Chasing the Sunset(16)

Now, dear, it is not as bad as you imagine, I am sure. Our Maggie is a fine, upstandin’ girl, and I am sure she has a reason for doin’ the things she is been doin’. After all, darlin’, she is right. Nobody can see her naked when she is in that room all alone, and the cursin’, well, you can blame that on her Da, I am afraid. I always was a terrible one to watch my mouth when I was angry.

Maggie laughed out loud, and suddenly realized that it was the first time she had thought of her parents without the pain that stabbed her like a dagger with every memory of them. She took a deep breath. It felt good to be free of the piercing grief of the last three years, felt good to remember them with laughter instead of tears. She leaned out the window, feeling deliciously wicked and definitely cooler as a breeze blew across her and tightened her nipples into hard little pink nubs. Maggie shuddered and remembered when Nick had taken her nipples into his mouth and sucked on them. She touched herself there, and felt a throbbing, almost-pain assault her body. It had been so perfect, that time in the library. She wanted that again.

The moon was a curved sliver of pearly-white, Venus a blue-white dot right beside it. She

craned her neck back and stared up into the sky. God’s toenail, Maggie thought. That is what Da always called the moon when it looked like that. I remember sitting contentedly in Da’s arms, the moon looking just like this, Mama beside us with that indulgent smile on her face.

Everything looked so different at night, darkness cloaking even ugly scenery with a mysterious beauty. She loved the night; loved the way it smelled, the quietness of it, the blue-black shadows that camouflaged ordinary objects, the rustles and noises of animals as they went about their business. It was soothing, somehow, to her soul, to stare out at the beauty of the night. It had been one of her Da’s favorite things, too. Mama had not understood about the night, but she had known that it pleased them, and so it had pleased her, too.

The white gauze curtains were sticking to her sweaty self like glue, and Maggie brushed irritably at them, then halted. What had that been, moving in the shadows by the horse barn? She leaned forward intently, straining her eyes as she tried to penetrate the ebony night. She bit back a gasp as the silhouette moved once again, and separated to become two distinct shapes. One was unmistakably a woman, and the other . . . the other was her Uncle Ned. Maggie gripped the curtain and took a step to the side as the Ned-shadow hesitated and looked up toward her room, then slipped into the barn after a long, tense moment, the woman-shadow following right on his heels. Maggie let out the breath she had not realized she was holding. What was Uncle Ned doing sneaking around in the middle of the night? And who in the name of God was that woman? Maybe it was a lady friend. She put a hand to her mouth to stifle a sudden giggle at the thought of gruff Uncle Ned with a girlfriend. Maggie resolved right then to tease him unmercifully on the morrow. That sly old thing, sneaking around in the middle of the night like a youngster with his light-of-love! Maggie giggled again. Uncle Ned, with a lady friend! She had not known he had it in him.

Maggie went back to bed with a lighter heart, distracted from her troubles at the very least. She dropped off to sleep quickly, but was troubled the night long with dreams of Nick. Nick touching her, kissing her as he had done in the library, skimming his hands down the overheated skin of her body.

Nick was telling her he loved her, his head laid in supplication in her lap as he begged her to come to him at night. She touched the silky blackness of his hair, running her fingers through the thick, soft stuff as he pleaded with her to be his, please love him, because he could not live without her. Then the texture of his hair changed underneath her fingers, became coarse and oily, and Maggie realized with horror that it was David’s face that lay in her lap, and his features were distorted with hatred, just as they had been on that last day. Suddenly, they were back in his office, where she had found the stacks of Ned’s letters hidden behind the book she had been trying to filch to secrete away in her room, nearly one letter for every month of the more than three years of her parent’s deaths. She had gone through them frantically, disbelieving, and she had lingered there too long. He had come home from his office to find her still there, poring over them.

“Shrew!” he had screamed when she had confronted him with the letters, waving them in his face, too angry to be frightened in that moment. She had thought her uncle dead, and she had mourned him as much as she mourned her parents. She dodged David’s slap with the ease of long practice, and sneered at him, driven almost beyond control by this final, horrifying lie he had told her. She screamed her defiance in his face, then scrambled out of his way.

