The Surrogate, The Sudarium Trilogy - Book one (14 page)

“As long as you get to keep it.”

“I think they’d just as soon I didn’t go out in public at all.”

“For any reason?”

“They’re secretive. Well, no, that’s not the right word. They’re just very private people. Sometimes I think I don’t know them at all.”

She went on to relate their late-night appearance in the yard and how the two of them had stood in the moonlight, not moving for minutes, and how they’d never once mentioned the incident afterwards. And just this morning, there was the voice on the answering machine in Jolene’s studio.

“What’s odd about that?”

“They told me they don’t have any children. They couldn’t have children. That’s why I’m here doing this!”

“You’re positive this person said ‘mom’?”

“Yes.” Hannah fidgeted under Teri’s gaze. “Pretty positive. I don’t know now. I’m confused. I’m confused all the time. Some days, I wish I’d never heard of Partners in Parenthood.”

“Well, don’t get upset, hon. You’re not dealing with a simple ear ache. Your body is not your own anymore. It has been taken over by that little person inside you and what’s going on is amazing and agonizing and incredibly confusing. Nick says to me that driving a semi is hard work. ‘Nick,’ I tell him, ‘having a kid is hard work. Driving a fucking semi is R & R.'”

Teri let the point sink in, before adding, “Let’s go see what Jolene has in store for us”

“It’s called ‘Plum and Raisin Delight,'” Jolene explained as she passed a plate to Teri. “Low fat, low cal, if you can believe the baker.”

“Sounds different,” Teri observed politely.

“You two know each other from the diner in Fall River, is that it?” They were all seated around the round table in the sunroom, where Jolene had put out tea and a cake-like confection that bore a distressing resemblance to meatloaf. Hannah thought that she was overdoing her role as hostess, bombarding Teri with questions and then thrilling to answers which had to be of marginal interest to her.

“The Blue Dawn Diner, pride of the interstate.”

“I’m sure it is. I don’t know diners, personally.” Jolene sliced off another piece of cake and passed it to Hannah. “Tell me, Teri, do you get up this way often?”

“Not too often. Until Hannah moved here, I didn’t know anyone in the area.”

“Well, I do hope you’ll come back. I can see that your little visit has picked up Hannah’s spirits immensely.”

“I’ll try, but with two young boys in school, it’s not easy to get away.”

“Two? Goodness gracious. You must have to be terribly well organized.”

“I muddle through. That’s about the best you can hope for. Keep ‘em fed, keep ‘em dry, keep ‘em from killing each other. But you’ll find out about all that soon enough. So this will be your first?”

Jolene laid down the cake knife carefully and brushed some invisible crumbs off her fingers with a napkin.

“Yes, it will. My first and probably my only. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am. It’s a brand new world for me.”

1:27

Hannah heard the footsteps on the stairs, the light rapping at the door, and finally Jolene’s voice.

“Good morning…Hannah? … Are you awake, Hannah? …”

She lay perfectly still in the four-poster with her eyes closed, in case Jolene cracked open the door and looked in. There was a second round of rapping, but the door remained shut. Then the footsteps reversed direction and grew faint, as Jolene went down to the kitchen.

Hannah knew she’d be back before long. Breakfast in bed was now firmly established as part of the wake-up routine. The day invariably began with Jolene. No matter how early Hannah got up, it seemed Jolene got up earlier. The day ended with Jolene, too, (and sometimes Marshall), watching her climb the second-story stairs to her bedroom, making sure, the nightly joke had it, that “you get home safely.” As if someone might abduct her between the fifth and sixth riser!

Jolene bracketed her waking hours.

Hannah nestled down into the covers, rumpling them in the process to make it look as if she had tossed and turned all night, and waited for the return of the woman’s footsteps.

Sure enough, forty-five minutes later, there they were, followed by the rapping, louder than before. “Hannah?…Rise and shine!” (The voice, louder, too.) This time, Jolene permitted herself to poke her head inside the door. “I don’t want to wake you, but it’s almost ten o’clock. Breakfast is getting cold.”

“That’s okay, I’m up,” Hannah mumbled through a tortured yawn, the squint of her eyes suggesting (she hoped) that she was just this instant encountering the brightness of day and was disoriented by it. “I don’t seem to have any energy,” she said, stretching her arms over her head.

“See how quickly you tire out,” Jolene declared authoritatively. “It was very nice of your friend to surprise you like that yesterday, but I think she should give us advance notice next time, don’t you? That would let you plan ahead and conserve your forces. Did she know the doctor put you on bed rest?”

