Brass Ring

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Give me the key,” Randy said. He took the key from her hand and opened the other two doors while Claire simply stared. Before her was an entire collection of crazy-maned, prancing, snorting, pawing, untamed horses. She wondered why as a child she had felt no fear of these frenzied animals. There was no denying that she felt a thread of fear now.

  As dingy as the outside of the building was, the inside was spotless and glowing. Once the doors were fully open, shards of sunlight cut across the colors. The glossy paint and gold leaf and the oval mirrors on the inside rounding board made her squint.

  The mirrors.

  She looked away from them quickly, and she kept her face lowered as Randy took her hand and they began circling the carousel.

  “The side of the horse that faces out is called the romance side.” Claire could barely get the words past the knot of fear in her throat. The damn mirrors. She tried to keep her voice even. “That’s where all the decoration is, on the romance side. All the identity that’s shown to the world.” She stepped onto the platform, pulling Randy with her, and walked among the horses to show him their plain sides. “The real horse is back here,” she said.

  Randy was clearly enchanted. “It’s incredible to me that one man carved all these horses by hand.” Randy stroked his fingers over the intricate plated armor covering the side of a black stallion. “What skill.”

  Ahead of her, Claire caught sight of something nestled among the horses. She let go of Randy’s hand, still keeping her eyes lowered, and walked toward the glossy green shape.

  A chariot. Indeed, there was one. The carved wood of its sides was gently sloping, the shape disturbingly familiar; she had been doodling the curved line of that wood for months. The chariot was short, but wide, with one broad seat upholstered in brown leather. The wood was painted a deep green, and a gold dragon and a woman dressed in white gossamer were carved into its elegant romance side.

  Randy had caught up with her, and she gripped his arm.

  “What is it?” He followed her eyes to the chariot.

  She could almost smell the strong, spicy cologne. She could almost feel the scratch of an unshaven cheek against her face. She could hear the kind words.

  You’re a beautiful little girl. I love dark-haired little girls. And you’re smart, aren’t you? Smart and pretty. Easy to love.

  One meaty hand held her down—gently, yes, but holding her all the same—while the other touched her where she didn’t want to be touched. She could feel the buttons of his green shirt pressing against her skin.

  I won’t hurt you. That doesn’t hurt, does it? It feels sort of good, doesn’t it?

  Claire forced herself to look up. Above her, the gridwork of the carousel formed a pattern like the cobweb of a spider. The wavy oval mirrors were filled at first with green, then with her face, a child’s face. He was nuzzling her, his hand tugging down her pants. Her eyes in the mirror were filled with a confused sort of terror.

  Claire backed away from the carousel, nausea quickly building inside her.

  “Claire.” Randy touched her shoulder. “What’s the matter?”

  “Close it up, Randy,” she said, turning away. “Please just close it up.” She crossed the platform and stepped out into the sunlight. A bench was nearby, and she somehow managed to reach it before her vision blurred and blackened. She sat down, lowering her head to her knees. She could hear the doors rolling shut over the carousel, over Titan, over the chariot, and she covered her ears with her hands.

  She straightened dizzily as Randy walked toward her. He stood behind the bench, resting his hands on her shoulders.

  “You saw a ghost,” he said.

  She nodded. “He did it to me, too,” she said softly. “Zed Patterson. I must have known what he wanted with me that morning in the barn, because it wouldn’t have been the first time. I sent Vanessa instead. I was scared. I couldn’t go through it again.” She turned to look up at him. “How could I possibly have forgotten?”

  Randy walked around the bench and sat next to her. “You grew up in a family that taught you how to forget anything unpleasant and put a candy-coated lie in its place. They just forgot to tell you what to do when the coating wore off.”

  They sat quietly, Claire with her back to the carousel house. They had planned to get a hotel room somewhere nearby and stay the night—in separate beds—before driving back to Virginia, but now she wanted to escape this place. She wanted to leave the carousel and her memories here in this winter-dead park she would never visit again.

