Maggy's Child (7 page)

She sometimes thought that the only thing Lyle loved, in his own peculiar, twisted way, was David.

The sun was brighter now, and she guessed it must be around eight. Despite all that had happened, she wasn’t even behind schedule. She could go in, get dressed for the day, and go about her business as if nothing whatsoever had changed.

Which it hadn’t. Nothing had changed. Despite Nick’s return, she was still tied to Lyle for life. Unless she wanted to destroy David in the process of breaking free.

Trapped, trapped, trapped, trapped. The word reverberated in her mind with all the helpless frenzy of a butterfly beating its wings against the glass walls of an imprisoning jar. Trapped, forever trapped.

“Goddamn it, David, concentrate!” The raised voice belonged to Lyle, and the annoyance in it was palpable. Seconds later it was followed by the sound of smashing glass.

“I said concentrate! Look at that! The glass in that window is over a hundred years old, and you broke it because you weren’t concentrating!”

“Dad, I’m sorry! I tried …”

“Tried, tried! I don’t want to hear ‘tried’ from you. I
want you to do it! ‘Tried’ is for losers! Which is what you’ll be, if you don’t concentrate!”

“I will, Dad. Just give me one more chance.” The pleading in David’s voice caused Maggy to grit her teeth and hurry around the tall privet hedge separating the driveway from the back lawn. As she had expected, Lyle and David, each with a golf club in hand, stood with their backs to her scarcely ten feet from where she had emerged at the top of the lawn near the patio. Clearly they had been driving balls in the direction of the woods, and one of David’s had gone astray. Lyle was, as always, impeccably attired, this morning in plaid slacks and a navy sweater over an open-necked polo shirt. David, ever his clone, was dressed in nearly identical fashion. The only difference was that his sweater was white instead of blue, and he wore a pine-green turtleneck beneath it instead of a polo shirt. Two well-filled golf bags rested against the low stone wall that bordered the patio. A steaming cup of coffee, Lyle’s presumably, waited on the wall near one bag of clubs. She could not see her husband’s expression, but David’s, as he looked up at Lyle, was both miserable and pleading.

Maggie felt her heart constrict.

“Practicing, gentlemen?” she asked lightly as she walked up to them, meaning to deflect Lyle’s attention from David to herself.

“You look like hell.” She had succeeded. Lyle’s eyes were cold as they swept her from head to toe. One of his “rules” was that she must always be well dressed. No wife of his was going to go about looking slovenly.

“I’ve been walking the dogs,” she replied, refusing to take offense. Her gaze was on David.

“Have you eaten?” she asked him gently.

“Not yet.” Only she knew him well enough to detect the misery hidden in his voice.

“He needs practice more than food right at this moment. In case you’ve forgotten, we’re playing in the father-son
tournament this afternoon at the Club, and if David can keep up his end of the program, we’re going to win.” His eyes moved over her again, narrowing with disapproval. “I hope you don’t mean to wear that.”

“You know I don’t. The tournament is not until after lunch.” Her answer was quiet. Her gaze focused on David.

“Why don’t you go in and grab some breakfast?”

Lyle answered before David could. “He doesn’t have time. He has a golf lesson at nine.”

Maggy glanced up at Lyle. “Don’t you think that might do more harm than good?” She had to fight to keep her voice even. “I should think his game would benefit more from a good breakfast and a relaxed attitude than an eleventh-hour lesson.”

Lyle’s nostrils flared with disdain. “You would. Fortunately, David knows better. He knows as well as I do that he needs all the practice he can get. He’s not good enough, not nearly good enough. I mean to
win.
”

Maggy sensed as much as saw David wince. The look she shot at Lyle was as icy as the one he had earlier bestowed on her, but she did not jump to David’s defense as her every instinct urged her to do. If she said what she longed to say, Lyle would retaliate by loosing his vicious tongue on her, and that would upset David more than his father’s insensitivity toward him.

“It’s okay, Mom. I really do need the lesson.”

For an instant David’s gaze touched hers, and Maggy read the silent plea in them.

