Ghost Moon (20 page)

‘‘My mom’s like that, only she lives in California. After they get married again, they don’t want you anymore.’’ Chloe was so matter-of-fact that Seth winced. Was that really what those children thought?

He retreated back to the kitchen so quietly that the girls never heard him, leaned against the counter, and took a deep breath. Guilt stabbed him again. He’d been seeing Mallory when Chloe came to live with him. Soon afterward, they’d gotten pretty hot and heavy. Chloe’s misbehavior had worsened as his involvement with Mallory had increased, he realized as he thought about it. Once they got engaged, she’d become unbearable. Seth wondered that he hadn’t made the connection before.

Chloe was afraid that once he and Mallory were married he wouldn’t want her anymore.

Olivia had seen it. She had told him Chloe felt unloved.

Seth felt like the biggest prick alive. It was suddenly as clear as a pane of glass to him that he had been neglecting his daughter.

The problem was, he didn’t know quite what to do to make things right. Something more was required of him, he thought, than just sitting Chloe down and telling her flat out that she was his daughter and he would always want her, whether he was married to Mallory or not.

He was still pondering the question on the flight back to Baton Rouge. In contrast to the nonstop chatter that had marked the flight to Houston, it was quiet in the plane for the return trip. Lulled by the drone of the engines, Chloe and Sara were both asleep in their seats, he saw with a glance around. Chloe’s head lolled sideways onto her shoulder while Sara’s rested back against the gray leather seat. Behind the girls, the enormous fern he had known Olivia would want to bring took pride of place. Next to it was a box filled with Sara’s Beanie Babies, with which the girls had played until they had fallen asleep. The rest of the gear was, thankfully, in the hold.

‘‘Is Sara okay with moving?’’ he asked Olivia softly, after checking again to make sure the girls really were asleep.

Olivia looked sideways at him. ‘‘She’s excited, I think, but a little scared, too. It’s hard for a child her age to change schools and friends and everything.’’

‘‘Did you have much work persuading her?’’

It was growing dark outside. The horizon was limned with vivid pinks and oranges and silvers, but up where they were the sky was nearly purple, and a handful of stars had popped out. Just enough light remained to enable him to see her clearly without turning on the inside lights.

Olivia had one leg drawn up under her, one hand on the armrest and the other in her lap, and her head rested back against the seat. She looked tired, faintly rumpled—and so beautiful that he couldn’t believe the woman he was looking at was the girl he had known for so many years.

‘‘I didn’t really have to persuade her. It was the possibility of a cat that did it, I think,’’ she said, not very clearly. Or maybe he had missed something. He’d been so busy looking at her that it was entirely possible.

‘‘A cat?’’ His question was wary. If, by chance, what she’d said made sense, he didn’t want her to know he didn’t know it.

‘‘Sara wants a cat more than anything in the world. We can’t have one in our apartment. I told her she could have one at LaAngelle Plantation. You don’t mind, do you?’’

‘‘Livvy, you don’t have to ask me if Sara can have a cat at LaAngelle Plantation. It’s your home. Sara—and you—can have anything you like.’’

Olivia smiled at him. ‘‘Sara will be thrilled.’’

‘‘I overheard them talking today, Sara and Chloe,’’ Seth said abruptly. ‘‘From something Chloe said—you were right. I think she does feel unloved. The problem is, I don’t know what to do about it.’’

For a moment she looked at him without saying anything. ‘‘Are you asking me for advice?’’ There was a note to her voice that told him their quarrel had not been entirely forgotten.

‘‘I guess I am.’’

‘‘My goodness, this is a first.’’

‘‘A watershed moment in our relationship, hmmm?’’ Seth said dryly. ‘‘Okay, Livvy, quit gloating. What do you think I should do?’’

‘‘Spend time with her. Do fun things with her. Don’t just drop her off to play tennis, play tennis with her. Get involved in her school activities. That kind of thing.’’ A sudden smile, quickly suppressed, made the corners of her mouth quiver. ‘‘Play Barbies with her.’’

