to be another woman one time or another."
"Mike, there's a series I call 'The Mistress Series'. I don't suppose you've read it."
"Hell, no! Who wants to read a bunch of dry diaries his old man kept?"
"Diaries aren't dry. Not if you read from one end to the other. Even the dull, ordinary things start to mean something when they run together in a life."
"So? Anyhow, I haven't read any of the damn things except snatches here and there trying to find something that would fit this one."
"Mike...." She made her voice very soft and very gentle. "Mike, this is the final volume of his 'Mistress' series." She smiled. "It's nice he had time to say something about Colleen in it."
Mike's eyes widened. "Something about Colleen? Honey, brace yourself! She is it! That journal is the Colleen part of his life for the period since he got into this volume."
"Mike! Really, Mike?"
"Damn right!"
"Quick, Mike! That shelf over there! See that row of journals?"
"Yeah."
"Pick one! See if he's talking about Colleen in it!"
He flipped to three different pages in one of the volumes, then nodded. "Sure! Couldn't you tell?"
"I didn't ask myself. To me, Colleen was his daughter."
"Holy Christ!" He stared at her. "Okay! Now I know where we stand! Here!" He snatched the final volume from her. "This exchange of letters ... three entries from the end of what he wrote! Look at it!"
She looked. In his own terse way, Oliver had noted receipt of John McAllister's letter about the approach of her own eighteenth birthday. Sarah had mentioned that letter. Oliver touched on the nature of his reply and on his decision to reunite Colleen with the child she'd never seen. And he mentioned telling Colleen of his decision.
That much, Mike had understood clearly; he'd known Judy was Colleen's daughter the moment he'd read those pages.
"But I didn't know she was his mistress," he told Judy quietly. "I didn't know that, Judy Garlock."
She shivered violently. Only now did the full implication of Oliver's journal become evident to her. God! If Lowell had known that, I'd be dead, not Colleen! she thought. And a surge of anger toward her mother's killer washed over her.
"Those other documents make sense now," Mike remarked. "Bentley won't have any problem tonight."
"He might," she replied. "When he gets to Lowell's share."
Mike shook his head. "It's still Lowell's share. And he might need it to pay for his defense."
"Will it be enough, do you suppose?"
"I don't know if it'll be enough to get him off, but it'll pay his legal fees, no matter if the case goes all the way to the Supreme Court!"
Judy gasped. She'd heard somewhere what it cost to get a case that far. And Mike was talking about a ten percent share of the estate.
Mike made it sound even more awesome. "And if the Supreme Court decision came out in his favor he's still have enough to spend the rest of his life living better than he is now."
"Omigod, Mike! Not really!"
"Pretty sizable inheritance, honey."
"Oh, dear!" The thought frightened her. She had no idea what would be involved in being that rich. But she decided it was going to be fun finding out.
"Oliver's accident, Mike...Was that murder, too?"
He shrugged. "That's guesswork. It could have been sabotage. We never will know. Only one person will, if it was. Lowell stood a better chance of getting away with a few fatal accidents when nobody knew where you and Colleen fitted into the puzzle than he would have afterward, though. You'll have to pick your own theory."
She'd try not to, she decided.
"One question before we have to listen to Bentley...You're my sister, Judy. We didn't know that the other day. Would it have made a difference?"
She looked into his eyes. "Yes." When his expression clouded, she added, "Mike, it was something precious. Knowing about us would have made it even more precious. That won't be our last time, will it?"
He sighed happily. "Not if I have anything to say about it!"
They left the library reluctantly. The distribution of the estate seemed a dry and boring affair to Judy. Signing a few dotted lines and accepting a few receipts wasn't at all like suddenly becoming the owner of a vast sum of money. She felt no richer after Bentley had left than she had before his arrival. The only moment of real excitement was when Bentley announced dryly and undramatically he'd examined the documents and was satisfied Judy McAllister was, in fact, Judy Garlock, born to one Colleen Devlin and entitled to the use of the Garlock name by virtue of a document ordered and signed by Oliver Garlock, himself.
At that point in the proceedings, Lowell registered utter defeat. Edith's habitual hauteur melted into a warm, glad smile and Cal and Gwen showed nothing but awe. They'd carried Sarah downstairs for the" brief meeting and she greeted the announcement with a curiously triumphant expression.
