Will lowered his mask and straightened away from her. He studied her for a long moment. Lucy was shaking so hard, only her restraints kept her upright. Slowly, deliberately, he pressed his palm to the center of her chest. Her heart was a battering ram. She couldn’t fill her lungs.
“Lucy.” He dropped his hand. “You know how to put on the brakes. Did you forget?”
She could make no sense of his words. “Just . . . just stop. Please.”
He sighed in exasperation, a sentiment echoed by his body language. “That’s not how it works. You know that.”
“I don’t . . . how what works?”
He tossed up his hands. “I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but Mick was right. I should’ve pulled the plug back in your kitchen when Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum showed up.”
He stalked to the mattress and scooped up the corpulent mouse, now snoozing amid O-Zing crumbs. He started to tuck Josie into his sweatshirt pocket, then glanced at Lucy and set the beast on the floor near her shackled feet. “Wouldn’t want you to get lonely.” Then he flipped two switches in the electrical panel, turning on the music full blast and turning off the overhead fluorescents.
“No!” she cried as the room was plunged into impenetrable blackness. “Wait!”
The door swung open, turning Will into a shadowy silhouette. “We’re going to have an interesting chat when this is all over, Mrs. Narby.”
______
WILL STEPPED OUTSIDE into dazzling sunshine and shirtsleeve temperatures: a taste of summer in early April. The building at his back was a long, low-slung stretch of pale tan bricks set well back from the road, the very essence of spare postwar architecture. The first time he’d set eyes on this Stalinesque pile, he’d dubbed it the Gulag—a prescient name, all things considered, and long since shortened to “the Goo.”
Lucy’s screams were audible even through the boarded-up windows, but Will never looked back as he ambled a hundred yards to the sprawling Queen Anne Victorian he called home. The house, once a proud painted lady, had already begun showing her age back in the 1950s when a Presbyterian congregation held its first services there. The church eventually erected the Goo, which housed a sanctuary, classrooms, commercial kitchen, and social hall. Will had purchased the three-acre property in the early nineties when the growing congregation pulled up stakes and moved to larger digs.
He’d been eighteen at the time, his TV days long over. Still, the enduring popularity of In No Time translated into a respectable annual income for the former child star. Respectable, not bottomless as some seemed to think. The princely sum that had secured this property came from an altogether different source—a sudden, secret windfall that only two other people knew about.
In No Time had teetered on the brink of cancellation for two and a half seasons in the early eighties until Will’s abrupt departure sealed the show’s doom. Ironically, the notorious details of that departure immediately elevated In No Time from forgettable sitcom to cult classic, ensuring syndicated reruns in perpetuity. The show’s signature catchphrase “I’m having conniptions!” had long ago been absorbed into the popular lexicon, taking its place alongside such venerable chestnuts as “What you talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?” and “He’s dead, Jim.”
Likewise, the show’s tragic young star had become a household name. Thankfully, people rarely made the connection between cute, carrot-topped Ricky Baines and thirty-four-year-old Will Kitchen, currently playing the part of a grown-up.
He was halfway to the house when the sound of car tires on gravel brought his head around. He watched the dark green Acura roll up the long driveway at the far side of the property and disappear behind the Goo. There was a little parking lot back there, a weed-choked strip of asphalt that hadn’t been replaced or even resurfaced since the church days. Will wasn’t what you’d call handy. The list of needed repairs just kept growing.
He retraced his steps and met his half sister, Judith, as she strolled around the near side of the building. She pushed up her Ray-Bans to hold back her chin-length blond hair, and the two exchanged cheek-pecks. As they started toward the house, she squinted at the action on the big wraparound porch. “What’s Fergus doing to Cuba?” By the next breath, she’d figured it out. “That screwy old crackpot.”
“Fergus isn’t so old. Fifty-four,” Will said. “Only seven years older than you. I can’t argue with screwy or crackpot.”
She grimaced. “He’s going to make the poor girl look even more ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous” wasn’t how Will would describe the fifteen-year-old runaway. “Complicated,” maybe. He served as unofficial guardian to Cuba Johnson, a discarded child trying to hide her emotional neediness beneath a fragile veneer of don’t-give-a-shit. Will could identify with the girl’s pain all too well.