Knowing when he was being teased, Seth shot her a quelling look. ‘‘I’m serious.’’

Olivia laughed. ‘‘All right, so I was kidding about playing Barbies. The key is for you to spend time with her in a way you both enjoy, I think. Let her know you like being with her. Hug her. Tell her you love her. And Seth . . .’’ She hesitated.

‘‘Hmmm?’’ He glanced at her questioningly.

She looked at him without speaking for a moment. He got the impression that she was hesitant to say whatever was on the tip of her tongue.

‘‘Go on,’’ he said.

‘‘Maybe you and Chloe and Mallory should spend time doing things together, too. Fun things. So Chloe can get used to the idea of the three of you as a family.’’

‘‘Good idea,’’ he said. And he knew it was. But he had trouble picturing himself, Chloe, and Mallory doing anything together that would not end with a tantrum from Chloe and a diatribe from Mallory. Suddenly he realized that he was having trouble picturing the three of them as a family, too.

And that gave him something else to think about all the way home.

CHAPTER 29

Donaldson, Louisiana—October 19, 1976

I HATE SCHOOL. ACCORDING TO THE CHIMES of the big grandfather clock downstairs, it was just after two A.M. Unable to sleep, Kathleen Christofferson lay sprawled on her stomach in the too-soft double bed in her grandmother’s guest bedroom, her head with its hated flaming-red mop hidden under a pillow, her hands closed into fists around folds of fresh-smelling white sheets.
I hate school, I hate school, I hate school
.

Little and skinny for ten years old, cursed with waist-length hair and freckles that all the kids teased made her look just like Pippi Longstocking, she had been, that day, the butt of jokes from the entire fifth grade.

Carrottop! Carrottop! Call the bunny rabbits!

It would help if her mom would let her get a pixie cut like a lot of the other girls so her hair wouldn’t be so noticeable, but her mom wouldn’t hear of it.
Your hair’s
beautiful,
she said. You’ll be thankful for it one day.

Yeah, right, Kathleen thought with an inward snort. Like maybe if I were to get lost in a fog and needed somebody to find me, I might be thankful for it.

Everybody stared at her hair. This afternoon, some creepy guy followed her all the way to her grandmother’s house after school. Her hair was what had attracted his attention, she knew. Without her hair, and her freckles, she wouldn’t stand out at all. She would be perfectly ordinary, and that was what she wanted.

Be proud of being di ferent
. That was her mother again. Her mom was full of little snippets of advice like that. Of course, her dad had had red hair. That was why her mother and grandmother both liked her hair so much: It reminded them of him.

He’d been a helicopter pilot who had died in Vietnam a month before she was born.

Her mom was a librarian. The school librarian. It was her mom who had suggested that Ellen Maddox, the most stuck-up girl in her class, read
Pippi Longstocking
at the beginning of the year, as a matter of fact. Ellen had showed the book around, with the picture of skinny, freckle-faced, red-pigtailed Pippi on the front, and that was when everybody had started calling her names.

Just ignore them and they’ll stop
. That’s what her mother said. But ignoring them didn’t work. Kathleen had tried that, had tried it today in fact, by burying her nose in a book and pretending she was deaf. But they’d just kept on and on and on until she couldn’t take it anymore. To her eternal shame, she had finally burst into tears and run away to hide in the girls’ bathroom.

She wasn’t going back to school on Monday. She didn’t know how she was going to get out of it, but she wasn’t going back to school. She was absolutely determined about that.

Her mom was at a librarian convention in New Orleans this weekend, which was why she was staying with her grandma. Grandma was her father’s mother, and she was really old, like ninety or something. Kathleen loved her, though. She wished she’d known her father, Grandma’s son. Grandma said that she looked like him, even without the hair.

There was a picture of him in a brass frame beside her bed. Even with the red hair, he’d been handsome. Kathleen kind of thought she looked like him, too. Anyway, she hoped she did.

