Fine Spirits [Spirits 02] (18 page)

      
“What will I do in the meantime? Stay here?”

      
“No. You can't stay here any longer. Mrs. Bissel's staff is getting too edgy, and they might find the courage to come down here and confront you. Right now, they still think you're a spirit. Or a ghost.”

      
“Oh.”

      
“The thing is, the only place I can think of hiding you until I can talk to Harold is in the basement of our house on Marengo.” I scanned Mrs. Bissel's basement. “It's not as commodious as this one, I'm afraid.”

      
For the first time since I'd discovered her in the kitchen, she smiled. “I don't mind.”

      
I thought of something else that might throw a monkey wrench into the works. “Nuts,” I said. “I have to go to church tomorrow, because I sing in the choir.”

      
“That's very good of you, Mrs. Majesty.”

      
“For heaven's sake, call me Daisy.”

      
“Daisy,” she said obediently.

      
At least the girl was manageable. That was a good thing at the moment. As far as ultimately getting her to be responsible for herself, her strict compliance to other people's orders and evident inability to think for herself might not be such a useful quality. “I guess you'll have to stay in our basement until we get back from church. I'll try my best to make arrangements before I leave the house in the morning, but I can't guarantee anything.”

      
“As long as I don't have to go home again,” she said, her voice trembling.

      
“You won't have to go home again,” I promised. I only hoped I wasn't lying to the poor child.

Chapter Nine
 

      
The rest of that night was pure hell. I don't think I got more than an hour's worth of sleep altogether.

      
First I had to sneak Marianne out of Mrs. Bissel's house and into the Model T. That wasn't too difficult, since the rest of the household was upstairs, although they probably weren't sleeping. Not since Marianne and I had startled them out of their collective wits.

      
I threw my blanket over her, hoping that if anyone was looking out the window, maybe they wouldn't see her. I know it sounds stupid, but I was desperate. Besides, the night was a dark one, and the wind was still howling like the devil's choir in hell. I didn't think anybody would notice a black lump huddled near me as I walked to my automobile. The wind darned near blew both of us to perdition before we got to the Model T and I gestured for Marianne to squat next to a back tire.

      
Marianne did as I'd told her to, staring at the driver's side of the car. “Where's the door?” She pointed, her whispered question almost blown away before it reached my ears.

      
I whispered, too. “There isn't one on that side.”

      
“Oh.”

      
“I'll have to crank it up. You'll have to wait until I get it started and get in. Then you can get in, too.”

      
“I've never seen a car without a door on this side.”

      
That's because she was rich and didn't have to get around in an old Model T Ford. I didn't say so. “I'm hoping to buy a new machine soon. Do you know how to handle the choke wire?” I was hoping for the best but prepared for the worst, which turned out to be a good thing.

      
“What's a choke wire?”

      
“Never mind.”

      
Cranking the Model T to life was difficult even in the daytime. In the dark of night, with the wind trying like mad to whip me away, it was even worse than usual. I couldn't see a blasted thing. I persevered, as I always did back then no matter what I was doing, and eventually the motor coughed to life. And I didn't even break my arm, which was perhaps the first truly good thing that had happened all evening.

      
The Model T didn't have headlights like cars today have, and it was hard to see anything by squinting into the blackness as wind-blown dust made my eyes water. Marianne sat next to me in the machine, shivering, although she was still wrapped in the blanket.

      
Once I got the automobile on the road, I asked, “Are you all right?” If she took sick from eating such a poor diet for two weeks, I didn't know what I'd do. If she visited a doctor, there was no way in heck her presence in my life could be kept a secret.

      
I think she nodded, although I couldn't see her very well. “I'm just scared.”

      
Perfectly understandable. I was scared, too, for that matter. Sam's warning about the obstruction of justice kept clanging in my head like an alarm bell. Darn him, anyhow. Trust Sam Rotondo to make my job more terrifying than it already was, even when he wasn't even there.

      
“Try not to worry,” I advised. She might as well relax, since I was worrying plenty enough for the both of us.

      
“I'll try.”

      
Boy, was she easy to manipulate. Her father must have whipped her into obedience when she was a baby. I don't think she had a backbone to call her own--not unlike her mother. I decided to work on her; maybe get her to respect herself and stand up for her rights. She'd better learn how to take care of herself, and quick, if she expected to remain independent of her family.

      
All at once the task facing me loomed up like a mountain in my mind's eye. I couldn't do this. I was being an idiot. I was wrong and bad, and Billy was right about me. And so was Sam.

      
“Thank you, Daisy,” Marianne said in a small but sincere voice. “Nobody else has ever understood or tried to help me before.”

      
Okay, maybe I wasn't a total failure. The poor thing needed somebody on her side. She
deserved
for someone to be good to her for once. Smothering an internal sigh, I said, “I'll do my very best to help you, Marianne.” I'd never expected rich people to be so much trouble before I took up spiritualism as a profession.

      
“Thank you.”

      
I heard her sniffling and sighed inside again.

      
I managed to get Marianne inside our house on South Marengo Avenue in Pasadena without making too much of a racket. Tiptoeing around the house like a thief in the night, I brought her bedding, an old nightgown and robe, and some slippers. Her feet were bigger than mine, but she didn't complain. By that time, if she
had
complained, I'd probably have carted her straight back to her family, no matter how much I sympathized with her.

      
Hiding a daughter from her parents was a frightening and perhaps illegal proposition, and I was in an anomalous position. Actually, it wasn't anomalous at all. I was doing something both the law and everyone else would consider wrong. But I couldn't abandon her. Not now that I knew the hell she suffered in her home.

