Bloodline(73)

He walks over to the oak dresser. Opens the top drawer. Takes out a folded sailor suit.

I suck in my breath.

“We didn’t want you to find out this way. Lord knows it almost broke Dorothy’s heart that it’s fallen to this. We were hoping you would come around. Deck offered to bring you home, you know. No one better for the job.”

I think of the night I first met him at the 620, how he pursued me. I grow ill all over again. I was so naive, thinking he was infatuated. He’d been acting. My eyes fill with acid tears. “Did you set him on me, back at the bar?”

Ronald shrugs. “Think of it as an arranged marriage.” His tone is strangely syrupy. “You and Deck have so much in common. You just didn’t know it. Children of Lilydale, reunited.”

“Did Stanley rape my mother?”

“Stanley and Virginia had an affair. When Dorothy found out, she snatched the product, as was her right, though we would have preferred she waited for us to get your mother to agree beforehand. It would have kept the out-of-town newspapers out of Lilydale. Still, everything would have gone smoothly if your mother hadn’t sobered up and come after you.”

I imagine my hands around Ronald’s neck. It’s all I can think about. Squeezing his bones until his lips turn blue. He will thrash and scratch, and I’ll revel in the blood I draw. He must see the murderous hatred in my face, because he scowls.

“You stole me from my family,” I growl, not recognizing my own voice.

He moves surprisingly fast, rushing forward to pin me against the window. “We’re your family,” he spits. “Virginia was only a vessel. You’re half Lily, which means you’re ours.”

I want to weep with frustration. “Please. I’m an adult now. You can’t keep me.”

His face shifts like a kaleidoscope. “Whatever do you mean? This is the only way.”

“What happens if I leave and tell the whole story of what you two did?”

His eyes narrow, and his tone is mocking. “Like you tried at the Saint Cloud police station?”

My bravado drains out. “Kris will help me,” I whisper. It’s ridiculous, a child’s nonsense, but who else do I have?

“The man who pretended to be Paulie? We let him stay in town because he was harmless. A small-time con artist. We made sure he didn’t hurt you. Don’t you see how much we’ve done for you?”

“Regina, then,” I say desperately, but I ruined that.

“If she’s smart—and I think she is—she’ll be one of us soon.”

My mind’s racing. Ursula believes them, and Grover, if still alive, is hospitalized. Deck was always an invention, a lie I fell for like a dazzled schoolgirl.

“You want to be very careful,” Ronald says, his smile brittle, his resemblance to Deck the cruelest of quirks. He’s using the singsong voice of a kind teacher speaking to a naughty child. “The police in Saint Cloud think you’re crazy. The doctor’s records show that you’re unstable and have subsequently been prescribed heavy doses of Valium and sleeping pills. You’ve said some very odd things to several people, including your best friend in Minneapolis. She saved your message. The rantings of a paranoiac.”

The sticky, awful truth paints itself across my mouth and nose, suffocating me. I either follow their rules or I’m put away.

“If you stay and keep the peace,” he says, “we can all finally have everything. If you don’t, you know how it ends.”

“The obituary,” I rasp. The one my mother hadn’t wanted me to write.

Ronald raises an eyebrow and then smiles. “That’s right. All this time, Dorothy has been watching for news of the daughter she’d lost. The name was different, but she’d recognize Virginia Aandeg’s face—survived by one daughter, praise be—anywhere. By that time, Stan was lost to us, couldn’t be of assistance in retrieving his child, but she convinced Barbara and me to send Deck to bring you back. It would take only a few months of living in beautiful Lilydale to fall in love with it, and you and Deck would replenish the next generation of Lilys.”

As he tells me all of it, every detail of what happened leading up to my birth, I begin weeping.

Johann and Minna Lily were brother and sister as well as husband and wife. They left Germany to found Lilydale in 1857. They had twelve children, only two of whom lived to adulthood, a son and a daughter. The rest were born horribly deformed; those who survived childbirth were kept hidden until their deaths days or weeks later. To guarantee the Lily bloodline (which they thought was pure, and the reason for their intelligence and success) and keep their wealth intact and in the family, Johann got other women pregnant.

Minna raised the children as her own. In exchange for their half-Lily children, these women and their families got to live in Lilydale and be protected by the Lilys. By 1938, though, there were only ten Fathers and Mothers left, the lowest number since it had been founded, all of whom lived on Mill Street and ran Lilydale.

Stan Lily believed it was his obligation and right to sleep with any of the women of Lilydale, including Virginia Aandeg, my mother. The Fathers and Mothers were fine with it because it made more Lily offspring, but when Virginia would drink, she’d tell townspeople about the night visits. The Fathers and Mothers paid Virginia a small stipend to keep her quiet, and it was working.