The Unloved (32 page)

Clutching Jenny’s hand in her own, Marguerite forced herself into the first position of ballet, her unseen partner of a moment ago apparently forgotten now. “Position one!” she commanded, twisting her lame leg outward, the veins of her forehead standing out as she fought against the pain the movement caused in her malformed hip. “Turn your feet out, Marguerite! Out!”

Jenny stared at Marguerite, stunned. What was happening? Didn’t Marguerite even know who she was?

“Position two!” Marguerite demanded. Her arms came up, but her right leg, throbbing with pain now, refused to move.

Jenny watched in horror as Marguerite battled against her own disfigured body. “Stop it,” she cried, her voice breaking as a sob rose up in her throat. “Please stop it, Miss Marguerite. What are you trying to do?”

Marguerite’s hand snaked up, slashing across Jenny’s face. “Do not speak,” she hissed. “When I am teaching you, you will not speak!”

Her voice had taken on a strangely familiar tone, but for a moment Jenny couldn’t place it. And then she remembered.

How many times had she heard that voice echoing through this house, calling out, demanding, commanding? But it wasn’t Marguerite’s voice at all.

It was her mother’s voice—Miss Helena’s voice—calling out to Marguerite, demanding her presence, commanding her every action. But now Miss Helena’s voice was coming out of Marguerite’s own throat.

“No,” Jenny whimpered. “Oh, no …” She started toward the door. “I—I have to go,” she whispered. “I’m sorry …”

“No!” Marguerite screamed. “You can’t go. Not now! You can’t leave me! I forbid it!”

Her tears flowing now, Jenny fled from the ballroom, lurching toward the head of the stairs. And then, just as she got there, she heard Helena Devereaux’s voice once more, crackling out of Marguerite’s throat. “You won’t leave! I will not permit it!”

At the same instant that the words slashed at her ears, she felt two hands against her back and a great weight, pushing her forward.

She teetered for a moment, tried to grab for the banister, but missed.

Then she was tumbling, plunging head first down the steep staircase.

She hit the bottom, but the sound she heard—the last sound she would ever hear—was not that of her head striking the wooden floor of the landing.

Instead, it was the sharp crack of her own neck breaking.

“But I’m tellin’ you, Dad, that’s what she said. Isn’t it, Toby?” Jeff looked expectantly at his friend, as if Toby’s corroboration would convince his father. The three of them were sitting in the back booth at the drugstore. An uneaten hamburger sat limply in front of Jeff. “How come you won’t believe me?”

Kevin shook his head tiredly. He’d already explained to Jeff three times that Emmaline Carr’s story was just too strange to be believed. Marguerite locked up in a hidden room in the basement? It was ludicrous! But what wasn’t ludicrous was the fear in Jeff’s eyes. “Look,” he said at last. “How’s this? We’ll all go out to the house, and I’ll ask your aunt about it.”

Jeff’s jaw set stubbornly. “Toby won’t go out to our house anymore,” he announced. “He’s too scared of Aunt Marguerite. And I’m scared of her too.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense,” Kevin insisted. “Your aunt loves you. She wouldn’t hurt you for anything in the world.”

“Yes, she would,” Jeff argued, his eyes stormy. “She’s only nice to me when you’re around. If I’m all by myself with her, she acts like she hates me.”

Kevin took a deep breath, knowing that once Jeff had made up his mind, he wasn’t about to change it. “Okay,” he sighed. “I’ll tell you what—you go home with Toby for a while, and I’ll go out to the island by myself. I’ll have a talk with your aunt and see if I can find out where Ruby really is.”

“Will you come and get me later on?” Jeff asked uncertainly.

Kevin shook his head. “You managed to walk all the way out to Emmaline’s house. You can manage to walk back home.” He slid out of the booth and dropped twenty dollars on the table. “You guys can pay the bill out of that, and there’s enough left over for a movie. Okay?” The two boys, their eyes fastened on the ten dollar bill, bobbed their heads mutely. “And be home by supper time,” Kevin admonished his son. “By then I’ll have this all straightened out.”

