Fool's Journey (22 page)

“You
look better.” He smiled. “No ghosts in your eyes.”

           
She smiled foolishly in return, as if he had paid her
some extravagant compliment. Maybe everything would be all right. Seating
herself at the table, she breathed in the rich aroma of coffee. Like everything
else this morning, it seemed to bolster her.

           
“Good morning, Deirdre,” Mrs. Ruiz greeted her. She
turned the cards idly, then gathered them up and shuffled them again. “The
cards – they’re quiet this morning,” she said, hearing Deirdre’s unspoken
question. “Nothing to say to me. Sometimes it’s like that.”

           
“Maybe it’s a good sign,” Deirdre ventured.

           
Mrs. Ruiz shrugged. “Too early to tell,” was all she
said.

           
Manny brought their plates to the table, piled with
huevos rancheros
and fried potatoes.
While they ate, Mrs. Ruiz gave him a few details about the new children. Like
the others Deirdre had heard about the night before, this pair had been
separated from their parents and had been shuttled among a number of safe
houses until they had ended here.

           
“During
the day, they laugh and play like regular kids. The nights, though
 
. . .” Mrs. Ruiz shook her head. “Maybe it’s
better if their papa didn’t come back here.”

           
“Well, they’re safe for now,” Manny said. “We’ve got more
pressing problems. Deirdre? Do you feel up to telling us what happened last
night?”

           
Deirdre pushed her plate away and took a long sip of
coffee before she answered. “How do I describe what happened last night?” she
mused. “Bad, sad and dangerous, I guess. I can encapsulate it for you, though:
When I got home last night, Freemont Willard was inside my apartment waiting
for me.”

           
Mrs. Ruiz drew in her breath sharply and Manny reached
across the table to take Deirdre’s hand in his.

           
“It was worse than horrible,” Deirdre went on. “To feel
outraged and invaded in your own home . . . No, I can’t say that. It will never
be home to me again.”

           
“How did he get in?” Manny asked.

           
Deirdre
laughed and shook her head. “That’s the funniest part. He told the manager he
was my father—my father! And he stepped right into my life as if the past had
never happened. You were right, Manny. Nothing stays in its grave that’s not really
dead. It was like a horror film: you can shoot a monster to pieces and it just
reforms, more dangerous than ever.”

           
Mrs. Ruiz narrowed her eyes. “Deirdre,” she said, “I
understand a little part—the spirit part of last night. You are right. Evil
walks into your life. But I don’t know the story. Manny?”

           
He nodded. “I know some of it. All I’ve needed to know,
but...”

           
“You need to know the rest if you’re going to help me,”
Deirdre finished for him. “I’ll pay you a real retainer, too.”

           
“There’s no need—”

           
“I can pay, as you’ll see. Scruples don’t matter at this
point and I have more money than anyone can count.” She glanced up and took in
the expressions of the two people sitting at the table with her. “None of this
is making sense, is it? I’ll start over. As soon as I tell you a little, you’ll
be able to fill in a lot. To begin with, the name I was born with, the name I
thought I’d left behind, was Katie McClellan.”

           
The bright, cheerful kitchen didn't suddenly darken at
the sound of her birth name, but Deirdre had almost expected it to. When she
had whispered it in her mind over the years, an aura of mothballs and
bloodstains hovered about her.

           
“You probably only know what the tabloids reported,” she
continued. “I was the little rich girl who murdered her famous, respected
father. Little Lizzie Borden, the tabs called me.”

           
The photos had been lurid, her father’s body being
carried from the mansion in a black bag, the bloody murder scene, her mother’s
face, pale and vacant, as Deirdre was escorted from the house in over-sized
handcuffs that threatened to fall from her slim wrists. The stories had gone on
for months until the attorneys for her father's corporation had swept her out
of the juvenile system into a private sanitarium. The records were sealed.
Nothing more came out after that. To the corporation, it was more important to
preserve their founder's reputation than to reveal the cruelty that had forced
his daughter's hand. She'd had no advocates, no one to fight for her. To the
world she remained a bad seed, a heartless sociopath, evil from the cradle.

           
“I remember,” Rosa Ruiz said softly. “That house you
lived in . . . it was Hell. I thought that when I saw the pictures by the
checkout at the grocery. I prayed for your mother—and for you. But something
was always wrong with the story. The whole truth never came out, did it?”

           
Deirdre felt the sharp sting of tears forming in her
eyes. She’d thought she didn’t have any left, but there they were.

           
“Your mother?” Manny asked. “What happened to her? I don’t
know this part of the story, Deirdre.”

           
“You were young—not much older than Deirdre was,” his
aunt explained. “Not paying attention to scandals in grocery store tabloids.”

           
He pressed his lips together and wished that he’d been
silent.

           
“It’s all right. The night it all happened,” Deirdre went
on, “my father was furious with me. He was a devil and he knew how to get me.
When I sinned, he punished my mother. Usually, he’d lock me in my room. When he
eventually let me out, I’d see her face all black and blue.

           
“This time was different, though. Something had changed
in me. I had begun my first period. I had heard about it from the other girls
at school. When I told my mother, she went pale and begged me not to let my
father find out. I couldn’t understand it. I told her not to worry. Surely,
even my father knew there was nothing either of us could do to prevent my body
from changing. She just shook her head and cried.

