Disillusions

by Seth Margolis

  “Her parents knew about us, what we had together. They even knew about the thistle. And they did everything they could to separate us. Priscilla and I used to meet sometimes, when she lived in New York. We found this old hotel in the Catskills, practically deserted. I’d bring her a thistle from my garden. Later, when she moved back here, she took cuttings from me for her own garden. We always thought we’d be together some day, once her…once Tess was grown, her father gone. Our lives were on hold, Cilly’s and mine.”

  On hold. Like Nick and Valerie, waiting, waiting. Cicadas, all of them, Sheila and Priscilla, Nick and Valerie, biding their time underground, year after year, all for that brief, hoped-for moment in the sunlight.

  She didn’t have the heart to tell Sheila that Russell Cunningham had destroyed those precious flowers, his last stab at regulating his daughter’s life.

  “Sheila, put down the gun.”

  “Just leave us alone,” she said softly. Gwen didn’t move. Sheila looked up, eyes unblinking, and pointed the gun at her. “Leave now,” she said, the snarly voice again. “Or I’ll shoot.”

  “Okay, Sheila.” Gwen backed away, hands raised over her shoulders. “I hate to leave you here, Sheila. I wish you’d come with me.” After several yards she turned and headed up the hill. Halfway to the top she stopped and called out. “Sheila! Sheila, come with—”

  A single gunshot ripped through the woods.

  Chapter 47

  Gwen called the police from a pay phone on Route 24 and told them to send an ambulance to the Devil’s Ravine. After the gunshot she considered running back down the embankment to help Sheila, but Jimmy was shivering with terror in the car; she didn’t want to leave him alone for one more moment. Sheila had chosen her fate, as much as anyone ever does. Gwen headed home.

  Jimmy had trouble sleeping that night, peppering her with questions until he was too tired to hold his head up. Why did Sheila take me to the ravine? Was she really going to kill us? Are you ever going back to jail? The phone rang about nine.

  “Hello, Gwen.”

  She gasped, then almost sobbed with relief.

  “Sheila…”

  “I’m sorry, Gwen. I’m so sorry.”

  “Where…where are you?”

  “Home.”

  “You’re okay?”

  “I couldn’t do it, Gwen. I wanted to but…I fired once and it went over my head, and after that…”

  “Does Betsy…”

  “I told her everything. I told her about…”

  Gwen gave her a moment to compose herself.

  “I don’t deserve her,” Sheila said after a while. “I don’t—”

  The line went dead.

  Gwen spent the next day trying to absorb it all: Nick’s deception and disappearance, Sheila’s deception and betrayal. She tried to talk things over with Jimmy, but he seemed reluctant to revisit the incident, and perhaps that showed precocious wisdom. Eventually he’d have to deal with what happened—his father’s abuse, his father’s death, the Devil’s Ravine. But that could wait. Just then he was most concerned with his baseball swing. So she spent the early afternoon pitching whiffle balls.

  “Keep your eye on the ball,” she told him whenever he missed—advice she tried to follow herself. Whenever her mind strayed to Nick Lawrence she felt a sharp queasiness in her gut, a sickly light-headedness. For months now she’d assumed that what Barry had done to Jimmy had been as evil as human behavior could ever be. But Barry had been sick, unable to control himself. What Nick had done was the work of a deliberate, calculating mind in full control of itself.

  “Swing level, Jimbo!” she shouted. “Keep your eye on the ball!”

  One question hounded her above all others: Why had Nick seduced her? How had sleeping with her furthered his plans? Once she agreed to work in his house she was fated to take the fall for the murder…fucking her had been optional. The heat in his eyes when he looked at her, the desperate hunger of his mouth when he lapped at her breasts with his tongue, the passion he showed when he shared the music, his music, with her…could all that be faked?

  Jimmy popped the whiffle ball over her head.

  “Home run!” she yelled as she ran to retrieve it. Her own voice sounded thin and nervous.

