Chapter 10
"Where's your mother, Jennifer?" Richard asked absent-mindedly. They were in his study. He was seated at the glass and chrome desk, with paper from his briefcase scattered in front of him. Jennifer, curled up happily in a leopard sling chair, glanced up from her comic book.
"I don't know, Daddy," she said. "I'll get your drink for you."
"No, darling, that's not necessary. I'll wait for her." Engrossed again in the thick folder of papers marked "Stover Hills Project," he didn't see the frown of disappointment that crossed his daughter's sunny face.
They settled down again to read in compatible silence. The evening shadows darkened the room. Tom Johnston's dark bookcases had been replaced with chrome brackets and Lucite shelves, and the green velvet drapes had changed into wide vertical blinds that let in the light, but the study still became early shadowed by the great oak trees on the north side of the house. It had been a warm, cozy room, now it was cooler and supposedly more cheerful, yet late afternoon always found the study in need of artificial light.
Jennifer found herself squinting to see her magazine, and glancing over at her daddy, she noticed his head bent rather low over his work. She jumped up from the chair and turned on the fluorescent desk light. He looked up and smiled at her.
"Thank you, Princess."
"You're welcome, my liege," she said solemnly, and curtsied very low. She held the hem of her dress in both hands, and since it was a miniskirt, her low bow showed a flash of pink panty bobbing slightly higher than her golden head. Richard laughed. He got up from the desk and went over to the Swedish liquor cabinet which slid open at his touch.
"After today, Jenny," he said, well-satisfied with himself, "you're going to be a very, very wealthy young lady."
"More than I already am?" she asked coquettishly.
He poured the vodka and a dash of vermouth over ice. His eyes smiled at her over the rim of the glass as he lifted it to his lips. "Yes," he said after a taste, "much more."
"Good," Jennifer said, " 'cause I want a lot of things."
"Well, you deserve a lot of things," Richard agreed. He took his drink carefully and settled himself in his deep square antelope-skin chair. "Come here and sit on daddy's lap and tell me what you want."
"No!"
Jennifer and Richard both looked up in surprise at Catharine, who stood in the doorway, visibly trembling.
"She's too old to sit on your lap, Richard. Jennifer ... Jennifer..." Suddenly, she was crying, and leaning heavily against the door frame. Little pearls of perspiration stood out on her forehead. Her eyes roamed the room, as if seeking something or someone who was not there. The study had changed, everything had changed. She felt that she was surely going mad.
"Catharine ... what's the matter?" Richard's voice seemed to come from very far away.
His hands reached out to her, and she fought her way back to him from the edge of blackness. She clung to him with cold hands.
"Richard ... I ... I have to get out of the house. Right away ... tonight. Before ... before ... please help me."
"Catharine, what are you talking about? What's the matter? What's happened to you?"
"Please ... I'm already packed," she said.
"Catharine. For God's sake, tell me what's happened?" He spoke sternly, in a voice that demanded an answer. She tried to sort out her feelings, to tell him as much as she could. But the fears and the facts and the memories and the nightmares got all mixed up together. She couldn't tell him all of it, not ever. Her head was reeling too much to sort it all out.
"I ... saw something. I saw something terrible, terrifying ... it's waiting for me..."
"Catharine, come on. What did you see? What did you see that was so terrible?"
He obviously didn't believe her. She drew her icy hands from his and shrank back into the hard unyielding chair. His chair, that had replaced her daddy's.
Jennifer, unnoticed, frightened, slid quietly into the big chair behind the desk. She stared at her parents without any expression on her face.
Her mother was terribly upset, and her daddy was angry. He didn't like emotion very much. She, Jennifer, hardly ever showed what she was really feeling. Daddy preferred that.
"If you can't tell me what you're talking about," Richard was saying in his most reasonable tone, "how do you expect me to help you?"
"I ... I can't explain it ... you'll just have to help me, believe me, please ... there's evil in this house. I must leave. Now. Tonight."
Richard was impatient. He picked up his martini from the table and took a long swallow, looking down at Catharine as if deciding what to do with her. Jennifer wondered if she should offer to refill his glass, or just do it without asking, but then she decided she'd just stay there as still as a mouse, and listen.
