Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil, Love and Hope

by Jude Deveraux

  “So you owe him? Putnam? Your fiancé?”

  “His family,” she said, then changed the subject. “I thought you wanted me to make you do things.”

  “I want to understand all of this,” Adam said seriously, dragging his eyes away from the paper to look at her. How could this tiny woman hold such a power? He was having trouble comprehending what she could do. She could use her mind to make people do—and think—what she wanted them to. Didn’t she have any idea of the possibilities of that kind of power?

  “What have you done with this ability of yours?” he asked softly. “How have you used this power in your life? When did you first realize that you could do this? How have you refined it? Worked on it? Who knows about it?”

  “Which of those questions do you want me to answer first?” Darci asked as she sat back down on the floor and sipped her drink. “I want to make something clear from the start. I’ve never used what you call my power to do anything bad to anyone. And, the truth is, until today, I didn’t know that I could . . . that I could make people stop in their tracks.” She looked away for a moment, and when she looked back at him, her face was pleading with him to understand.”You see, I’ve always believed that anyone could use True Persuasion, but people choose to believe that they can’t. They’d rather whine that they can’t do so-and-so because somebody didn’t give them something, or love them enough, or whatever other excuse they have for not doing something.”

  “You can’t possibly believe that normal people—” He cut himself off when Darci started to get up. “Sorry,” he said quickly then she sat back down. “Look, it’s nice to believe that anyone anywhere can do what you can, but they can’t. And I’m glad they can’t. If everyone could do what you do—” He ran his hand over his face to clear his mind of that thought.

  Looking at her again, he took a breath. For himself, he needed to understand all of this. “Okay, so maybe you haven’t explored this ability of yours fully. You’re young, so you haven’t had time. And you haven’t shared this with anyone because you didn’t grow up with a warm, loving family who could sit down with you and explain things and—”

  “And you did?” she shot back at him. “I haven’t heard you say anything warm and loving about your childhood. What happened to your parents that was so horrible that you can’t speak of it? And don’t tell me again that you ‘don’t know.’ And how old are you, anyway?”

  “This isn’t about me,” he said, louder and more angrily than he meant to. “This is about you and how you can freeze people in place. Oh, no, you don’t!” he said when he saw Darci looking hard at him. “You’re not going to—” But in the next moment he leaned across the table and kissed her on the cheek.

  Part of him was annoyed, but the greater part of him saw the amusement in what she’d just done. Leaning back against the couch, he looked at her. “I want you to tell me everything. I want to know what you can do, what you have done, and I want to find out what you don’t know that you can do.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Give me a good reason why I should share my lifelong secret with you when I’ve shared it with no one else.”

  It took Adam a moment to form his answer. “When I started this search, it was personal. All I wanted to know was what happened to my parents.” When Darci started to speak, he put his hand up.”Yes,” he said,”that’s what I want to know. But I also want to know what was done to me. No! I can’t go into that now. Now’s not the time. Anyway, since I started searching, I’ve learned a lot about some ugly things that go on in this world, and I’d like to put a stop to as much of the ugliness as I can.”

  “What you’re saying is that you want to use me to obtain what you want.”

  Adam took a deep breath. Should he lie? Or should he tell the truth and risk angering her so much that she walked away? “Maybe,” he said, deciding on the truth. “The idea that’s coming to me is that you could stay somewhere safe and use your mind while I....”He lifted his palms up as if to say he wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “You mean that we’d make a team,” Darci said, smiling. “Almost a marriage of sorts.”

  Adam smiled. “I guess so.”

  “That makes sense,” Darci said lightly. “So, where do you want to start?”

  “With your history,” he said quickly. “Tell me what you’ve done and what you know,” he said as he pulled his briefcase from beside the couch and withdrew a notebook and a pen.

