Wild Orchids Page 12

  “Before or after I research a book for you?” She put two potato pancakes (cooked in some no-calorie spray) on my plate. “Before or after I get an auctioneer to clean the excess furniture out of this house? Before or after I cook three meals a day for you?”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I said as I bent my head and filled my mouth with food.

  After breakfast, I suggested we also buy a dishwasher and hire someone to install it.

  “Good idea,” Jackie said, drying her hands on a paper towel. “And when do we start trying to find out about the devil story?”

  “Let’s talk about it in the car,” I said, and minutes later we were driving.

  I must say that buying things with Jackie made me remember my childhood. She was as in awe of spending money as I had been when I was a kid—or I was at her age, before my books were published.

  Jackie’s delight at being able to buy several major appliances at once was infectious. She made me understand how good dirty old men felt at buying their young mistresses bags full of jewelry. We bought vacuum cleaners (one for each floor), lots of knobs for the kitchen cabinets, and enough cleaning supplies and equipment for a hospital. I was getting bored until we got to the gardening and tool section where I felt more comfortable.

  “I thought you hated machines,” she said, leaning against a shelf and flipping through a book on landscaping.

  I didn’t answer but just smiled.

  “What?!” she said.

  “I never said that so you must have read my books.”

  “Never said I didn’t,” she replied, wedging the book into the already-full cart. “Who’s going to do the cleaning and the gardening? And don’t look at me. And, by the way, you still haven’t told me how much you’re paying me or what my hours are.”

  “Twenty-four/seven. And what’s the minimum wage now?” I said, just to see her sputter.

  But she didn’t sputter. Instead, she turned around and started walking toward the front door of the store. She was moving so fast the big glass entrance doors had slid open before I caught her arm. “Okay, so what do you want?”

  “Nine to five, twenty dollars an hour.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But are you on or off the clock at breakfast and dinner?”

  After a look of disgust, she shrugged. “Who knows? I can’t figure out anything about this job.”

  “Excuse me,” said a woman loudly.

  Jackie and I were blocking the exit and the woman wanted out, so we stepped aside.

  “Okay,” I said quietly. “How about a grand a week and we play the hours by ear? If you want time off I’ll stay home and take care of the furniture.”

  I got a tiny smile out of her at my joke, and we went back to our overloaded cart.

  I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I was putting up with her cantankerousness. I hadn’t put up with anything from the other women who’d worked for me. One second of bad temper and they were out of there.

  But each time Jackie bit my head off, I remembered her story about the Pulitzer prize. That had been insightful and creative. And I remembered the way that lovely little Autumn had sat down in the middle of the room and cried—and I wondered if she’d done it just to get Jackie to tell a story. If so, what other stories had Jackie told?

  As I looked at weed whackers, I thought, Jackie can research the devil story and I’ll research Jackie.

  We had lunch at a fast-food place, where Jackie had a salad and I had about four pounds of sandwich and curly fries. Through the whole meal, I could tell she was dying to lecture me on fat and cholesterol.

  By two, we were on our way back to that monstrosity of a house, the car loaded nearly to the ceiling, appliances to be delivered tomorrow, when I couldn’t resist telling her she should eat more. It was like I’d turned the crank and the jack-in-the-box sprang out. She started in on arteries and saturated fat until I was yawning and wished I’d not said anything.

  But we both came alert when I drove around a hairpin curve and there before us was an overturned car. In front of it were four laughing teenagers, obviously laughing in relief that they hadn’t been hurt in the accident.

  For a second both Jackie and I sat frozen to our seats; we were seeing her dream come to life. The next second we had thrown open the car doors and were screaming, “Get away from the car!”

  The four teenagers turned to look at us, dazed from having just been tumbled about, but they didn’t move.

  When Jackie started to run toward the kids, I ran after her. What the hell was she going to do? Get torn apart with them?

  I don’t think it occurred to me to doubt that, any second, that car was going to blow up, and anything near it was going to be sliced into pieces. When I reached Jackie, I grabbed her by the waist and held her on my hip like a sack of cornmeal. Even in that position, she didn’t stop screaming at the kids, nor did I, but I wasn’t going to let her get any closer to that belly-up vehicle.

  Maybe it was that I wouldn’t get closer to the car or that I wouldn’t let Jackie run toward them, that finally got through to one of the kids. A big, good-looking boy with lots of black hair finally seemed to understand what Jackie and I were saying and moved into action. Grabbing one of the girls, he nearly threw her across the road, where she began rolling down the steep hillside. The other boy grabbed the hand of the girl beside him and started running.

  Like something in a movie, the three kids leaped toward the far side of the road just as the car exploded.

  I got behind the safety of a big rock, holding Jackie’s trim little body against mine, and covering her head with my arms. I bent my head and ducked under an overhang of tree roots.

  The sound of the explosion was terrifying, and the brilliance of the light made me close my eyes so tight they hurt.

  It was all over in seconds, then we heard pieces of steel falling onto the road, and the car began to burn. Still holding Jackie, I waited to see if it was really over.

  “I can’t breathe,” she said, struggling to lift her head.

