The Unwanted

by John Saul

  “I want you to meet someone, Eric. This is my daughter, Cassie. She’s just arrived from California to live with us. Cassie, this is Eric Cavanaugh. The proverbial boy next door,” he added, winking at Eric.

  Cassie smiled shyly and held out her hand, but Eric didn’t take it. Without meaning to, he frowned slightly, still trying to place her in his mind. As their eyes met, he took an involuntary step backward. Then, remembering his manners, he recovered himself and managed a crooked grin. “H-hi,” he stammered. “I’m sorry about your mother.…” Cassie’s face turned even more pale, and as she turned and hurried toward the house, Eric wished he’d thought of something else to say. But his mind had suddenly gone blank, for as he’d looked at Cassie, something had happened to him.

  It was as if their minds had met, as if an instant connection had been made. Something within her had reached out, and something within him had responded. As he went back to his lawn mowing, the strange feeling inside him grew stronger.

  She was someone he’d been searching for, though he had been unaware that he was even searching. He knew her, knew how she felt, knew what she was thinking. For some reason he didn’t understand, he was certain that it had been the same for her.

  And in that instant, he had known something else—that Cassie Winslow didn’t truly care that her mother had died.

  But that’s stupid, Eric told himself. I’ve never seen her before, and I don’t know anything about her at all.

  Chapter 3

  She looks so much older than I thought she would, Rosemary Winslow thought as the front door opened and Cassie stepped inside. But, of course, why wouldn’t she? After all, the last pictures Keith had brought back had been taken when Cassie was only eleven. The child in those pictures, the little girl with the large—almost haunted—dark brown eyes which had stared out from beneath thick bangs, was gone. The girl who stood before Rosemary was now almost grown up. Nearly as tall as Rosemary herself, Cassie held herself erect, her long chestnut hair drawn back to expose a pale face that seemed more mature than her fifteen years. But the girl’s eyes still seemed to have the same haunted look that Rosemary remembered so vividly from the last set of snapshots.

  “I’m Rosemary,” she said, offering Cassie a smile and stepping forward, ready to hug the girl. “I’m so very sorry about what’s happened. If there’s anything I can do …”

  Cassie hesitated—Rosemary could almost feel the girl shrinking away from her. Then she offered Rosemary her hand. “I’m Cassie,” she said softly. “It … it was good of you to take me in.”

  Good of us? Rosemary repeated in her own mind. What a strange thing to say—what else could she have thought might happen?

  “I’ve been wanting to meet you for so long,” Rosemary said out loud. “I even tried to convince your father to take Jennifer and me along the last time he went to visit you, but Jennifer was only three, and in the end it just didn’t seem like it would be fair.” She turned and glanced up the stairs. “Jen? Don’t you want to come down and meet your sister?”

  Jennifer suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs, looking shyly down at Cassie. Very slowly she started down the steps. “My name’s Jennifer Elizabeth,” she said, offering her hand to Cassie. “But you can call me Jen, or Jenny. Just don’t call me Punkin. Daddy calls me that, and I hate it. Did he call you by a dumb name when you were little?”

  Cassie stared at the little girl, who was a tiny feminine version of her father. Her reddish curls seemed to go in every direction, and her sparkling green eyes peered out of a square face with a jaw that gave her a stubborn look. But though her voice had been serious when she spoke, Cassie still saw a happy gleam in Jennifer’s eyes.

  “I don’t remember what he called me,” she said. “I was only a baby when he went away.” She turned to her father. “Did you have a nickname for me?”

  Keith spoke without thinking. “Same as Jen’s. Punkin.” Then, seeing the hurt in both his daughters’ eyes, he wished he could take the words back. “I guess I don’t have any imagination, do I?” he offered, trying to ease the moment.

  “Jenny, why don’t you take Cassie upstairs and show her her room?” Rosemary said hurriedly, then turned to Cassie. “Did you really manage to get everything into that one little bag, or are there some suitcases in the car?”

