Under My Skin

by Jaye Maiman

I groped for a towel, found one on the rack, and stepped out. Burying my head into the damp terry cloth, I muttered, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  The towel whipped out of my hands. “Yes, you do. I could see exactly what you had in mind when you looked at me. You wanted me—and for the first time you stopped yourself, didn’t you?”

  Why the hell was she so damn insistent? I refused to look at her. Instead I grabbed another towel, wrapped it around me and marched into the bedroom.

  “Why, Robin?” The change in her tone stopped me in my tracks. The anger had evaporated too fast. In its place was an inflection that was both mournful and resigned.

  I tightened the towel around me and faced her. Fighting the impulse to shiver, I smiled at her. K.T. was leaning against the doorjamb, staring at me with a look so intent it made the smile wither on my lips instantly. I scrambled for a lie. “I just realized that there wasn’t time, that’s all. I’m already running behind schedule.”

  She frowned and said, “Yeah, right,” then propelled herself toward the hallway.

  My lie had just dug the foundation for an impenetrable barrier between us, the Berlin Wall that I always built in relationships to prevent my egress to intimacy. Isolation was so much safer. And so damn oppressive. I could feel the cement rushing into the void with each step she took away from me. I scrambled to the top of the steps and called her name. She didn’t respond.

  “I was afraid.” My words snowballed down the stairs. By the time they hit her, I was trembling. Dammit. I wasn’t ready for this.

  She gazed up at me, swept her curls from her face with one hand that came to rest above her ear, as if she wasn’t sure that she heard right. I felt more naked than I ever had in my life. I wanted to run into the bedroom and layer myself with thermals, wool sweaters, thick corduroys.

  “Afraid of what?” she asked warily.

  Here was my chance to bolt. But my feet wouldn’t move. Her eyes captured me. No one had ever looked at me that way. They said: Tell me the truth or lie. Either way, I’ll know. Her gaze was as penetrating as a deer’s, and its depth as unsettling.

  I lowered my eyes and said, “Of your past — and of mine.”

  Without looking up, I knew she was climbing toward me. And all I could think about was making love to her. Not tenderly. But with a hunger that shook me to my core. When she stood beside me and raised my face with a finger under my chin, I whispered hoarsely, “How will I know when it’s too much?”

  She blinked once and said, “I guess that’s something we’ll just have to find out together.”

  And with those words she led me to the bedroom.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The drive to Wilkes Barre took just over an hour. I spent the whole time replaying our lovemaking. Something was happening to me I didn’t fully understand. I had slept with several women and most of them I had loved. But I had never felt like this before. For the first time in my life, I realized with amazement, I was truly falling in love. And I was petrified.

  I missed my turn and had to drive around the block. The squeal of the tires against the road brought me back to the moment. I’d deal with my relationship later. I swung the car around hard and hit the parking marker. I scrambled out to make sure I hadn’t scratched Dean’s car. Relieved to see the silky paint job unblemished, I locked up and faced the church.

  The building was Norman Rockwell perfect. The chalk-white steeple stretched up toward a sky that had turned periwinkle. Wrought iron gates were propped open against cement-cast planters. Three narrow steps led up to the entrance. I climbed them with growing agitation. A discreet brass plaque bore the name of the church: Central Presbyterian. The pastor was the Reverend Doctor William Boyle. I made a mental note of the name and headed inside.

  A wood splinter jabbed my finger as I pushed open the rough-hewn doors. I cursed, then halted abruptly, my eyes scanning the shadows for witnesses. Of the few congregants scattered among the darkly gleaming pews, none seemed to note my presence. I took a deep breath and started searching for the pastor’s office. As I entered a dimly lit corridor that smelled of Windex and ammonia, a few feet away a white-haired man wearing cloth overalls at least two sizes too large for his slight frame doggedly scrubbed a glass case bearing church announcements. He smiled at me, then returned to his work with a quick wink in my direction. I could tell from the wrinkles in his red, leathery skin that winking was undoubtedly one of his favorite pastimes. I marked him instantly as a source. I strode over and said, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” in a hushed tone. He ignored me. Mildly piqued, I repeated the question.

