Comes the Blind Fury (16 page)

Without realizing quite what he was doing, Cal got up and poured himself a tumbler of whiskey.

June came into the kitchen just as he had taken his first swallow of the liquor. For a moment she wasn’t sure he was aware of her presence. Then he spoke.

“It’s my fault.”

June knew instantly that he was thinking of Alan Hanley, and connecting his death to Michelle’s accident.

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “What happened to Michelle was an accident, and though I know you don’t believe it, Alan Hanley’s death was an accident, too. You didn’t kill him, Cal, and you didn’t push Michelle off the bluff.”

It was as if he didn’t hear her. “I shouldn’t have brought her up.” His voice was dull, lifeless. “I should have left her on the beach until I could get a stretcher.”

She stared at him. “What are you talking about? Cal, what are you saying? She’s not that badly hurt!” She waited for an answer. When none was forthcoming, she began to feel the fear that had subsided as Michelle came out of her unconsciousness surge through her once more, clutching at her stomach, choking her. “Is she?” she demanded, her voice rising sharply.

“I don’t know.” Cal’s empty eyes met hers, then shifted to the bottle. He refilled the tumbler, then stared at it, as if realizing for the first time what he was drinking. “She shouldn’t be hurting as much as she is. She should be bruised, and she should be aching, but she shouldn’t have those sharp pains when she moves.”

“Is something broken?”

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“Then what’s causing the pain?”

Cal’s hand crashed down on the table. “I don’t know, damn it! I just don’t know!”

June reeled at his outburst, then, seeing that he was on the edge of some Kind of breakdown, forced herself to stay calm.

“What do you
think?”
she asked when she felt she could trust her voice.

His eyes took on a wildness that June had never seen before, and his hand began to quiver. “I don’t know. I don’t even want to guess. But there could be all kinds of damage, and it’ll all be my fault.”

“You can’t know that,” June objected. “You don’t even know that anything serious is wrong.”

It was as if he didn’t hear her. “I shouldn’t have moved her. I should have waited.”

He was about to pour some more whiskey into his
glass when there was a rapping at the back door, and Sally Carstairs stuck her head in.

“May I come in?”

“Sally!” June said. She’d thought the children had left long ago. She glanced at Cal. He appeared to have calmed down slightly—enough, anyway, that she was able to shift her concentration to Sally. “Are you all out there? Come in.”

“There’s only me,” Sally said half-apologetically as she let herself into the kitchen. “Everybody else went home.” She stopped uncertainly, then: “Is Michelle all right?”

“She will be,” June said with an assurance she didn’t feel. She offered Sally a glass of lemonade, and invited her to sit down. “Sally,” she began as she poured the lemonade, “what happened down on the beach? Why was Michelle coming home early?”

Sally fidgeted at the table, decided there was no reason not to tell what had happened.

“Some of the Kids were teasing her. Susan Peterson, mostly.”

“Teasing her?” June kept her voice level, curious but not condemning. “What about?”

“About her being adopted. Susan said that—that—” She fell silent with embarrassment.

That what? That we wouldn’t love her anymore, now that we have Jennifer?”

Sally’s eyes widened in surprise. “How did you know?”

June sat down at the table, her eyes meeting Sally’s. “It’s the first thing everyone thinks of,” she said quietly. “But it’s not true. Now we have two daughters, and we love both of them.”

Sally’s eyes fell to her glass, and she seemed intent
on its contents. “I know,” she whispered. “I never said anything to her at all, Mrs. Pendleton. Really, I didn’t.”

June could feel herself slipping. She wanted to cry, wanted to lay her head on the table, and weep. But she couldn’t let herself. Not now. Not yet She stood up, struggling to maintain her self-control, and made herself smile at Sally.

“Maybe you should come back tomorrow,” she said. “I’m sure by tomorrow, Michelle will want to see you.”

Sally Carstairs finished her lemonade, and left.

June sank back onto her chair and stared at the bottle, wishing she dared have a drink, wishing there was some way she could make Cal see that whatever had happened to Michelle wasn’t his fault. She watched him refill his glass, started to say something to him. But as she was about to speak, she suddenly had the feeling that she was being watched. She turned quickly.

