The Step Between

by Penny Mickelbury

  “So, Paolo, what do I get for my seven-fifty?”

  Carole Ann believed in taking good care of herself, in pampering herself, even; she had weekly manicures and pedicures; twice-monthly facials and massages; waxing as needed; and haircuts and coloring when the mood struck her. She just never did them all at once, because she’d never had the time or the desire to spend an entire day in tonsorial pursuits. Paolo had warned her to plan to spend the better part of the day at the Garden of Eden, and when she considered how long it would take her to get there, and the list of pleasures to which she was succumbing, she realized that it would, indeed, take most of the day.

  She enjoyed the drive. She enjoyed driving. It was a short hop from her Foggy Bottom neighborhood across the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge and the Potomac, into Virginia and onto Route 66 and points west. The day was cloudless and warmer than it had been in recent weeks—well into the forties, though that didn’t exactly constitute warm. Still, Carole Ann said to herself by way of justification, it was warm enough to do it just for a few moments . . . for a few miles. “It” was to lower the top on her ten-year-old Saab convertible and feel the wind. She almost never drove because Al had not enjoyed driving; they had taken monthly excursions into the countryside, choosing a different direction each month, in deference to her California native’s love of cars and driving. And they’d often taken this drive, into the lush and exclusive Virginia hunt country, a world of its own and unto itself. But since Al’s death, she had taken no such drives and realized how much she’d missed this simple, delightful pleasure.

  She knew she was being a little crazy and she already was more than a little cold, and she was acknowledging to herself that it was time to put up the top, when a low-slung red Jaguar convertible passed her as if she were standing still. The top was down on the convertible and the fur-swathed couple within waved at her wildly as the horn sounded, its chime carried back to her on the wind. Kindred spirits! She waved back and pressed her horn, though they were practically out of sight, and punched the button that would lift the top, enclosing her and warming her body. Her soul had been warmed by the whipping, frigid air.

  She turned onto I-81 just past Front Royal, and headed toward Winchester. But according to Paolo’s directions, she’d never get that far. She counted off the miles as instructed and, as promised, saw on her left a signpost with the word EDEN and an arrow on it. She turned, again following directions, counted off the miles, and, just where he said it would be, another sign and arrow. She turned right this time and almost immediately came face-to-face with paradise. She’d heard about the Garden of Eden. The wives of several of the partners in her former law firm had both the time and the money for monthly visits, as had some of her clients. Several of her friends had the money but rarely the time for more than semiannual visits. But she was not prepared for the sight before her. At the foot of the Appalachian Mountains was a Swiss chalet. Wood and glass and stone nestled in a grove of majestic pines all but winked a welcome. Smoke curled from three chimneys. Though the woods and forests en route still were heavy with drifting snow, the roads to Eden had been perfectly clear, as was the drive up to the building. But there was no parking lot and no cars in the circular drive leading to the front door.

  Just as she was wondering whether a mistake had been made, the door to the chalet opened and a smiling young woman clad in white—turtleneck, stretch ski pants, and ski boots—smiled and waved to her. Carole Ann drove up to the door.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Crandall,” the young woman said, her voice low and extremely pleasant.

  Carole Ann exchanged the greeting in what she hoped was as pleasant a manner as the one extended, though she was recovering from being called Mrs. Crandall. She wondered why Paolo made the appointment under that name; but even as she wondered, she realized that she already knew all the answers, and struggled to regain her equilibrium.

  “I hope your trip from D.C. was pleasant.”

  “Magnificent!” Carole Ann replied. “I drove with the top down for as long as I could stand it.”

  The young woman laughed with real joy, then lowered her already low voice to a whisper. “Mrs. Van der Wal and her sister arrived just a little while ago, and the top was still down.”

  “Red Jag?” Carole Ann asked with a grin, and they both laughed. Carole Ann relaxed and determined that no matter what Eve Islington said or didn’t say, she would enjoy this day. The young woman, whose name was Susan, would park Carole Ann’s car in the garage at the rear, and have it ready for her when she was ready to leave.

  She was met just inside the door by another young woman, who identified herself as Jasmine and who would, she said, “take care of you for the first part of your visit.” Carole Ann followed her across a stone lobby the size of a Caribbean island airport with a wall-length fireplace at one end that was consuming logs the size of small trees. Though people were everywhere, there was no sense of hurry or congestion; there was no noise but the sound of a gentle undercurrent of classical music and the crackling of the wood in the fireplace; there was nothing to feel but luxury and leisure.

  Following her manicure, pedicure, and waxing, Carole Ann was led to a grotto from which steam rose as if from a geyser and which was warm and enveloping. She was left to enjoy the hot pool, the sauna, or the steam room, as she chose and for as long as she chose; and her attention was directed to a discreetly positioned buzzer that she was to push when she was ready for her facial and massage. While she was aware of losing track of time, Carole Ann was pledging a monthly return to the Garden of Eden. She didn’t know when, if ever, she’d felt as nurtured and relaxed and that included those weeks in Louisiana being cared for by Tante Sadie and Ella Mae and Lil; that time she’d been so ill and so in need of care that it had been more appreciated than enjoyed. This time, in full health, she reveled in the pampering with all of her being. She also acknowledged that it was time to stop wondering who Eve Islington/Ruth Simmons was and find out.