  Of course he’d faked it; she’d never be able to move on if she didn’t face the truth. Nick had never really wanted her. Fucking her had been a way to stay physically close, keep an eye on her. Perhaps he’d even enjoyed humiliating her, relishing the power his knowledge gave him, the humiliation he knew she’d feel.

  She tossed a perfect pitch. Jimmy, distracted, let it go past him. He pointed behind her.

  “Sorry to interrupt the game.” Dwight Hawkins crossed the small lawn, squinting in the late-afternoon sunlight. Jimmy walked over to her, his shoulder touching her waist. She put a hand on him; he was trembling.

  “Is there some place we can talk in private?” Hawkins said.

  Jimmy’s face was rigid with anxiety.

  “My son needs to hear, too.”

  “We’re dropping the charges,” Hawkins said quietly.

  Jimmy’s face relaxed into a tentative smile. “For real?”

  “For real,” Hawkins said, also smiling.

  Jimmy thrust a fist in the air, then started racing around the yard, whooping as he punched out the sky.

  “The FBI had already run DNA tests on some hair evidence collected at Penaquoit. They don’t have any samples from Valerie Goodwin, but they were able to rule out Priscilla Lawrence as the child’s biological mother.”

  Gwen waited before speaking, hoping to feel at least a twinge of pleasure at being proven correct. Nothing came.

  “Have you located Nick Lawrence?”

  He shook his head. “What did Lawrence tell you about his background?”

  She shrugged. “He was pretty vague. I got the impression he didn’t like talking about his past.”

  “Any specifics?”

  “He was from Lansburg, Pennsylvania. His father was a purchasing executive. He went to Julliard for a few years, then dropped out when his father lost his job.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No.” A spark of anger, then a deflating sadness as she realized the target of that anger: herself. How could she have made herself vulnerable yet again to a man who gave so little? “Where is he?” she asked.

  “London. The FBI traced his passport through Immigration. He left JFK this morning on a TWA flight to Heathrow. Interpol’s been alerted.”

  “London…” Knowing he was an ocean away only deepened her rage. And still she felt no safer from him.

  “The FBI’s sending a sketch artist up here to draw a composite.” He shook his head slowly. “I was over at Penaquoit this afternoon. There’s not a single goddamn photograph of him anywhere in that house. Not one.”

  An image flashed before her: Priscilla’s camera, the roll of film dangling from it, exposed…the fiasco blamed on Tess.

  “Who was he?” she said. Even monsters have faces.

  “Even if we manage to find him we don’t have a shred of evidence that he did anything.”

  “And the money…”

  “I’m sure he’s parked it somewhere where it can’t be traced to him. You can’t hide five million dollars in cash in this country, but there are banks in Switzerland, the Caribbean, that’ll take cash deposits from foreigners without asking questions.”

  “And Tess?”

  “She’s his daughter. If we do manage to find him outside the country we’re going to have trouble extraditing him from wherever the hell he is, unless we come up with new evidence connecting him to Priscilla Cunningham’s murder. And that’s assuming we find him in the first place. I doubt London’s his final destination.”

  “Mom, come on!” Jimmy was swinging the bat in the air.

  “I’ll spend the rest of my life regretting what almost happened to you and your boy.”

  “Forget it.” Gwen felt tears on her face, the first tears in
a long time. She’d never forget.

  “I thought they were pranks, the break-in, what happened with your clothes at the ravine.”

  “So many lives on hold,” she said. “Sheila, Priscilla. Nick and Valerie. All those years squandered with the wrong people, holding out for future happiness. I wonder if Sheila will ever find it now.”

  “Well, Nick and Valerie got their reward.” Hawkins glanced up at the cloudless sky. “What a day. There’s a low-pressure system a hundred miles west of here, but it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Kind of like me.” He looked at Gwen and smiled. “Nothing but blue sky,” he said, and sang the final three words: “From now on.”

  “Mom, please?” Jimmy shouted.

  “Mind if I throw him one?” Hawkins asked. She handed him the whiffle ball. He threw a perfect pitch. Jimmy swung and missed.

  “Level swing,” Hawkins said as Jimmy threw the ball back to him. “And bend your knees, yeah, that’s it. Now, step into the ball.”

