The Unwanted (16 page)

“My God,” Rosemary said, her eyes drifting up to the ceiling toward Cassie’s room. “What must it have been like for her?”

Then they both fell silent as they heard Ed Cavanaugh’s voice shouting from next door.

“Lying, stinking, rotten kid!
I’ll teach you to talk back to me!”

Laura’s voice came next, softer. “Ed—”

“SHUT UP!”

Keith rose to his feet, but Rosemary stopped him. “Don’t,” she said. “We can call the police, or we can ignore it. But I don’t want you to get involved.”

“But we are involved, damn it,” Keith replied. “We have to listen to it, don’t we? And what about Eric and Laura? Do we just let him beat them up?”

Rosemary met his eyes. “Then call the police,” she insisted. “If you want to do something, call the police. But let them handle it.”

Keith reached for the phone, then, as he always did when he was tempted to report the fights at the Cavanaughs’, hung up again before he dialed. If he called the police, Ed Cavanaugh would know immediately who had reported the fight at his house. And there were too many nights when Keith had to be at sea, and Rosemary and the girls would be alone in the house. He couldn’t risk Ed taking out his drunken anger on them when Keith himself was hundreds of miles away.

“Shit,” he said softly, pouring himself a second glass of
wine. Then he smiled sadly at Rosemary. “I guess Cassie’s story didn’t work for Eric. But at least she tried, didn’t she?”

For a moment Rosemary said nothing. Was that really all the lie had been? An attempt to help Eric? Or had it been meant for them too? She wished she could be sure.

She dismissed the uncharitable thoughts from her mind and made herself smile. “Yes, I guess she did.” She reached over and squeezed her husband’s hand. “We’ll make things work out. She’s got some problems, but nothing we can’t handle.”

“And it’s hard to get mad at someone whose always looking out for someone else, isn’t it?” Keith added. “She did it for Jennifer the other night, and she did it for Eric today. Whatever mistakes Diana may have made, I think she raised a good kid.”

But Rosemary made no reply, for once again her mind was occupied with the strange feeling she had about Cassie, the feeling that the things Cassie was doing, no matter how well-intentioned they seemed on the surface, were cloaking something else. Cassie, she was beginning to believe, was a lot more complicated than she seemed on the surface. Something was going on behind those large brown eyes of hers, and it wasn’t something that Rosemary understood.

More and more, she was growing certain that it was something she should fear.

But that’s silly, she told herself once again. She’s only a child. What can there be in a child to be afraid of? But as the afternoon turned into evening, and the evening turned to night, Rosemary found herself watching Cassie, looking for something.

What it was, she didn’t know.…

Late that night, as Miranda Sikes carefully banked the fire in the ancient wood-burning stove that sat next to her makeshift kitchen sink, the nondescript grayish cat with the black markings on its back wove around her feet, rubbing itself against her ankles. She finished with the stove, closing the vent to let in only enough air to keep the fire going, then turned the oil lantern on her table down low.

She began stripping off her clothes, hanging them carefully in the armoire against the east wall, and finally slipped
into a worn flannel nightgown. As she turned the bed down, the cat leaped up and slithered under the covers, but Miranda shook her head.

“No, no, no, Sumi,” she crooned.

Reaching into the depths of the bed, she scooped the cat up and cradled it in her arms. Stroking its belly, she looked down into its glowing yellow eyes. “Didn’t we have a long talk yesterday, and didn’t I explain to you that you can’t come back here anymore?”

The cat mewed softly, and one of its forepaws stroked Miranda’s wrist.

“Yes,” Miranda crooned. “I know what you want, but you can’t always have what you want, can you? And you just can’t live here anymore, no matter how much you want to. You have to stay with Cassandra. You have to stay with her and do what she wants you to do. She needs you now, doesn’t she?”

Opening the front door, she stooped down and slid the cat out into the night.

The cat hesitated, looking up almost questioningly into Miranda’s eyes. But once again Miranda shook her head.

“No, you can’t come back in. You know where you live now, and you know what you’re to do.” Quietly but firmly she shut the door.