  She’d rotated from hot pool to sauna to steam room and back again several times, consuming at least a gallon of water from the strategically placed cooler in the process, and was feeling so languid that she needed to lean against the wall where the buzzer was, and as she pressed it, she peered around the corner of the wall and was startled into a new reality: it was like being outside. The entire back wall of the the room she had thought small was glass, and the snow-laden out-of-doors seemd to be one with the steamy grotto. “This is just like Islington’s house!”

  “No. His house is just like my paradise.”

  Carole Ann whipped around to face a woman of eerie and arresting beauty. Not the Hollywood celebrity kind of beauty; the real kind, the kind that emanates from within.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “Since you’re obviously not Mrs. Crandall.”

  “Actually, I am,” Carole Ann replied with a small smile, “though my husband is dead. Professionally, I’m Carole Ann Gibson and my firm was hired by Richard Islington to locate Annabelle Islington.”

  The woman studied her intensely. “I’m Ruth Simmons and I like it that you called him by his name—Richard Islington—and you didn’t call him my husband, and that you said Annabelle Islington and you didn’t refer to her as his daughter—”

  She was interrupted by the arrival of several women, whom she greeted by name and with welcoming hugs and whom she bid enjoy themselves. Then she returned her attention to Carole Ann. “Are you ready for your facial and massage, Mrs. Crandall?” And without waiting for a reply she turned away and Carole Ann followed her, aware, only after she’d left the steamy warmth of the grotto, of her nakedness in the chilly hallway.

  She gratefully received a thick terry-cloth robe upon entering a small chamber equipped with a reclining chair and a massage table. She sat and knew perfectly well that she was expected to explain herself, which she did in as much detail as she thought necessary to ensure the other woman’s cooperation.

  “So you think my daughter is in danger?”
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br />   “I think you’re in danger, Miss Simmons. I don’t think we were hired to find Annabelle as much as we were hired to have our search for her lead us to you.”

  “And what will you do?”

  Carole Ann shrugged and raised her hands, palms up. “Tell him we haven’t found Annabelle. Which we haven’t.”

  She received a smile in return, and a gentle pat on the shoulder that was part push, and the chair in which she sat was lowered and she closed her eyes. Ruthie Eva began applying cooling, soothing creams to her face, and telling her a story. It was very much like the story she’d already imagined: in Ruthie Eva’s telling of it, she was a small-town girl who, while she loved her origins, yearned to see more of the world and to be more than the wife of a coal miner and the mother of a coal miner’s children. But for Ruthie Eva, “more” didn’t mean “better than.” Ruthie Eva didn’t think there was anything wrong with being a coal miner or a coal miner’s wife; she just didn’t want to do that. She thought, when she met Dicky Rae Waters, that they shared not only a desire for something different, but a basic belief in the inherent good of all things and all people.

  “I never knew he hated our kinfolks or the people we grew up with or our hometown. He didn’t tell me any of that until we got to Washington and he wanted me to talk and dress in a different way, to act in a different way.”

  Dicky Rae also didn’t want her to ply her trade. “He called it low-class work, never mind that my low-class work earned the money he bought his first land with, and his first Mercedes Benz.”

  Ruthie Eva’s words were as slow and gentle as the movement of her fingers on Carole Ann’s face, smoothing in and then removing the cleansing potions. And as Carole Ann sat with a hot towel wrapped around her face, a steam moisturizer adding intensity to the experience, Ruthie Eva continued to talk. About the baby girl born to her who altered the focus of her life. From that moment on, she wanted only to do for and be with the baby girl. Dicky Rae objected, fearing that she would instill “too much that was common and low class” in the child. “He took her from me. He said she was his and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. And there wasn’t. I didn’t have any friends or people who could help me. I didn’t have any money of my own by that time—he’d spent all of mine and everything was in his name. We were rich and I didn’t have any money. But when we were poor and low class, I had money all the time. Funny, isn’t it, how things change?”

  So she’d left. She’d taken the million dollars Dicky Rae gave her and left, relieved to be rid of him, distraught at the loss of her baby girl. Needing a place to live, she answered a newspaper ad for a studio apartment in the Shirlington section of Arlington. It was an apartment in the home of Bill Williams and his wife, who was alive at the time but dying of breast cancer. “I took one look at the two of them and broke down crying. Told them everything. And Bill just about fainted when he looked at that million-dollar check.” At the lawyer’s insistence, she’d kept one hundred thousand dollars for herself and invested the remainder for her daughter—he’d had to insist that she take some for herself because she’d wanted to invest all of it for Annabelle.

  “I used half the money to buy my first shop and half to buy my first condo. In five years, both had doubled in value, so I bought a bigger shop and a bigger condo. In another five years I had investments worth half a million dollars. From doing low-class work. So I took my low-class self to the highest-class place I’d ever heard of—out here to the hunt country. I didn’t even know what that meant, ‘hunt country.’ But I did know that the women who lived out there needed something to do with all their time and money, and I was low class enough to want to give to them.”