  And there was something else she wanted. Something Randy knew before she did.

  He took her hand and rubbed the back of it. “Do you want to see Jon?” he asked.

  She nodded. Yes. She wanted more than anything to see her husband.

  51

  VIENNA

  FROM THE WINDOW IN the kitchen, Jon saw Claire’s car pull into the driveway. He was surprised. She’d told him she would be gone this weekend—away with Randy, no doubt. The man with whom she supposedly had no physical relationship.

  He was making chili for a potluck at Pat’s that night, and he was stirring the pot when Claire walked through the back door. She gave him a weak smile and burst into tears.

  His heart contracted sharply. Had something happened to Susan? He couldn’t bring himself to ask that question.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She pulled one of the chairs from the kitchen table and sat down, digging a tissue from her purse.

  “I went up to Winchester Village to see the carousel,” she said, “and I remembered something.”

  Jon lowered the heat under the chili and pushed his chair closer to her. “Go on.”

  She twisted the tissue between her fingers. “Zed Patterson did it to me, too,” she said. “I remembered it vividly.”

  He listened as she described what she’d remembered. If she wondered why his face registered no shock, she didn’t say. She was too lost in the past to notice. He reached up once to brush away the tears that she’d needed to cry for a very long time. Tears for a little girl who, in many ways, had never been allowed to grow up.

  When she was through talking, she blew her nose, swept back her hair, and sat up straight. “I made a decision driving back to Virginia,” she said. “I’m going to go public with this. Vanessa’s getting my support whether she wants it or not.”

  She was very close to the truth, he thought. Close enough for him to fill in the gaps without harming her. He touched her knee. “I think that’s fine,” he said slowly. “I think it’s important for you to do that, but…Claire? What more do you remember?”

  Her eyes widened in exasperation. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “How did your grandfather die?”

  She frowned. “You’ve asked me that before, Jon, and I told you, I don’t know. How is that relevant? All I remember is that he sort of…disappeared. No one ever really talked about it. Eventually I realized he was dead.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little strange?”

  “My family was a little strange.”

  Jon sighed. He reached his hand toward her. “Come here, Claire.”

  She hesitated.

  “Please.” He leaned forward to take her hand, and she let herself be pulled onto his lap. She sat woodenly, though. He rested his hand lightly on her back.

  “I’m not certain if I’m doing the right thing in telling you this,” he began. “I’m not certain if I’ve done the right thing all along, but I’m not going to play your mother’s game any longer.”

  She looked at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “You remember when Mellie was living here? How I spent a lot of time with her because I was sick and home from work for a while?”

  “Yes. I was glad to see you two getting close.”

  “We did get close. And Mellie told me a lot, Claire. I guess something happens to people when they know they’re going to die.”

  A look of
alarm passed over Claire’s face. “What did she tell you?”

  “She said how glad she was that you’d found me. That she thought I was a good person and a good husband.”

  Claire’s eyes filled again, and she raised her arm to circle his shoulders. “You were,” she said. “You are.”

  “She said that she’d been afraid you would never be able to find happiness as an adult because of all the trauma you’d endured as a child. She told me it had taken every ounce of her creativity to prevent you from being permanently scarred.”

  “Her creativity?” Claire wrinkled her nose. “What was she talking about?”

  “Think about it, Claire. Think of all that happened in your family that you remember so little about. You forgot those things because Mellie made sure you would. She told me she worked hard to twist things around, so you’d forget the bad and remember it as good, or at worst, benign.”

  Seems like I was always having to cover things up, Mellie had said to him. Claire made it easy, though. She always wanted to believe me.

  Claire shook her head. “No wonder I’ve been feeling so insane lately.”

  “Do you want to hear what I know?” he asked.

  She nodded uncertainly.

  He wrapped his arms around her and held her close as he told her what Mellie had revealed to him.

