Memory Lane

by Vella Munn

  “You have. Kim, please sit down. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  Kim did as she was told. She continued to lean forward in her chair, her emotions straining to reach out to both her grandmother and Mark.

  “Kim?” Her name came out at the end of a deep sigh. “I kept that damn pin, not because I needed a loving reminder of the father of my children, but because—because I didn’t want to ever forget.”

  “Forget what?” Kim asked. Mark was getting to his feet. He came to stand behind Kim. His hands rested lightly on her shoulders. He didn’t say anything. “What didn’t you want to forget?” Kim repeated.

  Margaret was shaking her head. Her lips moved, but for a moment nothing came out. “Kim, the skeleton you found…”

  “Yes.”

  “It was your grandfather.”

  Now it was Kim’s turn to find herself without words. Denial screamed through her. Her grandfather had been killed in a logging accident in the woods. He’d been brought home and buried in the Camp Oro cemetery. “No,” she managed. “No.”

  “Yes. Yes, my dear. Why do you think I reacted the way I did when I learned you’d found it?”

  “No,” Kim repeated. She started to get to her feet, but Mark stopped her. His breath was on the back of her neck, his strength holding her still, supporting her. “That’s not—”

  “I know. That’s not what I told you. But I told you a lie. One of too many lies.”

  Kim couldn’t demand that her grandmother stop. They’d gone too far now for anything but the truth. “No more lies,” she whispered. “Please, no more lies.”

  “No. Oh, Kim, you might hate me when I’m done. I—don’t blame you if you do. That’s why I’ve never told any one. I—I should have rehearsed this. Maybe it would have been easier.”

  With Mark supporting her, Kim found the strength to help her grandmother. “Does anyone else know what you’re going to tell me?”

  “Only Mark. And Dow. But Dow’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Kim didn’t understand what this had to do with Margaret’s second husband, but she sensed that she soon would. “What did Dow know? And Mark. Why Mark?”

  “Because…” Margaret smiled up at the man standing behind her granddaughter. “I had to tell someone. Mark was the only one I could trust. Kim, I said that skeleton was your grandfather. I know that because I put him in there. Dow and I did.”

  Kim was getting light-headed. She might have slumped to the ground if it weren’t for Mark. But if her grandmother could say the words, Kim could listen. Mark would give her the strength.

  It was an ugly story, years of shame and fear and sudden explosions. Jeromiah Jacobs wasn’t the man Kim had believed him to be. Yes, at the time he’d married a seventeen year-old girl, he’d been the wealthiest man in Camp Oro. On the outside he was successful, powerful. He’d showered wealth on his wife and paraded his three babies around for all to see.

  But there was the dark side to him as well. The half of Jeromiah Jacobs that no one but his wife ever saw. “He beat me, Kim,” Margaret said with emotion blocking her throat and altering her voice. “The first time, before your father was born. He never apologized. Never regretted. I told him I was going to go home to my parents, but I didn’t.”

  “Why not?” Kim got out.

  “Pride. Shame. No,” Margaret amended. “It wasn’t that simple. Honey, the man terrified me. He said he’d come after me if I tried to leave him. He’d hurt me again. And he said he’d hurt the children. I believed him. I believed my husband. My parents had moved north and I didn’t have anyone nearby who I could trust. They…I’m sure they thought they’d left me in good hands. After all, I lived in the biggest house in town. I didn’t have any skills or any way of supporting myself and my children without him. I didn’t know what to do. For years, I just didn’t know what to do.”

  The afternoon was warm. Still Kim shivered and when she did, Mark drew her back against him. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t say anything. This was her grandmother’s time, and Kim could be patient.

  The physical and emotional abuse never let up. With each baby she’d felt more trapped. She dreamed of fleeing in the middle of the night. Twice she had tried, but Jeromiah was careful not to keep any money in the house. It had been easy for him to track down his wayward wife. Others might have guessed what was going on within those freshly painted walls in the big house on the hill, but because Jeromiah Jacobs practically owned Camp Oro, no one had come forth to defend Margaret.