And when Judy was helping her stepmother-the new relationships still made her dizzy-to get comfortable for the night, Sarah let her know what the expression had meant.
"I'm glad for you, my dear. I really am. I feel better, too. I've known almost from the beginning of my marriage to Oliver he had a mistress. She was always a shadowy, frightening figure to me ... always unreachable and awesome, like a goddess might be. I loved Colleen. I'd have been glad to share Oliver with her if I'd known. And I'm glad he showed such fine taste."
Sarah died during the night. The sheriff hadn't yet arrived to take Lowell into custody and there seemed to be a tacit truce when everybody stopped in her room to wish her a good night. She smiled sweetly and spoke to them as if they were very young children. To Judy, there was no pretense in her manner; she actually saw them as small children. She praised them and wished them pleasant dreams.
"Right to sleep, now," she said upon dismissing them. "Tomorrow's another delicious day, and you know how you hate to miss even the first hour! Good night."
The lapse frightened Judy. She realized the others-who should have known Sarah better than she did-believed the bedridden woman was teasing them gently and trying to avoid any reference to Lowell's betrayal of her. But she'd sensed too much depth and sincerity in Sarah's admonition to accept their judgment. She lay for a long time listening to Sarah's labored breathing-one breath much like another with an occasional long pause when Sarah's body might have been considering whether another breath was worth the trouble.
And she heard Sarah call to her. There was only the one call. She sprang from bed and hurried to her older friend immediately.
"I'm here, Sarah," she said softly.
"Yes, dear. You've always been. I wanted to say something extra to you, Judy. Do live life all the way. It's so very precious." She smiled in the dim light and stopped breathing.
After Sarah's funeral there seemed little to hold any of them at Garlock Heights. Lowell did not return, in fact, even when he was released on an appropriate bond. Gwen was gone, too. She'd left to go home and wait for Lowell, but she'd suggested she couldn't quite make her choice between his money and the considerable attractiveness of a male model she'd met shortly before Oliver's death.
Cal and Edith and Mike and Judy accepted their narrowed circle of companionship as if they'd been suspended in a timeless bubble. None of them expected the quiet, pressure-free interlude to last; neither did anyone make any effort to bring it to an end. But in each mind the consciousness lurked that the end would come.
Judy realized she might as well have been awakening from a dream when, eight days after the funeral, she received a letter from John McAllister.
"They did fix a piece of money on Penelope when they finally got around to tidying up," one part of the letter said. "Suppose with the old man dead you got nobody taking care of you. Penelope thinks she could swing it out of her inheritance to support you here while you go to junior college. A year or two ought to be enough for you to land a job and start supporting yourself." There was other news and there were complaints. John mentioned casually an accounting he'd drawn up showing precisely how far Oliver had under-estimated the cost of rearing a girl for eighteen years. "Of course," he said. "A man can't hardly hold that against the girl. She didn't have any say in making the estimate."
Judy laughed and cried at the same time. And she showed the letter to Mike.
"Penelope got disinherited because of the man she married," she remarked pensively. "At least Oliver was a little bit more human than his father and hers."
"He mellowed as he aged, too," observed Mike. "Threw me out of the house five years ago and told me never to come back without an invitation. That was because I said he was a Goddamn sadist for never letting Colleen get to know that baby she had."
"Mike, do you suppose we ought to think about whether he mellowed enough when it came to making up for what his father did to Penelope?"
Mike chuckled. "That damn money burning a hole in your pocket already?"
"You're teasing."
"Yeah. I think we ought to move real careful-like, but we sure ought to do something along that line." He reached for her and she slid toward him on the couch. "How come, little sister, you're such nice people when everybody on your family tree was a son of a bitch?"
She wrinkled her nose at him. "Must be me Irish mither," she said.
"Come here, you Goddamn sexy mick! And stop putting on all that phony brogue."
"It just sticks to my mouth sometimes," she murmured. "Nobody I know gets it off there any better than you."
He placed his mouth over hers and drew her close. He was obviously conscious of the way she'd exposed one thigh by crossing her knees, she thought. His hand had gone to the narrow strip of bare flesh above her stocking as if guided by radar. She shivered and clung to him. Once in a while the chilling question was coming to her mind far too often: How was she going to survive when she couldn't slide across a couch to her brother that easily-or when she couldn't get up and go around the table to him when the ache became intolerable? He'd be going back into those mountain forests soon, in spite of his fortune. And she wasn't going to go with him. He wouldn't expect it, nor did she have the right to suggest such a thing. His going would create a void around her no matter where she went.