  He had pressed Mellie to elaborate on the truths she’d claimed to have twisted, and she’d finally relented, swearing him to secrecy. “It could only damage Claire if she knew,” she’d said.

  The tale Mellie told began several weeks after Vanessa’s abduction by her father. Mellie’s father—Claire’s grandfather—was suffering from phlebitis and emphysema that summer and was not able to work much. On one particular day, however, he asked Mellie to go out to the barn with him to help him carry some tools back to the house.

  Mellie had trembled as she related the story to Jon. “I knew Claire was in the barn helping the deputy sheriff, Zed Patterson, with something on the carousel,” she’d said. “At least that’s what I thought she was doing. But when my father and I walked into the barn, we could see that Zed and Claire were on the seat of the chariot. I didn’t get a good look. I just remember that Claire was lying down, and Zed was sort of kneeling over her. But Daddy got a look, all right. He was a gentle man, a teddy bear, but he flew into a rage the likes of which I’d never seen before. He started beating on Zed, bloodying his nose, but he was no match for a man in his twenties. Zed got the upper hand right away. He wasn’t really punching my father, but he was shoving him around. Poor Daddy with his bad legs. He kept falling down and struggling to get up again. I tried to get between them. I wanted to kill the bastard myself.”

  Mellie had hung her head then, shamefaced. “You see,” she’d said, “I’d been having an affair with Zed. I thought he was so charming. I was touched that he gave my girls—especially Claire—so much attention, when her father gave her so little.”

  After a minute, she continued her story. “Claire was kneeling on the chariot. There was terror in her little face. She loved her grandpa more than anyone. More than me, I think. It must have upset her terribly to see him getting shoved around that way. I told her to run and hide, and she scooted past all of us and ran into the workshop. I thought she was safe in there. Then, all of a sudden…” Mellie’s voice trailed off, and Jon had to prompt her to get her talking again.

  “All of a sudden, Claire ran out of the workshop and over to where the men were fighting. She was so fast, I couldn’t stop her. She reached them just as Zed pushed my father for the last time. Daddy fell to the ground, cracking his head on the platform, and Claire charged at Zed, screaming like a soldier in battle. It was only at the last second that I realized she had one of Daddy’s carving knives in her hand. She ran at Zed and got him in the groin. His pants were up and zipped, but she got him good, and there was blood everywhere. On the floor of the carousel. On the horses. On Claire. I thought I’d never get the mess cleaned up.” Mellie broke down then, and it was a few minutes before Jon could force himself to coax her to continue.

  “I told Claire to run to the house and call an ambulance, and she took off,” Mellie said. “I tried to help my father, and Zed took the opportunity to make a run for it. When Claire got back to the barn, I could already hear the sirens in the distance. I closed the barn doors and wouldn’t let her in. I told her Grandpa was going to be okay, but that the ambulance would take him to the hospital for a few days just to keep an eye on him. Actually, they told me later he’d died of a heart attack before he even hit the floor.”

  “Why did you lie to her?” Jon had asked Mellie, incredulous.

  “How could I tell her the truth? Look at what had happened to this child in the space of a few weeks. She’d lost her sister and her father, then her grandfather. She’d stabbed a man. She’d been…molested”— Mellie winced at the word—”who knows how many times. Looking back, I realized that morning was probably not the first time it happened. Zed was always after her to help him in the barn. I had to protect Claire from as much as I could.”

  Silence filled the room when Jon had finished telling Claire all he remembered of Mellie’s story. Claire was leaning against him. She was shaking, and he felt the rapid beat of her heart against his ribcage. He rubbed his hand up and down her arm as the silence stretched on.

  Finally, Claire spoke. “My mother was so crazy,” she said softly, her voice thick. “And she left a few things out, I believe, when she told you that story. Unless I’m making it up.” She pressed her hand to her head, and Jon caught her fingers and drew them down to her lap again.

