When I Found You (A Box Set)

by Webb, Peggy

  Flowers. Always the flowers. Would she never outrun the smell?

  “Nothing but white flowers for you, Ruth, the flowers of a virgin.”

  A sharp bark brought her to her senses. The brown terrier growled and nipped at her heels. She realized she’d been standing on the sidewalk, lost once more in the past.

  Run. Run. She filled her lungs with oxygen and raced onward.

  The car appeared suddenly out of the night, its horn blaring at her. With a screeching of brakes, it came to a halt in the middle of the street, a dark, hulking menace.

  “Hey! Sugar!”

  Run! Ruth swerved toward a stand of oak trees. Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw a large man step into the glare of headlights.

  “Hey,” he called. “Wait.”

  Panicked, she looked for a means of escape. The car was in front of her, a large fence behind her.

  “Hey ... babe ...”

  Her skirt ripped as she scaled the fence. Ruth raced on, leaving bits of red clinging to the chain links like blood.

  A heel broke off one shoe, and she almost lost her balance. Ruth flailed the air, then raced on, lopsided.

  Run. Run.

  A ditch was coming up. It was deep, filled with water from the spring rains. Could she make it? What if she fell in and broke her leg?

  Somewhere behind her was a man who had leered at her and called her babe. Taking a deep breath, she jumped. Her landing was solid, but the heel on her good shoe was hopelessly mired in the mud.

  She struggled to pull it out. Was that a noise behind her? The bushes on the other side of the ditch were moving. There would be no silk sheets and white roses for her this time. Only the dirty, knowing grin of a stranger.

  Biting down on the scream that formed in her throat, Ruth jerked her foot out of the shoe, then left it behind in the mud. Behind her a dog barked.

  Would she never be able to stop running?

  Pleasegodpleasegod.

  Her house appeared suddenly, as if a giant hand had dropped it out of the sky. Breathless, she flung herself against the trunk of a massive magnolia tree. Its slick shiny leaves cloaked her.

  She stood under the tree three minutes, three hours, three days. Time was meaningless to her. There was nothing except the silent screams and the awful need to vanish from the face of the earth.

  Her mother must not see her. That much was paramount. Using a stealth she didn’t know she possessed, Ruth somehow managed to get through the back door and up the stairs without being caught.

  Inside her room she leaned against the door. A stream of moonlight coming through the windows fell across her, and she saw the pale shadow of herself in the pier mirror across the room. Her skirt was in tatters, and her eyes glowed like coal in skin that was too dark ever to be called peaches and cream, too dark, even, to be called olive.

  Ruth put her hands to her cheeks.

  “Who am I?”

  “Ruth?” It was her mother, knocking at the door. “Is that you?”

  Ruth didn’t know. Was it she? Or was it a horrible clone of her mother staring back at her from the mirror, a dark, passionate girl-woman made for the pleasures of men?

  The knocking was loud and insistent. Ruth could picture her mother’s rage, the fair skin flushed a bright rose and her eyes snapping blue fire.

  “Ruth? What are you doing home so early? Ruth! Answer me.”

  Ruth pressed her hands to her ears, but she could still hear the banging. If she didn’t answer, it would never stop.

  “Fred ... got sick. And we had to leave.”

  “I didn’t hear his car. Why didn’t I hear his car?”

  “It ... ran out of gas. I had to walk the last block home.”

  Silence. Did Margaret Anne believe her lies?

  “Did you have fun?”

  Had she? She’d said pleasepleaseplease. Had she been begging Fred to stop or begging him to continue?

  “Ruth? Why don’t you come down and tell me about the dance? I was having a cup of tea. We’ll sit in the kitchen together. It will be just like old times.”

  When she was five, she’d given her mother a homemade valentine, a crooked red-felt heart pasted on a piece of paper bearing the message “I luv U, Ruth.” When she was six and had to stand in front of the class at show-and-tell, she’d shown a picture of Margaret Anne. “This is my mother. She plays the piano and sings, and sometimes she lets me help make cookies. I want to grow up to be a beautiful lady just like my mother.”

  If having a cup of tea in the kitchen would bring back old times, Ruth would be willing to drink a gallon.

