Stunner (30 page)

I hear the growl of an engine driving up the road to the house. Sounds like a motorcycle. I don’t touch the lights, but creep to a dark bedroom next to this one, clutching the baggie with the broken brush and white garbage bag, with Warrior by my side. My dog barks. “Quiet, Warrior,” I say in a stage whisper.

I look out the window and can barely make out a motorcycle stopping a hundred yards from the house. The rider parks his bike behind a bush and walks in our direction under trees when possible, doing his best to stay out of the rain, which appears to be easing up. He avoids a pool of light coming from a front-door lamp fixture.

I watch the figure lurk about the house, trying to see inside. I’m sure he’s casing the place to determine whether anyone’s at home. The soft rain isn’t noisy, and I can hear him mumbling. I guess that’s Bobby Taylor down there. In the dark light, while I can’t tell if his bare arms have those abundant tattoos, I would bet it’s that creep and feel a shiver go straight through me.

I reach down to Warrior for reassurance, and he rubs his head against my leg, waiting for my command. I feel him quiver. “Warrior, stay quiet,” I whisper.

Warrior does the opposite and whines loudly. The guy’s head jerks up, and I back away from the window at once. “Quiet,” I repeat softly to my dog, putting my finger to my mouth. “Shhh.”

“Who’s up there?” Bobby—or so I suppose—growls from below. “Teresa, that you? I know the old guy’s not here, so come down and talk to me.” Yep, the sound of his voice confirms that it’s Bobby Taylor.

I cautiously peek out as he backs up from the house to get a better view of the entire structure. “Aw, Terry,” he says. “I thought you were finished with all this. Why’d you want to come back to this house again after all these years?”

Again
? I jerk my head back from the window and stare into the room. What’s he talking about? I glance outside. He paces back and forth through the pool of light, and even though the rain has stopped, I see his tee-shirt is soaked and now clings to him like a second skin.

“Don’t-cha remember?” he says, almost mumbling but I can pick it up by staying very quiet. I think I hear him say, “You swore you’d never come back here…after what happened to you and your mama.” And then I feel it once more—a familiar flickering at the edges of my memory. My dog stirs, and I put my finger over my mouth and whisper, “Shhh,” to quiet him down.

Bobby walks up the front steps and bangs hard on the door. He slams the heavy brass doorknocker repeatedly, yelling, “Teresa!” over and over.

“Get down here! I wanna talk to you,” he demands. “I can help you get revenge.”

Revenge? In my mind I hear Juliana’s voice saying,
You’ll ruin everything, spoil everything
. My radar is on full alert. This revenge factor has always worried me. Revenge for what?

Bobby’s getting very worked up now. He jiggles the door knob, attempting to enter the house. Warrior’s agitation grows, and he growls. The guy moves over to the windows, trying those, too. My focus is scattered, confused by Bobby’s ramblings.

“Teresa! I know you’re in there,” he yells. Why doesn’t he just go away? “Teresa, I can help you, and you can help me. Joe is puttin’ a lot of pressure on me for money…for some deal. Terry, I need money.” His tone is desperate.

Wait a minute. Joe? Does he mean respectable Joe who runs that model drug prevention program in Scranton? Joe, who says he hasn’t seen his brother, Bobby, in such a long time? What kind of deal does Joe have going? If he wants help from Bobby, it must not be very above board.

Bobby bangs his fists against the front door. Oh my god, I’m pretty sure I forgot to lock the kitchen door when I came in.

“If you won’t come out, I’m coming in.” He rams his body against the big door.

Warrior breaks into a fierce bark, and I make a dash for the upstairs keypad in the center hall. I enter the distress code, which goes straight to the police. In an instant, spotlights turn on and brighten the area around the entire house. Simultaneously, a screeching siren goes off and a digital voice booms from a speaker announcing, “Police notified and sending help.”

With Warrior barking ferociously, I dash to a nearby window and peek down below. Bobby Taylor is momentarily frozen, prior to making some kind of a fight or flight decision. It’s as though someone has yelled,
Stop or we’ll shoot
. His arms are bent out from his sides as if to ward off a blow, and his head turns in all directions, looking for a physical attacker. Then he snaps out of it.