The cat stared at the closed door for a moment, then bounded off the porch and down the slope into the darkness of the marsh. It moved quickly, slipping through the reeds and grasses like a dark shadow, its eyes glittering brightly in the starlight.

As the clock in the church tower struck midnight, the cat slipped once more through Cassie’s window. A few minutes later it was asleep at its new master’s feet.

By the end of the week Rosemary Winslow was finding that she no longer looked forward to each new day. So on Saturday morning, instead of getting up at her usual time, she allowed herself to sleep in, lingering in bed, not quite asleep, but somehow unwilling to dress and begin the day.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Keith asked when he came up to look for her just after seven.

The look of concern on his face and the slight tremor in his voice almost made Rosemary laugh out loud, but when she had reassured him and he’d gone downstairs again, she lay awake, a strange feeling of ennui overcoming her. Slowly she’d come to realize that she wasn’t nearly as all right as she’d told Keith she was, though she still couldn’t put her finger on precisely what was wrong.

Part of it was simply the fact of Cassie’s being there. She understood that and accepted it. Time would take care of that. It was simply a matter of waiting for new routines to establish themselves. What, after all, had she expected? Had she really thought that a teenaged girl could come into their lives without having anything change? Of course not.

Yet deep down inside she suspected that she had hoped for precisely that. A part of her knew that she’d hoped nothing would change, that somehow Cassie would simply meld into their family, sliding naturally into her role as Jennifer’s older sister and her own eldest daughter. Which, of course, was a stupid idea, even if it had been an unconscious
one. And if she was completely honest with herself, she also knew that so far everything had gone much better than she could realistically have hoped for.

And yet …

She cast her mind back over the week, remembering all the little things that had happened, the little things that really shouldn’t have bothered her but somehow did.

The biggest of those things was the cat.

Tuesday morning when Cassie had come down to breakfast, the cat had been with her. Rosemary’s first instinct had been to tell her to put it out and not let it come back in again, but when Jennifer had seen it, she’d squealed with excitement and immediately demanded to be allowed to hold it. Rosemary had opened her mouth to protest, but before she could say anything, Cassie had set the cat in Jennifer’s lap. It immediately closed its eyes and began purring.

“His name’s Sumi,” Cassie said.

“Sumi?” Keith repeated. “How did you come up with that?”

“I dreamed it,” Cassie replied. She turned to Rosemary, smiling softly. “When you dream something, you should pay attention to it, don’t you think?”

Before she could even think, Rosemary had nodded. She wanted to protest again and insist that the cat must go, but Cassie had artfully changed the subject. By the time she was able to turn the conversation back to the cat, it all seemed to be over.

“But I always wanted a cat,” Jennifer wailed. “And it’s not a kitten, like the other one was. This one’s all grown up, and I bet it won’t even scratch the furniture or anything.”

“You have to admit it’s kind of pretty,” Keith argued. “It almost looks like a gray Siamese, except I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“But it’s just an alley cat,” Rosemary protested. “And it looks far too well-fed to be a stray. It has to belong to someone.”

It wasn’t until the girls had left for school and Keith had gone down to the marina to work on the
Morning Star
, that Rosemary realized that throughout the discussion Cassie had said nothing. She had merely brought the cat downstairs and let her father and half sister talk Rosemary into letting it stay.
As she’d loaded the breakfast dishes into the washer, the cat had sat quietly on a chair, watching her.

Watching her, Rosemary had thought, as if it knew exactly what had happened, and knew that it—and Cassie—had gotten the best of her.

That’s stupid, Rosemary told herself now. It’s only a cat, and cats don’t think. Even so, all week long, whenever she found herself alone in the house with the cat, she’d kept getting the feeling that the cat was watching her, assessing her somehow. As each day passed, she grew more wary of the animal. More wary, and also more suspicious.

Where had it come from?

What did it want?

Unreasonable as she knew the thought was, she had a growing certainty that the cat did, indeed, want something.

But it wasn’t just the cat.

One night—Wednesday night, she remembered—she had asked Cassie how things were going at school.

Cassie had shrugged. “Okay.”

“What about the kids?” Rosemary asked as casually as she could. “Do you like them?”