  This time, when she started talking, Adam listened. Previously, she’d accused him of not listening to her, and he knew that she’d been correct. As she began to talk, he racked his brain to remember every time she’d mentioned her True Persuasion, trying to recall what she’d said—and what had happened. On her first night in Camwell, she said that she’d found him by applying her True Persuasion. What can she find? he wrote in his notebook. Darci had said that she had been surprised when he offered her the job because she hadn’t yet applied her True Persuasion to it. In Hartford, she’d used it on the hairdresser to give her a great haircut. She’d used it on the people sitting in “their” booth. She’d used it to get people to feed her when she was a child.

  And she’d used it to paralyze two grown men.

  “You sneezed and broke the spell,” Adam said, interrupting her. “How long can you hold a spell?”

  “I am not a witch,” Darci said. “I don’t cast spells on people. I just—”

  “Make people do what you want them to. For how long can you hold them under your”—he searched for a word—”enchantment?”

  “Some people are easy and some difficult. I think it depends on how stubborn they are. But if I think really hard over many days, I can almost always bring even the most stubborn person around. But sometimes I can’t persuade the person, so then I have to maneuver others around that person.”

  “What does that mean?” Adam did all he could to keep his feelings from showing on his face. She seemed to have no idea how truly unbelievable what she was saying was. But he knew that to express shock would make her stop talking. He held his pen ready to write down her answer.

  “What are you going to do with what you’re writing?”

  “Publish a biography on you and make millions,” he said quickly. “You’ll either be reviled or worshiped. You’ll certainly be a celebrity.”

  “Very funny,” she said, but she didn’t laugh. Instead, she was looking at him hard.

  “Are you trying to make me fetch something for you or trying to read my mind?”

  “Read your mind,” she said, “which, by the way, I can’t do. Was that a joke about writing a bio? I can never tell about your jokes.”

  “Yes, it was a joke. You know, some people think I have an excellent sense of humor. They— Never mind about that. I want you to tell me about what you can do. I know. How about giving me an example? Take one thing you’ve done and tell me about it from beginning to end. Tell me an instance of where you worked on someone stubborn.”

  “All right,” Darci said slowly. “There was a man in Putnam named Daryl Farnum who owned a very mean dog. Actually, Mr. Farnum owned lots of dogs and some of them were probably very nice. I guess. But then, it’s not like anyone ever saw the nice dogs Mr. Farnum owned, because he kept them in back of his house where no one ever went. Except for Mr. Farnum, that is. Anyway, he kept the mean dog chained up in his front yard, and the animal snapped at everybody who walked past his house. And since he lived next door to the elementary school, there were a lot of scared kids. Also, the animal barked all day long, so the teachers on that side of the building could hardly hear themselves talk.”

  “So what did you make Mr. Farnum do?” Adam asked.

  “Move away from Putnam.”

  Adam’s face showed his disappointment in her answer. “It wasn’t an easy job,” she said defensively. “Mr. Farnum’s house and property were a pigsty so the first thing I did was think really hard in an attempt to get Mr. Farnum to clean it up. But I couldn’t make him do it. If there’s
one thing I’ve learned, it’s that all the True Persuasion in the world can’t change character. That man was lazy to the bone, and I could have sent him industrious thoughts forever, but I don’t think I could have changed him. So I had to work on the mayor of Putnam to make him want to get the place clean; then I had to work on Putnam’s father—”

  “Also called Putnam?”

  “Yes,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. “I worked on Putnam in Putnam. Now are you happy?”

  “‘On Putnam in Putnam,’” Adam quoted as he wrote, then he looked back up at her. “Go on.”

  “Now I see why you’re so old and unmarried. No woman will have you.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” he said cheerfully. “So what did Putnam of Putnam do?”

  “Paid for everything, of course. That’s what Putnams do. They pay. I worked on putting the idea that Mr. Farnum’s place was a disgrace to the town into the mayor’s mind—I knew he was very civic-minded—then I worked on Putnam to make him want to pay for the backhoe.”

  “Backhoe?” Adam asked, eyebrows raised.

  “I told you that the place was filthy,” Darci said in exasperation. “Are you not listening again?”

