Losing Control (15 page)

She didn’t get to find out - they
missed the town completely, headed out to a piece of sandy land that jutted out
into the Bay. The driver opened the back doors of the ambulance to reveal a
charming French cottage made of stone with a cedar shake roof, shuttered
windows, ivy-strewn walls and double dormers. The yard around it was lush with
low-hanging willow trees, fresh-blooming pink roses and exquisite lavender.

Fawn was helped out of the ambulance
and into the house by the polite but unfriendly driver. Brisby and June carried
their bags and hers, following them in.

The living room was cozy, filled with
chunky old chintz chairs and a slip-covered sofa. Fawn noticed lots of quirky
little antiques sitting here and there that could only have come from
Europe
. There were also some beautiful
paintings of seascapes and ships that were delicate and fresh though the
signature on one revealed it had been painted twenty three years ago.

Any other time Fawn would have been
thrilled to be in a house so delightfully inviting but she was listless, cold,
and cranky. What had happened to all that spunk she had garnered at the
hospital? She was so helpless now, letting her mother and the sour-faced
spinster of a nurse do everything for her. All she did was
stare
at the sea, which seemed grayer and more troubled than it did in
Malibu
.

June took her bags to a guest room
upstairs. Brisby lit a fire in the stone hearth, and handed Fawn a cell phone.

“Call him, now,” she huffed. “I’ll be
in the kitchen, making tea.”

Fawn gladly did as ordered; at the
first note of Taury’s resonant tones she relaxed, all the crankiness and misery
passed out of her frame.

“Taury, darling, I don’t think I can
stay here.”

“Why, it’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but why couldn’t I stay at your
apartment instead? Or the penthouse suite in the factory? Then we’d be
together.”

“I don’t want Mother to know where
you are. If she did, she’d keep bothering you I’m certain. And she’d never
suspect I sent you to the
Bodega
Bay
house. She thinks I sold it a long
time ago. She hates that house!”

“Why? It’s a charming place. I could
imagine being quite happy here under different circumstances.”

“My father used to go up there alone
every weekend. Once I found out about Inger, I figured he must have taken her
up there a lot. Maybe
Elizabeth
knew that.”

“Your father’s name was Jim, is that
right?”

“Yeah, short for James. Why?”

“I’m looking straight at a tiny
portrait of a woman on the mantel; a blonde with deep set blue eyes. The
artist’s name is Jim.”

“Yeah, I put it there. I found it in
an upstairs closet. My dad used to paint as a hobby.”

“So that’s your mom, Inger?”

“Probably; the resemblance is easy to
see.”

“Did he paint all these seascapes and
ships, too?”

“No, they were done by someone else.
If you look you’ll notice they all have dates instead of an artist’s name.”

“Oh, yes, I did notice that. Is
everything okay there? It’s awfully quiet.”

“That’s because I’m hiding in my
office. Everyone else is in the board room. As a matter of fact I’m sitting on
the very sofa where we had our candy orgy.”

She managed a short laugh. “I hope
you had it cleaned.”

“Yes, I did. But I can’t wait to do
that again!”

“I know. Oh, Taury, I hate this! I
want you so much and I can’t do a damned thing about it!” She lowered her
voice. “As long as I had you near me I felt satisfied to be able to please you
with my mouth. My insides are in pain from the operation but I still feel such
a need to have you in me. As soon as I think about it I get all stirred up.
It’s agony.”

“For me, too, Fawn. I have an idea.
I’ll call you tonight, about eleven. You should be in bed by then, right?”

“I’m never up past nine anymore. You
know that.”

“Well, when I call I’ll talk you up,
sexually speaking, and you do the same for me. It couldn’t hurt. Are you
willing?”

“Sounds wicked good to me.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m getting hard just
imagining what you’ll say. I’d better go. Set the phone on the vibrator so I
won’t wake your mom and Brisby when I call.”

“All right. Taury … is my dad being
any help to you?”

“Sure, he’s had some fine ideas.
We’re pouring over any old documents we can find, trying to discover some angle
to keep Elizabeth and Ainsworth, and that bitch Harper, from taking over the
company. I’ve talked to my sister. She has a few shares but not enough to swing
it. I think it’s going to be a rough evening.”

“Well, I’ll be there with you, in my
thoughts. Whatever good that might do.”

“It does a lot, believe me! Love you,
Fawn, talk to you tonight!”

“Love you, too!”

She heard the click of his phone, sat
staring at the sea again, until the shrill screech of a tea kettle startled
her.

“Tea’s on!” Brisby called in her
husky British accent. She brought out a platter with a yellow teapot and cups
and some miniature pecan pies.

June came slowly down the stairs;
joined Fawn.

“Oh, these look lovely! When did you
have time to make them?” June asked.

“Didn’t! Mr. Taurus had the house
stocked with food this morning. He had it cleaned, too. Ever the gentleman,
that young man is.”

“Yes, I’m beginning to see that.”

Fawn glanced at her mother,
astonished at the change in her.

SIXTEEN

During tea, Brisby made herself
scarce, stating that she had some organizing to do in the kitchen. She reminded
Fawn of one of those stalwart English housekeepers in old movies – usually
played by Elsa Lanchester or Sara Allgood. Round and stern; they either were
hiding a heart of gold or a sinister agenda. She wondered which one Brisby
might be hiding.