  No one, that is, except Dow Revis. “We weren’t lovers. Please believe me, Kim. Dow worked for your grandfather. He was his woods foreman. Sometimes he came to the house for meetings. He was always so good to my children. He gave them something they never got from their own father. And I…maybe I fell in love with him then. But, Kim, I was so afraid of my husband that there wasn’t enough of me left over to know what else was going on in the world.”

  One night Jeromiah had come home drunk. He’d been having trouble at the mill. He couldn’t take his frustration out on his employees or the machinery, but he could take them out on his wife. “He went crazy that night,” Margaret said in her too-controlled voice. “He said he was going to kill me. And our children. Your aunt was just a baby. Still sleeping in a crib. Jeromiah picked her up and held her over his head.”

  The silence stretched for a long time through the peaceful garden setting—too long. Kim’s shoulders, under Mark’s heavy hands, felt numb. Finally she did what she could to help her grandmother along. “Had he ever hurt the children before?”

  “No. He had threatened. That’s how he kept me in line. But I knew, that night, it was in him to kill my baby. I—” For the second time since bringing Kim and Mark out here Margaret shut her eyes. For almost a minute she remained in the darkness she’d created. “Kim, I killed him. He was drunk. I picked up a poker from the fireplace. I told him to stop. I was screaming. Crying. He put down the baby. Then he started after me.”

  Kim had known that was coming. As the story unfolded she’d felt her hands turn into fists. Her nails were digging into her flesh. Her scream of outrage could barely be contained. If it had been her, she would have done the same thing. Kim might be a civilized woman. Her grandmother might be the most gentle, loving woman she’d ever known. But the man who had held her in slavery was threatening to kill her baby, and that night there hadn’t been anything civilized left of Margaret.

  “What did you do then?” Kim asked in a calm voice.

  Margaret opened her eyes. “You understand?”

  “Oh, yes. Believe me, I understand.”

  “You don’t hate me?”

  “Hate? Oh, Grandmother, I could never hate you. You’re a mother. Someone you hated and feared was threatening your children. You didn’t have any choice.”

  Dow had agreed. When Margaret, terrified and crying, had shown up on Dow’s doorstep with her three babies, the foreman had taken them in. They had stayed up all night talking, putting the children to bed, getting Margaret to the point of being able to think. Before dawn they made their plans. Dow knew about the tunnels running under the town. One of them went through his property. He would open up the tunnel and place Jeromiah’s body in it. Then he would tell everyone that he and Jeromiah Jacobs had gone into the woods and Jeromiah had been killed by a falling tree. He’d say the body had been badly crushed and he’d wanted to spare Jeromiah’s widow the shock of seeing him, so he’d built a wooden casket in the woods and brought the body down on a buckboard.

  The funeral was closed casket. Rocks, not Jeromiah Jacobs, were buried in the Camp Oro cemetery.

  “I thought your father might remember.” Margaret’s voice, laced with emotion during the telling, was now exhausted. “He was three. But he didn’t. And Dow, Dow kept me sane. Everyone thought I was a rich widow, but Jeromiah had made sure I wouldn’t get a dime if something happened to him. I didn’t want to be dependent on another man, not after what I’d been through. But the children fell in lov
e with Dow. And so did I.”

  “And you kept that inside you all those years. No one but you and Dow knew.” Kim rose and again stepped over to her grandmother. She reached out her hands and drew Margaret Revis to her. Kim cradled her grandmother against her, marveling at the incredible strength and courage that lay beneath the frail surface. A woman without skills or a family to turn to, a woman entrusted with the safety of three small children, a woman bullied and terrorized by the most powerful man in town…

  “The first day I came to see you here,” Kim started slowly, “I talked about how fortunate you’d been to have had two loving husbands. I didn’t help, did I? I just made it harder.”