Of course, Judith was referring to Cuba’s physical appearance: the lank hair, dyed shoe-polish black, and the grungy boy’s clothing she insisted on wearing, mostly vintage thrift-shop finds, including the patch-bedecked Boy Scout shirt she threw on over her T-shirt most days. The shirt was from the eighties, Will figured, and several times too large for her slender frame.
Cuba was one of Will’s “strays,” as Judith called them, one of the handful of permanent houseguests who’d drifted into his life and home over the years, and stayed. They’d become his family in a way.
Tom was on the porch, too. The nine-year-old lifted Cuba’s brown and white lop-eared rabbit, Hasenpfeffer, off her lap. He held it awkwardly against his chest, squeezing it tighter when its hind legs jerked, whispering something close to its head. A balloon expanded in Will’s chest. This was his son, his precious boy. He loved him so much, it scared him sometimes. He’d do anything to keep his child safe.
As he and Judith climbed the porch steps, Will confronted Gabrielle Fonteneau, stretched out on the bench swing, reading In Style magazine. “Gabby, how can you just sit there and watch that big, dumb Irishman maim this poor child’s head?”
Cuba sat in another rocker, her narrow shoulders draped with a towel, the rabbit once more on her lap. Fergus stood behind her, using Gabby’s pinking shears to turn the girl’s chin-length black hair into freaky little spikes. All three of them cast disdainful glances at Will.
Gabby looked up from her magazine. “Eet is very fashionable, this cut. C’est le dernier mode. And Cuba is perfect for it, the dainty head, the big eyes. Fergus knows what he is doing.”
“Why, thank you, Gabby, for that vote of confidence.” Fergus’s shaggy eyebrows arched, twin chinchillas facing off over smiling eyes the color of Irish whiskey. “As a show of gratitude, you’re next in this chair. A free trim.”
“Certainement. So long as you understand, you cut my hair, I cut yours.”
Fergus was vain about his long, light brown hair. When he wore it loose, like now, it came practically to his waist. “Maybe I’ll sneak up on you,” he told Gabby, and snapped the shears menacingly.
“You do that.” She flipped the page of her magazine. “Then I will take those things and I will snip off something of yours, something you will miss perhaps a bit more than I will miss my hair, oui?”
“Ha!” Cuba hooted. In her lap, the bunny flinched.
He chewed back a grin. “I wouldn’t put it past you.”
Judith stared pointedly at Fergus’s blue and gray plaid kilt, which he’d paired with a Wile E. Coyote T-shirt. “Well, that thing should provide easy access to her target. If it’s true what they say about what one wears—or doesn’t wear—under a kilt.”
“Maybe it’s true and maybe it isn’t,” he said, as another chunk of Cuba’s hair dropped to the plank floor of the porch. “But I tell you what, Mrs. Drinkwater, you’re welcome to find out. Just reach one of those dainty hands under there and have a pull.”
“You don’t get an offer like that every day, Jude,” Will said. “Better hurry or he’ll change his mind.” He leaned against the wooden balustrade, which squeaked under his weight and began to list toward the shrubb
ery. He jumped back. Okay. Something else to add to the repair list.
“What are Fergus and Aunt Judy talking about?” Tom stood by Cuba and petted Hasenpfeffer.
“Never mind, chéri.” Gabby wore a mysterious little smile as she rubbed a scented perfume ad on her wrist. In French she told him, “They are just being silly, those two.” Tom rolled his eyes theatrically and answered, in the same language, “They’re always being silly.”
Idly Judith lifted the fur-covered pouch hanging on the front of Fergus’s kilt. “You know, I hate to break it to you, but only Scots can get away with this getup. You’re Irish in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I’ll thank ye not to be fondlin’ me sporran, Mrs. Drinkwater.”
She frowned. “Why do you call me that?”
“Why, it’s your name, is it not? A little more off the sides, lass?” he asked Cuba, who lifted a hand mirror and examined her shorn head from various angles.
