The serenity in her voice scared him more than it should. She was a different person. “What kind of man I am?” He shouted now, not caring if the servants heard him. “What kind of man I am? Stupid bitch. You sit in here smelling the damn roses while I work to make this life for you. What kind of man I am?” Near her now, he pushed into her neck with his index finger.
She shoved his hands away. “Don’t touch me. You’ve done nothing to make my life good. This is my father’s, not yours. He gave you a job for me. None of this is yours.”
He grabbed the sides of her arms. “Shut your fucking mouth or you’ll be sorry.”
She went stiff, staring into his eyes. “There’s nothing you can do to me ever again.”
“You think?” He started shaking her. Behind them, the door flew open. Seb lunged into the room, holding a baseball bat above his head. Before he could comprehend what was happening, Seb smacked him in the lower back with the bat. Miller let out a monosyllabic moan and turned toward his son. “Give me the bat.”
Seb, like a graceful dancer, side-stepped Miller and held the bat in front of him of like a sword. “Get out, or I’ll do it again. Only this time it will be your head.”
“You’ll be sorry, Caroline.” He kicked the door on his way out, and sprinted down the hallway toward the study. When he reached Edmund’s study, he slipped inside, closing the door behind him. He picked up the phone and dialed Timmy’s bar. The bartender put him through to Timmy.
“I know why she wasn’t on her walk,” he said into the phone. “The crazy bitch drove up to Phil’s cottage.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Yeah. She knows everything. We need this done tomorrow morning. Whatever he has to do.”
“But her family knows. You’ll be out in the cold,” said Timmy.
“Not with the life insurance policy I took out on her. I’ll be set. Not Bennett money, but enough to take care of Phil. We’ll leave town. Go somewhere they can’t find us.”
“Consider it done.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Caroline
AFTER MILLER LEFT, Caroline sank into the chair. “Sweetheart, will you pour me a glass of water?”
Seb set the baseball bat in the corner of the room and poured from the pitcher on the dresser into a glass. “I’ve never been this tired in my life.” She put her face in her hands. No tears came. Perhaps, for now, there were no more. She looked out the window. It would be another spectacular sunset. She wondered if anything would give her pleasure ever again. “The smell of the seashore is my favorite smell. Have I ever told you that?”
“Yes, Mother.” He handed her the glass of water, then sat next to her on the ottoman. “We all know everything you like.”
She brushed his bangs from his face. “I’ve never done anything better than make you children. No matter what, I have that.”
“Mother, I called Julius.”
“Why, sweetheart?”
“Father hit me. I was afraid for us to be alone with him. He’s on his way here.”
“He hit you?”
Seb’s eyes clouded over as he traced the pattern in the carpet with his heel. “He’s gone. He’ll never be able to hurt us ever again.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said.
“None of this is your fault.” His eyes were fixed on the floor, but she saw a shimmer of tears in his eyelashes.
Her breath caught in her throat. What had Miller called her? A little idiot. Emphasis on the word little. That’s the way he’d made her feel all their marriage. A photograph of her, encased in a gold frame, stood by the water pitcher. She’d had it taken last Christmas for a gift for Miller. The black and white photo had been painted to make her cheeks and lips pink, and the diffused light in the photography studio had softened the hints of age. The picture did not tell the whole truth. She was no longer young. Her youth had been given to Miller. No amount of touching up would change that fact.
Miller was correct. She’d behaved like a little child all these years. Trusting him, putting him on a pedestal. She had participated in the lie, even abetted it with her complacency. How could she be surprised that he had a secret life when she hadn’t demanded he participate in this one? She’d been an ostrich, with her head in the sand outside this window. Sunny Caroline, kind Caroline, understanding Caroline. She’d been apologizing for Miller’s behavior for seventeen years. How many times had she made excuses for him to her mother and Julius? To herself, and most dreadfully, her children? If she had insisted that he be the husband and father her own father was, instead of being so damned grateful he married her, she would have seen the truth. She would have demanded more for her life, for her children’s life. She was nothing more than a little idiot.
“It is, actually. I didn’t care enough about myself and you children to see the truth when it was right in front of me.”
He looked up at her, brushing tears from his cheeks. “Mother, we all love you very much.”
She held out her arms. “And, I love you.”
A knock on the door distracted them. Julius popped his head inside the room. Seb crossed over to the door. “Uncle Julius, please come in.” He looked back at her. “Mother, I’m going to ask Margaret to make some lemonade for you. Would you like that?”
“Yes, please. Thank you.”
Her oldest son kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be in the sitting room, Mother, if you need me.” He nodded to Julius and left the room.
Julius pulled the ottoman close and sat next to her. “What’s happened?”
She looked at him, unable to speak.
“Caroline, please, what is it? Seb called in a panic.”
“It’s Miller.”
“What about him?” A sharpness slipped into his voice.
“Something’s happened. It’s as bad as I could ever imagine.”
