BlackWind (2 page)

She blushed. “Uh, huh,” she whispered. Her soft green eyes tracked between her mother and father, then lowered to the task she was performing.

Dermot smiled and turned away. Deirdre followed him from the room.

“What happened?” she asked when they were in the living room.

“I got Cullen on the phone and introduced myself,” Dermot said in a tight voice. He stood before the large picture window that looked out onto the front lawn.

“Did he know who you were?”

“He said something smart like, ‘Oh, yeah. You're the big wig out at the nut house.’ Then he asked what I wanted.”

Deirdre sat on the arm of the sofa that flanked the big window. “And?”

“I asked if he knew about what happened at St. Teresa's this afternoon and he said he did. I asked him how his son was and he said, ‘The little bastard got what he deserved for stepping in where it weren't none of his business to be stepping.'”

Deirdre blinked. “You're joking!”

Plowing a hand through his crop of thick black curls, Dermot let out a snort. “Do I look like I am? Not only did Cullen not care that his son had tried to defend our daughter, he said he—and I am quoting him verbatim—'Beat the crap outta the little punk for causing me to close up shop and go get his scrawny little ass.'”

“Oh, Derm,” Deirdre groaned. “Surely he didn't.”

He turned to look at her. “You've heard the rumors about Tym Cullen, DeeDee. Half the town has heard them, and the other half has seen some of his doings! No one goes into that shop who doesn't come out talking about what a son-of-a-bitch he is. How many times have people told us they've been to his store and seen Mrs. Cullen with a black eye and bruises all over her face? People know he cheats his customers and beats his wife and now
I
know he beats his boy, too!”

“What are you going to do?”

“There isn't anything I can do where Cullen is concerned, but by the good Lord I intend to do something about Hank Goodmayer! St. Teresa's doesn't need a man like him at the helm of our ship!”

Deirdre smiled. Her husband's father was retired Navy and, after years of traveling the globe with his father, Dermot's liberal use of nautical terms was a habit he could not break.

“We could report Mr. Cullen to the department of welfare,” she suggested.

“That would be about the best we could do.”

“And hope it will help.”

From her place beside the crack of the kitchen doorway as she eavesdropped on the conversation, Bronwyn allowed the door to close all the way. She stood with her head on the doorjamb and her eyes squeezed shut.

“I'm sorry, Sean,” she whispered. She opened her eyes and stared at the woodwork. “I didn't mean to get you in trouble.”

Hearing her parents moving toward the kitchen, she hurried back to the counter and finished arranging the deviled eggs on a platter.

When supper was finished and she had helped her mother clear away the dishes, she asked to be excused so she could do her homework. In her room, she stretched out across the bed and pulled her favorite gray and white teddy bear into her arms.

“Sean,” she sighed, pressing her face into the soft fake fur.

She knew he watched her.

Just as she watched him when he wasn't aware she was around.

Like on the day she had first seen him.

Bronwyn had been waiting for Sister Mary Pat to sign her absentee slip when Sean and his mother entered the office.

“May I help you?” Mrs. Cureton, the school secretary, inquired.

“I'm here to enroll me boy,” the thin woman with the paisley print dress and small white hat replied. She had a thick Irish brogue. “Me name is Dorrie Cullen. His name be Sean Daniel Cullen.”

“Hello, Sean. Welcome to St. Teresa's.” When the boy did not reply, the secretary looked at his mother. “What grade will he be in?”

“Third.”

Bronwyn was very aware of the slim boy with the curly blond hair standing beside his mother. For an instant, his gaze swept to her, then he looked quickly away, but in that fleeting moment, Sean Cullen's pale blue eyes had mesmerized Bronnie.

“Are you folks new to Albany?”

The woman nodded. “My husband bought the meat shop across the river.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Sutton's place. If I remember correctly, the shop was bought by folks from over in Savannah.”

“Aye, Savannah,” Sean's mother replied.

“Let me get the paperwork started. You are Catholic, of course.”

“There is no other true religion,” Mrs. Cullen pronounced softly.

“I agree completely,” Mrs. Cureton said. “Naturally you'll need to register with the parish to get parishioner tuition rates.”

“Aye. We can do that.”

