Wild Orchids

by Jude Deveraux

  She jumped up, threw her arms around my neck, and began kissing my face as though I were her father.

  Maybe she felt daughterly toward me, but I certainly didn’t feel fatherly toward her. Rather than make a fool of myself by showing her this, I kept my arms at my side and my lips closed—and moved them away when she got too near.

  After this moment of childish exuberance, she pulled her face away, but her arms were still around my neck. “I’m sorry about Rebecca,” she said softly.

  Part of me wanted her to get far away from me, and part of me wanted her to get much closer. If she didn’t move away soon, the closer part was going to win.

  “And your wife,” she said.

  That did it. I put my hands on her shoulders, moved her away, and got up. “Fix up the old building,” I said, “and give me the bill.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jackie

  He was great about the building. Of course I had to work hard to lead him up to my idea, but it was worth it.

  It seemed that all my life I’d had an affinity for cameras, and my father once said that I was taking pictures by the time I was three. I’d taken some courses in photography, but with the way we moved around, I never got to complete any of them. And I’d never been able to take all the pictures I wanted because film and processing cost too much. Over the years I’d been tempted to apply for a job in a photography studio, but my vanity wouldn’t allow it. I was afraid that if I learned to take pictures from someone commercial I’d never develop my own style.

  That, and the fact that the only photography studio in the last three towns my dad and I lived in had been in the local mall.

  My plan had been to let Kirk support me while I used my savings and my inheritance to open a small photography studio. When I told Ford about Kirk, he was certainly interested! Ford asked me about fifty questions about who, where, and how much. I told him I never wanted anything to do with Kirk again, but Ford kept asking me questions, and since I was trying to get him to finance my new business, I couldn’t very well snap that it was none of his business.

  In the end Ford came through and said he’d pay for fixing up the building so I could use it. I didn’t mention that I would, of course, have to add a small powder room onto the back of the house. When kids have to go, they have to go, so you have to have a WC nearby. There was water in the house, but I’d have to hook onto the city sewage and that would cost.

  Nor did I mention that I’d also need money to buy equipment. I had my camera and a wonderful lens, but I’d also need lights and soft boxes, reflectors, tripods, flash brackets, a few backgrounds, and, well, some darkroom equipment and supplies, as I hadn’t—ha ha—seen a super photo processing shop in or around Cole Creek. And I’d need another lens or two. Or three.

  During our long conversation about my opening a business, he asked me why I’d changed my mind and no longer wanted to get out of Cole Creek as fast as possible. I think I lied well. Actually, it was more that I left out some things. I told the truth when I said the name “Harriet” had rung a big gong in my head—and Ford nearly knocked me over when he knew who Harriet Lane was.

  During the night, I’d decided that my overactive imagination had made me believe I knew more than I did about what did or did not happen in Cole Creek. By dinner—candlelight, seafood, chocolate cake—I was calmer since Ford had agreed to renovate the building, so we talked in depth about what we both knew and had found out. It was our first real heart-to-heart in days.

  I told him about my several déjà vu instances in Cole Creek, and about how I knew the house so well.

  “But you didn’t know that building was out there,” he said.

  “Maybe I did,” I answered, because I’d gone straight to it on the first morning I started cleaning up the garden.

  As always, he was an attentive listener. I told him I remembered so many things about the house that I even knew where the hidden room was—and until that moment I hadn’t remembered there even was a secret room. At that, we looked at each other in complete understanding.

  “Second floor,” I said. “Behind all those boxes.”

  We jumped up so quickly that both our chairs hit the floor, and we took off running, reaching the doorway at the same time. I was going to push ahead of him, but I remembered the camera equipment I wanted, so I stepped back. “You first,” I said politely.

  Ford looked at me as though he was going to be a gentleman and let me go ahead, but then he said, “Beat you up the stairs,” and took off running.

