Charlotte’s Story (23 page)

When I woke, Press was gone from the bed and it was after nine o’clock. My heart began to pound when I realized that Michael would have awakened by eight, and Nonie was not there to get him from the nursery. Any thoughts I had about the previous night were gone. Throwing on my robe, I hurried from the bedroom.

The nursery door stood ajar, and Michael’s crib was empty. A wet diaper and soggy plastic pants lay on the changing table. As I left the nursery to go downstairs, I saw that J.C.’s door was open as well.

Chapter 21

Invitation

“Well, here’s Precious Bride!”

I said
good morning
to both Press and J.C. and went straight to Michael, who was in his high chair, happily eating dry cereal from a bowl. I noticed the canned peaches in a second bowl. His fingers, which promptly grabbed for me as soon as I came near, were covered with both sticky peach syrup and flakes of cereal.

“Mama! Mama!”

“Yum, yum, yummy.” When I kissed him on top of his head, I found that his hair was also sticky with syrup. He had been busy.

J.C. was wearing the silk robe I’d seen the night before, but I could see the outlines of a gown beneath it. A thick, peach-colored terrycloth turban was wrapped around her hair, so that her head looked too large to be supported by her reedy neck. The daylight made the fine lines at the corners of her eyes more pronounced, though without her makeup she looked five years younger than she had when she arrived.

Press cleared his throat. “Look, darling. Terrance has sausages.”

Terrance stood behind J.C.’s chair with a platter, and I knew Press had been hoping for just that moment. He was determinedly straight-faced, but I felt myself coloring with embarrassment.

“Oh, my, yes. They are delicious. A marvel.” J.C. stabbed a sausage link with a fork and held it out in front of her. “What did you say these were, Terrance? I keep forgetting.”

“Venison sausage, Miss Jacquith.”

Maybe I was carried away with relief that Michael was safe, but I suddenly also found Terrance and the sausages funny. I turned my head, trying to suppress a giggle. But when I couldn’t, I pretended a small coughing fit.

“Precious, are you all right? Do you need me to slap you on the back?”

As J.C. pushed back her chair, I waved her away.

“Press, there’s nothing funny at all about someone choking to death. What’s wrong with you? You need to help her.”

Press hurried over to pat me with exaggerated care. “Are you all right?” he whispered. I shook my head, unable to decide whether or not I was going to burst out laughing. Without looking at Press, I finally regained control of myself and was relieved to see that Terrance had taken the opportunity to move away from J.C. Sitting down, I told him that I would just have eggs and toast and juice. J.C. watched me intently from across the table.

Wanting to change the subject, I asked what everyone’s plans were.

“I know my plans.” J.C. lifted her hand. “Since the decorators have run off to work on some ridiculous emergency project. I mean,
who
has emergency decorating projects? Well, I guess that’s not fair, because I actually have them all the time. Anyway, I was thinking I’d just laze about and read. I brought work with me—plans for a five-room pied-à-terre for a lesser Rockefeller who thinks heaven is paved with chintz—but with all this gray rain outside, I am
completely
unmotivated.” She took a sip of coffee. “What about you, Press? You haven’t said. Playing lord of the manor, or are you going out into the muck?”

Press laid his napkin beside his plate and took two cigarettes from his case. After tapping them, filter-end down, on the table, he gave one to J.C., who put it beside her own plate. “I’m going in to the office today. I was hoping you’d come with me. I want you to draw up something for my office and the other empty one in the building. It’s pretty damn drab. Then maybe Charlotte could meet us for lunch.”

Terrance appeared at Press’s side with a burning lighter. As he held it to the end of Press’s cigarette, I watched him carefully for some telltale sign of the transcendent pleasure I’d seen there the night before. There was only his usual passive, unreadable gaze, focused only on what he was doing at that moment. Had Press been right? Had my eyes fooled me? I’d seen Hugh, but I had seen Terrance just as clearly.

I realized that even if I had been mistaken, I didn’t trust Terrance.

“Charlotte?”

Startled, I looked at Press. He and J.C. were both staring at me. “Did you hear me? I thought you could meet us for lunch in town.”

For the second time that morning, I felt my face flush with heat. “No. I’m sorry. Lunch?”

J.C. perked up. “Oh, there’s that cute little inn in town where your mother put me for the wedding. They did a nice breakfast.”