  Ruthie Eva didn’t speak during the massage, and Carole Ann was glad of it. With all she’d heard, she had more than enough to contemplate. Ruth was an accomplished masseuse; it was as good a massage as Carole Ann had ever experienced, including the best of what California had to offer. And when it was completed, she sat on the edge of the table wrapped again in the terry-cloth robe, exchanging a look of evaluation with Ruthie Eva. She had pale gray eyes—a rare color, C.A. thought—set far apart and above a straight but not pointy nose and close to perfect lips. She had very dark brown hair in which the gray was just beginning to show, worn not quite shoulder length and with the kind of expensive haircut that looks not styled at all. Her skin was the dark of Jews or Italians or Greeks, though Carole Ann did not think she was any of those. Irish? Scotch? She was not quite as tall as her own five feet nine inches, and her figure was naturally, voluptuously full: no silicone implants there.

  “Why didn’t you just tell him you’d found me?” she asked finally, and almost sadly.

  “I already told you, Miss Simmons. We weren’t hired to find you. We were hired to find Annabelle.”

  “But something turned you against him. What?”

  Carole Ann wondered what to tell this woman, then she remembered Paolo’s comment: Annabelle wanted to erase herself from her father’s life. “We’re puzzled, to tell you the truth, but we think that Annabelle is angry with her father and that he may blame you for it.”

  Ruth made a sound in her throat. “You’ve got good instincts, you and whoever ‘we’ is. Annabelle is furious with both of us—Richard and me. She blames him for sending me away and she blames me for going.” Tears filled her eyes. “As if I had a choice. Who I am now never would have left Annabelle. But who I was then didn’t know what else to do.”

  Carole Ann frowned. “But if Annabelle is angry with both of you, why is Richard looking for you?”

  “He’s mad because I filed for divorce. I hadn’t wanted to as long as Annabelle needed him. Once she didn’t, I didn’t.”

  “But it was because of you that she no longer needed him,” Carole Ann replied; it wasn’t a question and Ruth nodded and explained that Islington indeed had been angered to learn that his daughter was a millionaire without his assistance. So now he was angry with Ruth, and Annabelle had erased herself from both their lives. Carole Ann was beginning to think that the case had just resolved itself: Annabelle wasn’t missing. She just no longer was in contact with her parents, a choice, as a legal adult, that she had a right to make. She was wondering whether GGI would need to refund any of Islington’s retainer when they quit his case, when Ruthie Eva reclaimed her attention.

  “Miss Gibson. Mrs. Crandall. What should I call you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Ruthie Eva’s face was grave and serious. “Did you love your husband?”

  “I still love him,” she replied quietly.

  “Then it matters, Mrs. Crandall. I want to hire you and I’ll pay whatever Dicky Rae was paying. More if necessary.”

  Carole Ann frowned. “Hire me for what purpose, Miss Simmons?”

  “To find my daughter. To find Annabelle,” she answered, fear showing on her face for the first time. “She’s been missing from her home for almost three days.”

  “Richard hasn’t been able to contact her for weeks. Where do you get three days?” Carole Ann’s anger, which had been lurking just below the surface for too many days, surfaced. This was the proverbial last straw.

  The tears that had been poised and ready overflowed and fell. She wept silently and Carole Ann did not interfere; she was willing to wait for the explanation that she was determined to have. And as she waited, she observed and compared the responses of the parents. Ruth Simmons was both distraught and frightened. Richard Islington had projected concern but not fear for Annabelle, which suggested that Ruth knew something that Richard did not, and she was about to reveal what it was. She took a towel from a cabinet, wet it, wiped her face and blew her nose, and dropped it into a hamper in the corner. She made eye contact with Carole Ann, direct and open, and she began to talk.

  Annabelle had driven to Miami, where she boarded a chartered yacht and spent weeks cruising the islands of the Caribbean. She hadn’t told her father that she was leaving and she chose her method of escape because
she knew that he’d look for her. That’s why she drove and why she cruised the Caribbean—no paper trail; friends with island homes eliminated the need for the occasional hotel.

  “So how did you know where she was?”

  “She called me almost every day, asking over and over how I could have abandoned her. And I think she wanted to believe that I believed that I had no choice. I begged her to give me the chance to prove that I loved her, that I wanted to be a mother. I think it was easier for her to punish Richard than me; she wasn’t totally sure that I deserved it. But she also wasn’t sure that I deserved forgiveness, either.” Ruth shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut and inhaled deeply several times.

  Carole Ann allowed the other woman time to compose her emotions, and she utilized the time to compose her own thoughts, one of which was that Richard Islington must have realized at some point that Annabelle was not missing, that she was not in danger. But he was her father and he loved her and he wanted to know where she was; after all, a young, beautiful, wealthy woman is potential prey. And, she continued her musing, he would have, at some point, imagined that if Ruth could contact Annabelle and give her almost three million dollars, Ruth could know Annabelle’s whereabouts. But Richard Islington wouldn’t hire someone to find the wife that he’d exiled twenty years ago. He’d hire someone to locate his daughter, and follow the trail to his wife. And here was Ruth. And Annabelle really was missing.