  Cassie shook her head. “This is all I brought. Daddy said I shouldn’t bring anything else—”

  “And you paid attention to him?” Rosemary replied with an exaggerated gasp. “I told him no girl your age could put everything in one bag, and that he shouldn’t have asked you to.”

  “It’s all right,” Cassie replied. “I don’t really have much anyway. All I needed was a few extra clothes.”

  “Well, all right,” Rosemary said doubtfully. “But if you find out you forgot anything, just let me know, and we’ll go do some shopping.”

  Jennifer, who was already halfway up the stairs, whirled around. “Come on,” she urged. “Don’t you even want to see the room?”

  Cassie hurried up the stairs after Jennifer, then followed her down the hall to a large room in the southeast corner of the house. As she stepped through the door, she stopped short. The room had obviously just been done over, but whoever had planned it must have thought she was still ten years old. The walls were papered with what looked like characters out of Alice in Wonderland, and the curtains were made out of material that matched the paper. Against one wall there was an ornate brass bed, covered with a blue quilt with white ruffles. In addition to the bed there was a wooden desk, a bureau, and a rocking chair, all of it painted white. The rocking chair had a cushion on its seat, upholstered in the same blue as the quilt on the bed.

  “Don’t you just love it?” Jennifer asked excitedly. “Alice in Wonderland is my favorite book in the whole world.”

  Cassie suddenly understood. “This is your room, isn’t it?”

  Jennifer hesitated, then slowly nodded. “It’s always been my room. Mom and I just finished decorating it, and I was going to move back into it today. But then when we found out that you were coming, we decided I should stay in the other room and you should have this one, because this one is bigger.”

  “That’s dumb,” Cassie announced. “Let’s go see the other room.”

  Jennifer’s eyes clouded over with doubt. “I shouldn’t show it to you. Mom says I shouldn’t let anyone in my room unless I’ve cleaned it, and I didn’t even pick it up today.”

  “Well, that’s dumb too,” Cassie decided. “I never cleaned my room at home, and I had anyone in it I wanted. Let’s go see it.”

  Reluctantly Jennifer led Cassie back into the hall, then across to the other side of the house. “It’s kinda small,” she said before she opened the door. “Daddy says there didn’t used to be a bathroom up here, and when they put one in a long time ago, they took half of this room for it.” She pushed the door open and let Cassie step inside.

  This, she knew as soon as she crossed the threshold, was the room that would be hers.

  Had it not been for the space lost to the bathroom, the bedroom would have been large and L-shaped, with two windows on each wall. As it was, the room was perfectly rectangular, but no more than eight feet wide, with its fifteen-foot length giving it more of the feeling of a hall than a room. Just inside the door—to the left—a closet had been built. The floors were pine, and as Cassie moved slowly down the length of the room toward the single window at the far end, the planks creaked under her feet.

  And yet despite its odd proportions and creaking floor, or maybe even because of them, the room felt right to her. Its relationship to the rest of the house seemed to her to reflect her own relationship to her father’s family.

  Not quite connected, not quite fitting in.

  Set apart.

  In her mind’s eye she emptied the room of Jennifer’s toys and filled it with her own things. She covered the pink wallpaper with forest-green paint, and trimmed the window sashes in white enamel. Suddenly the room t
ook on a cozy feeling, as if it were wrapping itself around her, protecting her. As Jennifer had said, the room wasn’t nearly as large as the other one, but it wasn’t really small either. It was just oddly shaped. As Cassie examined it more carefully, she realized she could divide the space in half, with her bed in the part closest to the door. The rest of the room would be set aside as a private place, a place shut off to everyone else but her.

  She came finally to the window and looked out. Below her was the backyard, its lawn neatly cut, and beyond that, separated from the yard by a black wrought-iron fence, was a small cemetery. “What’s that?” she asked, and Jennifer came over to stand beside her.

  “It’s the graveyard,” the little girl said solemnly. “It’s the oldest one in False Harbor, and everyone in it’s been dead a real long time. Practically nobody ever gets buried there anymore—it’s almost all full.”

  Cassie grinned mischievously at the little girl. “Are there any ghosts in there?”