“Yeah, okay. But don’t cut off the scraggly stuff. I like that.”
“My name is Judith.” She scowled at Fergus. “You call me Mrs. Drinkwater just to make some kind of stupid point. You’ve been doing it for years, and I don’t like it.”
“Why, I just mean to show respect.”
“You just mean to show insolence,” she said. “You’re just trying to aggravate me.”
“Not that it ever works,” Will observed.
Fergus was all wide-eyed innocence. “Since when is it insolent to address a fine, respectable widow lady by her proper title?” Snip, snip.
Judith planted her hands on her hips. “Since when is it gentlemanly to bait a ‘fine, respectable widow lady’ just to see her lose her cool?”
“Well now, there I must plead guilty, Mrs. Drinkwater. The way you’re lookin’ now, with those bonny eyes spittin’ blue fire, your color all high like you’ve just been—” He cut his eyes toward Tom “—tickled good and proper—”
“Oh, for the love of—”
“Why, I just can’t help myself, that’s all there is to it. I plead guilty as charged.” Snip, snip.
She stabbed a manicured nail close to his nose. “What you’re guilty of is a failure to mature. You are a child and you always will be. You know why? Because you like it that way.”
“Will you two get a room?” Cuba cried.
“I could turn the hose on them,” Will offered.
“What is wrong with you people?” Judith said. “This is not about sex.”
“Uh-oh.” Tom clapped his hands over his ears, giggling.
“If you two aren’t engaged in some tediously protracted mating ritual,” Will asked her, “why does Fergus’s accent become pronounced only when you’re around?”
“That’s not true.” She glanced at Gabby for confirmation. The Frenchwoman shrugged, the mysterious smile still in place.
“It’s true, Aunt Judy,” Cuba said. “You two should totally hook up and put the rest of us out of your misery.”
“He always sounds like that.” Judith turned to Fergus. “You always sound like that.”
In a thick Yiddish accent he said, “Like vhat? You think I pay attention to how I sound? Feh!”
“Has it occurred to you,” Cuba asked Judith, “that Fergus has been in this country, like, forty years? He cranks that accent up and down. It’s his babe magnet.”
“Impudent brat,” Fergus said. “Show some respect for your elders.”
Cuba flipped him the bird. He pretended to close the pinking shears’ snaggleteeth around the upraised middle finger.
“Cuba,” Judith said, “do you really think that’s an appropriate gesture to teach Tom?”
“I knew it already,” Tom said. “Aunt Judy, do you want Fergus to be your boyfriend?”
“Of course not, honey. We’re just friends.”
In a brogue as thick as Mulligan stew, Fergus said, “To be sure, a refined lady like your aunt Judy would never dream of consortin’ with a great Irish brute like meself. I’m too far beneath her, don’t ye know? Sure and doesn’t she have that fine Dr. Milton payin’ her court in style like she deserves.”
“Oh, I give up.” To Will she said, “He’s worse than you are. Neither of you will ever grow up.”
Will grabbed a beer. “Growing up is overrated.”
Not that he expected Judith to agree. Mick’s birth twenty-four years ago had marked an abrupt turning point in her life. No more multi-city rock tours. No more screwing her way through the bus, from lead singer to lowliest roadie. No more hazmats eagerly filtered through lung tissue, nasal passages, and stomach lining. Once the blessed event was imminent, the former Groupie of the Year settled into single motherhood and a series of dead-end jobs with flexible hours that allowed her to raise her son but not to claw her way out of the ranks of the working poor. Richard Baines, Sr., expressed his disappointment in her lifestyle choices by snapping shut his checkbook and refusing all contact with his daughter and grandson.
In his more forgiving moments, Will almost pitied the old prick. His two children had managed, themselves, to produce only bastards—not one legitimate heir between them. So much for visions of dynastic glory.
Eventually Judith had married Donald Drinkwater, urologist and deacon. She got all church lady, devoting her life to doing good works and posting bail for her no-account son. By then, she’d given up any hope of a reconciliation with their father. Deacon Donald succumbed to a triple-bogey heart attack on their country club’s golf course last year, leaving Judith a comfortably well off widow. Recently she’d begun dating Roger Milton, the president of the club, whose wife had passed on several months earlier. The two couples used to socialize regularly, so her pairing off with Roger struck everyone in their social circle as both natural and sensible.