      
I couldn't stop having mental visions of cutting her father's privates off, but I kept them--the visions, that is--to myself. Even Marianne, who had good reason to wish her father a eunuch, would likely have been appalled.

      
After I got her settled, and after reassuring her approximately six hundred and fifty times that I'd be back as soon as could be, I left her in our basement and drove the Model T back up the hill to Mrs. Bissel's house. The car objected strenuously to being driven uphill twice in one night, but I forced the issue, praying all the while that it wouldn't break down or that I wouldn't run into anything in the dark. Because I figured I'd asked enough of God for one night, I thanked Him once I was safely parked in the circular driveway.

      
Then I trekked back down to the basement, cleaned up the crumbs, grape stems, banana peel, and apple core left over from Marianne's meal, carried the tray upstairs, and searched around until I found paper and a pencil. I wrote a note to Mrs. Bissel, telling her that I believed I'd solved her problem and would return to her house later that afternoon (it was almost dawn by this time), and I'd talk to her then. Fortunately, I remembered I'd told her not to return to the kitchen until she heard from me, so I left the note attached to the telephone in the pantry.

      
When I got back home, I checked once more on Marianne. She'd made herself snug on top of an old desk Pa had carted down there a couple of years before. He'd planned on making an office for himself, then decided he didn't need an office, which was true, but the desk remained.

      
I held a candle since if she'd fallen asleep I didn't want to awaken her, and I saw her eyes, glowing like a cat's in the dark. “Don't be afraid,” I whispered. “It's just me. I only wanted to see if you needed anything else before I went to bed.”

      
She sank back into her nest on the desk. “Oh, my! I was so frightened. I was afraid somebody'd heard me and decided to check the basement.”

      
“No, I think the household's asleep. Try to sleep, Marianne. My family will be leaving the house about nine in the morning to go to church, and there's always lots of coffee cake left over. My aunt Vi is a wonderful cook. You'll find plenty to eat in the kitchen. There are eggs in the ice box and bread and so forth.”

      
There was a lengthy pause before Marianne said, “Thank you.”

      
I surmised the reason for her hesitation. “You can't cook, can you?”

      
“No.”

      
“Don't worry about it. Just eat things you don't have to cook. You can make toast, can't you?”

      
“Um . . . I don't know.”

      
Again I wondered how this was going to work. It was as if the girl had been trained to be helpless. “Just eat the coffee cake, then, and maybe an orange. All right?”

      
“Yes. Thank you.”

      
“You're welcome.”

      
When I finally trudged upstairs from the basement for the last time that night--or morning, I mean--I was done in. It was all I could do to remove my dress and shoes, and I fell into bed with my combinations and stockings still on.

      
And I couldn't get to sleep to save myself. I kept envisioning myself being handcuffed and hauled off to the pokey by Sam Rotondo.

# # #

      
When I finally did get to sleep, it didn't last long. Billy woke me up around 6:00 a.m. with one of his nightmares.

      
“Joey! Joey! Oh, God, no!” he shouted, all but scaring the life out of me. “Oh, Jesus! The blood, the blood. Joey! God, Joey. No. He's gone.”

      
I jerked to a sitting position and blinked to get my bearings. After no more than a second or two, I understood what had happened, so I lay back down and wrapped my arms around my poor, ruined husband. “Hush, Billy. It's all right.”

      
Every time this happened, the crack in my heart grew wider, and I loved him more. Life had been so darned hard on Billy. He deserved better. Before the war, he'd been a cheerful, happy-go-lucky man, with a good start on a career as an automobile mechanic.

      
Not any longer. Now he was a shell-shocked, shot-up, gassed-out husk of himself, and guilt gnawed at my insides like rats gnawing on stale bread. I was so often short-tempered with him, and I tried his patience constantly, even though I didn't mean to. Months earlier, I'd started thinking that Billy deserved a better wife than I was proving to be, and I couldn't shake the thought out of my head. The poor man was stuck with me. I vowed I'd try to be a better wife to him. I made the same vow almost every morning, and broke it every day.

      
Shaking and sweating with the aftermath of his terrible dream, he whispered, “Sorry, Daisy. I was fighting the damned Huns again, I guess.”

      
“I know,” I crooned, trying not to cry because Billy hated it when I did. “It's all right, sweetheart.”

      
He groaned and I felt his body go stiff in my arms. When he flailed around in his sleep as he'd just done, his legs and his lungs suffered afterward. He lived with pain all day, every day, even when he didn't have nightmares. Although I worried constantly about his morphine use, I whispered, “Do you need me to get your medicine, darling?”

      
He tried to hide the extent of his torment, but I could tell how much he hurt because he gasped involuntarily when he opened his mouth to answer me. Then he said in his tight, pain-racked voice, “Yes. Please.”

      
“Be right back.” As carefully as possible, I unwrapped him and crawled out of bed. Without bothering to put on my robe, I ran to the bird's-eye-maple dresser on the other side of the room. I was shocked when I withdrew the bottle from where Billy kept it, because it was almost empty. I'd picked up a full bottle from Dr. Benjamin two days earlier. Could this be the same bottle? It was on the tip of my tongue to ask Billy if he'd had to use that much morphine syrup in two days' time, but I swallowed the question. Better he have the medicine, I reasoned, than live in anguish.

      
The fact that he'd taken so much of a potent opiate in two days' time frightened me, though. A lot.

      
He didn't need me nagging him about his drug use. He had sufficient hardships to bear without adding a pestiferous wife to the mix. I exasperated him quite enough already. That being the case, I took him the bottle and turned to go to the kitchen. “I'll get a glass of water.” Dr. Benjamin had told me he should take the medicine with a full glass of water.

      
“Don't bother.” He lifted the bottle to his lips and drank.