"Catharine," her daddy said, "you're planning to leave tomorrow anyway. What the hell is wrong with you?"
"Richard ... I can't explain. I wish you could trust me, I know what I'm talking about. If you can't take my word for it ... I'm sorry. I'm going. I'll stay at the Wayside Inn in town."
"Absolutely not. I forbid it. That's crazy. Are you going to tell me what all this is about, or..."
Catharine felt an unsuspected well of strength and determination suddenly rising within her. It was a survival instinct, she supposed, with part of her mind that was functioning quite rationally, acting to save her. It was this part of her mind that propelled her out of the uncomfortable chair across the room to the desk, where she picked up the phone and began to dial. It was the other part of her mind that didn't even notice her daughter sitting there, watching her with wide clear brown eyes. Catharine avoided looking at the mirror that hung alongside the desk, too.
Richard was furious. "What are you doing, Catharine? For Christ's sake, I come home elated ... I've finally arranged the expansion of the business beyond all expectations, I want to share it with you and our daughter, and you behave like..."
"Reservations, please," Catharine said calmly into the telephone.
Jennifer was upset. She slipped from her daddy's desk chair and came around to stand close to him. She hugged him around the waist with both her thin little arms. They watched Catharine silently.
"My name is Catharine Burgess. I have a reservation on Flight 112 tomorrow morning to Boston with connections to Paris. But I would like to leave this evening. Can you help me?"
Jennifer and Richard saw the terror which flooded Catharine's face. They heard the voice on the other end of the line snarling, a deep and chilling growl, not quite human.
"There are no flights this evening," they heard from across the room. "I can't help you."
Catharine stifled a scream. She thrust the ugly voice away from her. The receiver dropped onto the carpet. From it came the hideous sound of low demonic laughter. And then it said, clearly, "But your current reservations are confirmed, Catharine. Have a nice trip." The disconnecting click was loud and final.
"My God, who was that?" Richard demanded. "It sounded like-"
Catharine's face was twisted into a grimace. Fear and pain, terror and longing wrenched the lovely lines and shadows into a haggard, suffering crone's face. She saw herself in the mirrored wall behind Richard, and in a rage fiercer than she had ever experienced, she reached for the buzzing telephone and smashed it with all her might against the reflection.
The glass shattered. Again, and again and again, she beat against the fractured shards that still clung to the wall.
"Nol No! No!" she screamed. "I won't!"
Richard reached out to hold her. Jennifer, sobbing with fright, still clung to his leg. His strong hands held Catharine until her hysteria subsided and at last, she let go of the heavy instrument. Her eyes rolled in her head as she continued to struggle, helplessly, against Richard.
"Jennifer," Richard said, looking down at the clinging child, "go and get Lisa. Tell her to call Dr. Matthews."
The little girl started to back away from them, toward the door. But her mother cried out pitifully, "Baby, don't go ... help me, we have to get out of this house, you and I..."
"Do as I say, Jennifer. Do you hear me?" Her daddy was angry. She couldn't bear for him to be angry at her. She turned and ran, stopping at the door to look back. Her mother's face was ugly, all twisted and streaky. That frightened Jennifer more than anything, and she quickly slipped from the room and ran to the kitchen.
Lisa wasn't there. Neither was Abel. Jennifer knew where they were. With an angry sigh, she ran through the pantry to the ivy-covered areaway that led to the garage and their quarters above it. She bolted the steps three at a time on her lithe dancer's legs, and rapped sharply at the door of the little sitting room they shared. If they don't answer right this minute, she told herself fiercely, I'll go round to Abel's window and make a terrific racket and scare them good. I know what they do together in there...
But the sitting room door opened promptly, and Lisa stood there, tying on her serving apron.
"Goodness, what is it, Miss Jennifer? Look at you, all flushed from running..."
"Hurry, Lisa, Daddy says for you to call Dr. Matthews. Mommy's sick, she's having a fit or something. Hurry!"
Lisa wasted no time asking questions. She went down to the kitchen, with Jennifer a step behind her and Abel a few paces behind. In a moment, she had found the number in the little book by the pantry phone and had made the call.