“That’s why she came to visit.”

“Oh.” Jolene fussed with the breakfast tray. “Do you talk with her often? I’ve never noticed. I guess I’m always in the studio…Is apple juice all right this morning?”

“Yes, fine.”

She handed Hannah a chilled glass. “I think we should all make a special effort to stay in contact with old friends. Marshall and I don’t see ours half as much as we’d like. So by all means, invite Teri here for lunch any time you wish. Or anyone else. The only favor I ask is that in the future you give me 48 hours to make sure the refrigerator is stocked and Marshall’s dirty clothes aren’t strewn all over the house.

Hannah had never seen so much as a stray tie over the back of a chair, let alone a shirt or a sock. The house was compulsively tidy. It was Jolene’s studio that was the mess. So which Jolene was the real one - the neatness freak standing before her now or the artist who seemed to thrive on chaos?

Dutifully, she ate a couple of spoonfuls of hot oatmeal, then put down the bowl with a sigh.

“Not hungry?” asked Jolene.

“You’re probably right. Having lunch in town with Teri really took it out of me. My appetite’s gone…What are you going to do today, Jolene?”

“A few errands is all. I’ve got to pick up some groceries and drop Marshall’s suits off at the cleaners”

“Would you mind getting some shampoo for me?”

“Of course, not.”

“Thanks. It’s Avedo’s Chamomile Shampoo. They sell it at Craig J’s.”

“Craig J’s?” A note of reservation sounded in Jolene’s voice.

“The salon. At the Framingham Mall. I’ll give you the money.”

“It’s not the money, Hannah. I just hadn’t planned on driving that far today.”

“Oh, I see. Never mind, then.” She flopped over on her side, turning her back to Jolene.

“Well, I suppose I could… If it’s that important to you.”

“It really is. Look at my hair, Jolene. I hate it.” She sat up abruptly and tugged petulantly at a strand. “It’s stringy and limp. I’m turning into a fat, ugly whale.”

“Don’t be silly. If you need shampoo, I’ll get it. On two conditions. You finish your breakfast and you rest in bed until I get back.”

“Oh, thank you, Jolene. I promise.” She covered her mouth with her hand and yawned again. “I could fall asleep right now.”

Hannah waited until she heard the sound of the ignition turning over, then the wheels of Jolene’s mini-van wagon grabbing the gravel, before she got up and threw on her customary outfit - a pair of pants with an elastic waistband and a shapeless sweatshirt that once belonged to Marshall. In the bathroom, she took a half-filled bottle of Prell shampoo off the shelf in the bathtub and hid it away under the sink, thankful that Jolene hadn’t bothered to check. She’d never used Avedo products in her life. They were much too expensive. But she’d seen a sign for them in the window of Craig J’s.

She ran a brush quickly through her hair, then hurried down the stairs and out the back door.

Once inside Jolene’s studio, she had the feeling that the works of art were staring at her. There weren’t any actual faces on the canvases, but something about the paint-oozing gashes and the cuts seemed to scream out for help. Jolene had said they meant whatever they meant. It couldn’t be anything good, Hannah thought. The longer you looked at them, the creepier they got.

She went directly to the worktable and moved aside the rolls of canvases and the pile of rags. They covered up a cabinet built into the wall. Inside, she found a cordless telephone and an answering machine, as she had surmised. She hadn’t heard any ringing yesterday, just Jolene’s voice, then the incoming message. She checked the buttons on the side of the machine. The bell had been turned off. It didn’t seem a particularly convenient arrangement - any of it.

A thought crossed her mind. Picking up the receiver, she dialed the house, then as soon as the number began to ring, went to the door of the studio and listened. From the kitchen, the pulsations of a bell, regular and insistent, could be heard. She pressed the off button on the cordless phone. The ringing in the kitchen ceased. So the line to the studio was a private one.

Perplexed, she replaced the phone in its cradle and saw that the message light on the answering machine was blinking. She hesitated only a moment, before pressing the play-back button.

“Hi, Mom, it’s Warren…”

Mom! She had heard correctly. Jolene and Marshall did have a grown son. Hannah closed the cabinet door and put the canvas and the paint rags back as they were before. She started to leave, when she noticed a metal filing cabinet under Jolene’s worktable. Her curiosity piqued, she opened the top drawer. Like most filing cabinets, it contained a quantity of legal documents and semi-official papers. Several folders were devoted to bills and invoices from various art suppliers. Jolene had squirreled away a number of catalogues from past exhibitions and auction sales. Pretty predictable stuff for an artist.