Josiah Carson was standing in the kitchen door. How long had he been there? June didn’t know. He nodded at her, then he stepped into the room and placed his hand on Cal’s shoulder.

“Want to tell me what happened?” he asked.

Cal stirred slightly, as though Carson’s touch had brought him back to some kind of reality.

“I hurt her,” he said, his voice almost childish. “I tried to help her, but I hurt her.”

June stood up, deliberately shoving the table against Cal. The sudden movement distracted him from what he was saying. June spoke quickly.

“She’s in pain, Dr. Carson,” she said, keeping her voice neutral. “Cal says she hurts more than she should.”

“She fell off a cliff,” Josiah said bluntly. “Of course she hurts.” His eyes moved from June to Cal. “Trying to drown her pain in alcohol, Cal?”

Cal ignored the question. “I may have injured her myself, Josiah,” he said.

“Perhaps so. Or perhaps not. Suppose I go up and have a look at her. And just what is it you think you did to her?”

“I brought her home. I didn’t wait for a stretcher.”

Carson nodded curtly and turned away, but just as his face disappeared from her line of sight, June thought she saw something.

She thought she saw him smile.

Michelle lay awake in bed, listening to the voices below. She had heard Sally a while ago, and now she could hear Dr. Carson.

She was glad Sally hadn’t come up, and she hoped Dr. Carson wouldn’t either. She didn’t want to see anybody, not right now.

Maybe not ever.

Then the door to her room opened, and Dr. Carson stepped in. He closed the door and came close to the bed, leaned over her.

“Want to tell me what happened?” he asked. Michelle looked up at him, and shrugged.

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember anything?”

“Not much. Just—” She hesitated, but Dr. Carson was smiling at her, not forcing himself to, as her father had, but really smiling. “I don’t know what happened. I was running up the trail, and then all of a sudden it was foggy. I couldn’t see, and—and I tripped, I guess.”

“So it was the fog, was it?” There had been fog the day Alan Hanley fell, too. He could remember it clearly. It had come on suddenly, the way it did sometimes with sudden changes in temperature.

Michelle nodded.

“Your father thinks he hurt you. Do you think so?”

Michelle shook her head. “Why would he?”

“I don’t know,” Carson said softly. His eves moved to the doll on the pillow next to Michelle. “Does she have a name?”

“Amanda—Mandy.”

Josiah paused, then smiled, more to himself than to Michelle. “Well, I’ll tell you what. You lie here, and let Amanda take care of you. All right?” He patted Michelle’s hand, then stood up. A second later he was gone, and Michelle was alone once more.

She pulled her doll closer to her.

“You’re going to have to be my friend now, Mandy,” she whispered into the empty room. “I wish you were a real baby. I could take care of you, and we could be friends, and show each other things, and do things together. And you’d never say bad things to me, like Susan did. You’d just love me, and I’d just love you, and we’d take care of each other.”

Fighting against the pain, she moved the doll around until it lay on her chest, its face only inches from her own.

“I’m glad you have brown eyes,” she said softly. “Brown eyes, like mine. Not blue, like Jenny’s and Mom’s and Dad’s. I’ll bet my mother—my real mother—had brown eyes, and I’ll bet yours did, too. Did your mama love you, Mandy?”

She fell silent again, and tried to listen, tried to hear whatever voices might be talking in the house.
Then she began wishing that Jenny were in the room with her. Jenny couldn’t talk to her, but at least Jenny was alive, was breathing, was—real.

That was the trouble with Mandy. She wasn’t real. Try as she would, Michelle couldn’t make her be anything but a doll. And now, as she lay alone, her whole body throbbing with pain, Michelle wanted somebody—somebody who would be hers alone, belong to her, be a part of her.

Somebody who would never betray her.

Slowly, the drug began to take effect. In a little while, Michelle drifted back to the darkness.

The darkness, and the voice.

The voice that was out there, calling to her.

