Wild Orchids Page 9

  I took another breath to quieten the turmoil the memories had raised and glanced at Newcombe. He was frowning, seeming to think about what I’d told him. I didn’t see any need to tell him that my father had moved us repeatedly over the years. Sometimes he’d receive a letter or a phone call, his face would turn white, and I knew that within forty-eight hours we’d be on the road again. Over the years I’d lost friends and places I cared about because of my father’s constant moving.

  As I watched the road ahead, my mind full of my own thoughts, I began to fear that Newcombe was going to try to get me to reveal more than what I had—which, for me, was a tremendous amount. After all, he wrote books about his own life so now maybe he’d want to take mine apart. But he didn’t. Instead, he grinned and said, “Okay, now tell me the story with drama and fireworks.”

  Just weeks before, I’d been embarrassed to find out that he’d heard me tell a story, but things between us were more relaxed now, so I let him have it. I forgot about reality and the involvement of my parents and told him my devil story in the most grisly way possible.

  I had never had a more attentive listener. When I glanced away from the road to see if I was boring him, he had the wide-eyed look of a three-year-old sitting at the feet of a storyteller. The telling took me nearly forty-five minutes, and when I finished, we were silent for a while. Newcombe seemed to be thinking about what I’d told him. Finally, he said, “Devil stories are rare. I’ve read a zillion witch and ghost stories, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard one in which someone was believed to have loved the devil. Not just seen him but loved him. And a pressing.” He went on to tell me that piling rocks on top of a person believed to be a witch was an old form of punishment called a “pressing.”

  After a moment or two, he lightened the air by telling me what he’d done so far to discover the origins of the devil story. From the moment he told me about a librarian hanging up on him—him, Ford Newcombe—my mouth dropped open and stayed down there. I must say I was impressed when he told me how he’d bought a house over the phone.

  Isn’t it the dream of every minimum wage person in the U.S. to be able to buy a quarter of a million dollar house just like that? I’d never lived in an “owned” house. My dad and I went from one rental to another, one job after another. He’d managed a bowling alley, sold tires, been night manager at a dozen groceries. It wasn’t until I was nine that I realized my dad was moving us around so often because he didn’t want to be found.

  I must say that it was good to be able to live vicariously through Ford Newcombe’s chutzpah and his money. “You bought the house and the contents?” I asked.

  “Turn south at the next junction,” he said as he drained half a bottle of cola. “Yeah, and it’s your job to go through all the junk in the house.”

  I knew he was testing me so I just smiled and said, “Be glad to.”

  “Unless your husband…”

  When he trailed off, I knew he wanted to know if I’d left before or after the I do’s. “It’s still Miss Maxwell,” I said. “So you want to tell me about wages, benefits, and hours?”

  I don’t know what I said that made him angry, but I could see his face start to turn red.

  “Job description,” he muttered, as though I’d said something vile.

  I’d had all I could take from men in the last few days and I really didn’t care if he dropped me and my bags at the side of the road. I knew from experience that there were always jobs to be had. “Yeah,” I said as I turned south, and there was belligerence in my voice. “Job description.”

  As he looked out the window for a moment, I could see his reflection in the windshield and damned if he didn’t smile a bit. Maybe he was so used to people fawning over his big successful self that he liked it when people didn’t bow down to him.

  Finally, he said, “I don’t know. I haven’t written a book since”—he paused and took a deep breath—“for a long time so I don’t know what I need in the way of an assistant.”

  “There are a lot of women who’d agree with you on that one,” I said before I thought, then glanced at him in horror.

  But, to my relief, his eyes crinkled up and we both laughed.

  “I’m not the monster you’ve probably heard I am,” he said, and explained that most of the women who’d worked for him had marriage, not typing, on their minds.

  It was easy to be flippant and think that, of course, he’d be pursued since he was rich and unmarried, but I too well remembered my father in the same situation. Not rich, but unattached. Maybe some of the women Newcombe had fired deserved it. Maybe…

  For a while he munched on his cheesy things in silence, then I said, “You want to give me a job description?” and that made him laugh again. “And where do I live?”

  It turned out that—dare I stereotype and say “like a man”?—he hadn’t thought of where his assistant was to live. When he said, “I guess you’ll live with me,” I shot him a look that told him what I thought of that idea.

  He tried to get me back by looking me up and down, obviously finding me wanting. “You don’t have to worry,” he said.

  I’m sure he meant to put me down, but it made me laugh instead. He may be rich and famous, but I was the one who was in shape.

  Turning away, he shook his head for a moment, as though to say that he’d never before met anyone like me, then he wadded up his empty cheese-poison bag and said he thought the house was big enough for us to live together and not get in each other’s way.

  “I don’t do domestic,” I said. “I don’t cook or clean anything. I don’t do laundry.” I almost said that I didn’t iron shirts even if they’d been run over by a tractor, but I decided that might be too much.

  He shrugged. “If they have a pizza parlor or a diner I’ll be fine. You don’t look like you eat much anyway.”