  It was finally hitting me that she’d seen all of this. And her prophetic dream had just saved the lives of four kids.

  She seemed to know what I was thinking because when she pushed away and looked at me, her face was beseeching. “I didn’t know the dream was real. I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before. I—”

  She cut off when one of the boys came over to say thanks for saving their lives. It was the boy whose fast actions had saved all of them. “How did you know?” he asked.

  I could feel Jackie looking at me. Did she think I was going to betray her? “I saw a spark,” I said. “By the gas tank.”

  “I sure do thank you,” he said, putting out his hand to shake as he introduced himself as Nathaniel Weaver.

  “Let’s call the police from your cell phone,” Jackie said. There was so much gratitude in her voice that I didn’t dare look at her or I would have turned red in embarrassment.

  In the end, it took the rest of the day to straighten everything out. The girl Nate had thrown—“Like a football,” she said, looking up at the boy with eyes full of hero worship—had a broken arm so I drove her to the hospital while Jackie stayed with the other three kids until the police arrived. The police gave her and the kids a ride home.

  After the girl’s parents arrived at the hospital, I drove back to the scene of the explosion and looked around. The wrecked car had been towed away, but I picked up a piece of metal from the side of the road and sat down by the rock that had protected Jackie and me from flying metal.

  For the last two years I’d been reading ghost and witch stories that were littered with tales of fortune-tellers and people who could see the future. This morning Jackie had told me of a dream of something that was going to happen. Yet she said she’d never glimpsed the future before.

  Was it just my writer’s imagination or was there a connection between the fact that Jackie had returned to a place she seemed to remember and he
r dream of the future?

  A pickup truck going by brought me out of my thoughts. My car was still loaded with mops and brooms and a microwave, and tomorrow a truckload of appliances was to be delivered. I had to leave.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jackie

  I was determined to forget the whole dream thing. I’ve never really liked the occult and I certainly didn’t want to participate in it. Yes, I used to scare the wits out of people with my highly-embellished devil story, but I still didn’t like anything occult. One time when we were at a fair, my friends went to a tarot card reader, but I refused to go. It wasn’t my future I didn’t want to see but my past.

  Of course I didn’t tell my friends the truth. I told them I didn’t believe in fortune-telling so I didn’t want to waste my money. Only Jennifer looked at me hard and seemed to realize I was lying.

  As I grew older, it became second nature to me to tell people as little as possible about myself. The only person I really remembered living with was my father, and since he made such an effort to keep secrets, he had respect for mine. If I came home late, he never asked me where I’d been or what I’d been doing. If he’d yelled at me, I could have rebelled like a normal teenager, but my father had a way of silently telling me that I had only one life and it was up to me whether or not I screwed up.

  I guess that’s why I grew up so “old.” The other kids in my class were always being punished for spending too much, “borrowing” the car, staying out too late, or doing any number of childish things. But I never got into trouble. I didn’t spend too much money because I’d balanced the bank account since I was ten years old. My childish handwriting was on all the checks and my father signed them. I always knew how little there was in the bank and how much went for bills. I was amazed when I heard my classmates talk about money as though it just appeared. They actually had no idea how much the family water bill was. They’d make two-hour long-distance calls, then get yelled at by their parents and “grounded.” The kids would laugh about it and plan their next long-distance call. I often thought their parents should turn the bank account over to them for a few months and let the kids see how much it cost to live.

  Anyway, maybe because my situation at home was so different from everyone else’s, I learned to keep my mouth shut. And maybe because my father seemed to be hiding so much, I learned to ask few questions, and answer even fewer.

  By the time I was a teenager, I’d learned that it was useless to ask my father about my mother and why he’d left. If he did answer, he’d contradict himself. For years I lived in a romantic dream that he and I were in the government’s Witness Protection Program. I made up a long, complicated story in which my mother had been killed by bad guys, my father had seen it, and to protect us, we were moved from one state to another.

  But, gradually, I came to realize that the truth was known only by my father, and no outside agencies were involved. Eventually, I decided that whatever the truth about my mother was, it was probably better that I didn’t know it, so I avoided psychics who might be able to tell me about my past.

  However, secrets have a way of revealing themselves, whether you want them to or not. From about twenty miles outside the little town of Cole Creek, I began to recognize the area. At first I didn’t say anything to Newcombe, but then I began to point out things that seemed vaguely familiar. The first time I said anything, I held my breath. If I’d said such a thing to my friends they would have squealed and started prying. Kirk would have ignored me as he had no curiosity whatever.

  Newcombe seemed interested, but he didn’t pretend to be a psychoanalyst and try to get me to tell him more. He listened and made comments, but he didn’t act as though he was dying to find out everything about my life—and as a result, I ended up telling him more than I’d told any other person.

  And he could get to the heart of a matter in seconds! The first night we were in the house, I nearly fainted when he asked me if I thought maybe my mother was still alive. It’s what I’d been thinking since I saw the old bridge a few miles out of town. I could almost see myself as a little kid walking across that bridge, holding the hand of a tall, dark-haired woman. Was she my mother? My father had told a couple of stories about how she’d died, so maybe the fact of her death was a lie.

