Bad Blood (Maggie Ryan Book 8)

by P. M. Carlson

  “Maybe not.” Maggie was friendly again. “Maybe I argue the way you do.”

  “Maybe.” It was true, Ginny sensed an agile mind that could keep step with her own. She changed the subject. “Listen, did you go back to school afterward?”

  “Yes. It was my senior year in high school. I only missed a couple of weeks at the beginning.”

  “Did you tell anybody about me?”

  “My parents knew, of course. But it wasn’t anyone else’s business. Later there was a guy I almost married. I told him, and of course I told Nick.”

  So he’d known all along, even at the front door. Ginny remembered her talk about magazine subscriptions and felt foolish. She asked, “Is Nick the only husband you’ve had?”

  “Yes.” Maggie frowned a little, leaning forward, both forearms on the table. “Ginny, I don’t understand. Why don’t you ask about your father?”

  “But you don’t know who he is, do you? The certificate at the agency says ‘Unknown.’”

  “Oh, Christ, of course!” Maggie thumped the heel of her hand against her forehead. “So you thought I slept around or something, not knowing which of a hundred guys did it. A prostitute, maybe.”

  “Yeah. Either that or I was Jesus Christ the Second, right?”

  Maggie laughed.

  Ginny said, “Or I thought maybe it was rape. Was it?”

  “No. That was my story to the agency, but it was love, Ginny. Unsuitable but genuine. He was a wonderful man. I spent my junior year in France, you see. Exchange student. And at a gym I met a bright French engineering student, a gymnast, a cousin of my coach.”

  “My father was French?” asked Ginny in disbelief.

  “Yes, French. We liked each other right away. I was living with a very strict French family, and at school, a girls’ school, we were very proper. Uniforms and everything. But Alain and I managed to meet a couple of times a week. At the library, the park, eventually at his friend’s apartment. Thursdays especially. I had Thursday afternoons off from school. I’d say I was going to the library or something, and meet him instead. We talked about poets, and gymnastics, and Piaf, and the Beatles. He showed me Paris. He was a very exciting friend to have.”

  “So I’m part French!” Ginny was still astonished.

  “Yes. That was the problem, you see.” Maggie was sitting very quietly, hands folded on the table before her, trying to read Ginny’s reactions. “I didn’t want to give his name on the agency certificate, because I didn’t know what kind of international complications might result. I wanted you to have a home right away because it’s important for a baby. And he was Catholic. That might have limited the choice of parents. So I made up the rape story, pretended I didn’t know.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Alain Picaud.”

  “Peeko?”

  “Yes. P-I-C-A-U-D.”

  “Alice Picaud Ryan!” Ginny bounced on the chair in her excitement. “My name! I mean, on that certificate.”

  “Yes. Your baby name.”

  “Why—I mean, how did I happen?”

  “We were in love. It never occurred to me that we might not be spending the rest of our lives together. And I don’t know if you’ll understand, but I was so far from home, and very much in love, and suddenly the Americans and Russians were getting ready to blow up the world. The Cuban missile crisis, that time. And I wanted so desperately to live, and to live with Alain.”

  “Well, they didn’t blow up the world.”

  Maggie grinned. “True. We lucked out that time.”

  Ginny licked her dry lips. “Why didn’t you use the pill?”

  “Ginny, it was scarcely invented yet. This was 1962. You know, back when the dinosaurs lived? Even married women weren’t using it much yet. And I was fifteen, unmarried, a stranger in a Catholic country.”

  “Oh.”

  “Alain said he’d take care of it, but sometimes he forgot. And I was young enough to think it was romantic, you know, carried away by true love. God, I was such a kid! I was in love, so all natural laws were suspended, right?” She pushed her black curls back from her forehead. “Besides, I really thought we’d be together forever, or at least until the end of the world. Even when I started missing my periods, I thought, well, it’s a little early but we’ll want children eventually if we don’t get nuked. I assumed it would be okay.”

  “But it wasn’t okay.”