  “Mmmmm,” was all I said to let him know that my eating habits were none of his business. It was my experience that if you talked about food to a man he thought you were coming on to him. Men seemed to go from food to body to “you want me, I know you do.”

  “So what exactly am I to research?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, honesty in his voice. “I’ve never done this before. I’ve spent the last two years reading local ghost stories and trying to put some of them together. And it’s been difficult trying to get to primary sources, especially since I’ve not had a lot of help.”

  I bit my tongue on his last bit of whining. “So now you want to know about this pressing. Have any idea exactly when it took place?”

  At that he gave me a look.

  “Right,” I said. “I am your primary source. But I really have no idea when it happened or even if it did.”

  “Based on the attitude of the librarian, it did.”

  “Or maybe she was tired of people asking about it. Maybe it’s like Amityville and the residents are sick of people asking about that house. Or maybe she’s just afraid that her sweet little mountain town will be overrun by people with swastikas carved onto their foreheads, looking for the devil.”

  “Mmmmm,” he said, giving me the same non-answer I’d given him. He scrunched down in the seat, his long legs looking as though they’d disappeared into the motor, and put his head back. “When you get down to a quarter tank, pull over and I’ll drive,” he said as he closed his eyes.

  I drove in silence for a long time and I enjoyed it. I thought a little about Kirk and what he’d done to me, and thought maybe I’d someday break my vow of silence and ask Newcombe if he knew how I could go about recovering the money Kirk had stolen from me. But mainly I thought about how to research a story no one wanted to discuss.

  As the wide interstate stretched before me, I tried to remember everything my mother had told me about the pressing. So very much of my early childhood was a blur, but if I concentrated, I could remember the two incidents that had changed everything. My mother had gone from reading me a bedtime story to telling me that people who loved the d
evil had to die, and because she’d told me that story, my father had taken me away.

  Over the years, I’d often wondered what would have happened if I’d kept my mouth shut and never told my father what my mother said. But now that I was an adult, I knew better than that. Neither my big mouth nor my mother’s story had separated my parents. The truth was that they had disliked each other a great deal.

  When I looked at the speedometer, I saw I was going too fast, so I slowed down.

  As Newcombe dozed, I tried to remember that awful night when my father had taken me away. When he was alive, I wouldn’t let myself think about that night for fear I’d become too angry at him, and I knew anger wouldn’t have done either of us any good. We only had each other.

  The night I’d told my father what my mother said, he’d turned out the lights in my bedroom and closed the door all the way instead of leaving it open a bit as he usually did. But I could have been locked inside a bank vault and I would still have heard the argument he and my mother had. Even though they talked in low, stealthy tones, I could hear them as clearly as though I’d been sitting under the kitchen table.

  My father was saying my mother shouldn’t have told me the devil story. Suddenly, I remembered what my mother had actually said. She didn’t say, as I’d told Newcombe, that we would all die someday. My mother had said, “So how will you explain to her why I died?”

  I glanced at Newcombe, meaning to tell him, but he was sleeping, his mouth slightly open, his lips softened. With the tension out of his face, he looked much younger. Certainly not in his sixties as I’d thought. Actually, not bad looking at all.

  As I looked back at the highway, I remembered that my mother’s words had scared me so much that I’d put my hands over my ears and begun to hum loudly. Eventually, I went to sleep, but sometime during the night my father came in and woke me. “We’re going on a trip, Jackie,” he’d said as he pulled me out of the warm bed and lifted me in his arms. When I shivered, he grabbed a blanket and wrapped it around me. Minutes later we were in the car, there were suitcases on the floor, and my father told me to stretch out and go back to sleep. When I asked about my mother, he said, “She’ll come later.”

  But I never saw my mother again and sometime later my father told me she’d died.

  Over the years I came to realize that my father had kidnapped me. Sometimes I’d fantasize that my mother was still alive somewhere and dying of loneliness without me. One day, I said as much to my father. He said that he’d taken me away because my mother was very ill and she didn’t want her little girl to see her die. He said he’d taken me away so I’d remember my mother as a healthy, laughing woman who loved me very much. But another time, he told me my mother had died in a car wreck, and that was the story I told when I was asked about her.

  My memories of my mother were vague and confused. Sometimes I remembered her as being tall with long, dark hair, smiling and singing, and making me feel good when I was with her. And sometimes I remembered her as being short, with light hair, and always in a bad mood.

  I mentioned this dichotomy to my father and he said I was remembering my mother and his sister. I mentally leaped through the ceiling. I had an aunt?!

  Quickly, my father said my aunt had been killed in a car wreck when I was very young. Even back then I’d wanted to make a sarcastic remark about so many people in our family dying in car wrecks. But I didn’t say anything.

  When the tank was down to a quarter full, just as I’d been instructed, I pulled into a gas station. This time I filled the tank while Newcombe went in to get his own food. He was polite and asked if I wanted anything but I still hadn’t eaten my bananas. When he returned to the car with his arms laden with fat and cholesterol, he leaned against the door and watched me doing stretches.