He strode out of the drugstore into the dusty heat of the afternoon. The clouds from the southeast were drifting over the village now, and the temperature seemed to have dropped a degree or two, but Kevin’s shirt still clung damply to his body as he climbed into his sister’s Chevy and started the engine.

It’s the heat, he decided as he crossed the causeway toward the island. The heat gets to people after a while, and they start imagining things. But a story about Marguerite being locked up down in the basement of Sea Oaks? Alone in the car, he shook his head.

He found Marguerite sitting on the veranda, sipping a glass of lemonade. She smiled as he came up the steps, and when she rose to her feet, her limp was almost imperceptible.

“Still getting better?” Kevin asked, and Marguerite nodded, her smile broadening.

“I don’t know what it is.” She glanced up at the sky, then shrugged. “Usually it gets so much worse when a storm’s coming. But today it seems just fine. I suppose I should count my blessings, shouldn’t I?”

Kevin’s brows arched. “I wish more people in this town would do that,” he observed. “Instead of making up stories about other people.”

Marguerite’s smile faltered. “Making up stories? What sort of stories?”

Kevin hesitated, wondering how to begin. “Well, Emmaline Carr, for one. It seems Jeff and Toby went out to see her today.”

“E-Emmaline?” Marguerite said, with the trace of a stammer. “Why would they want to go out and see Emmaline? Everyone knows she’s strange in the head. Living in that
shack, with no water or electricity …” Her voice trailed off and her head bobbed sympathetically. “Sometimes I feel so sorry for her,” she went on. “Except for Ruby, she doesn’t have anyone else in the world.”

Kevin frowned. “But then Ruby doesn’t have anyone but Emmaline, does she?” he asked.

Marguerite blinked. “I—why, I don’t know.…” Then her voice took on a note of impatience. “Kevin, what are you trying to get at? Did Emmaline say something to Jeff?”

“I’m afraid she did,” Kevin replied. Slowly he repeated the story Jeff had told him a few minutes ago. As he spoke, the last traces of Marguerite’s smile disappeared and her eyes began to blaze with indignation.

“But that’s terrible,” she said when Kevin was finished. “How could Emmaline say such things about me? I’ve never done anything to hurt her—nothing at all. Why, she must have scared poor Jeff half to death.”

“But where is Ruby?” Kevin finally asked. “If she didn’t go to Emmaline’s, where
did
she go?”

Marguerite’s right hand fluttered at her bosom. “Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” she replied. “Perhaps she was lying to me. She’s like that, you know. Mother always said you couldn’t trust a word Ruby said. Not a word—” Abruptly she fell silent. As Kevin turned toward the front door, she asked, “Where are you going?”

Kevin turned to look at his sister, his eyes troubled. “Nowhere,” he said. “I’m just going to have a look around the house, that’s all.”

He stepped into the gloom of the house, closing the door behind him. He paused for a moment, feeling the atmosphere. For a moment he noticed nothing different: the house seemed as it always had. But then, as he started through the living room toward the dining room and the kitchen beyond, he began to feel a strange sense of something being amiss.

Somehow, though he knew he was alone in the house, it did not feel empty. There was a sort of presence in the house, and as he crossed to the dining room, his neck began to tingle. He stopped walking, spinning around as if expecting to catch someone staring at him.

But the room was empty.

And then he knew what it was. The portrait of his mother still hung above the fireplace, and it was his mother’s eyes he’d felt watching him, as if she were still alive and in the room. He paused for a moment, staring at the portrait.

It looked so much like Marguerite that a chill passed through him. His mother and his sister, he realized, could almost have been the same woman, they were so much alike.

Except that they weren’t. His mother had been hard, cruel, and unloving. Even now he could remember the dream he’d had—the dream of being locked away in a tiny room, with his mother coming to kill him.

A tiny room.

That’s what Jeff had said was in the basement—a tiny room, where Marguerite had been locked up.

He shook his head. It was crazy—it made no sense. He chuckled out loud, deciding the heat was now getting to him, too, but his small laugh echoed hollowly in the expanse of the room, mocking him.