But at moments like this, she could let that question grow small and harmless while her pulse raced and her pussy tingled and the familiar buzz of excitement swelled in the back of her head. She gulped at his rough, flat-tasting tongue and pushed one breast against him. When his caresses reached her panties and his thumb slipped inside the flimsy garment to probe the moist heat of her slit, she unzipped his trouser fly and lovingly cupped her palm over his sticky, twitching cockhead. Her fingertips played lightly on the neck of his cock and she experienced the too often unspoken rush of devotion to that silent messenger at his groin.
When he released her mouth and tilted his head back to laugh out of sheer contentment, she bent, her head moving downward over his broad chest and lean belly while her fingers pried the great hard-on into the open. For the first time in their love affair, she tenderly pressed her lips to the blunt nose of his cockhead and timidly extended her tongue to taste the metallic, barely salty coating that made the enormous bulb gleam so. Mike's hand drove convulsively into the perspiration-damp recess between her thighs.
"Lord Almighty, honey! What a fantastic feeling!" her brother exclaimed. "You've got lips like warm velvet!"
She let the full-flesh, relaxed lips part and slip outward to encircle the broad dome of his cockhead while her tongue gently stripped the smooth, spongy bulb of its coating. She was startled and intensely happy at his reaction. His thighs tensed noticeably and his hips rose, while he clawed at her clothes in his effort to get hold of naked flesh. He up-ended her while she worked her lips further onto the huge cockhead and clung fiercely with her hands to the majestic shaft. He pushed her knees apart and buried his face in the hot folds of her pussy, probing deeply with his tongue while she squirmed.
The library door opened and Cal and Edith came in. Judy could hear their low exclamations of pleasure as they took in the scene.
Cal growled excitedly. "Hey! Can anybody get into the game, or is it private?"
And her brother raised his wet face long enough to reply. "Find something to hang onto. You're welcome to join! Never did have much use for a dog in the manger."
Edith giggled. She didn't sound at all like the haughty, distant woman Judy had thought her to be.
"I don't know about mangers, but I've seen the day when I'd go a long way for a muzzle on my pussy, with the tongue buried all the way from there to my tonsils!"
Cal laughed tenderly. "You gotta understand." He didn't sound as if he worried. "This broad's got a thing about dogs. Let one look at her with halfway sad eyes and she's ready to crawl under him!"
As if this comment were light conversation, Edith added airily, "Nothing like it for a long, single-track fuck."
Judy cringed. She was glad when they dropped the subject and crowded onto the same part of the couch she and Mike were using. The trouble was, she could see entirely too vividly the scenes their joshing suggested. And in her mental images she didn't see Edith at all, but herself.
She gulped, driving her mouth over the bulge of Mike's cockhead and letting the fat knob settle in her mouth. It filled the cavity; if she pushed on it just a little the tip blocked the arch to her throat. Her tongue seemed to have no room at all, but somehow she managed to apply its wet caresses to the bulky intruder. She could make interesting things happen by sucking, too, and she had to do something to counterbalance the fiery impulses she was getting from her clitoris as Mike nibbled at it.
Sensations were rapidly growing confused. Cal and Edith were doing their thing while she and Mike continued their own. But the four bodies rested against each other and rubbed together when anybody moved. And hands strayed continually, so a person never quite knew who was caressing whom. It was a kind of intimacy Judy relished. With swapping, even when Mike wasn't at the center of it, she'd always have this sense tender sharing and likely adventure. Then, too, she could always pretend one of the unidentified hands belonged to her brother-reaching ghost-wise across whatever miles happened to separate them.
There just might be a friendly, warm-tongued dog somewhere in the fringes, as well. That kind companion could be depended on when a lonely hungry night came along. The fact was, life offered a "grand prize if you play your cards right," as anonymous note had once advised her.
Colleen had composed that letter, she knew without question. And she'd composed better than she'd intended. She'd left Judy something to guide her course by in a far broader way than the hopeful mother had anticipated.
"Walk carefully...stick if you can...play your cards right...know what your doing ... be shur things aren't all what they look like...."
That was the life Colleen had seen her daughter entering. And it was clearly what Judy needed for the life ahead. She swallowed hard and sucked another bit of juice from Mike's ready slit. She was ready if life was.