  “Trust your memory, Claire,” he said. “I think it’s growing more accurate by the minute.”

  “Well, I do remember the fight she was talking about. I remember the blood.” She sniffled. “Remember the blood on porcelain? The flashback?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “It wasn’t porcelain after all; it was Titan.” She took in a breath. “I also remember my mother screaming at Zed, something like, ‘What were you doing to her?’’ and he answered, ‘It’s her fault,’ pointing at me. ‘She’s always after me.’ I guess I thought it was my fault. When Grandpa fell, I thought somehow I was to blame.”

  “Oh, Claire.” He hugged her hard. Her body quaked with her weeping.

  “And you know what?” she asked after a moment. “Grandpa never came back from the hospital, and no one said a word about it. Mellie and Grandma, as far as I can remember, never shed a tear in front of me, and somehow I knew better than to ask where he was or why he didn’t come home. If I asked and the answer was bad, they might remember it was my fault.”

  They sat quietly for a few minutes. Jon wasn’t anxious to move. Claire was leaning heavily against him now, and he would hold her as long as she would allow it. After a while, she spoke again.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?” she asked.

  Jon sighed. “I was afraid it would do more harm than good. You always seemed so content with your life, and I loved your cheerfulness and your spirit. I didn’t want you to change. When you started having flashbacks, I thought of telling you, but Pat said people need to work through repressed memories at their own pace, and I was frankly glad to be taken off the hook. I knew Randy was helping you sort through the past in a way I didn’t have the guts to do.” His eyes suddenly burned, and he pressed his lips to her shoulder. “I’ve been afraid, though, Claire. I’ve been so afraid of losing you to Randy for good.” He felt the warmth of tears on his cheeks. “Have I lost you?”

  She sat up straight to look down at him. Her nose was red, her own eyes brimming. “You asked me once what Randy did that made it so easy for me to talk to him,” she said. “I think I said that he listened well or something like that, but I know that isn’t it. It’s not anything Randy does that makes it easier. It’s that I can tell him about terrible things that happened to me, and it doesn’t hurt him the way it hurts you.” She brushed her fingertips across his wet cheek. “He doesn’
t cry when I tell him sad things. He doesn’t love me the way you do, Jon. And I don’t love him the way I love you.” She kissed him softly. “You haven’t lost me. That is, if you still want me after all I’ve put you through.”

  He pulled her close enough to bury his face in the valley between her shoulder and throat. “I still want you, Harte,” he said. “I never stopped wanting you.”

  They held each other awhile longer. He heard Claire’s breathing grow even and felt her relax in his arms. And when she spoke again, her voice had lost the sound of tears.

  “Where did that courageous little girl ever go?” she asked.

  Jon smiled to himself, turning his head to kiss her throat. “She’s right here,” he said. “She’s right where I want her.”

  52

  WASHINGTON. D.C.

  BRIAN HAD STOPPED PACKING. Vanessa stepped out of the bathroom of their cozy hotel suite to find him staring out the window, the suitcase only half filled on the bed.

  “We’ve got to get going.” She tightened the bath towel across her chest. “The guy at the front desk said the airport traffic’s unpredictable.”

  Brian turned to face her. “I changed our flight,” he said. “We’re not leaving until tonight.” The light from the window behind him made his features dark and unreadable.

  She frowned. “Why would you do that?”

  Brian stuffed his hands into his pants pockets. “Because your brother-in-law called and asked us to come to a press conference this morning. Claire is planning to make some sort of announcement.”

  “About?”

  “He didn’t go into it. He just said he really wishes we’d be there.”

  Vanessa lowered herself into one of the armchairs by the window. In the distance, the Washington Monument nearly glowed in the sunlight. Brian had changed their plans, radically, and she wondered why she felt so little annoyance at him for not consulting her. She tried to muster up a solid sense of indignation, but it remained small and petty and not worth expressing. Still, a press conference?