“Are his shots up to date?”

Sean's mother reached into her purse. “Aye. Here is the documentation.”

Each time his mother spoke, Sean Cullen winced. To Bronnie, whose grandmother still bore the lilt of the West Country, she understood his embarrassment. She was about to speak to him when Sister Mary Pat called her into her office. With a smile of encouragement the boy seemed to ignore, Bronnie left him standing awkwardly at his mother's side. Though she did not see him again until a few days later, she thought of him constantly, for his good looks had fired her girlish imagination. By the time she laid eyes on him again, she had developed a strong crush on the boy with the blue eyes.

It was a crush that had only grown stronger over the years.

Because Sean was two years older, Bronnie only saw him when he passed her in the hall or as he sat in church during daily Mass. Though he never spoke to her and she was too shy to talk to him, the only contact they had was when their eyes met. It was during those brief times Bronnie thought she saw deep sadness in Sean Cullen's cobalt gaze.

Now, she thought she understood why.

“I love you, Seannie,” she said and sighed, pulling the bear tighter against her.

Sean turned over in bed and winced. He felt the pull of his shorts against the broken flesh on his backside and knew the crusted blood had glued the fabric to his flesh. Though he had taken a shower and his mother had salved the lacerations caused by the priest's diligently wielded paddle, the abrasions must have opened again. Gently, he reached behind him to tug away the material. The sting made him draw in a breath and mentally curse Goodmayer to the Abyss and beyond.

“You are evil, Sean Cullen!” Fr. Goodmayer had snarled with each slap of the paddle. “You are evil!”

Bent over the priest's desk, with Goodmayer's hand pressed firmly between his shoulder blades, Sean had been able to see the man's legs and the thick bulge between them that gave evidence to how much the priest was enjoying the punishment. The harder the hits, the firmer the bulge, until with one last brutal pass of the wood, the cloth covering Goodmayer's crotch darkened in a spreading stain.

“Evil!” Goodmayer pronounced one final time, then stalked to the window, his back to Sean. “Return to class, and as you walk, think on the sins you have committed. I will talking with your father about your misconduct.”

His rump on fire with the pain, Sean straightened. He hurt so badly he could barely hobble to the door. Not bothering to look back at the sadist who had inflicted such savage punishment, Sean went into the foyer and leaned against the wall, his head down, and his legs trembling.

“Don't let him come out here and find you, Sean,” Mrs. Harold, the priest's housekeeper, warned. She had come down the hallway, drying her hands on a towel. “Get going now. You don't need another paddling, son.”

Later, when Tym Cullen arrived to escort his son home, Sister Mary Justice had come to Sean's classroom to get him. She looked at him with pity as he walked down the corridor beside her.

“He doesn't look pleased, Sean,” Sister whispered.

“He never does,” Sean said quietly.

One look at his father's face and Sean knew he would pay dearly. He had to grit his teeth to climb into the cab of his father's pickup because he did not want the man to witness his pain.

“This is a hell of a note!” his father snarled as he slammed the truck into reverse. “Being called down here to get your ass in the middle of the day!”

Sean knew he should not speak. His father's hands were wrapped around the steering wheel so tightly the knuckles were white. From the way those huge hands squeezed the plastic, Sean knew his father was itching to lash out at him.

“When we get home, I'll teach you to embarrass me like this!”

Sean kept his eyes straight ahead. His bottom throbbed with the cuts left by Goodmayer's beating. It was all he could do not to shift on the seat or to cry out as the vehicle bumped over the roadway.

“Well, you won't be coddled in that Papist resort after today.”

Slowly closing his eyes, Sean knew what that meant: public school.

It wasn't that he cared one way or another where he got his education, but St. Teresa's was where Bronwyn McGregor was.

“I'll teach you,” his father growled, turning to give him a steady look. “You're nothing but trouble and never have been from the day you was conceived. Well, I'll make a man of you if it kills me!”

The beating he'd been given at the unholy hands of the priest was nothing compared to the strapping he received from his father at home. Despite his mother's pleading from the other side of the locked door not to inflict further punishment on their child, Sean's father had made good his promise to teach him a brutal lesson. His blood flowing from lacerations caused from the barber's strop his father wielded savagely, Sean finally slipped into unconsciousness as the vicious pain continued. He awoke to find his mother kneeling beside him, his hand held protectively in hers, and one of her eyes swollen and already turning black from Tym Cullen's fist.