“Teresa, you bitch. You can’t hide behind these rich f—s forever,” he screams, circling in the pool of light. Then he comes to a dead stop. “I’ve got it! I’ve got a better idea.” Huh? What better idea? “You wait! You’re gonna love this one,” Bobby Taylor threatens. Laughing, he turns on his heels and runs out of the light.

Once away from the house, he cuts behind a bush, and I hear a motor start. He guns the engine, and the motorcycle shoots onto the wet gravel, where he skids into a left turn and speeds away.

Wanting to go after the intruder, my dog continues barking loudly. “Settle down, Warrior,” I command. He stops. I can feel my heart thumping away a mile a minute. I open the window and inhale as much of the night air as I can, which finally calms me. Warrior drops to the ground and puts his face down between his paws, his brow furrowed as if he’s worried.

I collect my thoughts, which are a confused muddle at the moment. What did he mean:
Why’d you want to come back to this house?
When was Juliana ever here before this visit with Frank?

I can still hear him, and I’m sure he said it—
You swore you’d never set foot here again
…
after what happened to you and your mama
. What is Bobby Taylor talking about? And how does Joe Taylor fit in? Lastly, what better idea does Bobby have for Juliana?

I turn off the blaring alarm and wait for the police.

The police arrive five minutes after Bobby Taylor is gone. Any sooner and they’d have passed each other on the property. But as the cruiser raced up our road to respond to the distress call, I made a snap decision.

I know our local officers—another advantage of small-town life—and tell them I’ve dropped by to pick up a book at the house, and while here, the attempted break-in occurred. I give them the details as they really happened, except I leave out two major items—one, that I know the identity of the suspect, and two, the suspect’s yelling about Teresa. That’s the account I stick with when I call Rita right after the police depart Meadow Farm. I leave it to her to pass on the story to Frank.

After Bobby Taylor’s outburst, I need to figure all of this out. If I’m to believe what he shouted, then Juliana has already been at my family’s farm at some point in the past. This is not her first visit. My mind returns to my memory of the little girl hiding under the dining room table, bawling, with her arms wrapped around our dog, Glory. Is it even possible? But the child I remember was named Maria.

The rolling thunder outside agitates Warrior.
Crack!
My dog and I jump. The lightening sounds as if it’s right over us. I wonder if these loud noises take Warrior back to Afghanistan when Tommy was shot down.

By now it’s four in the morning, and Warrior and I sprawl on the floor of Meadow Farm’s library, with me flipping through an old picture album. This one is forty years old, from the 1970s.

“Unbelievable.” I stare at a yellowed photograph of myself in 1971, wearing my favorite cork platform shoes and my preppy version of hot pants. Preppy just means they weren’t obscenely short and skin tight. I remember clearly how my mother was not happy at all when I showed up in this outfit, and she was even less happy when I came home—next picture—in a purple maxi coat topped by a pink floppy hat after my trip to London with my best friend and her mother.

I stare at the photo and remember how much I loved that purple coat. While Warrior naps on the floor and quietly snores, I continue flipping through the pages of the album, surveying my brothers and me growing up in the ’70s.

I stop. Found it. The picture I was sure was in one of these albums. And there she is, the same little dark-haired girl I remembered tearing through our dining room. In this photo, she’s slouched over and sitting cross-legged on the floor at the foot of a sofa with her arms draped around our Lab, Glory. Her mother, sitting on the sofa, leans forward with her hands on the little girl’s shoulders. The woman smiles for the camera. The little girl looks startled. Scribbled in ink underneath the picture is the caption
Rosa & Maria with Glory.
The year is 1979.

I look closely. I slip the small picture from the photo corners that keep it in place on the page and grab a magnifying glass from Frank’s desk so that I can examine it in more detail. It falls from my fingers and floats to the floor, landing face-down. I notice pale writing on the back. Warrior opens one eye to watch me pick it up. The faded words are still clear enough to read—
Rosa & Maria-Teresa Gonzalez
.

Son of a gun! So Bobby Taylor was telling the truth. Maria-Teresa, Teresa, Terry, Julie, a.k.a. Juliana lived at Meadow Farm as a little girl. In my head I hear the echoes of Joe Taylor’s voice when I was at his office to learn about his school drug program.
Her mother worked somewhere in New York or New Jersey. I don’t remember where.