  But nothing could bring back the old times. Things had been broken that could never be fixed. A heart. Dreams. Trust.

  Didn’t her mother know that?

  Ruth turned on the television to drown out the sound of knocking.

  “The Science Network is proud to bring you tonight’s special on the Corday Foundation,” the announcer said.

  “Ruth!”

  She turned up the volume. “The Corday Foundation was established by Dr. Joseph Corday in the late fifties,” the disembodied voice screamed at her.

  What did she care when it was established? She no longer wanted to be part of a place that established foundations, and sponsored dances where boys could run wild, and tolerated mothers who sold their daughters.

  Photographs of a jungle flashed across the screen—and mountains so beautiful, they would have taken her breath away if she’d had any left to take.

  “Primarily the work of Dr. Corday and his wife, photojournalist Eleanor Sims Corday, the foundation now boasts another member of the family, Dr. Brett Corday. Dr. Corday, will you tell us something of your background?”

  Ruth turned toward the bathroom. The voice of Dr. Brett Corday followed her there. It was a deep, mesmerizing voice, rather like music.

  Ruth didn’t want to be mesmerized. She closed the door to shut out the mellifluous voice of Dr. Brett Corday.

  There were no windows in the bathroom, and it took her a while to adjust her eyes to the total darkness. But she didn’t want the light. She didn’t want to see her torn dress and her black eyes that had seen too much.

  Faintly, she could make out the outline of the medicine chest. The latch clicked as she reached inside for the bottle of aspirin.

  How many would it take? She took out the whole bottle.

  Panic seized her, and she felt cold all over. Shivering, she held the bottle to her chest. Was she making a mistake?

  Last year everybody had mourned when Brad Howitt had been found dead in his bed. What a sad and lonely way to go, they’d said, as if he’d decided to go off on a trip to some distant and foreign country all by himself. A few had said how brave.

  She hoped they would say nothing about her. If she knew someplace they’d never find her, she’d go, but she didn’t, so there was no use looking.

  She closed her eyes. “Don’t think about this. Just do it.”

  “Welcome,” the announcer of the Science Network said when she opened her door, as if he were personally delighted to have her back in her own bedroom.

  She hurried to the TV to snap it off when the image of a gorilla filled the screen. The sassy look on its face reminded her of Miranda.

  Ruth had forgotten about her cat. Who would feed Miranda after she was gone?

  “Welcome to the Science Network, Dr. Brett Corday.”

  The camera panned back, and Ruth saw that the gorilla was perched in the arms of a man who looked more like Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights than a scientist.

  “And who is this young lady with you?”

  “This is Cee Cee.” Dr. Brett Corday turned and looked right at Ruth. She sucked in her breath. The right side of his face was movie-star handsome, breathtaking. The left side had a thin curving scar along his cheek and a leather patch over his eye. It gave him the dark, dangerous look of a pirate. He stared right at her, his good eye black, bright, intelligent, accusatory.

  Coward.
r />   Her hand trembled on the bottle. “I don’t care what you think,” she whispered.

  “Two years ago Cee Cee’s mother was brutally murdered by poachers.” Dr. Corday spoke with an intense passion of this violent act that had snuffed out life. Ruth looked down at the aspirin bottle, ashamed.

  “I brought her to the Corday Foundation to live with me. She now considers me her mother.” He hugged the baby gorilla and said, “I love you, Cee Cee.”

  Ruth’s shame tripled. Who would hug Miranda and tell her how wonderful she was? Who would tell her that she was the best cat in the whole world and say, “I love you, Miranda?”

  Postponing her quest for oblivion, Ruth sank onto the carpet, where she sat cross-legged in front of the television. Dr. Corday sat on a chair facing her, his stare burning a hole through her.

  Did he see her dark secret? Her guilt? Her fear?

  Mesmerized, she watched him. The gorilla reached up and traced the faint line that curved around his cheek, then touched his eye patch as tenderly as a child touches his mother. Showing her teeth in an enormous gorilla smile, Cee Cee moved her fingers.

  “What did she say?” the announcer asked.

  “Cee Cee said, ‘I love you.’”