  “No.” Maggie fiddled with the children’s plates on the table. “I found out the rough way. It was in April, I was three or four months along by then, and I’d realized it wasn’t just irregular cycles. So I finally told him. And he disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Yes. Poof. His friend with the apartment claimed he had no idea where. I couldn’t believe he’d gone. I went to my gymnastics coach, his cousin. But we’d been so clever, you see, she had no idea how involved we’d gotten. I asked her where he was and she said, ‘Who knows?’ And then she must have seen that it mattered, because she told me I shouldn’t be looking in that direction.”

  “He disappeared. Because of me?”

  “No, no, no! It would have ended anyway. It was the old trite sad story. He was married already.”

  “Oh.”

  “The year before, my coach said, he got a girl pregnant, and the family demanded marriage. And they were Catholic, of course. No divorce.”

  “Oh.”

  “So there we were, you and I. And for the first time I let my brain in on the action and really thought about your life and my life and what I should do. It dawned on me that marrying Alain might not have worked anyway. I’d had a vague idea of bringing him to the U.S., but he probably wouldn’t have wanted to go. I certainly didn’t want to stay in France forever. And of course, as it turned out, there was his wife and kid. It really hit me how much everyone would have to sacrifice if I did track him down somehow and marry him. And I realized that the concerts and gymnastics and happy afternoons were not quite enough for a whole life together.” She looked anxiously at Ginny. “Do you understand what I mean?”

  Ginny thought about Buck, about actually being married to him. What a drag. She said, “Yeah, maybe.”

  “Yeah. Anyway, a couple of days after he disappeared the friend with the apartment caught me after school and handed me an envelope from Alain. It had a thousand francs in it. That was worth a couple of hundred dollars then. I was furious that he’d try to buy me off.”

  “Boy, me too!” Ginny straightened in her chair, indignant. “What did you do?”

  For the first time, Maggie seemed a little discomfited. She adjusted the stacked plates again. “You might not like it.”

  “Listen, I can handle anything! Anything except not knowing.”

  Their eyes met. Maggie gave a brief nod. “You’re right. Okay. I pulled out all my emergency money. Every penny, so I could send him back two thousand francs. With a polite little note.”

  “Saying what?”

  Maggie looked away. “‘Pour la saillie.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  Maggie hid her eyes with one bony hand. “God, Ginny.”

  “What?”

  “‘For the stud fee.’”

  “Oh, my God. Like a horse?”

  “Or a dog.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “Yeah. After that I cried for three days.” She peeked back at Ginny and lowered her hand. “But you know, later I got to thinking that maybe the money wasn’t really to buy me off. Maybe in his way he was trying to do the right thing for you. Because it was true, getting married was not such a hot idea.”

  “So you think he felt responsible for me?”

  “Now I do. Now I think that according to his own standards, he was trying to be reasonable. Of course, he should have told me about his wife. I might have done exactly the same things, but I should have known the truth. Still, he was basically a good man, bright and lots of fun. Also young and hot-blooded and impulsive, just like me.”


  Ginny looked down at her hands on the oak table. She decided she needed more time to think about all that. She tucked the new information into a back corner of her mind and said, “I was born here. In New York.”

  “Yes. I thought things over and wrote my family and friends that I wouldn’t be back in Ohio till September. But I flew back in June. I called my mother from New York, and she and Dad both came. They checked out homes for me, and hospitals. Got me a summer job. They were very understanding about the whole thing.”

  “Sorry to be so inconvenient!” blurted Ginny. And before Maggie could object, she added hastily, “Do I look like my father at all?”

  “Your bone structure is about halfway between us. And you have the Picaud hair.” Maggie reached across the table and gently lifted a strand of Ginny’s new-brushed hair, then let it fall. “He had splendid shiny black hair, perfectly straight.”

  “I always sort of wanted curly,” Ginny admitted. “Were his eyes blue?”

  “Yes. Not as dark as ours.”

  “Was he like Nick?”

  “In some ways. Not in looks. But they’re both musical. Both athletic too. Nick does dance and fencing and mime instead of gymnastics. And they both have a sense of humor.”

  “Were you sad when my father disappeared?”

  “Very sad.”