All her life it had been just her and her mom, living alone in their own little house, and Grandma, living alone in this big one two blocks away. When Kathleen had asked why they didn’t just all live together, her mom had said she and Grandma got on each other’s nerves.

Unexpectedly, the third step from the top of the stairs creaked, jerking Kathleen from her reflections. It was the one that always creaked, whenever she went up or down the stairs. She would know the sound anywhere. Coming out of nowhere in the middle of the night, the sound was enough to make the hairs rise up on the back of her neck. For some reason, or no reason really except she just
was,
Kathleen was suddenly very, very scared.

Grandma was asleep in her bedroom at the end of the hall.
She
couldn’t be coming up the stairs.

It was pitch-black with her head under the pillow. Kathleen couldn’t see a thing. After that one creak, she didn’t hear anything, either. Not another sound. But she was positive, absolutely positive, that someone was in her room, which was the one closest to the top of the stairs.

She lay still, hardly daring to breathe. But to her horror she realized that she could
hear
breathing—in and out, in and out, not very loud but really, truly there.

Someone
was
in the room with her.

Suddenly the pillow was plucked right off of her head.

‘‘Peekaboo,’’ a man’s voice said.

Kathleen’s eyes popped open. Her mouth popped open. Starting up, she got just a glimpse of a weird-looking head and huge shoulders bending over her. Then, before she could scream, before she could run, a cold, wet, sick-smelling rag was clamped over her nose and mouth.

Kathleen was so surprised that she gasped, drawing in lungsful of the sweetish fumes. She gagged, coughing, and that was the last thing she knew.

He’d spotted this one coming out of a school. Her hair was beautiful—deep, flaming red. The sun had caught it, making it glow like it was lit from within. He’d never taken a redheaded one before, and he just couldn’t resist. He’d been trying to be so good, too, really he had. He’d thought a lot about his little fetish since the last one— Maggie—and he’d decided that he wouldn’t do it again. He’d even prayed to God in church to be delivered of his affliction. But prayers or no prayers, the urge had come on him with increasing strength in recent months, like there was a spring inside him that just kept getting wound tighter and tighter. He knew that if it got too tight the spring was going to break—and that’s just what it had done today.

The monster in him was once again on the loose.

Like Charlie Brown in
Peanuts,
he was a sucker for a little redheaded girl.

The thought made him smile. He was still smiling as he stuffed the little redheaded girl in a canvas laundry bag, and, swinging the bag with her in it over his shoulder, carried her right out the front door of her own house.

CHAPTER 30

THE NEXT MONTH WAS SO BUSY THAT OLIVIA barely had time to catch her breath. She settled into her job at the Boatworks, Sara and Chloe started school— they were in the same class, and Olivia didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad one—and Callie endured another cycle of chemotherapy. Big John remained hospitalized. Olivia was finally permitted to see him—Seth drove her in one day a week during lunch—but since he had not regained consciousness it wasn’t the catharsis she had hoped for. The frail old man in the hospital bed with tubes sprouting from every part of his body bore almost no resemblance to the grandfather she remembered. Each time, she held his hand, murmured a few words, and then it was time for her and Seth to go.

As it became apparent that Big John was going to be in the hospital on a long-term basis, David and Keith had begun dividing the week between their home and LaAngelle Plantation. Weekends, which were the busiest time in the restaurant business, were spent in California. Monday through Thursday mornings they spent in LaAngelle, or, more properly, at the hospital. David and Belinda divided up the days, so that one or the other of them was pretty much always at the hospital. The rest of the family took turns as their schedules and responsibilities permitted. Even Keith went to the hospital, although he stayed away from Big John’s bedside. But, as he said, he wanted to be nearby for David.