  The answer came from behind me. “Certainly is. Just another reason for thanksgiving.”

  Turning, I came nose to nose with a heavyset man in his late fifties. “Adam’s hard of hearing, aren’t you?” he said, tapping the older man on the shoulder. He turned around and adjusted the hearing aid I hadn’t noticed before.

  “Hey, Reverend,” Adam said, waving the Windex at us both.

  “Don’t say ‘hey.’ Remember?” The reverend lowered his chin and raised his eyebrows meaningfully. Although gentle, the rebuke was unmistakable.

  “Sure enough,” Adam said with another wink in my direction.

  The reverend had already turned his attention to me. He extended a pudgy hand and peered at me through thick eyeglasses, his curiosity blatant. “I’m Doctor Boyle, and you are—”

  “Rosemary Harris.” Scary, how easy it was for me to lie.

  “Well, Rosemary, I’ve not seen you here before. Are you interested in joining our humble congregation?”

  The moment he said the word “humble,” my distrust escalated. He was too self-conscious and his graciousness far too deliberate. I answered him warily. “Not exactly. I’m a lawyer. The former pastor—”

  His shoulders snapped back into a military posture and his left hand sliced through the air, cutting me off. “My office,” he ordered abruptly. Dr. Boyle’s slit of a mouth sank into his face like a stone into mud.

  I glanced at Adam, who mugged for me the way a kindergartner might when his best friend’s been caught in a prank. As I passed him, he muttered something under his breath. It wasn’t until Dr. Boyle closed the office door behind me that the words sank in. “Make sure he doesn’t take a ruler to your fingers.” I was sure Adam was joking, but to be on the safe side I sat down in the tufted leather chair farthest from the reverend’s desk and crossed my hands in my lap.

  The room was small and sparsely decorated. Besides two chairs and a desk, there was one potted plant, two religious paintings in plain wood frames, and an umbrella stand. The office could have belonged to anyone, or no one.

  Boyle eased himself into a hard-backed chair, his hands braced on the desk as if he were afraid someone might wheel the chair away from his butt without his knowing. He palmed his thin, dank gray hair back over his scalp, then steepled his hands with great deliberation. All of a sudden, I saw the reverend as a youth — the nerd everyone loved to tease. The image made me feel kindlier toward him.

  “Okay, Miss Harris,” he said in a no-nonsense tone, “before you say anything more, let me tell you that this congregation has changed quite a bit since the Reverend Van Eyck was in charge.”

  He was so defensive I had no choice but to attack. I leaned forward and asked, “How?”

  “How, indeed,” he replied ponderously. “Some sixteen years have gone by. I can assure you, I’m no Van Eyck.” Boyle was an artful dodger, and the glint in his heavily lidded eyes told me that he was well aware of his skill. As I tried to decipher his answer, his features squirmed into an artificial smile. “And your mission here?”

  I parried the question. “Van Eyck’s legacy is a hard one to overcome, I suppose?” I hoped that the query was open-ended enough to trick him into disclosing what he apparently assumed I knew.

  He pressed his fingertips together so tightly, his knuckles cracked. “I’d hardly call it a legacy.”

  I watched his eyelids flu
tter and wondered what the hell he was hiding. “Van Eyck was pastor here for nineteen years, Dr. Boyle,” I said indignantly. “I imagine there are many individuals in your congregation right now who were just babies when he first joined the church.”

  He slapped the desk and jumped up, slamming the chair against the wall so hard that the windows rattled. “Just as I thought! I will not tolerate another scandal. Who sent you here?”

  I started putting two and two together, and I didn’t like the number I was arriving at. “Everything that’s said in this room will remain confidential, Dr. Boyle. I assure you. Please sit down.”

  He stared at me with undisguised anger. “This is my church, Miss Harris. I do not need assurance from you. Now, are you going to tell me who has conjured up this latest revelation?”

  Since he wasn’t about to sit down, I stood up and asked in my most lawyerly voice, “Just how many of these ‘revelations’ have you had, Dr. Boyle?”