At the time, it never dawned on me that Teresa and her mother had lived here, at Meadow Farm. With us. And that’s why Juliana knew about our secret tree house; she, we, had all climbed up there as kids.

And now the memories begin to flood back. I remember this adorable little girl and her mother, Rosa. As with Rita today, the Meadow Farm household could not have run without Rosa Gonzalez.

I look for any indication of Juliana’s adult face in this beautiful child. It’s hard to say. I remember I had thought Juliana reminded me of Angelina Jolie when I first saw her, but I realize now that definitely more than her movie star features were nudging at me.

I flip through the 1980s album and spot other photographs as Maria blossomed into a lovely girl-almost-tween. The full mouth and high cheekbones evolved on the girl’s face over the years, and her dark, piercing eyes are the same ones I’ve seen in Juliana. I note how much, as a tween, Teresa also looks like Francesca in Scranton, like a twin sister who time-traveled a few decades. Then in 1985 the pictures of Teresa and her mother stop. I don’t really have to ask myself why.

I close the albums, listening to the rain splatter on the terrace outside the library’s French doors, and every painful detail comes back from that time in 1985. It’s an understatement to say it was not my finest moment.

I was home for the weekend from my job as a production assistant on some Hollywood-entertainment show in New York. I hated that job. It was tedious, boring, and I couldn’t stand the woman for whom I was working.

I arrived from the city in a foul mood, only to discover a pre-teen Maria in my room. I walked in as she pranced in front of my full-length mirror trying on my clothes and jewelry.

I exploded. Blew up. I was nasty, definitely way up in the bitch-decibel level. I demanded Maria get out of my clothes pronto right in front of me. Which she did, scared to death. Tears were running down her face as she ran from my room holding her own clothes in front of her to shield herself.

I cringe when I think of my awful behavior. But I wasn’t finished. As I put my things away, I discovered a treasured ring missing. I assumed the worst and tore down the hall after her.

I found Maria in her room crying. She was only twelve, for god’s sake, a child. But I didn’t let that stop me from accusing her of stealing the missing ring, which meant so much to me because Frank and Peter had given it to me for my birthday.

Rosa intervened and demanded I leave her daughter alone. She insisted she had taken the ring and had sold it. She stuck with this pathetic story, and later, my mother fired her with severance pay…such a sad conclusion to Rosa’s seven years of working for my family.

The whole scene was out of control. My mother instructed Frank and me to drive Rosa and Maria to the bus station, as Rosa had requested. Rosa wouldn’t say where they were going, just that they planned to go where she had family. I still remember how stoic and proud Rosa was as Frank helped them with their shabby suitcases. But the moment was all too much for Maria, who had nonstop tears streaming down her face.

As he placed their suitcases near the bus stop for Pennsylvania, the girl broke away from her mother and ran up to my brother. She pounded at him with her fists, crying out, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” Frank, looking sad, just stood there and took her blows, until Rosa pulled Maria off of him.

I waited there without moving and didn’t intervene to help my brother. I knew I had made a mess of things and that I was scum. I felt such shame.

Frank and I got into the car and drove home in silence. When we arrived, Mother presented me with the missing ring, which had turned up in a laundry hamper filled mostly with my dirty clothes. The implication was that the ring had been in one of my pockets. My mother looked at me with such disappointment, because I had been so quick to accuse.

It was too late to go after Rosa and Maria; we knew Rosa had too much pride to return. They were gone, and we didn’t know where they were in Pennsylvania. We didn’t try too hard to find out, either.

Stupid, stupid. How could I have been so very stupid? All little girls want to try on big-girl clothes. When I think back, I can’t believe how I let that innocent event snowball into accusations of jewelry theft. It was one-hundred percent my fault.

I know that we all have moments in our past that leave us feeling ashamed of ourselves. Until today, I realize I had successfully buried this memory because I don’t think I ever forgave myself.

Then I see the link. I remember their bus was going to Pennsylvania, setting the young Maria on her angry journey toward leading the Scranton Gang a couple of years later.

I also can’t get that image of Maria pounding her fists against Frank at the bus station out of my mind. Has Maria Teresa, now as Juliana, been waiting all these years to get her revenge against our family, more specifically, Frank and me? Is Frank walking into a trap? Has another trap already sprung, setting my brother against me so that I’m in exile?