Julius’s mouth, sweet when he smiled, had become a straight line. A muscle on the side in his cheek twitched. “Another woman?”
“For years now. Three years.” She told him, in stops and starts, how she had driven to Phil Rains’s cottage. “I knocked on her door, Julius, like I was someone else, not me. Not me, who, last week, could not have imagined this could ever happen.” After she told him all the details, including the unfortunate coincidence of Henry being Phil’s landlord, she ended with the confrontation with Miller. “Seb hit him with a baseball bat.” She covered her mouth, suddenly seized with nervous laughter, like in church when she was a little girl.
Laugher appeared to be the last thing on Julius’s mind. His face had flushed pink while she told him her story. His voice shook as he seemed to bite out words. “A mistress, with a pregnant wife at home.” That was all he seemed capable of for the moment. He stared at the wall and opened his mouth as if to say something else but seemed to decide against it as he rose from the ottoman and went to the window, pulling back the cotton curtain to peer out to the sea.
“If he’s lied about this, I wonder what other lies he’s told?” she asked. “He could come home to me and act as if he cared about me and our children, come to my bed, and yet all the time his heart was somewhere else. Who can do this? Who can lie this well for this long?” She wanted to stand, but was afraid her legs would not hold her. She pulled her knees to her torso like when she was a little girl. “Seb asked me yesterday if Miller could have falsified the records somehow, so that he didn’t have to serve in the war.”
Julius let the curtain drop from his fingers as he turned to her. “Fake his medical problems? That’s impossible.”
“Julius, with our kind of money, anything’s possible. We can buy any lie we want to. I admit I was relieved he couldn’t go. I’d already had to send you away and many of our friends were over there. So many didn’t come back. I thought only, my husband’s safe from harm. I wonder what that says about me? That I was only too happy to accept the easy way, even though it was a morally inferior decision to almost every other man I knew, including my father who fought in the first war and
you who put your life on the line every day for injured and dying soldiers.”
“Caroline, do you remember when we were little and helped your mother with the gifts for the orphans? Do you remember how their letters made you cry?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“The girl you were, pure of heart, kind. That’s the person you still are. What’s happened here is not your fault. It’s him, not you.”
She stared at the window, watching the curtain flutter in the breeze. “I’ve been an idiot.”
“Tomorrow is another day. The kids and your parents and me—we’re all here for you. We always will be.”
“I’m tired.”
“Climb into bed. I’ll sit here until you fall asleep.” Julius pulled her to her feet and escorted her over to the bed. He pulled back the covers. “Hop in.”
She allowed him to tuck the covers around her shoulders, staring up at his familiar face. “What will I tell the children?”
“The same thing my father told me when my mother left. ‘This has nothing to do with you and everything to do with us. None of this is your fault.’”
“But you didn’t believe him, did you? If you had, Julius, we would not be having this conversation.”
“I have many regrets.” He smiled, but looked so sad, she began to cry all over again. “But we have to make sure the children know this is not their fault. And your father and I will be here to take his place, as we’ve always done. That will matter to them in the long run. They won’t feel unlovable like I did.”
“Julius, you’re the opposite of unlovable.” She pulled one arm from the covers and reached for him. He covered her hand with his. “And tomorrow’s another day.”
“Yes, it is and I’ll be in it, no matter what.”
CHAPTER SIX
Phil
SHE WOKE FEELING LIKE SANDPAPER LINED HER EYES, having cried herself to sleep. In the kitchen, she made coffee, then stood at the window, staring at her reflection, a sense of dread in the pit of her stomach. Mrs. Dreeser was divorcing Miller, leaving him penniless. This should have given her a way out, but she knew Miller, regardless of his fortune, he would never let her go. She was not safe. Something else was bothering her, too, a detail she couldn’t work out. If Miller were to leave his wife, he would lose everything, which is why he’d always been clear that he would never be able to do so. The other day, however, he said he wanted to marry Phil. There was only one way that could happen. Caroline Dreeser had to die.
Her heart thudded. Was he planning on having his wife killed?
The children came into the kitchen. She made them french toast while Mary read to Teddy at the table. He listened to her with adoring eyes never veering from her face. After breakfast, Teddy jumped down from the table.
“Me find truck,” he said.
After he left, Mary cleared the table and started to wash them at the sink. “Phil, who was the lady yesterday?”
“It was a woman. A woman who needed something from me.”
“What did she need?”
“Nothing for you to be worried over. Just grown-up things.”
“Is Mr. Dreeser your suitor?”
“Suitor?” Phil couldn’t help but smile. “Where did you hear that word?”
“Just around, I guess.”
“Mr. Dreeser’s a friend.”
“But you don’t like him. You’re afraid of him,” said Mary. “I can tell.”
“Mama!” Teddy was yelling to her from her bedroom. Alarmed, she ran out of the kitchen and down the hallway. Teddy was under her bed with just his feet showing.