Reluctantly she capitulated to it. She would not oppose his lesson. “You need something in your stomach before you go, then. Run on in and eat. Right now, do you hear?” Though she said it gently, it was still an order. David looked to Lyle for permission before obeying. Lyle nodded once, a jerky, displeased bob of his head.

David turned away. When Maggy would have followed David, Lyle stopped her by grasping her hand. Maggy
halted, knowing she was in for it now, but unwilling in front of David to make the scene it would take to free herself. Both Maggy and Lyle stood silent, side by side, hand in hand, for the few minutes it took the boy to return his club to his bag, heft the bag over one shoulder, then walk along the stone sidewalk to disappear around a corner of the house.

“I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of my relationship with my son.” Lyle’s low voice was laced with menace as he glanced down at her.

Maggy couldn’t help herself. She had to say it, though she knew she would pay dearly for her outspokenness. “You’re putting too much pressure on him. He’s only eleven.”

“He needs pressure if he’s going to succeed. What do you know about success? Where would you be if I hadn’t married you? Starving in a flophouse somewhere, that’s where. As it is, you’re nothing more than a parasite. I won’t have your weak genetic traits coming out in David. I’ll make a man out of him no matter what it takes.”

“You know all about being a man, don’t you?” She had gone too far. Maggy knew it as soon as the words left her mouth. His blue eyes flickered, and she just had time to register how they paled when filled with hate. His hand, the one holding hers, twisted viciously. Pain shot up her arm as her wrist bent. Maggy felt rather than heard something pop.

T
he pain of it wrung a small cry from Maggy’s lips.

“Oh, sorry, darling, did I hurt you?” Lyle asked with patently false concern as he released her hand. A satisfied smile lurked around his mouth.

Cradling her throbbing wrist, Maggy stared up into mocking eyes that she had once thought were gentle and kind. It was their color that had thrown her off, of course. Who had ever heard of a blue-eyed demon? Which was how, after twelve years as his wife, she had come to think of Lyle. The image even haunted her dreams. For the last few years Maggy had suffered the same terrible nightmare over and over again: she died and went to hell, but had not yet been consigned to the pit of flames where other lost souls screamed in torment. The Devil saw her standing on the sandy shore that led down to the pit, and began to chase her with his pitchfork so that he might spear her on it and throw her into the sea of eternal damnation. She ran and ran and ran, while he laughed and chased her—and then she woke up. But when she lay in her bed, sweaty and scared in the aftermath of the nightmare, the face she always saw superimposed over that of the Devil was Lyle’s.

“I think my wrist may be broken. I should go to the emergency room and have it X-rayed. Of course, they might ask me what happened. I wonder what they would do if I told them the truth?” With her memory of that
grinning dream-Devil to goad her, Maggy found the courage to challenge him, something she hadn’t done in a long, long while.

“Are you threatening me, darling?” Lyle’s lips thinned into a predatory smile. “I thought I had cured you of that. If not, I’ll be glad to provide another lesson. And, just for your information, I’ll tell you what would happen: nobody would believe you. If they should, if you should manage to put me in the position of having to defend myself from a charge of spouse abuse, be assured that I would do so very ably. But there’s no telling what little secrets might get spilled along the way.”

Maggy met that bland gaze with hatred in her own, clearly understanding the threat that reduced her to impotence. “You are a truly evil man,” she said.

Lyle’s smile broadened. “Our son doesn’t think so.”

Maggy turned her back on him without attempting to reply. Words would not move Lyle. Nothing moved Lyle. Where she and David were concerned, he held all the cards, and he knew it. Cradling her injured wrist gingerly against the warmth of her body, Maggy headed for the house, back stiff, head high. Lyle’s untroubled voice followed her.

“Why don’t you wear that yellow linen suit to the Club? You know how much I like you in yellow.”

Maggy pretended not to hear.

She walked around the corner out of Lyle’s sight, and immediately wished she had chosen another route into the house.