Now, lying in bed, staring at the wall, Sean knew that one day Tymothy Cullen would meet his rightful end and, when it came, it would be a violent end to a violent, brutal life.

“One day, I'll kill you, Tym Cullen,” he vowed. “Before God, I swear I will kill you.”

In the adjacent bedroom, he heard his mother cry out as she did nearly every night.

“I don't sleep so good, Seannie,” she had told him once. “Your Da thrashes about and he accidentally hits me sometimes.”

“One day there will be no more beatings, Ma,” he said softly. “No more black eyes or broken arms.”

As he had grown older, Sean tried to stop his father from abusing his mother and the results had been disastrous. The one time Sean tried to physically restrain his father, Tym Cullen had beaten him so savagely, Sean stayed in bed for three days.

But the brunt of that fury had fallen on Sean's mother, and she had wound up in the hospital with a fractured jaw, a broken arm, and a ruptured spleen.

“Fell down the stairs, she did,” his father told the doctors at the hospital in Savannah.

Unable to prove otherwise and incapable of getting Dorrie Cullen to press charges, the authorities were forced to drop the matter, though one burly black officer had warned Tym Cullen that they would be watching him.

“Go ahead, Sean,” his father said later. “Stand up for your Ma and see what I do to her next time!”

So, through the years, Sean had been forced to watch his mother's abuse and endure his own. He was biding his time, waiting for the right moment to strike.

“You are a dead man walking, Tymothy Cullen,” he declared as he drew his pillow closer to his chest. He buried his face in the clean scent of ozone that permeated the fabric.

As he drifted into sleep, the soft material beneath his cheek became the creamy flesh of Bronwyn McGregor's shoulder and he nuzzled against that phantom sweetness.

He sent his mind out into the night and his thoughts moved gently into the cheerful lavender bedroom where she slept. In his incorporeal state he stood there and watched her sleeping for a moment, then laid his spectral hand against her cheek.

“Seannie,” she sighed and turned to rub her cheek against his ghostly palm.

Her words erased the pain in his body. He relaxed, giving in to the closing arms of sleep, and withdrew to his own dismal room and lonely space.

His lips moved against the fabric of his pillow. “Goodnight, Milady,” he whispered. “I love you, too.”

Albany, Georgia, September 1983

The halls smelled stale and old as Bronwyn stopped beside the library. The bustling corridors of Albany High School seemed intimidating. There were too many students jostling past her, eyeing her as though she were an alien creature dredged up from the muck, and none seemed inclined to ask if she needed help. She shifted her French II, Geometry, and Biology books to her left hip and let out a snort. Just as she started forward again, a rowdy boy ran past and hit her arm. Her books went flying, skidding across the floor before her.

“Thanks, you little creep!” she yelled, and was astonished to find herself on the receiving end of the boy's middle-finger salute.

Exasperated by the rudeness, angry at being thrust into this new and unsettling experience, Bronwyn clenched her jaw and stooped to grab her notebook.

“Need some help, Princess?”

The smirk in the voice did nothing to improve Bronwyn's state of mind so she ignored the speaker. Grumbling to herself, she picked up her textbooks and slammed them on top of the notebook on the floor at her feet.

“Suit yourself,” the speaker said.

After lifting the heavy stack of books into her arms, Bronwyn stood. As she did she took in the faded jeans and rundown sneakers of the young man who had spoken. Her gaze moved up his chest, past a plaid shirt that had seen much better days, to his expressionless, thin face.

Despite the lack of the light blue shirt and dark blue twill pants that had been the uniform at St. Teresa's, Bronwyn would have recognized him anywhere, although he had grown taller. “Sean?”

He shrugged, but didn't reply.

“How are you?’ she asked, smiling.

He shrugged again. “Okay.”

The day after Fr. Goodmayer had punished Sean, the boy's father had enrolled him in public school. Bronwyn hadn't seen him since that day on the playground at St. Teresa's, but she had never forgotten him.