  The bottle rolled out of Ruth’s hand and under the bed. Miranda came out, stretching and yawning. With the grace of her jungle ancestors, she pounced onto Ruth’s lap, then curled into a ball, purring.

  “Oh, Miranda ... Miranda.” Ruth pressed her face into her cat’s soft fur. “I love you. I never meant to leave you. Never!”

  Miranda patted Ruth’s face as if to say, I know. I understand. And I love you, anyway.

  “This is it, folks,” the announcer said. “The gorilla who talks.”

  Still hugging her cat, Ruth hitched forward. An animal that could talk! For years she’d known they would have lots to say if only they knew how to say it. Her dog Dangerous had had ways of communicating so that Ruth could understand, and Miranda was so demonstrative, she was practically human.

  “For the last two years Dr. Brett Corday has not only been raising the gorilla, he’s been teaching her to communicate using American Sign Language. Will you explain how that works, Dr. Corday?”

  “Because of prior language studies that had been done with primates, I knew the gorilla was capable of communication. Initially I used the method of repetition. Cee Cee rapidly acquired a basic vocabulary.”

  “Dr. Corday, there are skeptics who say that these primates are merely imitating what they’ve seen again and again, that the skills they have can’t be termed ‘real language.’“

  “If you had heard what Cee Cee said to me yesterday about not getting her snack to her on time, you wouldn’t have any doubt that she not only knows how to use the language, but she’s capable of abstract thought.”

  “Can you really talk, Cee Cee?” Lights gleamed on the announcer’s bald head as he leaned close to the gorilla.

  Cee Cee stuck out her tongue at him, then proceeded to make rapid-fire movements with her fingers.

  Dr. Corday’s hearty laughter filled Ruth’s bedroom, and with it came the first hope she’d felt in two years.

  “What did she say?”

  “Cee Cee said, ‘Egg man dumb.’ She insulted you not once but twice, first by referring to your baldness and then by denigrating your intelligence.”

  “Well, I’ll be ...” The announcer broke into a sheepish grin.

  Wild horses couldn’t have dragged Ruth from the TV set after that. She leaned forward and hung on Dr. Corday’s every word.

  Project Cee Cee was his life. He spent every waking moment with her deep in the jungles of Central Africa teaching her to communicate. When he spoke of the Virungas, it was with the passion of a lover. Chills went through Ruth.

  “Think of the possibilities,” he said. “We’re training her in the wild. Someday we’ll reintroduce her into her natural habitat. Her first desire will be to communicate with the other gorillas. Will she teach them to use sign language, or will she adopt their ways and forget hers? But most important, can and will she tell us what they know?”

  Dr. Corday’s voice drew Ruth deep into possibilities she’d never dreamed of. When the program was over, she turned off the television, then sat in front of the blank screen, still seeing a dark, craggy face with a leather eye patch.

  She owed her life to him. He had come in her time of greatest need. For two years she’d been a shell, a shadow. Now a tiny glimmer of light shone in the dark places of her soul, and dreams she’d thought dead began to stir to life.

  She stretched her hand toward the television and traced the line where his scar had been, upward toward his leather eye patch. As her hand rested flat on the blank screen, she tasted the salt of her own tears.

  “Thank you, Dr. Corday,” she whispered.

  A strange energy pulsed through her palm as if she had miraculously connected with the dark, mesmerizing man who had touched her from a distance and given her hope.

  Book Two

  Chapter 13

  OAHU, HAWAII, 1994

  Malone was sick of gorillas. Everywhere he went, it was Cee Cee this and Cee Cee that. Endless questions. Microphones thrust into his face. Spotlights making him sweat.

  “Does Cee Cee really paint pictures?”

  “Does she understand what she’s saying?”

  “Does she really cuss?”

  That last question always made him laugh. Just a week before, she’d called him a dirty stinkpot, all because he’d said she looked ridiculous in her pink hair bow. Brett encouraged her by laughing at everything she did.

  That gorilla was getting too big for her britches. So was his brother, for that matter.

  What right did Brett have to send him off on these stupid fund-raising tours? Brett was far better suited for public appearances. And Malone had told him so. But Brett had been adamant.