  Okay, so I’m limber, but I didn’t appreciate being stared at in that way, especially not while he was eating a sandwich that reached from my knee to my ankle. The way he watched me made me feel as though I should hand out popcorn and charge admission.

  After we got back in the car, him behind the wheel, we didn’t talk for a while. We’d shared some laughter, and we seemed to now share a goal of wanting to find out the truth behind a story, so we were content. At least I was.

  As we drove, we watched the landscape change into the drop-dead gorgeous scenery of western North Carolina, with lush, verdant trees covering rolling hills.

  He must have memorized the map because he never asked me to look at one for directions. Eventually, we pulled off the major highway and went down a progression of roads that kept growing more narrow with every corner we turned. As the houses grew farther apart, they went from brick with fancy beveled-glass doors and porches too small to use, to the traditional North Carolina wood frame with porches big enough to live on during the summer.

  The beautiful green hills and valleys were salted with barns and houses falling down so picturesquely that my right index finger ached to push a shutter release button.

  “What’s that look?” Newcombe asked, glancing at me.

  “This is beautiful,” I said, “and I’d like to take pictures of—” I waved my hand to indicate that I wanted to photograph all of it.

  “Is that big black bag full of camera equipment?”

  “Yes,” I answered, but he didn’t ask any more questions. Too bad. I would have loved to talk about my photography. After a while, I had one of those déjà vu feelings. “Are we getting close, because I think I remember having seen some of this area before. There!” I said. “That bridge. I think I remember that.” It was an old steel thing with a wooden bottom that had big holes in it.

  “Right,” he said. “Just a few more miles and we’ll be in Cole Creek.”

  “You’re good at remembering directions,” I said tentatively.

  He gave a little smile at the compliment and said, “Yeah, Pat said—” He stopped and clamped his mouth shut.

  He didn’t have to tell me who Pat was. Anyone who’d read his books had read the long, gushy thanks he’d written to her in each one. Her death had been national news, and I remembered seeing a photo of him taken at her funeral. He’d looked like a man who didn’t want to go on living.

  “Left,” I said suddenly. “Turn left right here.”

  “This isn’t—” he started to say, but he turned sharply and we took the curve on two wheels.

  It made me feel good that he listened to me instead of relying on his memorized map. The road we were on followed a creek and was so narrow he drove down the middle to keep the overhanging trees from scratching the paint on his car. Maybe I should have been worried about oncoming traffic, but I wasn’t.

  On the banks above our heads we saw houses that didn’t look as though they’d been remodeled since they were built in the early 1900s or so. It wasn’t unusual to see a patch of land not far from the house filled with rusting cars, old refrigerators, and washing machines. Porches held an incongruous assortment of galvanized washtubs and kids’ big plastic cars in gaudy colors that clashed with the weathered wood and lush green forest.

  Abruptly, the trees ended and before us was a town that looked like something out of a book of photographs entitled Our Forgotten Heritage. If this was Cole Creek, and I was sure it was, then there was nothing modern in it. The few buildings on each side of the street were old and decaying rapidly. In the few store windows were items that would make a movie set dresser’s heart leap in delight.

  In the middle of the town was a pretty little square of land with a big white bandstand. The park was perfect for a Saturday afternoon of strolling and listening to the local barbershop quartet. I could almost see women in long skirts, wide belts, and high-necked, long-sleeved blouses with pintucking down the front.

  “Wow,” I whispered. “Wow.”

  Newcombe seemed to be equally awestruck. Slowing the car down to a crawl, he was looking at the old buildings as hard as I was. “Think that’s the courthouse?”

  Across from the perfect little park wa
s a big brick building with huge, two story columns up the front of it.

  “‘Cole Creek Courthouse,’” I read on the perfect little brass plate beside the door. “‘1866.’Right after the war.” I pronounced it “wahr” as was proper.

  Newcombe slowed the car to a roll. He was looking on both sides of the street by the courthouse. To the left was an alley and next to it was a cute little Victorian house with a curved porch. Was this the house he’d bought?

  On the right, across the street from the courthouse, was an impenetrable mass of tall trees which I assumed covered a vacant lot. Further left was another Victorian by the first one. It wasn’t in such good shape, but it had an adorable little balcony upstairs.

  “There,” Newcombe said as he stopped the car.

  Yippee! I wanted to say and already I was scheming to get the bedroom upstairs, the one with that balcony. I opened my mouth to start my campaign, but I saw that Newcombe wasn’t looking at the little Victorian. He’d driven ahead far enough that we could see into what I’d assumed was a vacant lot on the other side of the street.

  I followed his gaze.

  Closely planted trees surrounded about two acres of land, enclosing the space so it was private and secluded. In the center was a majestic, noble-looking Queen Anne house that was a wedding cake of balconies and porches and turrets. On the first floor was a porch wrapping around three sides that had—someone catch me, I may faint—big bentwood frames, like parentheses, that ran from the rail to the roof. The second floor had a turret with a porch and curved balusters under a pointed hat of a roof, with a cute little weather vane on the top.