When I Found You (A Box Set)

by Webb, Peggy

  Leave it to old Aunt Sukie May to get sick. She was always getting sick at the drop of a hat, running Ruth’s mother ragged flying off to Michigan or Minnesota or wherever the nursing home was.

  When you’d never been to a place, it was hard to remember. It was even harder to be generous-spirited to a person you’d never laid eyes on.

  When her mother wasn’t looking, Ruth sometimes said “shootfiredamnation” and once nearly broke her toe kicking a piece of furniture at the way Aunt Sukie May was always ruining their plans, but her mother never complained.

  Cussing. Another reason Ruth guessed she was going to grow up to be some kind of selfish witch instead of a lady like her mother.

  Sighing, she looked out the window at the passing scenery.

  The car was as quiet as the school study hall when Mean Green Jeans was in charge. That’s what they called Mr. Cogg, who was older than Abraham, meaner than Satan, and always wore jeans that had faded a putrid kind of green.

  In the distance Ruth heard dogs barking. She immediately perked up.

  “Do you have dogs here?”

  Uncle Max smiled at her. He did that a lot. He was nice looking, too ... for somebody fifty years old. Wanda’s daddy wasn’t nearly that old, forty-five Wanda said, and he had a bald head and a potbelly. Uncle Max was nice and trim like the tennis players she and Wanda admired on television.

  “I have dogs and horses, too.”

  “Do you think I might get to ride?” She was so excited, she nearly forgot her manners. “Please?”

  “Ladies always say please and thank you, Ruth. It’s a sign of good breeding.”

  Her mother was a stickler for manners and was always lecturing her about good breeding and showing respect for her elders and being a real lady. The lectures bored Ruth out of her skull. That was just one more difference between her and her mother. Her mother thrived on etiquette.

  “I’m sure you’ll get to ride.” Uncle Max’s smile got wider. “You’ll have the run of the place, Ruth. You can do whatever you like.”

  “Thanks, Uncle Max.”

  “You’re welcome, sweetheart.” He patted her hand. “We’re going to have a wonderful time together.”

  She grinned at Uncle Max, then stared back down the long driveway they’d traveled on. It looked like a ghost tunnel with giant oak trees spreading their branches overhead and Spanish moss hanging down like long, spooky arms. Instead of calling Uncle Max’s place a castle, she might refer to it as the House of Horrors. “How I Survived the House of Horrors” or maybe “Nightmare in New Orleans” she’d entitle the essay she’d have to write in English class.

  English teachers were so dumb. They made you write things like “What I Did on Spring Break.” Why couldn’t they think up something interesting, like “How I Learned to Ride like a Rodeo Cowgirl”?

  “Can I ride the horse now? Please?”

  “Of course you can, sweetheart. As soon as I stow our bags.”

  She’d have thought Uncle Max would have servants to put away the bags in a house that big, but, then, she was always fantasizing. Real life was seldom like the movies, her mother told her.

  “Come, Ruth. I’ll show you to your room.”

  She followed him up a long flight of marble stairs to her room. It was enough to take her breath away. Everything was pure white—the wallpaper, the draperies, the silk curtains that hung around the bed, even the roses that filled the room.

  “I had it done just for you, Ruth.”

  “You really had it done just for me?”

  Wanda’s daddy had never decorated a fancy room for her, even when she’d begged to have her brother’s room after he went away to college. Her other brother got the room, while Wanda had to keep sharing with her pesky little sister.

  “Yes. Do you like it?”

  “It’s the prettiest room I’ve ever seen.”

  “Good. Give your Uncle Max a little hug.”

  He leaned down and held on for so long, she got fidgety. Then she felt something soft and wet on her cheek. It was his lips.

  When he finally let her go, she stepped back, still smiling in spite of the fact that her cheek felt gooey.

  She wouldn’t wash her face until he left the room, though. She would never do anything to hurt Uncle Max’s feelings. Besides, she didn’t want the spring vacation to get off to a bad start.

  o0o

  It wouldn’t do to rush her.