           
“I was going to be different from her, though. Her
survival was in endurance. Mine would be in mutiny. It was as if I’d discovered
my power in becoming a woman that night. It separated me from my past, as if I
had stepped through a mirror. I could look back and see my backward life more
clearly than I ever had before. You saw that in the cards Mrs. Ruiz, didn’t
you?”

           
The older woman nodded, but did not break the spell of
Deirdre’s narrative.

           
After a long moment, Deirdre went on. “I took the power
into my hands that night. I accepted it. When my father found out he was
furious, crazy. He cut off my hair and called me a bleeding whore. When he left
I didn’t stay in my room as I’d been ordered. I knew I had to face what he was
doing to my mother and try to stop him, not just weep about the aftermath. I
crept down the hall to their bedroom and crouched at the door. I could hear his
low, cold voice oozing obscenities. Then there was silence.

           
“I opened the door. He had a marble angel that always sat
on her desk raised over her head. I knew that tonight he was going to kill her.
It didn’t take a heartbeat’s hesitation to grab the gun he kept in the drawer
by the bed and shoot the life out of him. It was the best and worst moment of
my life. I saved my mother, but I lost her, too. One of the bullets hit her. In
the head. My mother is still alive, but she never ... her mind was gone.

           
A few seconds of silence passed. “Where is she now?”
Manny asked.

           
“Not far from me. She’s at the Theodosia Home on Queen
Anne. She doesn’t know me. I don’t think she knows anyone or anything, thank
God. She just drifts and they take good care of her.”

           
Rosa got up and poured coffee all around again, then
busied herself tidying the kitchen. Answers to nagging questions were falling
into place now, but there was something more. She listened with one ear as
Deirdre went on, telling about how she’d hid herself over the years and changed
her identity, about her encounter with that professor. Rosa had dreamed last
night about a creature with many heads: some laughed, some cried, some sang
beautiful songs, but there was one that had opened its mouth and gobbled the
others down. As the blood ran down its chin it smiled.

           
A shudder ran through her as she recalled the dream. She
would have to do a cleansing ceremony to get the demon out of the house. She
glanced back at the table where Manny was asking more questions about what had
happened last night. He was more disturbed than he let on, she knew. It would
be good if Deirdre stayed here another night. They could do the cleansing
together. It would do everyone some good.

XXVIII.

           
“We’re going out for awhile, Aunt Rosa.” Manny stood
framed in the doorway, his arm resting lightly on Deirdre’s shoulder. “Is there
anything you want?”

           
“Stop
by the thrift shop if you can,” Mrs. Ruiz told him. “Marco has everything he
needs, but I don’t have any rain clothes for Ana. Look for size 5, okay? And
you, Deirdre. Stop by your place and pick up everything you need for a few
days.”

           
“I’ve imposed enough already—” she began, but there was
no conviction in her voice or heart. At the thought of returning to her
apartment, a lump rose in Deirdre’s throat.

           
“You really want to sleep there tonight?” Mrs. Ruiz
asked.

           
“No,” she answered quietly. She’d stay in a hotel before
she’d spend another night in that place. And move. She’d have to move.

           
“Then you stay here for now,” Mrs. Ruiz insisted. “No
arguments. You got it?”

           
Deirdre glanced at Manny who merely shrugged.

           
“Got it,” she responded. Suddenly, the darkness that had
descended on her as she recounted her tale that morning lifted. The happiness
she’d experienced on awakening came spinning back to her. She could stay here.
She didn’t have to go back today.

           
“Where to first?” Manny asked as they drove through the
neighborhood streets. “Do you want to stop by your apartment first to pick up
your things?”

           
“No,” Deirdre said. “I’m not ready to go back yet. I’ll
just buy what I need.”

           
Manny nodded silently and let the subject drop. She knew
there were more questions he wanted to ask, so his restraint was doubly
appreciated. She leaned back in the seat and took in the rare sight of Seattle,
illuminated by sunlight. Clouds hovered still on the horizon, but for the
moment the sky smiled down.

           
As
they came up over the crest of Queen Anne Hill, Deirdre wished she’d thought to
ask Manny to take a different route. She didn’t even want to drive by her
apartment. She could feel panic rising in her chest. As quickly as she
recognized it, though, she felt stupid, childish, and thoroughly
self-indulgent. Breathe, she told herself. Don’t be such a sap. You’re alive,
after all.

           
She stared straight ahead as the car began to descend the
hill. It bumped slightly as each downhill block disappeared behind them, until
the road finally leveled.

           
“We’re past now,” Manny said. “If I’d been thinking, I’d
have gone a different way.”

           
“I was being a coward. I don’t know what I was afraid
of.”

           
“Real ghosts don’t care whether it’s night or day—if you
believe in them, they’re always waiting for you.”

           
“So, I just need to stop believing in them?” she asked.

           
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” he said after a
moment, “but you have to stop allowing them so much power over you. It’s not
just Freemont Willard that scares you, is it?”

           
She shook her head. “No, he’s not the boogey man anymore.
Not after yesterday. He just dredged up the past for me. I keep thinking that
one day it will be all over and I can live a normal life, but I’m always
wrong.”

           
“You want to live a normal life?”

           
“I don’t think I know what it would be like,” she
admitted. “How would I learn? I don’t even know how to have a good time. I’m
twenty-eight years old and I live like a nun.”