  Putting down his notebook, Adam looked at her in genuine interest. “Next door to the elementary school was a house that was so, uh, filthy that it needed a backhoe to clean it up?”

  “Private property is a sacred concept in Putnam, so people don’t interfere in a man’s right to do what he wants on his own land. And the Farnums always kept dogs,” she said. “Lots of dogs. Generations of them. Generations of Farnums as well as generations of dogs, all on the same acre and a half.”

  “I see,” Adam said, but he certainly did not want to see. Or smell. His nose twitched just thinking about the smell. “So you got Putnam to pay for the, uh, cleanup. I bet Mr. Farnum was glad of that. All that ...dog,uh, matter, must have been an annoyance.”

  “Actually, Mr. Farnum didn’t want the place cleaned up. He was an old-fashioned man, and he said that what was good enough for his daddy was good enough for him, so he wanted things to stay as they were. And that attitude is why I knew that nothing good could happen if Mr. Farnum stayed in his house every day, all day, as he usually did. Besides, he had quite a few shotguns, some of them dating back to ...well,whenever shotguns were invented, and he knew how to use them. Nobody in town ever gave Mr. Farnum much trouble so—”

  “I’m curious. What did this man do for a living?”

  “Sold dogs. All the Farnums had an eye for dogs. Ones that they bred won all the shows. Not that the Farnums ever showed the dogs they bred. No, they were more on the . . . the breeding side. And when out-of-towners wanted to buy a dog, Mr. Farnum sent a litter of puppies to his sister’s house in Lexington. I heard that she has a nice place, so no buyer ever saw where their sweet little puppy had come from.”

  “So you had to get Mr. Farnum away so he couldn’t shoot anyone, right? Did you send him to his sister?”

  “Heavens, no! Daryl Farnum didn’t speak to his sister because she’d moved up north and married a Yankee.”

  “But I thought you said she lived in Lexington. Lexington, Kentucky?”

  “North to Lexington,” she said emphatically. “North. Yankees. Get it?”

  “Oh,” Adam said.”So how did you get Mr. Farnum away from his house so it could be cleaned?”

  “I knew that Mr. Farnum liked to drink whiskey, so I thought that if I got him drunk enough, he’d get thrown in the Putnam jail for a couple of days and that would give the town time to clean up his place.”

  “But isn’t that illegal? Isn’t that trespassing?”

  “Completely. But I worked on this so hard that the people involved didn’t think of that. Besides, if a Putnam was in on it, what could someone in Putnam do about it?”

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of that. This place, Putnam, is in the United States of America, isn’t it? Governed by both state and federal laws?”

  “Only vaguely,” Darci said, then glared at him in impatience to let her continue her story.

  “So you got Mr. Farnum drunk.”

  “That took work because, you see, Putnam is dry, so at first I didn’t know how to get whiskey to the man. I was sure that no liquor-store owner was going to drive up from Tennessee and present Mr. Farnum with a case of whatever, so I had to work on the local moonshiner.”

  “The local—” Adam began, then ostentatiously shut his mouth.

  “I had to make Mr. Gilbey, the moonshiner, visit Mr. Farnum, which wasn’t easy because Mr. Gilbey’s great-great-great-grandfather had impregnated Mr. Farnum’s great-great-aunt when she was thirteen, so there was a lot of hostility between the two families. And before you say anything, it wasn’t the age that bothered anybody, it was that the girl was so pretty that she was engaged to marry a Putnam. Mr. Farnum’s family was angry because they said that Mr. Gilbey’s family had taken away their one and only chance to join with the Putnams, because, well, you see, as a general rule, the Farnums don’t usually produce good-looking offspring.”

  Adam’s eyebrows were raised so high that they were nearly hidden under his hair, and he had to stamp down the urge to say, “I see.” “But you did manage to get these two feuding families together?”

  “Yes. I knew that Mr. Gilbey liked dogs, so I concentrated real hard and told him he absolutely, positively had to have a Farnum dog. He couldn’t live without a Farnum dog.”