“It’s beautiful here, isn’t it,
Fawn?” her mother asked, sighing. “It’s almost as nice as Connie’s beach
house.”

“Yeah, but I’ll take the bungalow
over them both!”

“Aren’t you going to live in the
beach house once it’s renovated?”

“No, Taury and I talked about that,
and decided to live in the bungalow, and maybe rent out the big house.”

“To strangers?” June seemed upset.

“Would that be terrible?”

“Oh, no, I suppose not. Still, it
doesn’t feel right somehow. That house has been in ours or Taury’s family since
it was built. It’d be strange to see someone else live there.”

Fawn grew quiet, sipping the
deliciously sweet tea.

“I have an idea, Mom. I know Taury
wouldn’t mind. Why don’t you and Dad move into the beach house? He’s going to
be working in
Los Angeles
anyway, so you’ll need a new place…”

The look on June’s face almost
brought Fawn to tears again.

“You don’t mean it? You’d let me live
in Connie’s house, as I always dreamed?”

“If you want to, why not? I’d kind of
like to have my parents near me again. We could talk and cook out, and take
walks on the beach. It’d be fun!”

“I never thought you’d want to live
near us again after all the trouble we’ve put you through. I…” June’s hands
became shaky; she set down her teacup.

Fawn leaned over, patted her arm.
“It’s okay, Mom. We’ve all made mistakes. Like I said before, it’s time to wipe
the slate clean. I think I’ll help Brisby with the dishes, if you’ll carry them
in. I hate not being able to lift things.”

“It’s for the best, you know. We want
you to get well as soon as possible. Come on, I’ll help Brisby with the dishes.
You sit at the kitchen table and tell me all about your Taury!”

Fawn smiled, followed her mother into
the kitchen.

Someone had stocked the chubby
bookcases in the study with an excellent array of classics. Following her
mother’s example, Fawn picked one out randomly on that dreary, rainy evening
and began to read it by the fire. It was a strange novel called
Escapade
,
written in the 1920s by a flamboyant young
Tennessee
woman, Evelyn Scott. Her life story
read like a novel itself: she had left
Clarksville
with an older, married man, and
followed him down to
South America
, where they lived in poverty and
squalor, finally returning to the
US
. She became a well-known writer, the
couple separated though it seemed they never quite got over each other. Then
Evelyn found other, stimulating romances and intellectual freedom in a time
when such things were not the normal course for women. Her prose, which often
rose to heights of poetic lunacy, drew an autobiographical tale of a woman lost
in heartache and unbearable misery. At times Fawn found
herself
exhausted from the sheer drama of it.

The three women enjoyed a simple
dinner of fish stew and sourdough bread then each retired to her room. June and
Brisby took the guest rooms upstairs while Fawn was relegated to the first
floor master bedroom.

Evelyn Scott’s flamboyant novel
inspired Fawn to write some poetic verses once she was alone in her room:
“Blue-eyed panther touched me, sweet desire. Stood before me, pale in
moonlight. Came inside me, storm and fire. Burned me softly, held me, loved me.
Seared my soul, the virgin’s pyre.”

She giggled, looked for something to
scribble it down on, so she could read it to Taury later. She searched through
the bedroom dresser and highboy, could find nothing.

She shrugged, crept through the dark
house to the study and turned on the light. A quick examination of a roll-top
desk left her frustrated. She perused the bookshelves, found a slip of paper
sticking out of a book. Fawn removed the book, labeled as a collection of poems
by Lord Byron, and opened it. To her surprise she found that it had been
hollowed out as a hiding spot for a small diary.

Fawn quickly jotted down her poetry
on the slip of paper, then set about reading the diary. It had belonged to
Inger Sjostrom, obviously the young Swedish maid who had loved Taury’s father,
James Trahern. According to the diary they had begun a torrid affair soon after
she was hired to clean the
Bodega
Bay
house on the weekends. It had been
love at first sight for Inger, who was only twenty at the time and fresh off
the plane from
Sweden
. But she kept her feelings a secret
since she knew Jim was married. She described him as a sad, overworked,
hen-pecked young man who needed love like a starving baby needs milk. It wasn’t
long before the couple succumbed to an intense physical attraction.

Fawn settled into a comfy wing chair
with a soft ottoman for her feet, and lost herself in the story of Inger and
Jim, whose passion echoed her own with Taury. Jim was repressed as Fawn had
been, and Inger was a free loving spirit, determined to give her man every conceivable
pleasure. Fawn would have blushed at reading Inger’s graphic narrative a few
months ago but now it was so completely in sync with her own feelings and joys
and sorrows that she had an unreserved sense of
déjà vu
.

“I wish they could have had a happy ending,”
she whispered to the air. “But he’s gone and who knows what happened to Inger.”

A gentle buzzing sound caught her
unawares. She relaxed, answered the cell phone.

“Oh, Taury, I’d almost forgotten you
were going to call!”

“I’m crushed. Here I was chomping at
the bit, waiting to hear you say something dirty in my ear.”

She laughed. “I still can. It’s just
that I found your mother’s diary, and I’ve been glued to the pages. She and
your father were so like us, only the roles were reversed.”

“Her diary? Where did you find it?”

“It was hidden in a book in the
study. I want you to read it. But then, maybe you shouldn’t. It’s very
explicit.”