“There you go, lass.” Fergus whipped the towel off Cuba with a flourish. She tentatively fingered her new do.
“Gabby, I’ve got a little job for you.” Will jerked his head toward the Goo.
“Let me!” Cuba jumped up, clutching the rabbit to her chest.
Will held up his hand to forestall the girl’s latest plea. “I told you before—”
“Not fair. Everyone gets to participate but me.”
“I don’t,” Tom said.
“Duh. You’re nine. Come on, Will.” Cuba tugged on his sleeve. “I can do anything Gabby can do. I can, what, tie someone up, get in their face.” She screwed up her delicate features and mimed holding a gun, a less-than-convincing display considering she cradled a bunny rabbit in the other arm. “Up against the wall, motherfucker.”
Judith rolled her eyes. “Could you please watch your language in front of Tom?”
“We’ll talk about it when you’re eighteen,” Will said. “This is nonnegotiable.”
“I probably won’t even be here when I’m eighteen,” she muttered. “If my fucking parents decide—”
“Cuba!” Judith said.
“Aunt Judy, I’ve heard those words before,” Tom said. “It’s not gonna make me say ’em.”
Fergus agreed. “That’s right, Mrs. Drinkwater. Just because Cuba chooses to be a potty-mouth doesn’t mean the rest of us have to lower ourselves to her level.”
Outwardly Cuba fretted that her mother and stepfather would force her to return home. Inwardly she had to know what had been clear to Will and the rest of them from the get-go, that her folks wanted nothing to do with their troubled daughter and were counting the days until their legal obligation ended. Her bluster was a coping mechanism, he knew, an effort to convince the world, and herself, that she was wanted.
Gabby had come across the young runaway while Christmas shopping in Manhattan last December. Cuba was just fourteen at the time, panhandling in the East Village with no coat while the wind chill pushed the temperature into the single digits. There were several ways this Dickensian scenario could end if the girl remained on the streets, none of them good. So Gabby brought her home.
Will allowed Cuba to stay indefinitely on the condition
he clear the arrangement with her parents. Denise Johnson Tauber and her husband, Len, readily agreed, though they didn’t know thing one about Will. Their indifference stunned him. He could have been a sexual predator for all they knew. A pimp or worse. During their meeting at the couple’s Jersey City home, Will sensed an undercurrent of jealousy and possessiveness: Denise considered her pubescent daughter a sexual rival.
Will kept the Taubers informed, but it was a one-way communication. Never once had they called to check up on their daughter.
“I will pay our Lucy a visit.” Gabby set aside her magazine and teetered on her high-heeled mules down the porch steps. “Is there anything I should know?”
Aside from the fact we’ve got a take-no-prisoners control freak on our hands? Lucy Narby had stood there in her jammies, chained to a wall, utterly helpless in every respect, yet had managed to get him so twisted around he no longer knew who was calling the shots.
She’d even had him half hoping that little psychosexual scene back there would play itself out, that she wouldn’t cut it short and neither would he. A major breach of his own rules, of course, but once the fantasy had sunk its teeth in, there was no shaking it.
I think you want it hard and fast against this wall.
Will should have been prepared for her manipulations; it wasn’t as if he hadn’t been warned. He needed time to shore up his defenses before facing her again. “She’s had enough for now,” he told Gabby. “You’ll see what I mean when you go in there. Give her a break, and bring her some more of that health-food glop she hates so much.”
Cuba made a face. “Oh, that’s what that shit was. I saw it sitting on the counter. I thought Hasenpfeffer puked up his bunny chow or something.”
Judith was brushing Cuba’s hair off the porch with the discarded towel. Will plucked it from her fingers. “We need to talk,” he murmured, and steered her around the corner to the far end of the porch.
She sighed. It was the unhappy little sigh she reserved for conversations about her son. “What happened with Mick last night?” she asked when they’d settled on Adirondack chairs out of earshot of the others.
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