Seth obviously felt that he should be at the hospital more, but his first responsibility was to run the Boatworks. As Olivia, with her access to the books, had quickly learned, the business that had provided the family with its comfortable lifestyle for so long had started to deteriorate badly over the last decade or so. With Seth’s insistence on taking commercial work, which many in the family still thought was beneath them, the company was slowly climbing back to financially sound footing, but every business transaction mattered. Seth oversaw every detail of the operation, from sales to production schedules to quality control. Without him, Olivia realized, Archer Boatworks would have gone the way of many longtime family businesses: sold to outsiders, or bankrupt.

Archer Boatworks had been in the business of turning out gentlemen’s yachts for almost a hundred years, and the office systems seemed to be almost that old. Ilsa Bartlett, whom Olivia would be temporarily replacing, was a tall, thin (except for her midsection, which bulged ominously as she entered her eighth month of pregnancy) thirty-year-old of moderate attractiveness but a great deal of humor. She handled all the routine business of the office, and, as she candidly told Olivia, the job was a killer. Papers dating back to the company’s inception were stored in a room in the main building that Ilsa referred to as the catacombs. It contained dozens of file cabinets squeezed into every available inch of space. In those file cabinets were what seemed like every scrap of paper ever generated by the business. In between answering the phone, keeping track of Mr. Archer’s (Seth’s) appointments, boat specifications, delivery dates and status, ordering and inventorying supplies, taking visitors on tours, and performing general secretarial tasks, Olivia was expected to transfer data from those long-stored documents onto the company’s newly acquired computer system. It was a daunting task, complicated by the fact that no one, including Ilsa, seemed to be able to keep the computers up and running on a consistent basis. From her first hour on the job, Olivia perceived that she was going to be earning every penny of her generous salary. That relieved her mind of one worry: that Seth had offered her a ‘‘gimme’’ position either out of the kindness of his heart or just to get her to move back to LaAngelle.

Carl and Phillip both worked for the Boatworks, Phillip as assistant general manager and Carl as sales manager. As Seth’s right-hand man, Phillip was always around, but Carl also seemed to have frequent business that brought him to the central office. Olivia never questioned the legitimacy of his visits until Ilsa remarked, dryly, that she had seen more of Carl since Olivia started work there than she had in the previous three years of her employment.

The Boatworks itself was located five miles to the west of town. It was a sprawling complex, consisting of a yacht storage facility, a repair shop, a retail sales center complete with four huge showrooms, a central office, the yacht design and building complex, and another construction facility devoted to barges. A twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire surrounded the operation, making it look, to the uninitiated, rather like a prison. Approached from town, visitors were greeted by two large rectangular slabs of polished granite marking the entrance, both bearing the legend ARCHER BOATWORKS. A paved driveway then led across the flat, grassy lawn to the sales center, a two-story brick and glass building half as wide as a city block. Behind the sales center, directly atop the great earthen barrier of the levee that held back the mighty Mississippi, were two dozen warehouse-style buildings lined up one after the other that housed the rest of the operation. The location of these buildings on top of the levee was necessary because of the requirements of launching the completed or repaired vessels. When a yacht, or, increasingly, a barge, was ready, a crane would position it at the apex of a ramp composed of huge metal rollers that formed a path from the top of the levee to the river. With gravity to propel it and heavy-duty steel cables directing its slide, the vessel would be released and simply roll down the ramp into the water. The resulting splash made a giant wave capable of swamping anything in its path. Whenever a launch was planned, the Coast Guard was notified to stop traffic on the river for the required amount of time. It was a system that had worked beautifully, with some minor variations, for nearly a century.

As general manager, Seth put in long hours. He arrived at the Boatworks before seven most mornings, and basically worked until there was no work left to be done that day. Since their trip to Houston, he’d made an effort to get home no later than seven so he could spend a little time with Chloe before she went to bed. Some nights, when problems arose or there were prospective customers to be wined and dined, or he had a date with Mallory, he wasn’t able to make his self-imposed deadline, but he was obviously trying to focus more on Chloe.