Now, as she slept, the darkness no longer frightened her. Now she only wanted to find the voice, or have the voice find her.

CHAPTER 11

For the Pendletons, there was a sense of waiting for something—something unforeseen and unknowable, something that would bring them all back to the real world, and tell them that life was going to be again what it had been before. It had been that way for ten days now, ever since Michelle had been brought back from the hospital in Boston, riding into town in an ambulance, making the kind of entrance she would have loved only a month ago.

But something inside her had changed. It was more than the accident—it had to be.

At first she had refused to get out of bed at all. When June, backed up by the doctors, had insisted that it was time for her to begin taking care of herself, they had discovered that she could no longer walk by herself.

She had been given every examination possible, and as far as the doctors could tell, there was nothing
wrong with her except for some bruises that had long since begun to heal.

Her left hip hurt her, and her left leg was nearly useless.

They had given her more tests—X-rayed her brain and spinal column again and again, injected dyes into her bloodstream, tapped her spine, checked her reflexes—gone over her until she wished she could simply die. Still unable to determine the cause of her lameness, they had brought in a physical therapist, who had worked with Michelle until, ten days ago, she had finally been able to walk by herself, though painfully, and only by leaning heavily on a cane.

So they had brought her home. June told herself that time would make the difference.

In time, Michelle would regain herself, would begin to recover from the shocks and indignities of the hospital, would begin dismissing her lameness with the same humor with which she had always dismissed whatever problems she had faced.

Michelle was taken up to her room and put in her bed.

She asked for her doll.

And there, for ten days, she lay, the doll tucked in the crook of her arm, staring idly at the ceiling. She responded when she was spoken to, called for help when she needed to go to the bathroom, and sat uncomplainingly on a chair for the few minutes it took June to change her bed each day.

But for the most part, she simply stayed in bed, silent and staring.

June was sure there was more to it than even the accident, the pain, or the crippling. No, it was something else, and June was sure it had to do with Cal.

Now, on Saturday morning, June glanced across the breakfast table at Cal, who was staring into his coffee cup, his face expressionless. She knew what he was thinking about, though he hadn’t told her. He was thinking about Michelle, and the recovery he claimed she was making.

It had started the day after they had brought her home, when Cal had announced that he thought Michelle was getting better. And each day, while June was horribly aware that nothing was changing for Michelle, Cal had talked of how well she was doing.

June knew the cause of it—Cal was convinced that whatever was wrong with Michelle was his fault. For him to live with himself, Michelle had to get better. And so he insisted that she was.

But she wasn’t.

As June watched him, she found herself becoming angry.

“When are you going to stop this charade?” she heard herself saying. As Cal’s head came up and his eyes narrowed, she knew she had chosen the wrong words.

“Would you like to tell me what you’re talking about?”

“I’m talking about Michelle,” June replied. “I’m talking about the fact that every day you say she’s better, when it’s obvious that she’s not.”

“She’s doing fine.” Cal’s voice was low, and June was sure she could hear a desperation in his words.

“If she’s doing fine, why is she still in bed?”

Cal shifted, and his eyes avoided June’s. “She needs to get her strength back. She needs to rest—”

“She needs to get out of bed, and face life! And you need to stop kidding yourself! It doesn’t matter what
happened, or whose fault it is. The fact is she’s crippled, and she’s going to stay that way, and both of you have to face up to it and get on with things!”

Cal rose from his chair, his eyes wild, and for a split second, June was afraid he might hit her. Instead, he moved toward the hall.

“Where are you going?”

He turned back to face her.

“I’m going to talk to Josiah Carson. Do you mind?”

She minded. She minded very much. She wished he would stay home, and if he did nothing else, at least finish the reconstruction of the butler’s pantry. But Cal was spending more and more time with Josiah, hanging on to him, and she knew there was no way to stop him.

“If you need to talk to him, talk to him,” she said. “What time will you be back?”

“I don’t know,” Cal replied. A moment later, she heard the front door slam as he left the house.

June sat alone at the table, wondering what to do. And then it came to her. Today she was going to get through to Michelle, make her see that her life was
not
over.