  “Okay,” Adam said, picking up his notebook and looking down at his few notes, “let me see if I can figure this out. You first tried to get Mr. Farnum to clean up his property, but when that failed, you made the mayor think that the Farnum place was a detriment to the beauty of Putnam, what with all the dog . . . waste and all. Then you made Mr. Putnam—oops, no Mister, just Putnam—When you’re talking to a local, not an outsider like me, do you ever add a junior or senior onto the names so your listener will know which Putnam you’re talking about?”

  Darci shook her head. “No, everyone knows.”

  “Of course they would. So Putnam agreed to pay for the cleanup with a backhoe and—”

  “It took a bulldozer. It was worse than anyone thought.”

  “Ah. Yes. A bulldozer. And this cleanup was done while Mr. Farnum was in jail for ...what? Disorderly conduct?”

  “Lewd behavior in front of the windows of Putnam Elementary School.”

  “I won’t ask,” Adam said. “So what happened after they bulldozed the place?”

  “Mr. Farnum was let out of jail, and when he saw his house, clean and freshly painted, he was really angry. He said that his beloved home, the home of his ancestors, had been ruined.”

  “But he couldn’t do anything legal because a Putnam was involved, right?”

  “Right. So he burned the house down, then he went away. I don’t know where. He had cousins in West Virginia, so maybe he went there. But the good thing was that he took his dogs with him, so, after that, we could hear the teachers. Although, a lot of the kids said that wasn’t a good thing.”

  “But they weren’t angry at you because they didn’t know you were the one who had done it all, did they?”

  “Oooooohhh, no,” Darci said, looking at him as though that was the most horrible thing she’d ever heard. “I was careful that no one knew what I could do. If anyone in town had known that I could....Oh,my,no.I would have been besieged.”

  “True,” Adam said, thinking about that. “But no one knew? Not even your mother?”

  At that Darci gave a snort of laughter. “Jerlene was the last person in Putnam who I’d want to know that I could True Persuade people into doing things. If she’d known....Well, let’s just say that there were some young men in town who wouldn’t have been safe.”

  All in all, Adam decided that he’d better not pursue that line of questioning. “So how old were you when you did this?”

  “Eight.”

  Adam’s jaw dropped down. “You were eight years old when you did
this?”

  Darci nodded.

  It was after that revelation about her childhood that Adam decided he’d heard enough about Putnam for one day. Instead, he decided to see what Darci could do, so he began to set up tests for her. She’d said that she couldn’t read minds, but he wanted to know for sure. After all, just that morning she’d found she had the ability to do something she hadn’t known she could do. If he looked at symbols on cards and concentrated, could she “see” what he was sending her? It took three hours of testing with the cards and symbols before he believed her. As far as he could ascertain, she wasn’t any better than the average person at reading thoughts.

  Then, after much talking in order to persuade Darci to try it, Adam got her to try to move a couple of objects across the coffee table. She couldn’t. Or, as Adam thought to himself, she didn’t want to. Darci seemed to have definite ideas of what was “freaky” and what wasn’t. Being able to move a pencil across a coffee table with her mind would have been, according to her, “too weird.”

  But research as he might, Adam couldn’t bring himself to try any more experiments that called for her to tell him what to do or put thoughts into his mind.

  At one point Darci wailed in frustration, “But you’re just giving me things I can’t do!”

  Her words made Adam see that the truth was that he was a little frightened of what he’d seen her do this morning. And he was more than a little afraid of finding out the extent of her talent.

  Because of her frustration at trying to do things that she couldn’t, at five in the afternoon, Darci decided that she’d had enough and walked out of the guest house, saying she refused to allow Adam to try any more experiments on her. Not even for “chocolate chiffon pie with raspberries on top of it.”

  So now Adam was following her in silence and thinking. And he didn’t like what was going through his mind. They—whoever “they” were—probably knew who or what Darci was. And after seeing and hearing about what Darci could do, Adam had no doubt that the young women who had been killed had been taken because they were believed to be Darci. Even the clerk in the store knew that the “correct” woman had moles on her left hand.