  He glanced at Gwen, smiled almost sheepishly, and threw another pitch.

  She tried drinking herself to sleep that night. She lost count of the scotches, but she couldn’t lose consciousness. She’d close her eyes and manage to relax for a few moments, but then faces would drift into focus, projected onto the swirling black and purple backs of her eyelids. Nick’s face appeared most often, those velvet-blue eyes mocking her. Sometimes she’d see Priscilla, haunted, melancholy—but her eyes were always curiously dry. Once she saw Valerie’s face, angular and smug.

  But the face that appeared most often that night, the one that thwarted sleep, was Tess’s, her mouth open, crying, her sobs tinny and distant, as if from a tape recorder placed at a distance.

  So Gwen spent most of the night with her eyes open, trying to banish the faces by focusing on her life, and Jimmy’s. Still they tormented her, Nick and Valerie or whatever their real names were. She thought of them latching onto Priscilla Cunningham like barnacles, sucking the life from her as they used her body to spawn their child.

  At some point very early in the morning she collected the paint cans and brushes and rollers and drop cloths from the dining room and brought them down to the cellar. The kitchen and hallway looked fine as they were, just as the dining room and living room and bedrooms had. As she piled the cans in a dark corner of the cellar a thought flashed, and soon a course of action took shape.

  At eight-thirty she dropped Jimmy off at the Pearsons’ and used their phone to call Dwight Hawkins. She got the information she needed from him and began the two-hour drive to Lansburg, Pennsylvania.

  Chapter 48

  Lansburg was southwest of Ondaiga County, on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, a two-hour drive along back roads that wound over gentle mountains and through sparsely populated valleys. It might have been a pleasant ride, but Gwen was blind to the scenery, unable and unwilling to enjoy the early autumn flecks of red and yellow, the occasional glimpses of glacial lakes and sun-dappled streams.

  Hawkins had given her the name and address of the nursing home in Lansburg, along with a warning to move on, “let it be.” But he’d sounded halfhearted, as if he knew she had to do this, and wanted her to.

  The Methodist Home was just outside Lansburg, a low brick building of recent vintage surrounded by acres of brown lawn and wilting trees.

  “Fred Lawrence, please,” she told the young receptionist in a spacious lobby that reeked of disinfectant.

  “It’s only eleven,” the receptionist said. “Visiting hours begin at—”

  “It’s an emergency, a family emergency.”

  “Mr. Lawrence doesn’t have family,” came a woman’s voice from behind her.

  Gwen turned to face a middle-aged woman with pouffy blond hair, wearing a pastel blue cotton suit and a synthetic smile. “I’m Agnes Marks, director of patient services. Mr. Lawrence hasn’t had a visitor since he’s been here.” She smiled sweetly, as if this were an amusing quirk of his.

  “He has a son.”

  Agnes Marks peered owlishly at her. “Well, yes, the FBI was here a while back asking about him. But Mr. Lawrence won’t have anything to do with him, hasn’t seen him in years.”

  “Why is that, do you know?”

  “Who exactly are you?” Another sugary smile.

  “My sister was married to Nick Lawrence, Fred’s son.”

  Gwen hoped the woman hadn’t followed the news stories about the Devil’s Ravine incident closely enough to know that Priscilla Lawrence had no sisters. And that Gwen had been a prime suspect.

  “Then you probably know that Fred Lawrence is…well, he isn’t exactly communicative,” she said. “His pension check is just about his only contact with the outside world.”

  “Pension check? I thought he was fired from his employer, some sort of scandal?”

  “Not at all, he retired from Hillman Candy with full benefits. As for a scandal, Mr. Lawrence was highly respected in the community, very active in First Methodist. I have no idea where you could have—”

  “May I see him?” Gwen asked. “I’ve come a long way.”

  “You won’t find him very talkative.” That smile again, then: “Follow me.”

  She crossed the reception area, pushed open a glass door, and led Gwen across a wide cement patio. Six patients sat in wheelchairs, backs to the building, facing the distant hills to the west. Agnes Marks circled the wheelchairs and walked along the row of patients, pausing in front of each one, squinting, as if trying to distinguish among sextuplets.