  What could I do after a challenge like that? What he didn’t know was that a little door in the kitchen, which looked like a broom closet, actually opened to a set of stairs so narrow I doubt if Ford could have climbed them. As he ran for the big front stairs, I slipped up the back and was waiting for him when he arrived.

  The look on his face! If I’d had my camera that photo would have won every prize given.

  I knew he was dying to ask me how I’d beaten him to the top, but he didn’t. Instead, we ran to the storage room and began flinging boxes into the hallway.

  It wasn’t much of a secret room. It was just a part of a room that had been made into a closet, then sealed off. Someone (me as a child?) had pulled the old wallpaper off so the door could open a few inches. We had to pull hard to open it wide enough to allow Ford to get inside.

  “Why would someone seal off a closet?” Ford asked.

  We were together inside the small space and it was absolutely dark.

  Ford rummaged around inside his pockets and withdrew a book of matches—the contents of his pockets rivaled a nine-year-old boy’s—and lit one. When he held the flame up, all I saw was old wallpaper behind him.

  But Ford’s eyes widened until I could see the whites. He blew out the match, then said in a voice of such exaggerated calm that it put fear into me, “Get out. Open the door and get out.”

  I did as he said—one obeys that tone—and left the closet, Ford close behind me. Once he was out, he closed the door and leaned against it.

  “What was it?” I whispered, and the word “devil” went through me. Was the devil in this house? Maybe as a kid I’d found this closet and I’d seen—

  “Bees,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The biggest beehive I’ve ever seen was behind you. The bees probably built in that closet, and instead of getting rid of it, some lazy so-and-so sealed the door shut.”

  “I thought—” I began, then started to laugh, and when I told Ford about my devil thoughts, he laughed, too.

  We laughed together but we didn’t touch. I’d decided to do no more touching of him. Earlier I’d spontaneously thrown my arms around his neck and kissed him, just as I would have done with my father. But suddenly I didn’t feel like I was with my father.

  When I’d pulled back from him, I thought that he didn’t look old at all. In fact, those lines at his eyes were more like character lines than old age wrinkles. And he had a very nice mouth. In fact, the more time I spent with him, the better looking he got. John Travolta, I thought. Even as out of shape as he was, Travolta was still sexy. And so was Ford.

  Abruptly, I’d dropped my arms from around his neck. First I was lusting after a gorgeous seventeen-year-old, and now I was drooling over a man old enough to be my…Well, too old for me, anyway.

  I decided I needed to start dating.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ford

  Considering everything, I decided that the wisest thing to do was to change my priorities. I would stamp down my desperate need to know why and redirect my mind to something other than Jackie’s devil story. And Jackie’s passion for her photographic studio gave me my new direction. I’m sure that, long ago, I must have looked as she did. When I first started writing, I was driven, and writing was all I could think of—just as Jackie was driven to get her photography studio set up and find out whether or not she could make it in that world.

  We had over a week of peace and quiet, and, in spite
of my intentions, I thought about things. Facts were piling up in a way that made me feel sure that when she was a child, Jackie had seen something she shouldn’t have, namely, a murder. And I suspected that her mother had been one of the people who’d helped kill that poor woman, and her lack of remorse was part of what had driven Jackie’s father to abduct their child and run away.

  I wasn’t a psychiatrist or I would probably have wanted Jackie to “get it out.” But, personally, I’ve always thought that releasing great pain was overrated as a cure. What good would it do if I brought all that to the surface again? Would it help Jackie to remember that she actually saw—and heard—a woman’s slow, agonizing death? And if we did find out who killed her, would it bring her back to life? And what would the murderer—or murderers—do to an eyewitness?

  Whatever my excuse, I decided not to continue my pursuit of the devil story. I hoped that whoever had tossed that rock over the wall and given us information wouldn’t contact us again. And when the package from the forensics man in Charlotte didn’t arrive, I didn’t call and remind him.