  Max didn’t want an unwilling victim; he wanted a grateful partner.

  And he knew just how to make Ruth grateful. She loved the outdoors and had a gift with animals and the natural grace of a born athlete. She also had a hunger for the kind of father-daughter camaraderie he could provide.

  He taught her to ride and rope, just as he’d taught her everything else since she was two years old. His life’s work was creating beautiful things, and his movies were a testament to his success. But Ruth was his greatest creation.

  At thirteen she was astonishing; at eighteen she’d be lethal. She’d need to know how to defend herself—from everybody except him.

  When he brought out the gun, she was skeptical.

  “Are you sure it’s all right? I mean ... would Mother approve? She’s such a lady.”

  He adored that quality in Ruth, her desire to please. It was going to make what he planned to do much easier. Margaret Anne had done a good job with her daughter. He’d have to remember to thank her properly. A square-cut emerald necklace should be just the right gift to show appreciation and to guarantee gratitude.

  “I don’t think your mother would mind. Many ladies are too delicate to handle a weapon, but some of the greatest ladies I know handle firearms as easily as they handle their teacups.”

  Ruth ran her hands lovingly along the mahogany stock. Max got dizzy just thinking of those hands on his body.

  A sense of daring and danger sparkled in her dark eyes. Slowly she wet her lips with the tip of her tongue.

  “Teach me, Uncle Max.”

  He placed the gun in her hand, then stood behind her to steady her aim. Her fresh young smell almost overwhelmed him.

  “I’m going to teach you many things, Ruth.”

  Chapter 3

  Ruth didn’t ask Max how long he planned to keep her in that perfumed bower of white silk sheets and dark, forbidden passion. She didn’t defy him, didn’t try to escape. It was far, far too late for any of those things. Who would hear her if she screamed? Where would she go if she ran? Besides, even if she wanted the whole world to know what she had done, which she most certainly did not, who would believe her?

  Ruth endured.

  And when the two-week nightmare was finally over, she sat in the car beside him without saying a word, without even asking where he was taking her.

  It didn’t matter anymore.

  She would carry it with her always, that dark, secret shame.

  Turning her head, Ruth looked out the window and watched a blue heron swoop down over the bayou looking for fish, watched a flock of egrets settle in a moss-draped tree, watched the sun sparkle on the water.

  “Be a good girl,” her mother had said before she’d left home, “and mind your Uncle Max.”

  She thought about the warm, wiggly fuzz ball of a puppy he’d given her after her mother had said they couldn’t afford a dog and she’d thought she would never have a pet of her own. He’d even brought a wreath of roses to the doggie funeral.

  It had been so easy to do everything Uncle Max had said, even to drink all that champagne the day she’d hit a bull’s-eye. That’s what had led to all the trouble in the first place.

  Her mother would never have picked up a gun, let alone shot one. And she would never, ever have got drunk on champagne at the age of thirteen.

  Ruth wished she’d tried harder to be more like her mother.

  “Two weeks was not enough,” Max said. “I should have bargained for six.”

  Horror coiled inside Ruth. Who had he bargained with?

  Not my
mother. Not my mother.

  “Margaret Anne would have seen that as a fair exchange for her future.”

  She wanted to scream but couldn’t, somehow. She and her mother were a team, two against the world. Margaret Anne Bellafontaine, beautiful and fragile and fair, a true Southern lady—and Ruth, who would never be beautiful but who had enough spirit and guts to fight both their battles.

  Her mother had bartered her like a sack of beans.

  Her silent screams threatened to become real. Clamping her lips tightly together, she focused on a large waterfowl wading in the shallows of the bayou.

  The car rolled northward, leaving behind the bayous and the house hidden by oak trees, leaving behind innocent youth and childlike dreams.

  “You’ve learned control, Ruth. That’s good. Most women never learn control.”

  Just over the Mississippi border he pulled into a roadside diner, and they went inside for lunch. At last, other people. But what would she tell them? What would they say?

  She ate her meal in silence.