  “Ah,” she said at the fifth patient. “Mr. Lawrence, you have a visitor.”

  Before the old man could respond she had circled his chair and was propelling him across the patio.

  “You’ll have more privacy here,” she said in a cloying singsong, then spun him around so that he once again faced away from the building. “Lunch is in fifteen minutes,” she said to Gwen. “I hope you’ll be done by then.” She smiled professionally and headed inside.

  Gwen carried a white plastic chair over to Fred Lawrence and sat in front of him. He looked very frail, slumped from the shoulders, his chin almost touching his chest. A few strands of yellow-gray hair were slicked over the top of his head, and what little flesh that remained on his face drooped listlessly. Gwen searched in vain for some resemblance to Nick.

  “I’m here about Nick,” she said. When he didn’t respond she repeated the line.

  “I heard you the first time.” His voice was unexpectedly strong. He still hadn’t looked up at her. “Go away.”

  “Mr. Lawrence, two people have died because of something your son did.”

  “I heard about that Priscilla woman. A man from the FBI was here asking questions about Nick. I told them I hadn’t seen my son since he left for piano school twenty years ago.”

  “Julliard,” Gwen said. He slowly nodded. “Why did you and Nick lose touch?”

  He didn’t respond, his chin still sunk in his chest. The reds and blues of his long-sleeved madras shirt looked garish against his sallow complexion.

  “Did you and your son have a falling-out?”

  Still no response. She was tempted to give up; indeed she was eager to get the hell out of there. But she had to know who Nick Lawrence was. The husk of a man sitting before her held the key.

  “Did you ever meet his wife?”

  His head slowly rose, milky brown eyes fixing on her with something like hatred.

  “Priscilla Lawrence,” she said. “Priscilla Cunningham, you did meet her, didn’t you?”

  His head drooped. When she repeated the question he shook it slowly.

  “How about your granddaughter? Tess, your granddaughter, did you ever meet her?” She opened her purse and took out a photograph, glancing at it briefly. A perfect May sun beat down on Jimmy, holding a bat, ready to swing. In the background, watching the game, tending to younger siblings, exchanging local gossip, were the Little Leaguers’ parents: two or three mothers, lots of fathers, a few grandparents. And ther
e, just to the right of third base, standing behind a woman in a Sohegan High School sweatshirt, was Nick Lawrence, Tess in his arms.

  “This is your granddaughter, Mr. Lawrence.” She placed the photo under his face and pointed to Nick and Tess. Nick hadn’t known he was being photographed. Indeed, he’d been just another background figure until she retrieved the photo from a kitchen drawer that morning, wondering if she’d inadvertently shot him that day in the park when she’d saved Tess from falling down from the bleacher. “Her name is Tess.”

  “No,” he said softly.

  “Yes, she’s Nick’s daughter.”

  “No!”

  “You can see from the photo that they look very much alike, can’t you, Mr.—”

  He swatted the photo from her fingers. Gwen picked it up off the cement patio.

  “That is not my granddaughter,” he said in a low but firm voice.

  “But she is, Mr. Lawrence. She’s Nick’s—”

  “That isn’t Nick.”

  “I don’t understand.” She placed the photo directly under his face. Again he batted it away. This time she let it rest on the patio.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “People change over time, features change.”

  “Not him,” the old man growled.

  “Twenty years is a long time…”

  He looked at her, head trembling as if from the effort of holding it up. “That is not my son’s face. That is not my son’s child. My son…”

  “What about your son?”

  He shook his head slowly but held her with a rheumy stare.

  “What about him, Mr. Lawrence? Why are you so sure? Why haven’t you spoken to him all these years?”

  “He…Nicholas…he was sick.” His voice had deteriorated to a gravelly wheeze. “Evil.”

  “Evil in what way?”

  “He…he was…” His entire torso sagged, as if he’d expended every breath he had left. The madras shirt billowed from his chest. “Nicky never married anybody,” he whispered into his chest. “Nicky has no child.”