“I could not have had the money if I did not marry you, now could I?” he had smirked, pouring himself a glass of port. Maggie knew he was only waiting for her to relax her guard so he could catch her; after all this time, she was wise to him. She knew him too well to fall for any of his tricks. “And you would not have married me if you’d had anywhere to go. Your parents were quite rich, and I coveted their fortune. Did not want to give up all that lovely money, even if I had to take you to get it. Do not believe all that claptrap about greed being one of the seven deadly sins. It is a virtue, in my book.” He had looked her over coldly. “I sent a letter to your uncle telling him that you were too ill to write, that you were fragile mentally from the loss of your parents. I paid a doctor to write a letter advising him not to visit, that in fact you were on the verge of madness . . . and I intend to make it true, dear.” He stalked her relentlessly, and Maggie darted behind the desk, looking for a way of escape. “I am tired of you, m’dear. I will have you put away somewhere, and I will come and visit you religiously once a month. Perhaps we will play a little while I am there, the dutiful husband. Come here,” he laughed, enjoying the chase as he always did. It got his blood up for what was to come next. “You know I am going to get you eventually. Might as well give in now.”

It was the laugh that did it. He was so contemptuous of her, so sure that he could do anything he wanted to her without reprisal. She lost control, screaming, flinging things at him, and David had gone down to his knees when a lucky hit to the solar plexus from a crystal figurine left him gasping for breath. Maggie took advantage of his weakened state by smashing a vase over his head, once, then twice more. She then watched him topple over, his head striking the stone of the fireplace with a sickening thud.

Blood, there was so very much blood . . . flowing down the top of his head to pool on the back of his jacket, flowing from underneath him to stain the carpet beneath him . . . Maggie reached out tentatively, her fingers trembling, to touch his chest. He did not move, did not seem to breathe, not even when she called his name and shook him roughly. She was horror-stricken, and she knew she had to leave, had to get out. She searched his office, desperately searching for anything of value, stuffing Ned’s letters in her pocket, digging with revulsion in David’s pockets for the keys to the safe and his money clip, thanking providence that she was wearing her mother’s brooch pinned to her underclothing as she always did to keep him from finding it and confiscating it. Then running, running . . . she had to get away, had to find Ned before they caught her . . .

She woke with a jerk, twisted in her sheets, soaked in sweat, breathing fast, her heart running like a freight train. She did not sleep the rest of the night; she was afraid that the dream would come back. When the sun chased the moon from the sky, she was fiercely glad that she had a reason to leave the bed, the source of her nightmares. Glad that she did not have to lie there any more, stiff with remembered terrors and old horrors, her eyes glazed with tears that refused to fall.

Maggie did her duties by rote the next day, her almost sleepless night telling on her. Kathleen seemed tired, too, and after the midday meal that Nick gulped down so fast he must not have tasted it, Maggie sighed and pushed back the hair that fell out of her coiffure no matter how many pins she put in it.

“Kathleen, let’s go put our feet in the river,” she said tiredly. “We’ve nothing to do for the moment and I cannot take this blasted heat any longer. We’ve two days or so until we have to make blackberry preserves, the bread has to rise again before I can bake it, dinner is hours away, and I need to get out of here. I would like some company, too.”

A grin made Kathleen’s eyes shine and made her cheeks into two round balls. She threw down the towel that she had been drying the dishes with and dropped her apron over a chair.

“You do not have to say it twice to me,” she said. “I wanted to stop an hour ago, but I did not want to leave you here doing everything. Nick will not care. Men do not notice anything as long as their meals are on time, and you do not act as if you have a brain,” she scoffed. “Nick is better than most men, but he is still a man, and they all think they know everything. Arrogance is bred in the bone.”

Maggie laughed. “Kathleen, whatever would your mother say?” she teased in an exaggerated southern accent, spreading her fingers across her chest and schooling her features into a parody of shock.