Second Child (43 page)

“I’m going to see my grandson, Elsie,” Cora told the Fieldings’ housekeeper. Elsie gasped in horror at the very idea, but Cora silenced her with a look. “Don’t argue with me, Elsie Conners. I know what I’m doing. And there’s more than Tag to think about. There’s Melissa, too.”

“Melissa!” Elsie burst out, her voice quivering with outrage. “Cora Peterson, have you gone clean out of your mind? Melissa Holloway killed Tag! What are you thinking about, worrying about her? If it was up to me—”

“It’s not up to you,” Cora snapped. “And thank God for small favors.”

She pushed open the front door, pausing abruptly as a memory of the night before came into her mind.

Melissa, walking in her sleep.

Walking from …

The pottingshed?

It was possible. She chewed thoughtfully at her lower lip, reviewing every detail of the previous night.

Melissa had been wearing her bathrobe.

A white terry-cloth bathrobe.

And there were no bloodstains on it.

Today, Melissa had been wearing the old dress from the attic, and it had been covered with blood.

She took a deep breath and started down the steps, then began threading her way through the clusters of people
who had gathered on the lawn. She heard words of sympathy being offered to her, but never paused even to acknowledge them, let alone respond. Finally, after what seemed to her an eternity but could have been no more than half a minute, she came to the pottingshed.

A gurney had been set up in front of the crumbling shack, and even as Cora arrived, four men came out, carrying Tag’s body, which had already been discreetly covered with a sheet of opaque plastic. For a moment Cora’s resolve weakened, but then she stiffened her back and moved closer. Behind the four men, who were now placing Tag’s body on the stretcher, was Tom Mallory. He paused in surprise when he caught sight of her.

“Cora, there isn’t any reason for—”

“I want to see him, Tom,” Cora said, her voice steady. “I want to see my grandson.”

Mallory shifted his weight uneasily. “There’s no reason for you to put yourself through that, Cora.”

“I have my own reasons, Tom. I want to see him.”

Mallory hesitated, scanning the old woman’s face for signs of hysteria. But her gaze was steady as she looked back at him, and he felt the determination emanating from her. “All right,” he said quietly, nodding to the man at the head of the stretcher.

As Cora approached, the medic folded the sheet of plastic back and Tag’s head was exposed to her view. She gasped as she saw his smashed nose and split skull, but then once more regained control of herself. “All right,” she breathed, shifting her eyes quickly away from what she’d seen as the man once more covered Tag up.

“What happened, Tom?” she asked.

Mallory shook his head. “Cora, you don’t need to put—”

“Tell me, Tom.”

A sigh escaped Mallory’s throat, but he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his notebook. Flipping through the pages, he found the information he was looking for. “There’ll be an autopsy, of course, but it looks like he got hit in the face first. His nose was broken and there was a lot of bleeding, which wouldn’t have happened if he’d already been dead. It looks like he lay on the floor for a little while, and then she split his head open with the machete.”

“Who?” Cora asked. “Who hit him? Who split his head open?”

Tom Mallory gazed at the housekeeper in bewilderment. “Melissa,” he said. “Melissa Holloway.”

Cora shook her head. “No,” she said softly. “I don’t believe that.”

“Cora, you were there. You heard her. There really can’t be any doubt. I’m sure when we examine it, we’ll find her fingerprints all over that machete.” He reached out to touch her, but Cora stepped back.

“I don’t care what she said. I don’t care what you find,” she told him stolidly. “I know Melissa. I’ve known her since she was a baby. And Tag was her best friend. She wouldn’t have done that to him—she couldn’t have, Tom. She doesn’t have a mean bone in her body.”

Turning away, she started toward the house, once again ignoring the people around her, who were now staring at her in shocked disbelief at the words she’d just uttered.

She came into the house just as they were bringing Melissa down from her room, where her father had taken her a few minutes before. She was out of the hideously stained dress now and wrapped once more in the bathrobe she’d been wearing the night before, when Cora had found her out by the pool. Cora watched her silently as she came down the stairs, her eyes searching the robe for any signs of blood.

There were none.

Only a few smudges of dust or dirt, which could have come from anywhere.