Her mother-in-law was taking breakfast on the glassed-in porch that ran along the west side of the house. With her was her daughter Lucy, and Lucy’s husband of thirty years, Hamilton Hodges Drummond IV, who flew his private jet into Louisville regularly to be with his wife. Louella Paxton, the family’s longtime cook-housekeeper, was just setting a basket of homemade biscuits down on the table when Maggy came into view.

Maggy checked almost imperceptibly as she saw the assembled company, and let her injured wrist drop to her side despite the shooting pain that made her grit her teeth. She had too much pride to reveal her injury to these people, who might be her in-laws but were never her friends. She was very much the outsider in this close-knit clan, despite twelve years as the titular mistress of the house. In reality, Windermere remained the family home of the Forrests, just as it had been for generations. The only reason she was even tolerated by them was because of David. Which, when she thought about it, was fair enough, because David was the only reason she tolerated them.

Chin up, Maggy continued on. What other choice did she have? She couldn’t very well turn on her heel and head the other way, which was what she really wanted to do.

“Good morning, Virginia. Good morning, Lucy, Ham. I didn’t realize you’d arrived already.” Maggy addressed this last to her brother-in-law, who was a good-looking man of fifty-nine. He was not much taller than her own height of five feet eight, and he had kept his waistline youthfully slim. He sported a very natural-looking black hairpiece, and a dyed-to-match moustache decorated his upper lip. This morning he was dressed in a navy sport coat, white open-necked shirt, and gray slacks, and he looked as though he had just flown in from New York’s Madison Avenue rather than Houston.

“I got in late last night. How are you, honey?” Ham’s thick-as-syrup southern drawl had charmed Maggy when she had first met him. Now she knew exactly what lay beneath that courtly exterior, and she was charmed no longer. Still, she managed not to grimace as he gallantly rose, pushing his chair back from the round table with its gay red-and-white-checked cloth. She even presented a cheek for the obligatory kiss between such close relations.

To think she had once thought this family so civilized,
so elegantly affectionate with their gentle endearments and air kisses! That had been long ago when she was young and unable to tell fool’s gold from the real thing.

She had grown wiser since.

“David just went up to his room. Were you looking for him?” Though Lucy knew that she didn’t have to fear Maggy as a rival for her husband’s attentions, she was nonetheless fiercely jealous of anyone in whom Ham exhibited an interest. As a result, Lucy’s voice was cool, as was her gaze as it fixed on Maggy. Lyle’s sister was a large-boned woman, angular and almost awkward in her movements, with iron-gray hair that she scorned to dye cut in a short, boyish style that, like her bright madras-plaid shirt-dress, did not become her. Unlike Lyle, Lucy, two years his senior, wore her age badly. She looked older than her husband, a fact of which she was painfully aware. Lucy had never liked her young sister-in-law, and made no pretense that she did. Still, she was outwardly polite, and that was all Maggy had cared about for some time now.

“I
was
looking for David,” Maggy said, making the effort and achieving what she felt was a credible smile. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go up after him.”

“You won’t join us for breakfast?”

From his tone, Maggy would have thought Ham genuinely disappointed. However, she knew better. She shook her head, and started to move away through the open French doors that led from the porch into the kitchen.

“Maggy, did you hurt your arm?” Virginia spoke sharply. Startled, Maggy glanced over her shoulder at her mother-in-law, who was frail and looked small in the wheelchair to which her heart trouble more and more confined her. Like Lucy, Virginia had once been tall and large-boned, but age and two heart attacks in the past year had left her both physically and spiritually diminished. As always, though, she was very perceptive. Maggy had thought she was doing an admirable job of hiding her injury.

“I—twisted my wrist.”

Maggy’s gaze met Virginia’s, and she saw quick, pained comprehension flare in the older woman’s eyes. Virginia probably knew her only son as well as anyone in the world. Though she might deplore many of his attitudes and actions, she loved him devotedly nevertheless. As Lucy had once said, with a small smile but entirely without humor, if Lyle committed a murder, Virginia would bury the body and take the secret with her to her grave. Maggy had suspected even then that hers was the body Lucy had in mind.