“The inn?” Press shook his head. “The food hasn’t been very good lately. There’s a roadhouse restaurant about five miles down the highway.
Phil’s,
I think it is. That could be an adventure.” He looked more closely at me. “Are you all right, darling?”

Michael chose that moment to knock over his milk. “Up oh,” he said. When I looked at him, he grinned.

“No.” I quickly grabbed my napkin and pressed it onto the carpet to sop up the milk. “Michael, that was very naughty.” When
the napkin was soaked, I reached for Press’s. “You know I have Michael all day, now that Nonie’s in Clareston. Michael is no fun at all in restaurants.” As though to illustrate, Michael sent up an ear-piercing squeal, then loudly declaimed for more milk. I might have asked Shelley, the orchardkeeper’s sister, in to babysit, but the last thing I wanted to do that afternoon was to go out to lunch with J.C. and Press. It was even difficult to look at her in the same robe she’d been wearing in the garden.

“What about Shelley?” Press asked. “She could watch Michael.”

“It’s short notice. She might be visiting her mother.” At least I thought she had mentioned visiting her mother. If not, it made for yet another convenient lie.

“That’s too bad.” J.C. made a little moue of disappointment. “I was hoping we could spend some time together. In fact, I’d like to have you all to myself for an hour or so, Charlotte. There’s something I want to talk with you about.”

“Sounds mysterious.” Press looked from J.C. to me and raised his eyebrows.

“You just hush. It’s girl talk.”

She was flippant, but when she looked at me I saw something in her eyes I hadn’t seen before. Sincerity. She leaned forward. “Maybe the excellent Marlene could whip us up lunch tomorrow? We can eat something yummy here and have a good talk.”

Michael banged his cup on the high-chair tray and shouted a word that vaguely resembled
yummy
. Then he began to laugh as though someone had just told a brilliant joke.

Chapter 22

Alone Again

The rain that had begun before breakfast showed no signs of stopping as lunchtime approached. Michael and I played with blocks and trains. We read books and sorted laundry for Marlene, who tempted Michael with a cookie she’d made that morning so he would stop trying to climb into the tub washer in the mudroom. It was a relief to have some normality in our day. He didn’t even call out “Eva! Eva!” when we went into the nursery.

It hurt sometimes that he looked so much like her. Both fair and small-featured, neither of them particularly resembled Press. (Though by the time Michael was a teenager, he looked a bit more like his father.) Press had teased me that they were changeling children, that perhaps they weren’t his at all. It had been a great joke between us because we both knew that I was as faithful as a dog.

It had never occurred to me to be unfaithful. Rachel teased and flirted with other men, but I was certain she’d never cheated on Jack.

Olivia had been forced to be with a man who wasn’t her husband, and he had been forced to watch. My heart broke for them both. I still could hardly believe what I had seen. Was I going insane? Had what had happened to Eva pushed me into madness? I tried not to think about it as I played with Michael, but I couldn’t help myself. I had been a witness, and to witness something like that was akin to participating. Olivia had had to live with it every day of her life, and who knew what had happened afterward. What if it had happened more than once?

I knew who the man was. His face was on many of the paintings on our walls, and in a few photographs in the stack of leather-bound photo albums in the library. What I didn’t (couldn’t? wouldn’t?) force myself to think about was what it meant. Not then. Not yet.

At one o’clock, just after I put Michael down for his nap, Marlene let me know that Terrance was driving her into church in town, where she would dust and vacuum the sanctuary as she did every week. I wondered at her steadiness, her willingness to work in Bliss House. I knew she disdained talk of the supernatural beyond the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (never the Holy Ghost, because she wasn’t that sort of Christian). It was reassuring. She was the perfect complement to Terrance who, for all I knew, was Satan himself. (Of course I didn’t really think he was Satan. But he was so unreadable that I might have believed anything about him.)

When they were gone, with the exception of Michael, I was alone in the house. What I wanted more than anything was to sleep, but I swore to myself that I would never again sleep when I was alone with Michael.

Chapter 23

Missing

“Terrance might have come back!”