As Melissa came to the bottom of the stairs, Cora hurried toward her and put her arms around her. “It’s all right, baby,” she murmured, “I know you didn’t hurt Tag, and I won’t let anything happen to you.” Then, feeling the strange lifelessness in Melissa’s body, she drew back slightly and looked into the girl’s face.

D’Arcy’s empty eyes stared back at her.

“Dear God,” Cora gasped, turning to Charles, her eyes finally flooding with tears. “What’s wrong with her? What have they done to her?”

Charles slipped his arm around the elderly woman. “They haven’t done anything to her, Cora,” he said. “She—She’s had some kind of a breakdown.”

“But—But she didn’t
do
anything,” Cora insisted.

Charles squeezed Cora’s shoulders. His own eyes were red-rimmed with tears. “It’s all right, Cora,” he managed to say. “They’re not going to hurt her. They’re taking her to a hospital. Nothing’s going to happen to her. They’re just going to make her well.”

Through it all Melissa stood completely still, her unseeing eyes staring ahead, her face expressionless. The two doctors, one on each side of her, led her unresisting form toward the front door. But suddenly, as one of the ambulance attendants opened the door, she turned, her eyes fixing on her father. Her face contorted, as if some kind of internal struggle were going on within her. With a flood of tears streaming down her face, she uttered one more word.

“Pearls.”

Everyone in the room stared at her in silence. Then Charles suddenly understood. “Her necklace,” he said. “She wants her necklace.”

Bolting up the stairs, he went into Melissa’s room, pulled open the drawer in which she kept the necklace he’d given her the previous Christmas and fished around under her sweaters until he found it. A moment later he was back downstairs. Very gently, he fastened the string of pearls around his daughter’s neck, kissed her on the cheek, then spoke softly to Burt Andrews.

“They’re her favorite thing,” he said. “Will they let her keep them at the hospital?”

Andrews hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll see to it,” he said. “It’s a good sign that she asked for them.” Charles gazed uncomprehendingly at the psychiatrist. “It was Melissa who spoke just now,” he went on. “Couldn’t you see the change in her face? She wanted the pearls so badly she was willing to wake up for them. And if she’d wake up once, we’ll find a way to wake her up again.”

But as they led his younger daughter out of the house to the waiting ambulance, a desolate thought came unbidden into Charles’s mind.

Why? Why wake her up at all?

Why not just let her sleep?

A sob rose in his throat as he realized he might never see his Melissa again.

*   *   *

It was nearly midnight, and Maplecrest was silent. Cora had long since gone back to her little house beyond the pool, quietly refusing Charles’s offer to her to spend the night in the big house.

“I don’t expect to sleep tonight,” she’d said. “But at least I can be in my own house, and feel Tag around me.” She’d looked up at Charles, her eyes dampening once more. “I don’t rightly know what I’ll do without him,” she’d said. “I can’t remember ever living in an empty house before. But I’ll get used to it, I suppose. A body can get used to anything, if it has to.” She’d reached out and taken Charles’s hand. “And don’t you worry about Melissa,” she went on. “Deep in my heart, I know she didn’t do anything to Tag. She loved him just as much as I did.”

Charles didn’t try to argue with her—he still wasn’t sure how to explain to Cora what had happened. Indeed, he still hadn’t grasped the full meaning of it himself. That there could have been another individual—a whole separate personality—living within Melissa, was almost beyond his comprehension.

“I’m not sure we’ll ever know exactly what happened,” Andrews had told him after they’d taken Melissa away. “Right now, the D’Arcy personality seems to be in full control of her, and until I can make contact with Melissa again, I can’t even begin working on trying to integrate the two of them. But I might be able to find out more about what’s been happening to Melissa over the years. There will be things that D’Arcy knows that Melissa isn’t even aware of. And if I can get D’Arcy to trust me enough to talk to me—well, this isn’t the time to be talking about that, is it?”

Eventually, the house had emptied out entirely, the neighbors returning to their homes, the police investigators finishing their jobs. At last there had been only the three of them left.

And now, at midnight, Phyllis and Charles had finally gone to bed. Teri MacIver was the only one still up.

She moved around the darkened rooms restlessly, experiencing each of them as if for the first time.

