Forever... Page 3

  For a while the man looked at her hard, and she stared back at him just as hard. As for the woman, she had neither spoken nor even blinked as far as Darci could tell.

  “If you’re in love with a man, you won’t be able to travel. And if you have relatives here in New York, you’d miss them if you were away for weeks at a time.”

  “No, I wouldn’t!” Darci said too quickly. But she didn’t want the man to think that she was an ungrateful person, certainly not after all her aunt and uncle had done for her. “They, uh . . .” she began.”They have their own lives, and as much as I love them, I think they’d do quite well without me. And my mother has....”What could she say? That her mother had a new boyfriend twelve years her junior and she probably wouldn’t notice if Darci fell into a hole? “My mother also has her own life. Clubs, charities, that sort of thing.” Could Putnam’s Spuds and Suds be considered a “club”?

  “And your young man?”

  She had to think for a moment to know whom he meant. “Oh. Putnam. Well, he has lots of interests, and he, uh....He wants me to have a whole year of—” She almost said “freedom,” which would have been close to the truth. “He wants me to have a year to myself before we begin on our lifelong journey of love together.”

  Darci thought this last was a rather nice turn of phrase, but she noticed there was a teeny tiny curl of the man’s upper lip that made him look as though he were going to be ill. She wasn’t sure what she was doing wrong, but she knew that she was blowing this interview. She took a deep breath. “I really do need this job,” she said softly. “And I’ll work very hard for you.” She knew that her voice was pleading, almost begging, but she couldn’t help herself.

  The man turned to the woman who was sitting slightly behind him. “Do you have what you need?” he asked, and the woman gave a tiny nod. As the man turned back to Darci, he picked up her application and put it on top of a pile of others. “All right, Miss, uh—”

  “Monroe,” Darci said. “No relation.” When the man looked blank, she said, “To the other one.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said. “The actress.” He didn’t pretend to think the joke was funny but kept his solemn expression. “As you have seen, we have many applicants, so if we’d like to interview you again, we’ll call you. You wrote your telephone number on here?”

  “Oh, yes, but don’t call between eight and ten. That’s when my uncle Vern watches TV, and he. . . .” Her voice trailed off. Slowly, she stood up, then paused as she looked at the man. “I do need this job,” she said again.

  “So do they all, Miss Monroe,” the man said, then looked back at the older woman, and Darci knew that she’d been dismissed.

  It took all her willpower to keep her shoulders erect as she left the office and looked into the hopeful eyes of the women sitting in the little waiting room. Like all the others she’d seen leave the office, she shrugged in answer to their silent inquiries. She had no idea how she’d done in the interview. Once she was on the street again, she opened her handbag and checked her wallet. How much food could she get for seventy-five cents? Sometimes the greengrocers would charge her very little for bruised bananas that they couldn’t sell.

  With her head up, her shoulders back, Darci started walking. Maybe she was going to get the job. Why not? She had all the qualifications, didn’t she? They wanted someone who had few skills, and that certainly fit her. The spring returned to her step, and, smiling, she began to walk faster, occupying her mind with planning what she’d say when the man called and told her she had the job. “That’s how I’ll act: gracious,” she said aloud. “Gracious and surprised.” Smiling more broadly, she picked up her step. She needed to get home so she could apply her True Persuasion to this problem.

  Adam signaled to the woman at the door to hold the applicants for a while. He needed to stretch and to move around. Walking to the windows, he clasped his hands behind his back. “This isn’t working,” he said to the woman behind him. “We haven’t found one woman who’s even close to being right. What do I have to do, canvass the elementary schools?”

  “The last one was lying,” the woman behind him said softly.

  Adam turned to look at her. “That one? The little Kentucky hillbilly? Poor thing. That suit she had on looked as though it’d been washed in a creek. And, besides, she has a boyfriend, a rich one. Is that what she was lying about? Those factories she says his family owns? He probably has a twenty-year-old pickup with a gun rack in the back.”

  “She was lying about everything,” the woman said, staring up at Adam.

  He started to speak, but he’d learned long ago that Helen used her mind and abhorred normal human ways of communication—which meant that she hated to talk. Many times she’d said to him, “I told you that.” Afterward, he’d racked his brain until he’d finally remembered that she had indeed said one short sentence that had told him everything.

  But now Helen had repeated this one sentence, so he knew it was very important. Tired as he was, he nearly leaped across the room to grab the girl’s application off the top of the stack and handed it to the woman. Staring into space, she took the paper and ran her hands over it, not reading it, just touching it. After a while, she smiled; then the smile grew broader.

  She looked up at Adam. “She’s lying about everything there is to lie about,” she said happily.

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend, no aunt and uncle? Doesn’t need the job? Exactly what is she lying about?”

  Helen waved her hand in dismissal, as these questions weren’t important to her. “She’s not what she seems, not what she thinks she is, not what you see her as.”

  Adam had to work to keep his mouth shut. He hated the convoluted, cryptic talk of clairvoyants. Why couldn’t the woman just say what she meant?