Though Cassie’s face had tightened, she had shrugged once more. “They’re okay, I guess,” she said, though her eyes never left her plate.

Rosemary opened her mouth to speak again, then changed her mind, remembering the conversation she’d had with Cassie on Monday. So far Cassie had not cut school again, nor had she complained of any problems with her classmates.

She hadn’t spoken of school at all, in fact. Each day she’d come home and disappear into her room, presumably to do her homework. Once, when Rosemary had been passing through the upstairs hall, she’d paused outside the closed door to Cassie’s room and listened.

Within, the soft tones of music from the radio had been barely audible, and above that she’d heard the sound of Cassie’s voice, murmuring softly.

Immediately, unbidden, an image of Miranda Sikes had come to Rosemary’s mind—Miranda, pushing her grocery cart slowly along the sidewalk, muttering to herself in barely audible tones.

No!
Rosemary told herself, forcing the image from her
mind.
She’s just talking to Sumi, that’s all. Everyone talks to pets, and there’s nothing strange about it
.

Then why had she become increasingly uneasy about it as the week had passed? Why had she begun to feel that though Cassie was being perfectly cooperative, appearing whenever she was called and doing whatever was asked of her, she was separating herself from the rest of the family, turning increasingly inward?

Then, late on Thursday afternoon, something else had happened.

She had been in Jennifer’s room finally unable to stand any longer the mess that never seemed to bother Jennifer at all. She was packing Jennifer’s toys away in the chest below the window when she’d glanced outside.

In the cemetery on the other side of the fence, kneeling in front of one of the graves, she’d seen Cassie. For several minutes she’d watched in silence.

Cassie seemed to be reading one of the headstones. Then she reached out and touched it. Her hand rested on the granite for a few moments before she moved on to the next one, where she repeated the process.

Finally, after about ten minutes, Rosemary left Jennifer’s room, went downstairs and out the back door, then crossed to the low fence that separated the yard from the graveyard.

“Cassie?” she asked, keeping her voice low.

Cassie froze, her left hand, about to touch another of the grave markers, hovering in midair. Slowly, almost furtively, she’d turned around and looked at Rosemary.

“What are you doing?” Rosemary asked.

Cassie’s eyes flicked almost guiltily away from Rosemary. “I was just reading the gravestones,” she replied. She met Rosemary’s gaze, and once more Rosemary saw that look of challenge in her eyes. “They’re—they’re interesting.”

Rosemary’s brows creased into a frown. “But you can hardly see them.”

Cassie hesitated, then nodded and got to her feet. “It’s all right,” she said. “I was just about done anyway.” She came to the fence and scrambled over it, then looked at Rosemary uncertainly. “Did I do something wrong?” she asked. “I mean, aren’t I allowed to go into the graveyard?”

Suddenly flustered, Rosemary shook her head. “No, of
course not,” she said. “It’s just … well, it seemed like an odd thing for you to be doing, I suppose.”

Cassie’s eyes immediately darkened. “Well, maybe I’m just an odd person,” she said, her voice quavering. “But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that either!” Covering her face with her hands, she fled toward the house.

Rosemary took a single step after her then stopped. It was too late—once again she’d said the wrong thing, and once again Cassie was upset. She took a deep breath, wondering once more why it was that she seemed to have such a talent for saying the wrong thing to the girl. She was about to go back into the house herself when she changed her mind and carefully climbed the low picket fence into the graveyard. It was nearly dark now, and the huge ancient trees that dotted the little cemetery seemed to be closing their branches overhead, as if trying to shut out what little light remained.

The air in the graveyard seemed to carry a chill Rosemary had not felt a few moments before.

Slowly, almost apprehensively, she moved toward the grave Cassie had been kneeling over when she’d come outside a few minutes ago. It was the grave of Rebecca Sikes, who had been Miranda Sikes’s mother.

Next to that was the grave of Charity Sikes, Rebecca’s mother.

Rosemary moved slowly down the row of graves, examining the stones that marked the memory of the generations of Sikes women.

It wasn’t the first time she’d looked at these graves—indeed, over the years she’d read most of the headstones in the village cemetery. And long ago she’d noted the oddity about the Sikes women.