For now, tonight, with Melissa finally gone, Maplecrest truly felt as though it belonged to her.

She lingered on the first floor, putting off the moment
she was most looking forward to. Finally, she could wait no longer.

Going silently up the stairs, she paused outside the closed door to the master suite, listening for any sign that her father and stepmother were still awake.

She heard nothing.

At last she went back to the other side of the house, but instead of going into her own room, she passed it by, opening Melissa’s door instead. She slipped into the darkened room, closed the door behind her, and switched on the light.

The bloodied dress, which had been lying on the floor only a few hours ago, left there when they’d taken it off Melissa, was gone. Cora must have taken it away.

Or perhaps the police had taken it, to be sure the blood on it was really Tag’s.

Not that it mattered. Melissa was gone now, and Teri had no further use for the dress.

It had, after all, served its purpose.

She lay on the bed, stretching out across its luxurious expanse, and began visualizing what she would do with the room.

Melissa’s things—all of them—would go up in the attic. And then the room would be redone. She looked at the wallpaper with distaste. Maybe she’d have it done in silk. She’d seen pictures of silk walls, and always, when she’d lain in bed in the house in San Fernando, thinking about Maplecrest, she’d pictured her room here with silk brocade on the walls. Emerald green, with white trim.

She tried to visualize it, and just the image of it made her smile. She snuggled deeper into the soft mattress and felt a comfortable sleepiness come over her. She gazed up once more at the ceiling, picturing the little room above it, tucked under the house’s eaves. “Thanks, D’Arcy,” she said, snickering quietly to herself. “You’ve been a big help.”

As she drifted off to sleep a few minutes later, a sound drifted into her ear, almost unidentifiable

Maybe it’s D’Arcy, she thought. Maybe she’s laughing, too.

It was the kind of perfect afternoon that the members of the Cove Club had come to expect as their due on the day of the August Moon Ball. Through July and most of the following month, a stultifying heat had lain over the coast, and the pace of life had slowed to a crawl. By nine o’clock on most mornings the tennis courts had been all but abandoned, while the few souls who braved the morning sun gathered around the pool to huddle under small patches of shade offered by umbrellas over the tables. The luncheon buffet was set up every day, but as the heat increased, more and more people chose to remain in the cavernous cool of their own homes, leaving the food in the club’s dining room untouched beneath its net coverings. Only in late afternoon would the members of the Cove Club finally venture forth to sit on the terrace around the pool, sipping tall drinks and solemnly swearing that the weather patterns were changing, and by next year Maine was going to turn into Miami.

But finally, toward the end of the month, the heat wave had broken, and today—the Saturday before Labor Day—
the weather was perfect. The sky was clear, a soft blue dome that seemed to insulate the cove from the outside world, and even the humidity appeared to have taken a day off. A freshening breeze was wafting in from the ocean, and a tingle of excitement had replaced the lassitude of the last eight weeks.

Even the tragedy of Melissa Holloway was fading into little more than the major memory by which this summer would be marked. The Barnstables were gone—only a week after the funeral, Paula had insisted on putting their house on the market. Despite the fact that it was the first house on the cove to become available to “outsiders” in three generations, it hadn’t sold yet, and there was talk of turning it into a historical museum.

“Who would buy it?” Lenore Van Arsdale had asked Eleanor Stevens only a couple of weeks ago. “After all, everyone on the East Coast knows we’re inbred to the point of degeneracy. We’ve become an anachronism.”

“We can’t be too degenerate if we can still use words like that,” Eleanor had observed, but still a sigh of resignation had come to her lips. “But you’re right, I suppose. Who would want to come in here at this point, and listen to all of us reminiscing about the good old days, three generations back?”

Kay Fielding had chuckled hollowly. “Can’t you just hear people fifty years from now? ‘Oh, them. They bought the Barnstable house the year of that terrible business with Melissa Holloway. Maybe next year we’ll vote them into the club.’ ”

They’d all laughed softly, and yet they all knew it was true, and privately most of the members of the club had begun to consider the idea of spending their summers elsewhere. There had been a rent in the fabric of their lives this year, and rather than mend it, they were all considering simply replacing it with something new.