"Go and tell your daddy that the doctor is on his way. Abel, go and help carry Miss Catharine upstairs. Hurry now! And come right back down here, you hear?"
Jennifer flew toward the study, and Abel lumbered after her. She motioned to him to stay back while she peered into the room. All seemed quiet. Her mother was sobbing against her daddy's shoulder. He still held her tightly, but she seemed not to be struggling any more. Jennifer couldn't see her face.
"Abel's here," she said. "He can carry her upstairs, Lisa said. And the doctor's on his way."
Richard looked up, and nodded for Abel to come in. He handed Catharine's trembling body over to the burly servant, who picked her up as though she were a great treasure, of no weight but infinite price. With Jennifer leading the way, and Richard behind, Abel carried Catharine carefully up the winding staircase and into her room. He laid her reverently on the bed.
In her panic and desperation, she clung to him for a moment. "No, nol Don't leave me here!" she moaned.
Abel stood paralyzed at the side of the bed. His mistress' long white arms reached up to him, her slim hands clutched at his shirt. Her pleading broke the dam of his repressed desires, and he could not bear to turn away from her.
"All right, Abel, you can go now. Thank you," Richard said.
Catharine rolled over on the bed, away from them, her heartbreaking sobs indicating that she had given up all hope.
"Abel, that will be all. Go downstairs now."
Abel straightened with a last look at the beautiful woman lying crushed and vulnerable on the huge satin-covered bed. Her dress had ridden high over her thighs. Her legs, spread awkwardly in abandon, were deeply tanned all the way up to her white panties. Her face was covered by her long hair now, and her arms no longer reached out to him but fell limply on the pillow.
"Abel!" Richard said sharply.
Abel turned away sadly, and left the bedroom, shutting the door as he had been taught to do.
There were tears in his eyes when he entered the kitchen.
"God in heaven, what is it? Is she terribly sick?" Lisa said, startled to see her brother's expression.
Abel nodded, then shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know," he moaned. "She didn't want me to leave. She said that."
"Now, now," Lisa said, patting his back. "She'll be all right, I expect. Don't you worry about her."
"I touched her. I carried her."
"Oh. So that's it. My poor dear," Lisa sighed.
Abel shook his head, bewildered by his own torment. "She was so soft," he said.
"You never touched her before, did you, in all these years?"
Abel looked up, shocked at the idea. "No!"
"Well, darlin', that's all it is that's got you so upset. Touchin' her and all. Lisa will take care of you, you know that. Later, love. Later. You'll see. It'll be all right. Now you sit down there, that's the way."
Abel nodded. His shivering slowed and finally came under control. Lisa bent to wipe his forehead with a corner of her apron. "You just sit there, now, and when dinner is over-if there's to be any dinner this night-we'll have a fine time, you and Lisa. No need for you to worry. You got feelin's, sure you do, and Lisa knows how to take care of you."
"She's cryin', " Abel said.
"What about?"
He shook his shoulders. "She didn't want me to go away. That's what she said. Honest, Lisa."
Lisa stared at her brother's bent head. A memory stirred unpleasantly in the back of her mind. "Abel," she said thoughtfully, "you remember when Miss Catharine's mother went away..."
Abel nodded.
"I mean just before, when she was so upset that time ... do you remember that?"
Abel's eyes narrowed. After a moment he nodded again. "I was just a kid, but I remember hearing her cry that night," he said thoughtfully.
"Yes, she did," Lisa said.
"She cried a lot," Abel remembered.
"Yes ... and then she just ... left." Lisa's thoughts were deeply disturbing to her, and she tried to shake them off. Just because Miss Catharine was the same age now as her mother had been when she disappeared ... or walked out, never to send even a postcard to her little girl ... and Miss Catharine was the same age then as little Jennifer was now, wasn't she ... just because it happened once that way, it was an old wives' superstition to believe in family curses, or the sins of the mothers returning in the daughters...
Lisa was interrupted in her dismaying reverie by the chimes ringing at the front door.
"That's Dr. Matthews, Abel. Go and let him in," she said. "Goodness, I'd better do something about keeping this roast hot, before it dries up to nothing in that oven!" With that she dismissed all morbid thoughts from her head and busied herself with good hard work.