  “You’re the best man for the job, Malone. One look at that sincere, innocent face, and donors can’t wait to write out big checks.”

  “Cut the bull, Brett. What they really want is you.”

  “I don’t care what they want. I’m not going to leave Cee Cee. Every day in her development is crucial. Besides, I don’t like to leave the Virungas.”

  “Screw the Virungas.”

  “See. You need a change of scenery. It will do you good to get away.”

  What he wanted was to get away permanently. He longed for a simple life in a simple town where he could practice his veterinary medicine and raise lots of dogs and children. Hawaii wasn’t bad, but it was too exotic, and in that respect too much like the Virungas.

  Someday he’d go somewhere and have a life of his own, maybe Texas or Alabama or Virginia. In the meantime Brett needed him—Brett, who had sacrificed his eye for his brother.

  He glanced up from his notes at the crowd filling the hall. The woman in the back of the room stood out like a rose in an onion patch. It wasn’t her clothes that set her apart, the simple white dress that skimmed her curves, nor even her face and body, awesome as they were. It was her presence. Walking down the center aisle, she commanded the auditorium as if it were her kingdom. Heads turned as she passed by. Women whispered behind their hands. Men wolf-whistled.

  Malone turned to the young man sitting on the stage with him, Rick O’Callaghan, president of the Society of Anthropology.

  “Who is she?”

  Rick didn’t have to ask who he was talking about.

  “The Polynesian princess?”

  “Really? She’s a princess?”

  “Who knows? Some call her a voodoo witch.”

  “I believe it. I’m already under her spell.”

  “Well, good luck, pal. Ruth Bellafontaine is unapproachable. She can freeze a man at twenty paces with that icy stare of hers.”

  It wasn’t frostbite that Malone was getting, but something at the other end of the temperature zone. Caught up in his own private inferno, he stared at her, couldn’t take his eyes off her,
even after his name was called and he was deep into his lecture. Fortunately, it was a spiel he’d made so many times, he could have delivered it with a pack of wild dogs snarling at his heels.

  Dark, exotic, mysterious, Ruth stared back at him. He didn’t know half of what he said, but he guessed he’d made sense, for when his lecture was over, his audience applauded, then pressed toward him for further questions.

  He craned his neck, trying to see over their heads. He couldn’t see the white dress. He’d lost her.

  “Dr. Corday?”

  Suddenly she was there, standing in front of him, perfectly beautiful, perfectly poised. He tried to smooth down his cowlick and straighten his tie at the same time. She was going to think he was a complete idiot.

  “Yes?” He tried to sound wise and generous.

  “I’m Ruth Bellafontaine, a graduate student here at the university. Your lecture was tremendous.”

  “Thank you.” The way he sounded, he might as well have scuffed his feet and said, “Aw shucks, ma’am.”

  “No. Thank you. For more than the lecture, actually. I owe my being here to Dr. Brett Corday.”

  Always Brett.

  “My brother.”

  “He’s your brother?” Her smile was glorious. All because of Brett. “I was only fifteen when I saw him on television. I’ll never forget it.”

  So what if she wants to talk about Brett? Seize the opportunity, fool.

  “Why don’t we go somewhere quiet so we can talk about it?” They’d said she was unapproachable. He was careful not to take her arm. “I think there’s a coffee shop around the corner.”

  “Maybe just a quick cup. I’m not working tonight.”

  They sat on opposite sides of the booth. He wished he had the boldness to reach for her hand—at least her hand —but he still had a cowlick and the awkwardness that went with it, especially around beautiful women, and she was the most exquisite woman he’d ever known.

  Tongue-tied, he stared at her.

  “I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw that you’d be lecturing here,” she said.

  He couldn’t believe his eyes, either. Or his good fortune. She smelled like something good to eat. The waitress took their order, coffee for her, coffee and a sweet roll for him, when actually he’d wanted to order Ruth Bellafontaine, sprinkled with sugar, wrapped in cellophane, and delivered in a take-out bag. He’d take her back to his hotel room. Trapped as he was between the steamy jungles of Africa and an endless parade of hotel rooms in strange cities, he had had very few occasions to test his limited appeal to the opposite sex.