Chapter 2
It took two days for Laura to completely recover from the shock of the letter from her older sister.
It was not so much the contents of the letter which disturbed her: it was something far more complex, something which reached much farther into the past than the mere recital of Beverly's ancient, sexual sins. No, the thing which gnawed at Laura's breast like a cancerous ache was the fact that she, Laura, had been so selfishly, wickedly deceived all these years!
The mockery was almost too much to bear-and certainly too much to successfully hide from the prying eyes and pursed lips of a next-door neighbor like Mrs. Barton. The old gossip seemed bent on scooping up every scrap of information she could about Bev, as if her one dedicated mission in life was to pry, then to reveal all she knew, bit by bit, to the other Jezebels who clustered around her from dawn to daylight.
But Laura steeled herself as best she could from that kind of pain. It was the other pain-from the long-held secrets and deceit of her sister-that she simply could not forget, nor forgive.
For two long nights, Laura could think of nothing but the past, of how she and Bev had lain awake talking about life, chastity, goodness-of how Bev and she had promised each other to be the kind of young ladies their mother could be proud of, now that she was in heaven.
And I drank it all in like the gospel, Laura moaned.
What a fool she had made of herself.
And so it was the curious twisting of the mind upon a lost and somehow wasted past that irked Laura most. It even, for a time, destroyed her logic. For example, it was not until forty-eight hours after she had received the letter from Bev that it occurred to her to really wonder about it.
She had no doubt that the letter was indeed from her sister. There was too much intimate detail in it to be mistaken about that. But who was Claude? And where was Bev when she wrote the letter? And did it have any bearing whatever on the fact that Bev was lost?
In an attempt to better settle the matter in her mind, Laura forced herself to read the long letter again. She studied the details; she lingered over the obscene descriptions of cunnilingus and sexual intercourse with a long-ago boy named Rodney Bradshaw until her eyes were dim and weary with the search. The search for what? She scarcely knew herself, but some intuitive quirk seemed to suggest to her that a secret message lay unspoken between the lines of the letter.
She found nothing which really satisfied her. The letter seemed honest, as Bev said. As honest as a mind poisoned and corrupted beyond redemption could make words.
Then Laura reread the newspaper clipping that she had memorized by heart. It told of how Beverly Miller had been lost at sea on the yacht of- Laura's blood suddenly ran chillingly cold. On the yacht of C. Phillip Conner.
The Claude of the letter!
There seemed no question about the linking of the initial C in the brief newspaper story to the Claude of Bev's letter. But the postmark told her something which was even more mystifying. The letter had been written after the newspaper story. That certainly made no sense!
And then, of course, it did make sense.
It made all kinds of wicked sense . . . because the simple truth of the matter was that Beverly had not disappeared at all on the yacht of a wealthy playboy: she had merely seemed to disappear.
Laura found herself right back where she had been: hating her sister for having deceived her!
It is odd-and a bit cruel-how paranoia can seize the lonely of the world at the exact time when they are in need of friends and the confidence of their own egos. But Laura knew that was precisely what had happened to her. She even knew when it was happening to her, but she could only stand back and stare at her twenty-six-year-old, virginal body and plain face which reflected bluishly at her from a wall mirror, and call herself fool again.
She had always been a fool where her pretty, older sister was concerned. Even to herself she had never been anything but Cinderella's ugly sister, the one shut away when company arrives, the one not allowed to think of herself as attractive and charming . . . one who was not even allowed to think of herself as a sexual being.
And now she knew an even darker truth about herself; she had been cheated beyond measure, by her own self-imposed prison, to a trite and tasteless life.
But it was the fresh arrival of Mrs. Barton which capped the slowly mounting hysteria of Laura's rage. The witless beast of a woman had no more sense than to come over again, perch on the sofa like a vicious peacock, and tell Laura exactly what the latest gossip mill had produced.
"I wanted to be the last one to tell you, my dear," Mrs. Barton hummed, "but I told myself that no, I should be the very one to tell you-before you heard it all from unkind tongues."
"The first one to tell me what, Mrs. Barton?"
"To tell you what they're saying about you, Laura."
"And what is that?"
Mrs. Barton took a long, sensual breath and delivered the venom in a single sentence, "They say that you approve of your sister's behavior-that you are perhaps even guilty of such behavior yourself."