  Ginny rubbed her eyes, overwhelmed, and tried for a lighter topic. She said, “I danced until a couple of years ago. Ballet.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “At first. Then I got sick of it. I got sick of everything. They say I’m an underachiever,” she added defiantly.

  “They think you should be making better grades, or something?” There was no disappointment in Maggie’s voice, just curiosity.

  “Oh, I made good grades when I was a kid. But why bother? If I’m really just a—” Shut up, Ginny, she told herself.

  But Maggie had heard the unspoken thought. She asked, “Did you always think your birth mother was a prostitute?”

  “Oh, God, no! She could have been anything!” Ginny welcomed the change of subject and waved her hand at airy forms. “Sometimes I’d think she was a beautiful ballerina who couldn’t keep me because of her career. Or sometimes she was a murderer who killed all my brothers and sisters. Or I’d think she was very rich, a Rockefeller or something, and her family wanted to keep everything quiet. Or sometimes my father was the rich one, and my mother was poor but too proud to approach him for money.”

  “God. So it must be hard to adjust to someone with an ordinary story and an ordinary house and family.”

  “And even peanut butter sandwiches.” Ginny grinned suddenly. “But hey, at least you sent back the stud fee!”

  Maggie laughed. “God, Ginny, what standards you set!”

  “Didn’t you set standards for me?”

  “For Alice? Not really, not like that. It was much more fragmentary. I kept thinking about my daughter, hoping she was happy and learning all the wonderful things in life. I’d see a little girl somewhere having fun, hearing a bedtime story, maybe, or reading about the hobbit, or learning to turn a cartwheel, and I’d think, ‘Oh, I hope they’ve taught Alice to turn a cartwheel!’ You know.”

  “But I mean like grades and things. Didn’t you worry about that?”

  Maggie shrugged. “Not really. Alain and I are both bright, so I figured our daughter would be too. I didn’t worry because I’ve had too much education myself to be all that impressed by grades. Good grades just mean somebody has used her intelligence to fulfill the requirements. I figured you’d be smart enough to tell if they were worth fulfilling.”

  One phrase stood out. “Too much education? You mean you went to college too?” Ginny was excited. Few of her imaginary mothers had gone to college.

  Maggie pulled a blue-jeaned knee up from under the table and propped her elbow on it, regarding Ginny with mild surprise. “Yes, of course,” she said. “I went to college. I was Phi Beta Kappa. I went to graduate school and got a Ph.D. in statistics. Right now I’m partner in a statistical consulting firm.”

  Ginny stared at her. “Jesus Christ!” she said. Then a bark of laughter escaped her, and she put her head down and pounded her fist on the table in helpless mirth. “Oh, Jesus!” she gasped. “There’s one in the eye for Gram!”

  “What do you mean?” Maggie asked, smiling, wanting to share the joke.

  “Oh, Jesus!” giggled Ginny. “When I brought home those D’s, you know what she told Mom? She said it was my bad blood!”

  Suddenly Maggie was around the table, holding her tightly, fiercely, and saying over and over in a cold furious voice, “Goddamn her! Goddamn her!” Ginny’s gasps of laughter suddenly turned into sobs. She wrenched herself away from Maggie’s grasp and ran, blindly, all the long way through the house and out the front door. A cold, wet gust of wind stopped her, and she stood on the little porch sobbing, blinking at the dismal soaked September street, darkening now. It was a long time before her plunging emotions settled enough to let her go back inside.

  VI

  Rina pulled into the Selkirks’ drive, cut the lights, and sat in the afternoon gloom a moment gathering her thoughts. Of course kidnapping was still a possibility. But there had been no ransom demands. That was good, Clint had decided, maybe Ginny really was with friends. Rina herself put her faith in the way Ginny sounded: no fear, no caution in her voice this afternoon, just the usual impatience with a mother who fussed about her. So to find the Philadelphia friends, Rina would build on what Ginny had told her. Jan Selkirk had been Ginny’s best friend ever since they’d arrived in this Washington suburb. She hadn’t visited much recently, Buck had monopolized Ginny’s attention. But Jan might still know something. Rina walked to the front door, flanked by holly bushes, and knocked.