  An incisor tore into the corner of his lower lip as he considered his answer. “This, this,” he sputtered, waving at me as if I were a roach that had just crawled into morning oatmeal, “this is outrageous. What good can you serve? The reverend died years ago, and my church has put his memory in its rightful place.”

  “Can you give me the names—”

  “Child,” he said, his eyes boring into mine like twin laser beams searching for cataracts to burn, “this church...all churches ...are fighting for their lives right now. Do you have any idea of how this congregation has shrunk over the years? How can this—” He paused and whipped his hand around his head, in one gesture somehow compelling me to take in the cross hanging above his desk and the mesmerizing portrait of Mary holding an applecheeked baby Jesus. “How can this compete with what’s out there? Yes, Reverend Van Eyck disgraced all of us. But I—we —still have so much to offer. Tell your client to let the devil lie. No good will come from pursuing the evils of one’s past. Tell him to come to me, face to face, and we will exorcise the demons together.”

  Boyle was so roused it seemed he had almost forgotten my presence. I could hear the hiss of the radiator as he stared at the cross with a rhapsodic intensity that both disturbed and moved me. Whether I agreed with him or not, I couldn’t doubt his sincerity.

  I cleared my throat, then said, “I will relay your message, but first please answer one question.”

  Smoothing his hair again, he nodded, his back still toward me.

  “Did he sexually abuse Daniel and Melanie as well?”

  He spun around, his jowls flushed and his eyebrows angled up in an expression that pleaded with me to leave. “I will not talk of these things. The Reverend Van Eyck has met his Maker. May he, and his sins, rest in peace.” With those words, he flipped the back of a hand at me three times, letting me know that it was time to go.

  I went eagerly. If Reverend Boyle did not want to speak ill of the dead, I had a feeling someone else would. I scampered through the halls searching for Adam. After I had circled the building twice, I gave up and headed outside.

  Adam was leaning on the trunk of a car, smoking a cigarette. I waved and received a thumbs-up gesture that made me laugh. He pulled the cigarette from between his lips with his thumb and forefinger and hollered, “See you still got your fingers. You’re a lucky gal.”

  I walked over to him, “I gather you’re no fan of Dr. Boyle’s.”

  He inclined his head and studied his cigarette, then said quietly, “You’re wrong there. I’ve been a Deacon in this church nearly thirty-two years. Reverend Boyle’s the best thing that ever happened to this place.” He pointed the unlit end of the butt at the building with a look of genuine tenderness. “He’s a good man, Dr. Boyle, a tad too self-righteous, maybe, but there’s worse sins. All I know is Boyle is just what we needed. I seen him wipe a baby’s behind when her mama was too sick to stand. And I seen him shimmy under a car to help fix an axle when Old Jimmy Dale’s car slid into a ditch. No, Boyle’s done right by us. He’s just a bit sensitive about certain matters, you know.” Adam’s eyes were light gray and belonged on the face of a man thirty years younger. Now they smiled at me and waited for me to make the next move.

  “You know I was asking about the Reverend Van Eyck?”

  His eyes were riveted to my mouth as I spoke. Their gleam disappeared as he abruptly spat at the ground. “Don’t call him no reverend. The man played a part, that’s all, but he weren’t no pastor, I can tell you that.”

  “So the stories are true?”

  “Well, I can’t say yes or no to that without knowing the stories, can I?”

  We stared at each other for a solid minute. Adam might have been hard of hearing, but he had twenty-twenty vision. He pulled on the cigarette hard with his lips, expelling a cloud of smoke that made my eyes tear. His gaze never wavered. Finally, I gave in. I’ve been in this business long enough now to know that there are some people to whom I cannot lie effectively. Adam was one of them, and it made me respect him that much more. “I’m trying to find out what happened to Rev—Van Eyck’s children.”

  “You’re talking about Danny and Mel?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Hell.” His expression turned as arid as a riverbank in late August. “I’m as guilty as the rest—”

  Before I asked him for an explanation, he tapped a finger on my lips. The dry skin smelled vaguely medicinal. “You gotta learn to hush up every now and then if you want to hear someone.” To underscore the point, Adam lowered his hearing aid with a self-deprecating smirk and said, “We all blamed the kids themselves. They were adoptees, you know? So we was sure they just came from bad blood. There was no way our pastor could be responsible for them.”