  Helen, as always, read Adam’s thoughts, and, as always, they amused her. What she liked about him was that he wasn’t in awe of her abilities. Most people were terrified that clairvoyants could read their innermost secrets, but Adam was trying to find out his own secrets and those of others, so she held no fear for him.

  “You want to tell me what you’re really saying?” he asked, glaring down at her.

  “She’s the one.”

  “That undernourished waif ? The Mansfield girl?”

  Puzzled, Helen glanced down at the paper. “‘Darci T. Monroe,’ it says. Not ‘Mansfield.’ “

  “It was a joke,” Adam said, knowing he’d not be able to explain. Helen could tell you what your dead grandfather was doing at any given moment, but he doubted if she’d ever watched a TV show or movie in her life.

  Taking the application from Helen, he looked at it, trying to recall all that he could about the tiny girl who’d sat before him just minutes ago. Since he’d seen hundreds of women today, they were all blending together in his mind.

  Small, delicate, with an air of poverty hanging about her. But, still, she was a pretty little thing, like some tiny bird. A goldfinch, he thought, remembering her blonde hair that hung limply about the shoulders of her cheap suit. She’d had on sandals, no stockings, and he remembered thinking that she had feet the size of a child’s.

  “I’m not sure—” he began as he looked up at Helen. But she had “that” look on her face, the one that meant that she was in a semitrance as she looked deep into something. “All right,” he said with a sigh,”out with it. What’re you seeing?”

  “She will help you.”

  Adam waited for the woman to elaborate, but then he saw the smile play on her lips. Lord help him! It was clairvoyant humor. The woman was foreseeing something that amused her. From his experience this could mean something as good as winning the lottery or something as bad as being stranded in a snowdrift for three days. As long as everyone survived, Helen thought that such miserable experiences were amusing. In fact, any adventure that one survived delighted her. So who needed movies and TV when such things were running through a person’s head?

  “That’s all you’re going to say?” Adam
asked, his mouth set in a firm line.

  “Yes,” Helen answered; then she gave one of her rare full smiles. “She’s hungry. Feed her and she’ll help you.”

  “Shall I name her Fido?” Adam asked, trying to be nasty, but his tone just made Helen smile more as she stood up.

  “It’s time for me to go to work,” she said, for she spent the darkest hours of every night in a trance looking at the lives and futures of her clients.

  For all that she annoyed him, Adam felt a sense of panic as she was about to leave. “Are you sure about her? She can do this? Will she do this?”

  Helen paused at the door, and when she looked at him, her face was serious. “The future is to be made. As it stands now, you could fail or succeed at this. I won’t be able to see the outcome until you’re there with this Mansfield girl and—”

  “Monroe,” Adam snapped.

  Helen gave a bit of a smile. “Remember. You must not touch her.”

  “What?!” Adam said, aghast. “Touch her? Do I look desperate? That poor little girl? She probably grew up in a sharecropper’s cabin. What was that school she went to? Mann’s something or other? Touch her! Really. I’d rather—”

  He stopped talking, because Helen had left the room, closing the door behind her, but her laughter wafted about him. He’d never before heard her laugh.

  “I hate clairvoyants!” Adam said when he was alone; then he looked down at the application again. Wonder what the T stands for? he thought, shaking his head in dismay. Today, every time some gorgeous, long-legged beauty from South Dakota or wherever had walked in, Adam’s heart had nearly skipped a beat. If she was “the one,” then he’d be spending day and night with her, sharing meals, sharing what might become an adventure, sharing....

  But, each time, after the beauty had left the room, he’d looked at Helen, and with a mocking expression, for she’d seen every one of his lascivious fantasies, she’d shaken her head no. No, the beauty was not “the one.”

  But this one! Adam thought. This Darci T. Monroe—no relation to the other one—didn’t look strong enough to help him accomplish anything. Maybe it was true that she was, well, physically qualified—he could certainly believe that—but how could she ...?

  “Oh, the hell with it,” he said, then picked up the phone and called the number she’d written on the application. As the telephone was ringing, he thought, I still have two weeks. Maybe someone else who has the proper qualifications will show up, he told himself as a woman’s voice answered.

  2

  THE GROVE IN CAMWELL, Connecticut, was the most beautiful place Darci had ever seen in her life. The inn and its grounds had once been a rich man’s farm. Like George Washington’s Mount Vernon, she’d thought when she’d first seen it. The main house, with its deep porch and many windows, had been built in 1727. Inside, the floors were of wide oak planks, and to the left of the entrance hall, where she registered at a pretty little desk, was a large room with fat, overstuffed chairs and two sofas, all facing a massive stone fireplace.

  “It’s beautiful,” she’d said to the young man carrying her one small suitcase.

  “You’re in the Cardinal guest house, you and Mr. Montgomery together,”he said as he looked her up and down.

  “Oh?” she asked. “Does Mr. Montgomery come here often?”

  “Never been here before as far as I know,” the young man said as he walked through the main house and out the back.

  When Darci saw the area, with the flower-lined pathways leading to several small houses nearly hidden under the trees, she smiled. “Dependencies,” she said.

  “Right on,” the man said, smiling at her. “Not too many people know that word. You like history?”