Laura knew at that moment the sudden, conflicting emotions of both pride and anger.
"How dare they say that!" she stammered, more out of spite than conviction.
"Exactly what I told them. I said you wouldn't dream of being a loose woman. That you weren't even capable of it."
Laura took the analysis in silence. She waited.
"I'm proud to say, Laura, that it was I who finally convinced the-ah-certain parties in question of the purity of your life. And that you are not to be compared to your lovely sister. If anything, you deserve to be pitied for-"
"Pitied?"
Mrs. Barton smiled craftily. "I'm afraid that is exactly the attitude some of the backbiters have taken now, Laura. Once the freshness, the newness of the gossip about your sister abated, they seemed to find it amusing to pity you. It's dreadfully unfair, I know, to be scorned for one's virtues, but you know the kind of world we live in today. A jungle. Simply a jungle."
"Yes," Laura agreed, listlessly, "a jungle filled with all kinds of creatures."
Mrs. Barton nodded, uncertainly.
"Tell me, Mrs. Barton, what else are they saying about me? I mean, exactly how am I supposed to have lived this life of scarlet sin while being employed in the Public Library. Do I trap my victims behind the stacks-or do I invite them into this small apartment after midnight?"
Mrs. Barton flushed, somewhat unbecomingly, and pursed her lips in the old, familiar way. "You mustn't take the gossip so seriously, my dear. Talk is merely talk, after all, and-"
"But I do take it seriously. And for all you know, Mrs. Barton, there might even be a bit of truth in it."
The reaction, Laura told herself, is going to be more important than the female viper sitting across from her would ever know. So she waited-and Mrs. Barton took the bait as innocently as a starved carp by tossing back her head and giving a merry, tinkling little laugh which froze all charity in Laura's blood.
"My dear- the day I believe your character the least bit sinful will be the day I'll see pie in the sky."
Laura smiled back thinly, but a sudden, demonic tom-tom had begun to beat in her brain. Pie in the sky it will be, she thought.
And tomorrow!!
The sexual chemistry which at once began to work in Laura's brain and body was not something which has been charted. Only the edges of the murky, secret country of the libido has been explored by scientists of the mind.
Laura didn't understand it herself, and she certainly would not have made any formal protest to her conscience about her feelings. She was past analysis. She merely wanted to demonstrate to herself that the years had not been in vain.
She was, she told herself that very evening as she undressed in front of the figure-length mirror in her bedroom, only twenty-six years of age. Twenty-six! That certainly wasn't ancient, and the fact that her life had been clouded by the chaste shadow of a nightmare (her sister's duplicity) was no reason to believe life had to go on forever as it had.
To still the unjust gossip, she had only to fulfill it. But the stillness she was contemplating was not something stirring in the neighborhood, it was something stirring in herself.
She stood naked, at last, in front of the mirror, studying the lines of her white, thin body. She touched her fingertips to the small, pale pears of her breasts. They had never known passion-not once. The little pink, emotionless buds called nipples had never known the rough grasp of a man's hand. The narrow curve of her hollowed thighs had never felt the urgency of a satyr's finger, the sliding lust of a hand grown bold with desire. And the darkly feathered cup of her cunt . . .
Laura paused, feeling the word forming on her so lips like some small, spell-binding charm. Cunt.
And what is that little mouth of flesh between my legs, Laura thought, helplessly, if it isn't the passageway into my lost and scattered dream-past? And why shouldn't I, even at this late moment in life, try to salvage what I can!
But with whom?
And it was not until the wee hours of the morning that Laura sat up in bed, smiling in the darkness of her bedroom, sensing that the small buds tipping the peaks of her tits were suddenly fuller and warmer, like ripe little plums begging to be picked, knowing also that a rudimentary itch was starting, deep in the crevice of her slit.
But it was not because of the dim awakening of her body that she was smiling. It was because she had thought of the perfect object-the perfect male-to initiate her into the game of lust.
Who else but Mike Barton, the boy next door?
The idea had all the charm of revenge, too. Mrs. Barton's forked and puritanical tongue would rot at the roots if she found out that her seventeen-year-old son was about to be taught the arts of a whoremaster.
But she never need know anything.
At least not until the whore in question was mastered and fucked!