At Olivia’s suggestion, he went with Chloe to her classroom on the first day of school—Olivia was surprised to learn that he had never done that before—and attended a midday library awards program a week later to watch Chloe (along with nearly all of her classmates except Sara, the newcomer) receive a medal for reading a certain number of books over the summer. Seeing Sara’s downcast face after the program, Seth, all on his own, hit on the perfect way to both cheer her up and make her feel included: That evening, when he came home, he was carrying two small, exquisitely wrapped presents, one for Sara and one for Chloe. When the girls opened them, searching frantically through layers of tissue paper when it appeared that there was nothing inside, what they each found was his business card. Olivia watched, as perplexed as her daughter as Sara stared blankly at the card she held in her hand. Then Olivia saw, scrawled in Seth’s handwriting on the back, the words
Look in
my car
.

‘‘Turn it over,’’ she suggested softly. When they did, both girls squealed with excitement and tore out the back door and down the steps to where Seth had left his car parked on the pavement, instead of garaging it as he usually did.

Olivia, Seth, Martha, and Callie followed the children only as far as the veranda. From that vantage point, they watched as Sara and Chloe, chattering animatedly, peered through the windows, squealed again, and jerked open the right rear door. Seconds later, both girls emerged, clutching something close to their chests.

‘‘Mom, come look!’’ Sara called, her voice tremulous with awe.

Olivia went down the steps with the other adults behind her to find that Sara cuddled a tiny, fluffy smoke-gray Persian kitten. It had a pink ribbon tied around its neck with Sara’s name on it. Chloe was holding an identical kitten, with her name on it.

‘‘Oh, Sara!’’ Olivia exclaimed, giving her daughter a hug.

‘‘A kitten’s what I wanted more than anything else in the whole world,’’ Sara said, the words solemn as if she couldn’t believe her good fortune. She looked up at Seth, who had come up behind Olivia, shyly. ‘‘Thank you, Seth.’’

‘‘You’re welcome, Sara,’’ Seth said, and Sara smiled at him, her eyes luminous with joy. He put a hand on her head, and then Chloe thrust her kitten under his nose and he exclaimed over it, too.

Later, when Olivia had a chance, she thanked him for his kindness.

‘‘You notice I got two,’’ he said, settled on the couch in front of the TV, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched the girls playing with their kittens on the floor of the den. ‘‘Absolutely identical, so they wouldn’t have anything to fight over. You think I did good, huh?’’

‘‘You did good,’’ Olivia confirmed. She was sitting on the couch, too, at the opposite end. Their gazes met, and she smiled at him, a warm and affectionate smile. He looked at her for a moment, smiled rather wryly in turn, and after a few moments got up and left the room.

Although Seth was still not quite comfortable with the more hands-on aspects of parenthood, like tucking his daughter in at night or giving her the occasional hug, he was making great progress, Olivia felt, by simply trying. Chloe responded to his increased attention by being—at least, for the most part—better behaved.

Time remained the problem. There was simply not enough of it for all Seth had to do, Olivia realized. Besides work, and Chloe, and Big John, there was Callie. Chemotherapy rendered her weak and ill, and she needed him, too, although she would have poohpoohed the notion. But Seth was her only child, and they were devoted to each other. He spent as much time with her as he could, taking off from work a couple of mornings a week to sit with her while the cancer-killing chemicals dripped into her veins, and being there with her in the evenings after Chloe went to bed. In addition to everything else, the plans for his wedding were proceeding apace, and Mallory stopped by the Boatworks nearly every day to get his opinion on, or approval of, something concerning the ceremony or reception. With so many competing demands on his time, Olivia sometimes wondered how he could function at all, much less as efficiently as he always did.