  “No, dear.” Margaret didn’t try to pull free. She stood with Kim’s arms around her. “That wasn’t your fault. I’d set myself up for that years ago. Talking about my wonderful first marriage. I don’t know why I did that.”

  Kim believed she did. Margaret Revis had spent years in hell. And it had all ended in a nightmare. Kim didn’t blame her grandmother for spinning a fantasy to take the place of that nightmare, for wanting her children to believe that their father had been a loving man and not an animal.

  “Now three of us know,” Kim whispered. “Only three.”

  “Can you understand?”

  Kim held her grandmother at arm’s length and waited for the older woman to meet her tear-misted gaze. “Yes, I understand. I love you. Nothing will ever change that.”

  Except for the faint murmur of the wind slipping through the pines on the Revis property, there was nothing to distract Kim from the man sitting across from her in the dark. Margaret had insisted on taking Mark and Kim out to dinner. Their dinner conversation had been light, a welcome relief from the intensity of the courtyard. Margaret had done most of the talking as she talked about the year of contending with three growing children in a small community where the only curfew was that they be home by dark. Mark had been quiet. Kim had concentrated on her grandmother. What they had to say to each other would have to come later.

  By the time they returned to the manor, Margaret was obviously tired. Although she invited Kim and Mark to come inside for coffee, they begged off. Kim wanted to go home so she could rest. She promised she would call in the morning.

  Now only Mark stood between Kim and her finally coming to terms with the day. He hadn’t had to walk her up to the house, but he had done so. She hadn’t had to invite him in, but she had done so. She’d gone into the bedroom to change into a loose lounge robe. She’d thought Mark might turn on the lights while she was gone, but he hadn’t. Now he was sitting in an overstuffed chair on the opposite side of the couch where Kim was stretched out.

  “What’s going to happen now?” Kim wondered aloud. “The Comstock Museum is going to need a new director. I don’t know if the board’s going to want to go ahead with the installation of the security system until the other matter is taken care of.”

  “You could call Stephan.”

  “Tomorrow. Everything can wait until tomorrow.”

  “Almost everything.”

  “What can’t wait until tomorrow?”

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  Kim did. What needed to be dealt with was the man who’d put duty before the woman in his life, who’d risked losing her because he believed in a code of honor. Either Kim could accept that or she couldn’t. At the moment, sagging with exhaustion, Kim didn’t know the answer to that question. “I didn’t ask her, Mark. Somehow, after everything she told me, it didn’t seem that important. But why did she tell you about my grandfather?”

  Mark shifted his position. Kim could hear the chair’s tired protest. For a long time he didn’t speak. When he did, he sounded as weary as she felt. “I think it was because she trusted me. And because, after Dow died, she didn’t have anyone she could talk to.”

  “She couldn’t trust anyone in her family,” Kim said with finality.

  “She’d told too many lies, Kim. It had all started when she’d thought she had to keep the terrible realities of her marriage from her parents. It snowballed when she couldn’t bear to tell her children what their father had really been like. And, Kim, she and Dow were building a good life for themselves. She’d gotten out of the nightmare. She didn’t want to be sucked back into it.”

  “And so she kept quiet. Until Dow died.”

  “Until a year after Dow died.” Again Mark shifted.

  Kim focused on his shadow, but she had no idea what he was thinking. Or feeling.

  “I remember—do you want to hear this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember the day she came into my office. We’d been working on her will. There were changes that had to be dealt with after Dow’s death. I hadn’t pressed her about it. I’d waited until she was ready. We were talking about the way Dow had provided for his stepchildren. I asked something about why wasn’t there something from her first husband. That’s all it took. I think I was just in the right place at the right time.”

  Kim didn’t believe that. Yes, maybe losing Dow had forced her grandmother to deal with the past again. But if Mark hadn’t been compassionate and understanding, Margaret Revis would have never told him what she had.