  Jennifer’s eyes rolled scornfully upward. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. Everyone knows that!”

  “But it’s still fun to think about,” Cassie replied. “I mean, wouldn’t it be neat to think maybe there are still people down there who’ve been there for hundreds of years, and sometimes, when it’s real dark, they get up and wander around the town?”

  Jennifer frowned. “Why would they want to do that?”

  Cassie shrugged, and let her imagination begin to flow. “Lots of reasons. Maybe they just want to see the houses they lived in, or keep an eye on their descendants.” Her voice dropped slightly. “Or maybe there are people in the graveyard who weren’t supposed to die, and they’re still there, waiting for revenge.”

  Jennifer’s eyes narrowed, but when she spoke, her voice quavered just the tiniest bit. “Now, that’s dumb!” she declared in conscious imitation of Cassie’s earlier pronouncements. “All you’re doing is trying to scare me, and you can’t. I’m not a baby.”

  “But it could be true,” Cassie insisted, her gaze returning to the graveyard once more. “Nobody knows what happens to us after we die. Maybe we just die, but maybe we don’t. Maybe we keep on living, in different bodies.”

  Jennifer frowned. “You mean like re—reincar—whatever that word is?”

  “Reincarnation,” Cassie said. “Maybe—” She fell silent as she noticed a slight movement out of the corner of her eye. Peering out the window, she looked to the left and saw Eric Cavanaugh leaning into the power mower, pushing it through the thick grass in his backyard. She frowned slightly, remembering his odd reaction when he’d been introduced to her. For a second he’d almost seemed afraid of her.

  She watched him for a few moments, and then, as if he could feel her eyes on him, he turned, squinted against the sun as he tipped his face up, and hesitantly waved. Another moment went by before Cassie waved back.

  Abandoning the window, she looked at the room once more, then her eyes fell on Jennifer, who was watching her warily. “I told you it was small,” the little girl said cautiously. “You don’t like it, do you?”

  “Yes, I do,” Cassie said. “In fact I like it a lot better than the other room, and I think we ought to trade.”

  Jennifer’s eyes lit with sudden excitement. “Really?”

  Cassie nodded. “Why don’t you go down and tell your mother, and if she says it’s all right, we’ll just start moving your stuff back into your room, okay?”

  Jennifer squealed with delight, and darted out of the room. A second later Cassie heard her pounding down the stairs. Then, alone in the room, she let herself feel it once more.

  As before, it felt right.

  This house wasn’t hers, and the people she lived with weren’t hers. Not really. But this room, for some reason she couldn’t quite understand, truly felt as though it belonged to her, and she was meant to have it. Here she would feel comfortable, feel safe.

  When Rosemary appeared in the doorway a few minutes later, Cassie was still by the window, sitting on its ledge.

  “Cassie?” Rosemary asked. For a moment the girl didn’t move. “Cassie, is something wrong? Is there anything I can do?”

  Cassie looked at her then, and fleetingly Rosemary had the impression that the girl was somewhere else, somewhere far removed from the little bedroom. Then something in Cassie’s eyes changed, and she smiled.

  “No. I just think I should have this room, and Jennifer should have the other one. Is it all right?”

  For a moment Rosemary was tempted to argue, tempted to point out that surely Cassie would need the extra space much more than Jennifer. But as her eyes met Cassie’s, she changed her mind. For in Cassie’s eyes she saw something that suddenly worried her.

  Keith’s stubbornness, like Jennifer’s, was in his jaw, and was nothing more than a physical feature. But Cassie’s was reflected in her eyes, and that, Rosemary knew, was something else entirely. Cassie’s stubbornness was in her spirit, and Rosemary was suddenly quite certain that once this girl made up her mind about something, it would be very difficult to change it.

  “If that’s what you want,” she said at last, “I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t have it.”

  But as she left the room a moment later, Rosemary had the strange feeling that although Cassie’s voice had betrayed nothing, the two of them had just had their first confrontation, and Cassie had won.

  That’s ridiculous, she told herself. All she did was make a very nice gesture toward Jennifer, and I should accept it at face vlaue.