  The good thing about Newcombe was that he didn’t judge. Jennifer would have told me my father was a bad man since he’d kidnapped me and taken me away from my mother. But Jennifer’s mother was loving and kind, so Jennifer couldn’t comprehend that not all mothers were like hers.

  All I knew for sure was that whatever my father had done, he’d done it for good reasons. And he’d done it for me. I knew he was intelligent and educated, and that he could have had better jobs than selling shoes at a discount store. But how could he get a better class of job if he couldn’t provide a résumé and a transcript of his schooling? Yet to do so would have left a paper trail so he—and I—could have been found.

  It was after I had the dream about the kids and the car that I began to wonder if maybe my father had been running away from something evil. And I began to wonder if Cole Creek was someplace I should never have returned to.

  But twenty-four hours after the incident happened, I managed to calm down enough to conclude that, obviously, I’d lived in Cole Creek longer than my father said we had, which is why I remembered things. As for the dream, lots of people’d had dreams of the future, hadn’t they? It was no big deal. Someday it would make a great dinner party story.

  Instead of obsessing, I threw myself into making that wonderful old house livable. I’m not sure why I made the effort because Newcombe hated the place. Every other sentence out of his mouth was a complaint about the house and its contents. He hated the wallpaper, the furniture, and all the little knickknacks the Belchers had accumulated in over a hundred years of living. He even hated the porches! The only things he really liked were his giant bathtub and the little flame-spitting dragon on top of the newel post. I think I would have liked the dragon, too, but the fact that I remembered it so well made me uneasy.

  I didn’t tell Newcombe but I knew every inch of that house. And what’s more, I knew how it had once looked. I didn’t say so, but I knew that all the good furniture had been removed. There’d been some cabinets in the living room that weren’t there now, and the “small parlor,” as I knew it was called, had been cleaned out of some very elegant pieces.

  Newcombe had laughingly told me that Mr. Belcher had offered him the entire contents of the house for a dollar and the realtor had paid the fee. After viewing what was left, I wanted to say, “You should have asked for change.” But Newcombe was bellyaching so much that I put on a happy face and told him that everything was great. Besides, on that first day, he was playing with a bunch of stuffed ducks, moving the dining room chairs around, and turning the dragon on and off until I wanted to scream, so I said nothing about the missing furniture. And, too, I knew that if I could get his permission to have some repairs done, I’d be able to make that house into the beauty it had once been.

  I’ve always been a “good worker” as my teachers used to write on my report cards, but I must say that the day after Newcombe saved those kids, I went into overtime.

  Maybe my work frenzy was caused by my deep embarrassment. I was embarrassed about my vision, and embarrassed about the way I’d sat there in front of my employer that morning and bawled. But I think I was mostly embarrassed about the way I’d reacted when I saw my dream come true. When I saw that car and those kids, exactly like it was in my dream, I was unable to move.

  It was Newcombe who reacted. He leaped out of the car and started yelling. It was his action that made me realize I wasn’t having the dream again, that this was reality, and that those four kids were about to be cut into pieces. I went blind. A split second after he reacted, I jumped out of the car and ran screaming toward the kids. Thank heaven that Newcombe caught me before I got to the overturned car.

  He was a hero. That’s the only way I can desc
ribe him. He acted in a heroic manner and saved all of us. And later, he didn’t give me away by saying I’d had a dream and “seen” the future.

  That night when he got back from taking one of the girls to the hospital, he didn’t ask me a single question about the dream. I’ll go to my grave being grateful to him for not asking me questions that were guaranteed to make me feel like a freak.

  The next morning I awoke early, vowing that I was going to make that house livable as soon as humanly possible. At breakfast I had a brief discussion with Newcombe about money—which, for some unfathomable reason, made him shake his head at me in wonder—then I set to work.

  The old black telephones in the house had been disconnected, but I found a telephone directory that was only two years old, so I used Newcombe’s cell phone to call people and make appointments. If a workman couldn’t come that week, I called someone else. I knew I was taking a chance on hiring unknowns and that I’d probably get some scalawags, but I didn’t have time to meet the locals and ask who the best tradesmen in the area were.

  After the appointments had been made, I knew I needed to get Newcombe out of the way, so I gave him the address of a nearby electronics store and he was out of the house in a flash. He’d investigated and, yes, the little round silver thing in the wall of the small parlor was a hookup for satellite—no cable in town—TV.

  Newcombe didn’t return until eight that night and we had a very pleasant dinner in which we competed to see who had accomplished more.

  While I had arranged for a nearby auction house to come with a truck and haul away three loads of cheap, hideous furniture, Newcombe had bought computer, stereo, TV, and video equipment—and a pickup truck to carry it all home in.

  We shared a bottle of wine, and laughed about it all while he cooked steaks on a new stainless-steel gas grill, complete with rotisserie. All while we played our game of one-upmanship. Personally, I think I won because I hadn’t spent money but was going to earn it from the sale of the furniture. And I’d worked out a sort of trade—all based on photos—with the auctioneer that I was rather proud of. But I didn’t tell Newcombe about that. I thought I’d just let him be surprised on Friday morning.