J.C., Press, and I clustered in a half-circle in the front hall, watching Terrance in the kitchen doorway. At least I was watching Terrance. J.C. and Press were watching me as though I were raving. Which, perhaps, I was. I was as irrational as any mother might be whose child has disappeared from the bed where that child had been taking his afternoon nap, and was perspiring from running up and down the hallways, tearing apart rooms. Press and I had separated to look upstairs. Marlene and Terrance had scoured the downstairs, while J.C. went outside. Though none of us really believed, I think, that he had been able to open an outer door. We’d been looking for more than half an hour, and there had been no sign of Michael.

Terrance’s face was impassive. How I hated that face. His hands, upturned at his thighs, were his only expression.

“You didn’t hear him, Terrance?” Press said. “Maybe coming down the stairs?”

“Marlene and I only just returned a few minutes before you did, Mr. Press.”

“For God’s sake, Press. He could have come back earlier and left again. I don’t think you know what kind of man he is. What he’s responsible for. What he did to your mother!” I turned to Terrance. “Tell him what you did, you bastard.”

Behind Terrance, I heard Marlene murmur “Oh, dear Lord.”

Press took my arm and all but jerked me aside, pushing his face into mine. “You will not do this, Charlotte. You don’t get to behave this way just because Michael got out of his room while you weren’t paying attention.”

“What are you saying?” No, it wasn’t that I didn’t understand what Press was saying. He was only saying what everyone else was thinking. What I was thinking.

The nursery had smelled slightly of urine from the diaper pail because Marlene didn’t empty it until the evening. How used we women become to such smells, not minding what a man would find repellent because they come from our precious children.

After not seeing Michael in the crib, I had crossed the room quietly to the trundle bed’s rumpled coverlet, expecting to find him snuggled beneath it. But the bed was empty except for the Lassie doll, which lay on the pillow where Michael’s head might have been. I fell to my knees to run my hands over the rumpled sheets as though I would conjure Michael from them, but he was gone.

Would I have to tell them where I had been? I couldn’t. No one would believe me.

“Charlotte! Stop this, and tell us where he is.”

I broke away from Press and moved toward the telephone on the table a few feet away from Terrance. He didn’t flinch, but only blinked slowly as I got closer. So still. He was always so still. Picking up the telephone’s heavy black handset with one hand, I reached to dial “0” with the other.

“I’m calling the police. Anybody could’ve come in here and taken him.”
And where were you, Mrs. Bliss? Had you been drinking, Mrs. Bliss? Were you upset with your son, Mrs. Bliss?

Press strode over, but this time he had the sense not to grab at me. His voice was steady. Perhaps it could even have been called cajoling.

“Charlotte, stop. You’ll just inconvenience them. By the time they get out here, he’ll be safe in your arms. I used to disappear all the time. For hours. Then I’d turn up and find no one had even noticed I was gone. Let’s not imagine the worst. We just haven’t looked hard enough for him.”

I hesitated. The police might not even keep looking for Michael if they thought I’d done something to him. My stomach clenched when I thought of him being hurt.

Another voice spoke up. It was J.C., her usual insouciant, playgirl manner gone and replaced with a serious tone.

“Tell us what happened, Charlotte. We all want to find your sweet boy. What happened while we were gone? You were alone?”

Alone? I’d been certain Michael and I were alone. I tried to make sure I was making eye contact with Press and J.C. so they would believe me as I told them how I’d been reading a magazine in the salon, the doors to the hall open, when I heard a sound out in the hallway like something soft hitting the floor. My heart had begun pounding with the fear that Michael had tried to come downstairs and had fallen.

But there had been nothing in the hall. I’d looked up to see that the nursery door was still closed. I had locked it myself. Unnerved, I went to the kitchen to make myself a cup of hot tea, putting on the kettle to boil.

“When I got home, it was boiled dry and the whistle had come loose,” Marlene interrupted. “But it was on the lowest heat, or there might have been a fire.”

From the kitchen, I’d heard a cry somewhere in the house—I thought from the servants’ wing. God, it was a horrible, mournful
sound, like something in pain. Not quite human, not quite animal. First, I’d rushed up the stairs off the dining-room hallway, to make sure Michael was all right; finding his door still closed, I’d started toward the back of the house. Then I saw the animal. At least I was sure right away it was an animal. What else might have made such a sound? (And here I did not tell them that I’d been terribly afraid it was an
unnatural
sound, and that I had experienced a huge sense of relief on seeing the creature’s tail and two hind legs.)