  When they got back in the car, she shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep all he way to Oxford.

  “Wake up, sweetheart. We’re home.”

  Ruth slowly opened her eyes. Home was a place she’d known a long time ago. The house that she’d once thought so charming—set among huge oak trees, golden forsythia, and cascading wisteria—was like a foreign land to her. All her points of reference had been wiped out. She needed a map to find her way through this strange new landscape.

  “Remember, sweetheart. Smile.”

  She stretched her lips back and showed all her teeth to him. Max reached for her hand, but she shook him off. As far as she was concerned, he no longer existed. He’d bargained for two weeks. His time was up, and her time in hell was over.

  Now she just had to get through the rest of her life.

  o0o

  Sixteen society women sat in Margaret Anne Bellafontaine’s front parlor sipping mint tea and eating pecan tassies, a Southern delicacy purchased at a fancy bakery on the Square and served at every social gathering worth mention.

  Margaret Anne extracted herself from the group and came forward, smiling.

  “Ruth, sweetheart.”

  Her mother. Her betrayer.

  Ruth didn’t cringe from the kiss. Max was right: She understood control.

  “Max ...” Margaret Anne kissed his cheek, then took both his hands and drew him toward the circle of women whose upturned faces were plastered with polite smiles.

  “Everyone, I want you to meet Ruth’s godfather, Maxwell Jones.” There was the sound of old money and good breeding and well-concealed lies in her social laugh. “Uncle Max, Ruth calls him.”

  Ruth felt trapped in the net of smiles that was cast her way. Her face stiff, she returned their smiles. What would their faces look like if they knew the truth, these pampered matrons who gathered at Margaret Anne’s house to plan fund-raising events for worthy causes, who thought Margaret Anne was one of them, a fragile Southern belle leading a genteel life on old-family money?

  “My, my, Ruth. How you’ve grown.” Nancy McClannahan was the wife of the dean at Ole Miss. “Hasn’t she grown, Clara?”

  “Yes. Why, she’s practically a woman.”

  What would Clara Bingham, mother of the Baptist minister and wife of a church deacon, do if Ruth told her exactly how much a woman she was?

  “What grade are you in, honey?” Clara set aside her tea and concentrated her full attention on Ruth.

  “I finish the eighth grade this year.”

  “A pretty little thing like you. Soon Margaret Anne’s goin’ to have to beat off the boys with a stick.” A titter of laughter.

  Where was the stick when Maxwell Jones had presented his devil’s bargain?

  Satisfied that she’d carried out her duties of small talk, Clara turned her attention back to the pecan tassies.

  Ruth cast around for a means of escape.

  Margaret Anne still had one of Max’s hands, and he was deep in conversation with the reigning social queen of Oxford, a frail woman with blue hair, and blue veins showing on her bejeweled hands.

  Ruth left the room quietly so her mother wouldn’t notice. Her suitcases were still in the car. She didn’t care. She never wanted to see those clothes again.

  The first thing she did when she got upstairs was scrub the cheek her mother had kissed. Then, taking a pillowcase off her bed, she stuffed in pajamas, her toothbrush, two pairs of panties, a pair of jeans, and an old cotton T-shirt that said, “You have to kiss a few frogs before you find your prince.” As an afterthought she added her teddy bear.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Margaret Anne was leaning against the doorjamb, her perfume filling the room. Ruth used to love the way her mother smelled, like the gardenias that bloomed along the side of the house in summertime. Now the smell made her sick. It reminded her of the white room in New Orleans, of the things Max had done to her, of the reason he was able to do them to her.

  Everything reminded her of that white room.

  “I’m leaving.”

  Margaret Anne came into the room and shut the door.

  “Max told you. Right?”

  Ruth shattered like a dummy blown apart in one of the horror movies she and Wanda went to on Saturday afternoon. Deep inside she’d harbored the hope that Max had been lying, that her mother had known nothing of what he’d planned to do. Even if she had known, she could have offered some excuse. Ruth would have forgiven her if she’d said that all her inheritance was gone, that she was desperate and beside herself with fear, that she hadn’t known what else to do.