  “She was afraid I would find out certain things. Why? Because I would be going through the house?”

  “No. There’s nothing here. But she knew you would be working at the museum.”

  “Where she thought the mourning pin was. She thought I might find it.”

  “She called me the day you came to town. She was so afraid. I tried to tell her that if you did come across the pin, she could just tell you that she’d donated it to the museum. But of course the museum would have no record of who had made the donation. She was afraid you might discover that and start asking questions.”

  “Such a little thing.” Kim wanted to curl up on the couch and let sleep divorce her from her aching body. But Mark still hadn’t touched her, and she hadn’t touched him. Until she’d come to grips with the question of what to do about that, she couldn’t sleep. “You were willing to help her with the lie, weren’t you?”

  “I didn’t know you then.”

  “We got to know each other after that. And you still kept something from me.”

  “I’d made a promise to your grandmother.”

  “A promise.” Kim ran the word through her mind, trying to make sense of it.

  “What do you want me to say, Kim? That I can look into the future? When I fell in love with you…I think I know how trapped your grandmother felt.”

  “When I fell in love with you.” The words were precious to her. “You felt trapped?”

  “Yes.” Kim watched Mark’s shadow close the distance between them. He was standing over her with his hands hanging at his side. She could take them, but if she did, he might not finish what he had to say. “Trapped. I wanted to be honest with you. Honesty can be a selective thing with an attorney. Feed it out an inch at a time in the courtroom. Be totally up-front with a client. And sometimes you can work it to your advantage. Only, with you, I couldn’t do any of those things.”

  “And that bothered you?”

  “More than you’ll ever know.”

  Mark was all too aware that Kim still wasn’t moving. He had told her he loved her, opened himself up and made himself vulnerable as he’d never done before. And still she was sitting there in the dark, not reaching out for him. He’d said everything there was to say. It seemed it wasn’t going to be enough.

  “I think Stephan and the board members will want to go ahead with the security system,” he made himself say. He didn’t give a damn about the subject, but he had to say something. “You’ll be free in a few days.”

  “Free?”

  “To go back to San Francisco.”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  He couldn’t stay here any longer. Kim’s silence was the greatest truth he’d ever heard. “Go to bed, Kim,” he told her with his back to her. He could find his way out without
having to turn the light on; he didn’t want her to see his face. “You’re exhausted.”

  “Mark? Where are you going?”

  “Home.”

  “Home. I don’t want to sell this place. I don’t think I can do it.”

  “Your grandmother—”

  “I know. Maybe she’ll sell it to me.”

  Mark didn’t know what Kim was saying. What he did know was that she was speaking to him, and he couldn’t leave. “What would you do with it? Rent it out?”

  “Live in it.”

  “What about San Francisco?”

  What about San Francisco, Kim thought. That cool, foggy place was a million miles from where her heart was. Where her heart would always be. “I don’t want to go back.”

  “Why?” Mark asked her.

  It was both the hardest and easiest question she’d ever been asked. “You know why.”

  The distance was gone again. She was no longer staring at the strong shadow of his back and wondering how she would survive his leaving. She could feel him wanting to stay. “Because…” She stopped. She could say nothing as her grandmother had done for years, or she could take the greatest risk of her life. “Because I love you. Because I don’t want to leave you. I want to talk to Stephan about working for the museum. It has promise. It can become something good.”

  “You would make Camp Oro your home again?”

  “Yes. If you want—”

  “I want. Believe me, Kim. I want.”

  Kim wasn’t as exhausted as she thought she was. Either that or Mark had magic in his hands. They lay together on her grandmother’s bed with the wind touching them lightly and the pines humming with the breeze. They had the rest of their lives to make love, he’d told her. Tonight he wanted nothing more than to soothe her aching muscles. To hold her.

  Tonight there was touching, and whispers, and falling even more in love with a strong, gentle man.

  Tonight there was forgiving and being forgiven. And after that there were words. Plans. A future being mapped.