The bottom drawer was crammed with brochures pertaining to framing, color charts and paint swatches. There was a folder marked travel, the thickness of which bore testimony to the Whitfields’ penchant for globe-trotting. Tucked all the way in the back were two unmarked accordion files. The first looked to be a repository of old photographs, some still in the envelopes from the developer. They chronicled family reunions, birthdays, barbecues -the sort of events people feel compelled to record for posterity and forget a week later.

There was no lack of what had to be old vacation shots. The woman in several of them was clearly a younger Jolene, dressed in a fashionable leather jacket, carrying a colorful straw bag and already wearing the trademark red lipstick. But her hair was a rich chestnut color that caught the sun, leading Hannah to conclude she dyed it black now. Unless she dyed it back then.

Standing next to her was a thin boy, about eleven or twelve, with the same lustrous chestnut hair. They appeared to be in a foreign country. There was an ornate cathedral in the background. The stone spire was filigreed and surrounded by smaller, similarly lacy spires, so that the whole resembled a melting wedding cake. Several of the photographs had been taken before the cathedral in a spacious plaza, lined with honey-colored buildings that had red-tiled roofs and wrought iron balconies and could have been palaces once.

Here was another one of the boy, standing in a plaza, eating an ice cream cone and grinning, his lips dark with chocolate. Hannah wondered if this was the person who had identified himself as Warren on the answering machine.

Later Hannah would ask herself what kept her in the studio (a hunch, a premonition, one of the screaming paintings?) and prompted her to examine the last accordion file. But her eyes started to swim as soon as she saw what was inside.

It contained more photographs, Polaroids this time, dozens of them, but none so benign as the pictures she’d just examined. These photographs were frightening. They depicted— well, Hannah couldn’t tell exactly what was going on in them, but the overtones of sadism and violence were unavoidable. She had to force herself to look more closely.

There was one of a man with a cloth over his head, or a cloth bag, that seemed to be tied in place with a rope. He was visible only from the waist up and his chest was naked. His sinewy arms were raised high, as if each one was being pulled upward and outward in opposing directions, and his head, the head in the cloth bag, listed to one side and lay on his upper arm. The pain had to be agonizing, if the man wasn’t dead already from suffocation. In subsequent shots, the angle varied, but the distorted body position remained the same. Were they police shots, taken at the scene of a crime? Or, worse, some grisly form of pornography?

A whole series of photographs, similarly clinical and similarly upsetting, showed the body, slung over the shoulders of a person who appeared to be carting it away. The body hung limp, the head upside down and still in the infernal burlap bag.

Periodically, Hannah’s vision went blurry, as if her eyes were refusing to register the unsavory evidence before them, and she had to look away, look at something else, something inconsequential in the studio like the light bulb in the ceiling or the legs of Jolene’s easel to get her focus back.

There were pictures of strange-looking equipment, in particular what appeared to be a head brace that was anchored in place by screws to the temples. It was being tested on a mannequin’s head, but Hannah could imagine the suffering such a device would inflict on the living. And then the body turned up again, lying on the ground now, broken, inert, very much dead. What terrible happening, what ghastly encounter, had been recorded by the photographer?

The remaining photographs in the accordion file provided no answers. They were almost abstract, mere blotches and ripples and blobs that resembled Jolene’s canvases more than anything else. If they were close-ups, it was impossible to know of what. More likely, Hannah thought, they were mistakes. The camera hadn’t been properly focused or the photographer had moved, just as he snapped the shutter. As it was, she wondered what kind of person would allow himself to take photographs like these. Or keep them.

She had no idea how long she sat there, searching her mind for a story, a conceivable set of circumstances that would make sense of this discovery. Her imagination wasn’t up to the challenge. Nothing came to her. She gathered up the photographs, not noticing that one had slipped off her lap and fallen to the floor, and tried to erase the troublesome thoughts from her head

All at once, she felt a sharp jab in her stomach, then another, and terror gripped her, until she realized that it was just the baby kicking.

It was kicking harder and more frequently now. She placed her hand on her stomach. Usually, the little thumps coming from her belly brought her such joy. Not today. Today the random kicks of this tiny creature seemed ominous, as if they were spelling out a warning in some primal Morse code, reminding her with each sharp, quick jab, to be on her guard.