  Jan answered: curly brown hair, jeans and lime-green T-shirt, textbook in her hand, her finger hooked in the edge to mark the place. “Oh!” Her hazel eyes widened in surprise. “Hi, Mrs. Marshall. Come in. I’ll get my mom.”

  “Well, it’s you I’d like to talk to,” Rina said, stepping into the hall. It was Early American, with maple side table, hobnail milk glass shades, pineapple patterned wallpaper. A television stuttered in some distant room, alternating speech and snips of lush music. “About Ginny.”

  “Is she sick? I didn’t see her in English class today.”

  “Well, no. She’s fine.” Rina clenched her hands around the strap of her leather shoulder bag. This was hard to admit, especially to Jan, the good student, the talented dancer. Everything that Ginny had once been. But Rina had to tell her something, or she’d never learn a thing. She mustn’t let her own embarrassment at being less than perfect hinder the search. So she wasn’t Donna Reed, so what? She raised her head and met Jan’s puzzled gaze. “She’s left home.”

  “God! She just left?” Scandalized, Jan stared at Rina. “I remember you called about her yesterday, but I never thought—I mean, why would she leave?”

  “I don’t know. And I don’t know where she is, Jan. A couple of hours ago she called and said she was in Philadelphia. I wanted to ask you if you had any idea why she’d go there.”

  “Me?” The brown head shook, and Jan looked at the braid rug, embarrassed. “No. I, um, don’t really see her a lot these days.”

  “I know. Jan, please don’t try to spare my feelings. I know she’s friendly with a bunch of kids you don’t like much. Frankly, I agree with you. But if they’ve gotten her into some kind of trouble I have to know all I can.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know anything.”

  “Can you tell me what she was doing yesterday? Who she was with? Anything she said to you. You did see her yesterday, in English class, at least?”

  “Yeah.” Jan turned her head to frown at the maple console table and run a finger of her free hand along it. “But we didn’t talk much then. Hi at the beginning, you know. She came in a minute late.”

  “I see.”

  “She, um, hadn’t done the homework.” A furtive gl
ance at Rina.

  “Yes, sometimes she doesn’t.” Rina nodded encouragingly. “I appreciate your telling me.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter a lot really.” Reassured, Jan looked at her more confidently. “Hunt never asks anything that’s not in the book, and Ginny doesn’t have to write out the homework, she knows the answers. Anyway, he doesn’t take off much if you don’t hand in written homework.”

  “Yes. I wish she had a different philosophy, but you’re right, somehow she scrapes through.”

  “Well, she’s right, it’s a bore. Of course I do the stuff because I have to get into college. But she doesn’t seem to care.” Again that furtive glance to see if she had offended.

  Rina tried to keep the pain from her expression. “Yes, I know. So there wasn’t any problem yesterday?”

  “Not really. She was daydreaming and Hunt asked her a question. He does that sometimes to catch people. So I sort of nudged her and told her the number of the question. She knew the answer.”

  “Good.” Rina was perversely pleased, maybe at this proof of Ginny’s intelligence, maybe at Jan’s loyalty to her friend.

  “But that was all. Then I saw her again, in the bus.”

  “Oh? Did you sit with her?”

  Jan glanced over her shoulder toward the source of the television noise and nodded. Rina realized with a pang that the girl’s parents had told her to avoid Ginny. Jan said, “Yeah, she wanted to thank me for the hint.”

  “Good. Did you talk at all?”

  “Just stuff. You know. Nothing about Philadelphia, if that’s what you mean. Nothing about going away.”

  “Did she mention any friends?”

  “No. She was talking to Linda Lang just before she got on the bus. And of course Buck.”

  “Linda and Buck. That’s helpful to know, Jan. I’ll check with them again too. But did she mention anyone else? Anyone who might be in Philadelphia now?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. No. We just joked around a little.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she asked me what I was doing these days, and I complained about the College Board tests. I’m taking them this year. I asked her if she was taking them, and she said no. So I asked her what she was going to do.” Jan ran her finger along the edge of the table again.