  “I like a lot of things,” Darci said. “Is Mr. Montgomery here yet?”

  “Checked in hours ago,” he said as he turned down the left path. “All the guest houses are named for birds, but between you and me, yours used to be the icehouse. I shouldn’t tell you this, but. . . .”His voice lowered.”Look under the bed and there’s a trapdoor to a cellar. They used to keep ice under there.”

  “And is there a stream too? Something to keep the ice cold?”

  “Used to be, but I don’t think it’s there now,” he said. “Here it is.” He opened the unlocked door and walked into the little house.

  It was a small version of the big house, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a tiny, fully equipped kitchen, and a very pretty sitting room. The furniture was a mixture of old and new, but everything was beautifully kept, exquisitely decorated. “It’s beautiful,” Darci said softly. “You must love working here.”

  “Pays the bills,” he said. “Which room?”

  “Oh, uh, I don’t know. The one that’s vacant, I guess,” she said, then saw the young man smile a bit before he turned toward the bedroom on the right. Darci sighed. Darci knew about small towns, so she was sure that everyone in the tiny town of Camwell was soon going to know that she and her new boss were not there for a sexual rendezvous. Too bad, she thought, because she would have liked for people to think that she was doing something sexy.

  The young man plopped her bag down on a little stool at the foot of the bed, then turned to her in expectation, and it took Darci a moment to realize that he wanted a tip. Slowly, she opened her handbag, withdrew two quarters and handed them to him.

  For a moment the young man stared down at the coins in his hand in astonishment; then he looked back at her and smiled. “Thanks a lot,” he said, seeming to be greatly amused about something.

  When she was alone in the guest house, Darci sat down on the bed. Now what? she thought. Since the last two weeks had been the oddest of her life, she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to expect next.

  First of all, it had been Aunt Thelma who’d told her that she had the job, as she had been the one to answer the telephone.

  “What did he say?” Darci’d asked. “When do I report to work? Where?”

  Aunt Thelma hadn’t known any of these things. Her only thought was of the pleasure she was going to feel when she said, “I told you so,” to her husband. But when Uncle Vern got home, his only concern had been to try to calculate how much room and board he was going to charge Darci for the privilege of staying with them.

  As for Darci, she didn’t hear a word of the argument that went on around her. All she felt was a sense of satisfaction, because her belief that everything would work itself out had come true.

  But for the next two weeks, the only thing she’d heard from the man she’d met so briefly was a request for a social security number and other pertinent information needed so he could send her her first paycheck in advance. By the time two weeks had gone by and Darci had heard nothing else, Uncle Vern had started telling Darci that he’d known all along that the job was a come-on to girls like her.

  “And what does that mean?” Aunt Thelma had snapped. Since her sister’s daughter had landed a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year job, she felt that her place in life had escalated, so she was standing up to her husband more. “What does ‘girls like her’ mean, Vernon?” Thelma had asked, her mouth in a tight line. Uncle Vern had replied, “Like mother, like daughter,” and that’s when Darci had left the room.

  But finally, an envelope had arrived and in it had been a letter and a check for more money than Darci had ever seen in her life.

  And it was in that moment that Uncle Vern found out that there was indeed something of Jerlene Monroe in Darci—but not the trait that he thought she’d inherited. The instant Vernon saw that check, he came up with a scheme to deposit all of it in his own bank account. “You’ll get more interest that way,” Uncle Vern had said in a voice that dripped sincerity.

  “I tell you what, Uncle Vern,” Darci said with a smile. “Why don’t I open an account and you deposit your money into my account?”

  There’d been a lot of sputtering, and Darci had had to listen to a lot of words thrown at her, but she was used to that. If she hadn’t had a need for the money, a n
eed that would determine the entire course of her life, she would have been more than willing to share her good fortune with him. But she couldn’t share a penny with anyone.

  “You know what debts Darci has,” Aunt Thelma had said, but Darci could tell that her aunt wasn’t too pleased that her only niece was going to keep all that money for herself. Besides, Darci knew only too well that none of her relatives, by blood or marriage, thought Darci’s “debt” was the intolerable burden that Darci did.

  In the end, Darci had told them that she was going to give Uncle Vern’s request some serious thought and that she’d let them know her answer tomorrow. What she didn’t tell them was that the letter included with the paycheck had been from one Adam Montgomery, who Darci assumed was the man she’d met at the interview and who was now her boss. His letter had given her a date and time when he said he’d be sending a car to meet her to drive her to the Grove in Camwell, Connecticut. There was also a telephone number, but when Darci called it, all she got was a machine. She left a message asking that the car meet her, not at her uncle’s apartment, but sixteen blocks away in a much nicer part of New York.

  On the morning of the day she was to start her new job, Darci had packed all her belongings in her one old suitcase and carried it the sixteen blocks to the place where the car was to meet her. Since the car wasn’t to arrive until two P.M., she’d stayed there all morning and early afternoon, so afraid that she’d miss the car that she’d only left the corner once to purchase a tuna salad on toasted whole wheat; then she’d run back to the corner. The black Lincoln, with its tan leather seats, had met her exactly at two.