  But for some reason she couldn’t. And as she went back down the stairs, she realized why. All through their conversation she’d had the unsettling feeling that she wasn’t truly talking to Cassie at all, but to someone else, some persona Cassie had devised to present to the world. Beneath that persona, Rosemary thought, there was someone else—the real Cassie.

  Of that person, she was certain, nothing at all had been exposed.

  Eric finished his yard work at six-thirty, put the tools back into the garage, swung its lopsided door shut, and started across the driveway toward the back door. At least the lawn looked all right, and he’d gotten most of the weeds out of the garden. But the Cavanaughs’ house still didn’t look nearly as nice as the Winslows’ house next door, and Eric knew exactly why: paint.

  If he could only talk his father into buying a few gallons of white paint, Eric knew he could make their house look a lot better than it did. But he also knew it was hopeless, for he’d asked his father about it last year. Ed had only glowered darkly at him and told him he should keep his mind on his schoolwork and not worry about the house. “Besides,” he had added, “I don’t have money to waste just to put on a show for the neighbors. Only reason to paint a house is to sell it, and I don’t plan to sell this place.”

  But there was another reason why his father wouldn’t buy paint, and Eric knew all too well what it was: most of Ed Cavanaugh’s money was spent on liquor.

  It had happened again today. His father had left right after breakfast, having announced that he was going down to the pier to finish the repair job on the Big Ed. But when lunchtime came around and his father hadn’t come home, both Eric and his mother had known where Ed was, though neither of them had said anything. Then, half an hour ago, the truck had pulled into the driveway. When his father climbed down from the driver’s seat, Eric immediately knew that he was drunk. His step was unsteady, and his eyes held the bright glaze of anger that meant he was looking for a fight. Eric had looked away as quickly as he could, concentrating on clipping the edge of the lawn next to the sidewalk. But he hadn’t been quick enough.

  “You staring at something, boy?” Ed had growled. “Well, let me tell you something—anyone works as hard as I do deserves a little relaxation, and if I stop off for a coupla beers with my friends, that’s my business. Got it?”

  Eric had nodded mutely, not daring to challenge his father, but sure in his own mind that it had been a lot more than a couple of beers his father had shared wi
th his friends. Maybe it started that way, but after the second beer Ed would have switched to a shot of whiskey with a beer chaser, and bought the same thing for anyone willing to listen to him talk while they drank his booze. Only when there was no one left willing to listen, would his father have finally come home. Eric kept his mouth shut and his eyes on his work, and after a few seconds which seemed to stretch out into eternity, his father had shambled down the driveway and into the house.

  Now, unable to put off going inside any longer, Eric pulled the screen door open and went into the service porch. He could hear his father’s voice from the kitchen beyond. Though he couldn’t see him, Eric knew Ed was sitting in the breakfast nook, a half-empty glass of bourbon in front of him, his glazed eyes fixed dangerously on his wife.

  “Some reason why supper’s late again?” Ed Cavanaugh was saying, his voice slurring slightly, his words edged with bitter sarcasm. “You been doing something useful again, like sitting on your ass watching TV all day? Seems to me if I can work all day, the least you could do is have my meals ready when I get home.”

  “I’m sorry, Ed,” Laura replied, her voice barely audible. “But I’m fixing you a roast, and it’s just taking a little longer than I expected.”

  Eric moved into the kitchen. The oven door was open, and his mother bent down in front of it, tapping the meat thermometer with a wooden spoon. As Eric watched, she removed the roast from the oven and set it on the counter.

  “Smells good, Mom,” Eric offered, hoping to deflect his father’s anger.

  “It should,” Ed growled. “The price they get for that crap, and all it is is gristle.”

  “Aw, come on, Dad,” Eric protested when he saw his mother’s eyes start to flood with tears. “Mom cooks great—”

  Suddenly Ed was out of the breakfast nook, his bulk planted in front of his son, his eyes blazing with fury. “What the hell do you know about it?” he demanded. “You an expert on cooking too?” His right hand rose threateningly.