  But Margaret Anne Bellafontaine showed no remorse.

  “You sold me!”

  “Keep your voice down. I still have company.”

  “Screw your company.”

  Without changing expression Margaret Anne tuned the radio to a rock station and turned the volume on high.

  “Ladies don’t use language like that. I taught you better.”

  Ruth’s control snapped. The shaking started in her legs and moved its way up her body. She had to wrap her arms around herself to keep from falling into little pieces.

  “There are a few things you didn’t teach me. But Max did. Do you want to know all the things my uncle Max taught me?”

  “I already know them.” Margaret Anne’s face and voice never changed. She might have been addressing the socially correct women in her parlor rather than her trembling teenage daughter. “Max taught me first.”

  Bile rose in Ruth’s throat. She ran into the bathroom and vomited. Hanging over the toilet, she heaved until there was nothing left in her except despair.

  Her mother was still waiting when she left the bathroom.

  “How do you think I’ve provided for you all these years? Did you think the money just dropped out of the trees? When you were born, I had no education, no job, not even any prospects. I did what I do best in order to survive.”

  Ruth turned her head away, but Margaret Anne grabbed her shoulders and spoke in a fierce whisper that could still be heard over the music.

  “Look at me. I’m forty-four years old. The going rate for faded tramps is not very high.”

  Ruth’s shaking stopped, and she stared at the woman she no longer knew, had never known.

  “Don’t look at me as if I’m some worm. I’ve been a good mother to you. Everything I’ve ever done was for you.”

  “Including selling me as a love slave? I wish I’d never laid eyes on you.”

  “You selfish little bitch.” Margaret Anne swung the flat of her palm against Ruth’s cheek. The sting brought tears to the girl’s eyes. “Two weeks is all it cost you, two weeks in the company of a gentleman who knows how to initiate a young girl into the joys of womanhood.”

  “If Max is a gentleman, I’m a virgin. And we both know I’m no longer a virgin, don’t we, Mother?”

  Two spots of color showed on Margaret Anne’s cheeks,
but except for those telltale marks, she acted as if she were lecturing a child who’d been tardy for a church picnic.

  “Where would all your high-and-mighty moralizing be if you’d ended up in some crummy tenement with no money for food and clothes, let alone an education? Max paid a fortune for your precious virginity. You’ll never have to worry about your future the way I’ve worried about mine.”

  “Your worries are over. You can have it all. I wouldn’t touch Max’s money with a ten-foot pole.”

  Ruth went to her bed and picked up the lumpy pillowcase. She had no idea where she was going or what she would do when she got there. All she knew was that she had to get out of that hateful house.

  When she turned around, her mother was at the dressing table inspecting her makeup.

  “Use the back stairs. I still have guests.” Margaret Anne smoothed her dress over her hips as she faced her daughter. “And don’t slam the door on your way out. A slammed door is a sign of a low-class upbringing.”

  Chapter 4

  THE VIRUNGAS OF CENTRAL AFRICA, 1982

  Malone knew the moon as few lowlanders could, but not the sun, almost never the sun. Nights, the moon was so huge and bright, it turned the elephants’ tusks to silver and transformed the moss swaying from the trees to ghostly dancers. But most days the sun could not penetrate the mist. It clung to the mountains like a jealous lover, refusing to budge until late afternoon when the sun finally managed to burn it away.

  Malone had lived all his life with cool, damp mists. If there were any justice, the sun would shine on the day he officially became a man.

  He tumbled out of bed and walked to the window, dragging the sheet behind him. Mists shrouded Mount Karisimbi, and in the distance the snowcapped peaks of the other volcanic mountains in the Virunga chain were violet in the half light of early morning. Out of the mists came the bark of the duiker calling his mate to the watering hole, and the soft mounting cry of the rabbitlike hyrax protesting the invasion of his territory. The trees were just beginning to take shape, their lacy mosses moving in a languorous, hypnotic dance.