  His laugh made my flesh creep.

  Adam noted my silence with a single raised eyebrow. “I like a smart learner.” He heeled the cigarette into the pavement, then stooped down, picked it up carefully and stuffed it into a side pocket. A whiff of burnt tobacco sailed over me.

  “Danny was a handful right off. Mel was real quiet. Six months later, the reverse was true. The twins must have been around nine or ten when he first came here—” Adam scratched behind his ear lazily. I couldn’t tell if he was adjusting the hearing aid or just grazing in his hair. “By the time they was teens, they was strictly forbidden company. Something about them made me want to either slap them silly or run like fire in the opposite direction. It wasn’t till after the Van Eycks died that anyone came forward with the truth.”

  He stopped suddenly, scanning me with renewed interest. “You aren’t one of their siblings, heh? A man came by last August looking for them, just like you. Said he was a private eye hired by a family member. A sister, if I recall right.”

  “George Morris?”

  “Wouldn’t know his name. He didn’t get around to me. Instead, he got old tightwad Benita Welch. Man was lucky if he found out how much a beer cost in town.”

  I explained my role in the investigation and saw his assessment of me change right before my eyes. “No fooling?” he said. “That’s mighty courageous work for a woman, don’t you think?”

  I stepped around the question. “How’d the reverend die?”

  “Hit-and-run. They never found the driver. When the truth starting coming out about Van Eyck, folks just figured he got what was due him.”

  A shiver rolled through me. “And his wife?”

  “She just shriveled up after that. Lasted a few months. No one was surprised by that. She weren’t ever real healthy.”

  “What happened to the kids?”

  Adam was alert enough to sense the change in my tone. Suddenly, he was all business. “Danny left town first chance he could. Don’t know what happened to him. Kid was a loner. Only time I ever seen him smile was when he was around younger kids, or prowling around antique stores. Strange habit for a kid, but that was Danny. Always in his own world. Sharp as the point of my penknife, and just as cold. Mel was another story. She had a chance. She was kind of plain, but she had lots of sp
irit. Used to run down the church aisles whenever Van Eyck stepped up to the pulpit. Didn’t make much sense then, but it does now.”

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  His face darkened again, just as the sun disappeared. I glanced up at the sky. Storm clouds had rolled in. Adam followed my gaze and said quietly, “A big one’s coming in. If I were you, I’d buy myself a couple of gallons of water and head home.”

  “Where is she?” My voice was louder than I intended.

  “Last I heard? Spruce Hill. They locked her up when she was seventeen.”

  I was surprised to hear myself gasp. “The sanitarium?”

  “Poor girl’s mad as a rabid dog.”

  Hospitals give me the willies. There was no word for what Spruce Hill gave me. The grounds were immaculate. Trees lined both sides of the road, their limbs meeting above my head in a graceful canopy. The central building bore a magnificent stone face, lush ivy creeping over the boulders in defiance of the recent cold snap. Everything was so clean, so organized. I wanted to scream. The realization that such a scream might propel others to shut me up in this perfect domain made the horror all the worse.

  I had already given my name and pretext for visiting to five indistinguishable officials. Each of them had held so tightly to some absurd rule of propriety, I wondered if they had chosen to be the keepers of the mad solely out of fear that they would have otherwise gone mad themselves. The last keeper had informed me that, yes, Melanie Van Eyck was still a patient, but, no, a visit could not be allowed without prior clearance by the appropriate authorities. I had tortured the man long enough to find out that Melanie was probably in the “day” room, playing solitaire. Disturbing such a critical activity was strictly out of the question.

  I don’t take no for an answer if I can lie, pretend, steal or sneak my way around it. This time, I had used a combination of tactics. The end result was that I was now wearing a visitor badge that someone named Agnes Lipshin had dumped into the waiting-room garbage pail. Twenty minutes of subterfuge had carried me from the swinging mahogany doors of the unrestricted Spruce Hills into the smudged-blue corridors that were its true center.