  Okay, so the truth was, I’d had an idea for a book that had no devil in it. It was a book about loneliness, about a man who’d lost faith in himself and others, but who, eventually, finds something to believe in. I hadn’t worked out the details of the novel yet, such as exactly what the man came to believe in, but I felt that it would come to me.

  And the deeper truth was that I was beginning to enjoy myself. I wasn’t such a fool that I didn’t know that I was once again in some semblance of a marriage, the time when my life had been happy. And I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t know I must have been looking for that from the many secretaries I’d hired and fired. I hadn’t wanted a research assistant, I’d wanted someone like me, someone who had no life and wanted to join in my life. I used to yell at them that they were incompetent, when the truth was that I was angry—or maybe jealous—when they went home to their friends and relatives. I wanted to scream that I’d once had a family, people to share Thanksgiving and Christmas with.

  But I couldn’t do that. For one thing, no one would have believed me. The world thinks that if you’re a person who gives out autographs, you don’t need what “ordinary people” need.

  Right. Lonely at the top. Cry all the way to the bank. I’d heard it all before. But whatever my problem was, I found that I was happier than I’d been since Pat died, and I didn’t want to mess it up. I was writing down ideas in the mornings, but in the afternoons I found myself sitting in the garden that Jackie was wrestling from the weeds, sipping lemonade, and talking with whomever stopped by to visit.

  For all that she was often as sharp as an artichoke leaf, people liked Jackie and her enthusiasm for her new studio was infectious. Every afternoon someone came by to see how the work was going. And I must say that the excitement made me want to be part of it all. At dinner I’d go through the thick B & H catalog that the photography company in New York had sent Jackie and we’d talk about all the gewgaws that are available for a photographer. I read all the books she had on photography, a grand total of three, then ordered seventeen more books from Amazon.com, and after they arrived, we spent the evenings going over them.

  One afternoon Tessa, Allie’s daughter, came to stay with us. I don’t know if her mother was working or if she just wanted a break—or if Jackie wanted the girl to visit. Whatever, I ended up enjoying the child’s company.

  At first I was annoyed by her presence. My experience with children was limited, and mostly, I wanted them to go away. So I wasn’t happy when I went down for my lemonade and cookies and found Jackie sitting there with a nine-year-old girl. I felt that my time was being intruded on and, besides, how was I supposed to deal with her? Should I ignore the child and talk of adult things? Or was it better to ask the kid about her school and heap praise on a bunch of stick figure drawings?

  Since the girl didn’t say anything, I decided to ignore her and talk to Jackie. But when the phone rang, Jackie ran to answer it, and I was left alone with the girl. She didn’t seem to be any more interested in me than I was in her so we sat there and drank lemonade in silence.

  After a while it seemed that Jackie was going to stay on the phone forever so I said to the kid, “What were you inventing?”

  One thing I like about kids is that they have no idea of rules. They don’t have their minds full of what a person should and shouldn’t do. For instance, a kid doesn’t know that you shouldn’t celebrate the death of a bully of a cousin. So, based on the little I knew, I guessed that I wouldn’t need to make small talk about the weather before leading up to the more interesting things. And besides, I’d never yet met a kid who paid any attention to the weather.

  “Things,” she said, and looked at me sideways in a way that I recognized as an invitation.

  I didn’t answer, but just held my hand up in a gesture that said, You lead the way.

  I followed her into the bush. The jungle, really. Way back in the corner of my property, where no cutting implement had been for many years, she showed me an opening against the ground that a rabbit would have loved. She looked at the size of me and said, “You can’t get through there.”

  I’d had all I could take of females telling me I was too big. I gave her a look and said, “Try me.”

  I don’t know what got into me, but I ended up slithering through the brush on my belly like a snake chasing a rat. Of course I enlarged the hole as I moved, which took its toll on my clothes and whatever skin was exposed, but I finally made it into the interior.

  Inside, the girl had formed a green igloo. “This is great,” I said and really meant it. Sitting down on the ground, I looked up at the way she’d twisted and woven the vines and tree branches together. I wasn’t sure but I thought the place might be tight enough to repel water.