Turning away from the portrait of his mother, he hurried on to the the kitchen.

Dirty dishes were piled in the sink, and the remains of Marguerite’s solitary lunch still sat on the kitchen table, as if his sister expected Ruby to reappear at any moment to clean up the mess. Then Kevin’s eyes fell on the door to Ruby’s room.

Uncertain what to expect, he strode to it and opened the door.

It was exactly as it looked last night—the bed still neatly made up, Ruby’s nightgown still hanging from a hook on the open closet door.

But then Kevin noticed some other things—things he hadn’t noticed last night.

On the table in the corner behind the door, he saw a tray.

On the tray a supper was laid out—a plate of gumbo, cold and congealed, and a small salad, its lettuce limp and already beginning to shrivel.

A supper, as if Ruby had been about to eat alone in her room when—

When what?

Kevin rejected the thought flitting around the edges of his mind, and continued his inspection.

On the shelf high up in the closet, he found a suitcase, its top still thickly coated with dust.

No empty hangers hung on the clothes bar, nor did anything seem to be missing when Kevin inspected Ruby’s drawers.

Suddenly the nightgown hanging from its hook stood out from the scene.

If Ruby had gone somewhere, wouldn’t she have taken her nightgown with her? Wouldn’t she have taken
something
with her?

And she certainly wouldn’t have left a full meal, uneaten, sitting on a table in her room.

A knot of fear congealing in his belly, Kevin left her room and retraced his steps back through the dining room and living room.

His mother’s eyes seemed to bore into him as he passed the portrait, and he quickened his step until he came into the entry hall. Marguerite was standing just inside the front door, and as Kevin started toward the door below the main stairs—the door that led to the basement—she spoke, her voice quavering.

“Wh-Where are you going?”

Kevin turned to face her, his eyes meeting hers. “Downstairs,” he said.

“B-But you mustn’t,” Marguerite whispered. Once more her hand was fluttering at her bosom, but suddenly it dropped to her hip, and when she took a step forward, her limp was suddenly more pronounced. “Please, Kevin—don’t go down there.”

The knot of fear tightened its grip on Kevin, but he shook his head. “I have to,” he said. Then he pulled the door open, tugged the string overhead, and started down to the cellar, the white light of the naked bulb overhead glaring coldly. He was already at the bottom of the stairs when he heard Marguerite’s uneven footsteps as she slowly followed him.

*      *      *

He stared at the door numbly for a moment. It was still half hidden, almost lost in the shadows behind the furnace, and he understood now why he hadn’t seen it before. Until a couple of days ago it must have been completely lost behind the mass of cardboard boxes that had been stacked there. He must have uncovered it himself just yesterday.

Indeed, if he hadn’t let himself become so angry with Jeff, he surely would have seen it.

He could feel Marguerite now, just a few steps behind him, and hear her breathing coming in strange, half-strangled gasps. He turned to her, but her face was lost in shadow, the naked bulb above the stairs forming a brilliant halo behind her head.

“What’s in there, Marguerite?” he asked, deliberately keeping his voice low. But still his words seemed to echo ominously, hanging heavily in the air.

“N-Nothing,” Marguerite stammered. “There’s nothing in there, Kevin. Really—”

“Then open it,” Kevin said. “If there’s nothing in there, then there’s nothing to hide, is there?”

Marguerite seemed to shrink back. “No,” she whispered, her voice taking on a childish whine. “I can’t go in there. Please don’t make me. Please?”

Kevin’s heart began to race, and the cold knot of fear in his belly turned to ice. “Why?” he asked. “Marguerite, why can’t you go in there?”

“I can’t,” Marguerite pleaded. “It’s where Mama kept me. It’s where she kept me during the bad times, when I was sick. Don’t make me go in there, Kevin. Don’t make me.”

Taking a deep breath, Kevin stepped to the door and tried the lock. It held firm, hanging from its hasp and glittering dully in the light from the bare bulb.

“I need the key, Marguerite.”