By the end of September, Olivia’s routine was firmly established. She rose at six thirty, got herself and the girls up, dressed, and fed, had Sara and Chloe at school by eight, herself at work by eight fifteen, worked until two forty-five, then picked up the girls at three. After that, she had her afternoons free for Sara—and Chloe. She supervised homework, arranged play dates, chauffeured the girls to soccer games, attended PTA meetings, and volunteered to assist with the Brownie troop, among countless other mommy-type activities. For the first time since Sara’s birth, she had plenty of time to spend with her daughter. Except for her ever-present concern for Callie and Big John, and the bad dreams that increasingly plagued her, she was more content than she had been in years.

The dreams did not come every night. Olivia almost thought it would be easier if they did, because then she would expect them. As it was, there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to it: Some nights the dreams came, and some nights they did not.

In them, it was always night, she was always standing on the shore of the lake, and her mother, in some kind of flimsy white top with wide lace straps, was always in the water. Her mother cried out to her:
Run, Olivia!
Run away! Go! Run away!
Then Selena would disappear beneath the surface of the water, pulled down by something Olivia could not see.

But what made the dreams especially terrible was that each time some new detail emerged: In one she saw that her mother’s eyes were huge with terror, and her screaming mouth was bare of lipstick; in another she caught the ripples of something swimming in the water behind Selena as her frightened face turned toward shore; in a third she was a helpless observer as Selena sank, only to have one hand break the surface, fingers stretching frantically toward the sky, before it, too, was gone.

One thing never changed: Each time it happened, Olivia awoke terrified. She would lie in her bed, bathed in sweat, her eyes wide in the darkness as she reminded herself, over and over, that it was only a dream.

Or was it? She had never had dreams like this before returning to LaAngelle Plantation. Now they were so persistent, and so disturbing, that she was beginning to wonder if they were more than just products of her subconscious.

More than once, when the dream jarred her from sleep, she could almost swear that she caught a whiff, the merest whiff, of White Shoulders perfume.

It was her imagination, of course. Just like the dreams were almost certainly a manifestation of her fear of the lake. And she was afraid of the lake because her mother had drowned in it. When she thought it through rationally—which meant, in the daylight hours—the whole thing was perfectly logical.

Still, she made up her mind to ask Callie, or Seth, or someone, to tell her, in detail, about the night her mother died.

Just the thought gave Olivia cold chills. So she put it off, enduring the dreams, telling herself that knowing the details would make no difference. Besides, everyone was so busy. Surely, sooner or later, the dreams would just go away.

The big event in LaAngelle at the end of September was the Fall Festival. Held on a Friday night on the combined grounds of both the elementary and high schools, it was a combination carnival, picnic supper, and dance, designed to raise money for PTA projects. Seth, as general manager of the Boatworks and one of LaAngelle’s leading citizens, had been asked to serve a turn in the dunking booth. He was unenthusiastic but knew his duty, and left home around six thirty wearing swimming trunks and a T-shirt and taking dry clothes with him to change into later when his stint as target ended. Mallory and Chloe went with him in the Jaguar. Olivia had agreed to help out at the Cook’s Corner booth, where homemade baked goods were for sale. She and every other elementary school mother had contributed cookies, cakes, brownies, and fancy breads in massive quantities so the booth wouldn’t run out during the four-hour course of the event. Olivia had been assigned the first shift, from seven to eight, which would leave plenty of time for her to enjoy the other activities when she was finished. It was just getting dark when she and Sara drove into town with Callie and Ira and a trunk full of late-arriving baked goods in Ira’s big Lincoln. Dressed in a black short-sleeved sweater and a short white denim skirt, lugging an armful of miscellaneous goodies loaded into brown paper bags—Ira and Sara were similarly laden down—Olivia reached her booth just as the first customer arrived. Setting out the best of what she had brought with her on the U-shaped trio of tables that was the sales area, she got down to work. She was glad to see that her shift partner was LeeAnn James, who had a kindergartner in the school. Looking adorable in jeans and a pink sweater set, Sara went off with her teacher, Jane Foushee, and a trio of third-grade girls who had agreed to take the early shift with their grade’s fund-raising project, a cakewalk.