  She was a homely little girl, but when I looked at her smile of pride I could almost see her someday running a corporation. She was smart, determined, and an individual. She wasn’t a run-of-the-mill kid who colored in the lines and did everything to please her teachers.

  “Shown this to anyone else?” I asked.

  When she shook her head no, she made me feel good. Reaching behind her, she picked up a little green thing and handed it to me. It was an assemblage of leaves, sticks, moss, bits of mud, a rock here and there, and acorns—and it was fantastic. “I like it,” I said, and again she grinned.

  When she didn’t say anything more, I realized she wanted us to leave, maybe so Jackie wouldn’t see the hideout. Stretching out on my belly, I slithered back through the now-larger tunnel and out into the sunlight. When Jackie at last got off the telephone, Tessa and I were back in our chairs, looking for all the world as though we’d never left them. When Jackie turned away to say something to Nate, I winked at Tessa and she grinned at me before ducking her head and looking back at her lemonade.

  For days, I made notes for my book about the lonely man and spent the afternoons enjoying the social life Jackie was carving out for the two of us. We had a second barbeque dinner with Allie, Tessa, and some people from Asheville who were staying in the area. Since Jackie had met them in the grocery, she and I almost had a fight about her inviting strangers to dinner. But they turned out to be nice people and we had a good time.

  One afternoon I went downstairs but found no lemonade, no cookies, no Nate working, and no Jackie. After searching, I found her in the kitchen laughing with a good-looking woman who seemed vaguely familiar. Jackie introduced her as D. L. Hazel.

  “Ah,” I said, “the sculptor.” I was proud of myself for having remembered that, but still, it didn’t explain why she looked familiar.

  She was about my age or maybe a bit older, and I could see that she’d once been beautiful. She still was, but she’d faded somewhat. And maybe I imagined it, but I thought I saw something unhappy in her eyes. When I caught Jackie looking at me, I knew she had something to tell me later.

  Sure enough, after Dessie, as she told us to call her, left,
Jackie told me that the woman had once been an actress on a soap opera. “Ah,” I said. I didn’t say so but I knew which one. It was the one Pat’s mother had watched and I’d seen it often when I sat by her peeling potatoes for dinner.

  “She quit?” I asked. “To live here?”

  Jackie shrugged to tell me that she couldn’t understand it either. “The story is that she grew up in Cole Creek, but left when she was quite young to go to L.A. She got a job on a soap right away and was a big hit. But when she returned here for her best friend’s wedding, she remained in Cole Creek and never went back to L.A. They killed off her character on the soap and Dessie started sculpting. D. L. Hazel is her professional name. Her real name is Dessie Mason.”

  “Who was the friend?” I asked, thinking it was male.

  “The love of your life,” Jackie said, and it took me almost a minute to figure out who she was talking about.

  “Rebecca?”

  “The very one.”

  “She’s not the—” I began, but closed my mouth. Why bother? I thought. But I wondered if the entire town thought I was having it off with a woman I’d barely spoken to.

  I came to like Dessie. In fact, I liked her a lot. She came to dinner at our house on Friday and invited me—not Jackie—to lunch at her house on Sunday.

  The first time I met Dessie, she’d been rather quiet, subdued even, and she’d spent most of her time talking to Jackie. She caught me staring at her a couple of times and I’d looked away, feeling guilty. But I’d been trying hard to place her and having no luck.

  Besides, the more I looked at her, the better she looked. She was a mature woman with a grown-up body, grown-up clothes, and she knew about grown-up things. I looked at Jackie and Dessie standing side by side in front of the kitchen sink and I thought, It’s like looking at Sophia Loren and Calista Flockhart.

  Dessie didn’t stay long that first visit, but when she came for dinner on Friday, she looked fabulous. She had on a dress, something with a wide belt and a V-neck that showed off her great bosom.