She got on all fours. “Ducky, what’re you doing?”
“Truck stuck.”
His truck had lodged between the bed and the wooden box Miller had brought over. She reached in and moved the box and gave Teddy his truck. What was in that box? He’d said they were some books he wanted to keep safe. Why would he have kept them here? She sat on her heel, knowing, suddenly, there was something in that box that was important. She needed to see what.
She asked Mary to keep watch of Teddy as she bounded down the back steps and across the yard. She knocked on Henry’s back door. A few seconds later, he opened the door. “Phil, is everything okay?”
“Mrs. Dreeser came.”
“Yes, I know.”
“She’s going to divorce Miller and leave him penniless.”
“Slow down, Phil. I can’t understand you.”
“When he left the other day he said something about how he wanted us to be together all the time, that he was working on making that happen. Given what she told me yesterday, with the money situation, how would he have done that? Unless he…” She trailed off, unable to utter the awful words.
“What’re you saying?”
“I don’t know. This probably sounds insane, but he’s left a box under my bed. He said there’s books in there, but I feel like it’s something else. I feel like it’s important that I see what’s in there. It’s an instinct I have. But it has a lock. We’d have to smash it open with one of your hammers.”
He put his hands on her shoulders. “Listen to me. If we do this, you have to walk away from him.”
“I have to walk away from him anyway, Henry. I just don’t know how.”
“Let’s see what’s in the box.”
Minutes later they were in her bedroom pulling out the wooden box. About two by two, it was made of pine, and Henry easily pried open the lid with a hammer. Inside were a series of leather-bound notebooks placed in neat rows. “Journals?”
She picked the first one and opened to the first page. Old newspaper articles from 1921 were pasted to the pages. The articles were about the Bennetts.
Several pages in, this entry:
March 28, 1921
I saw them in the park. Fat Caroline wanted peanuts, so she got them. I want peanuts and all the rest of it, too. I will marry Caroline someday. I will become like Edmund Bennett. No one can stop me.
She knelt on the floor, turning page after page, Henry next to her. It was filled with stories of the Bennetts and more proclamations about the kind of life he would have and about how he would someday be a Bennett. “Grab a more recent one,” she said.
Henry handed her another.
April 11, 1943.
I hired a new seamstress today. Philippa Rains. She’s a dark-eyed beauty fresh from Iowa. Innocent but intelligent.
Page after page of remarks about her appearance or habits. And finally this: I want her. I will have her.
A month later: She’s obviously going to have a baby. This is my way in.
Next to her, Henry grabbed the last in the row, opening it to the first page, titled 1946: Somebody has to die. I have to have Phil. She has to be my wife. I cannot be apart from her. She is rightfully mine. Caroline has to die.
“Oh no. No, no, no,” she said.
He took the book from her and placed it back in the box. “All right now, we have to think what to do.”
She started to rock back and forth. “He’s sick. We have to stop him. She’s pregnant, you know. And those children. Their mother. Oh my God, Henry, what do we do? He’s ruthless. He’ll do anything to get what he wants. He’s told me that many times. There was something crazed about him when he left this time. He will have hired someone to do it. And he left this morning with the intent to see his family in Santa Barbara. It’s going to be soon. We have to warn her.”
“I know where the house is,” said Henry.
“How?”
“I’ll tell you in the car.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Miller
TIMMY HANDED MILLER A SMOKE and gestured for another round from the bartender. It was two a.m. and they were both drunk. Strangely, given all that had happened that day with Caroline, and the plan in motion for the morning, the two men had talked about the old days. The days in the orphanage, words spilling from them in equal measure to the number of whiskeys.
He’d been here since eight, having driven str
aight from Santa Barbara, chain smoking with the window down and taking the turns too fast. He wanted Phil, but he knew he needed to be someplace public the next morning, in case he needed an alibi. Being with his mistress when his wife was being pushed over a cliff was probably not the best idea he’d ever had.
Now, the conversation changed. “You sure you don’t want me to call it off?” asked Timmy. “Her dying the day she was going to file for a divorce don’t look too good.”
Miller took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Edmund Bennett took away the one thing I’d been working for my entire life when he gave the reins to that suck-up. I’m going to take away something he cares about and see how he likes it.”
“Wait a minute now. I thought this was about Phil. Is this some kind of revenge?” asked Timmy.
“You know, man, I’m sick of being screwed. I ever tell you about my whore of a mother? All my life, no one ever wanted me. Fucking Bennetts, same thing, except for Caroline. And you know what? The fact that she’s stupid like a fucking puppy makes me hate her. Makes me want to kick in her face.” He was slurring his words, and the masses of anger were spewing out of his gut like black bile. “I want them all to hurt like they hurt me.”
About three a.m. they both stumbled upstairs. Miller passed out on the guest room bed with his clothes on. When he woke the next morning, hungover and smelling like an ashtray, he drew back the curtains and looked out to the street below. Fuck them. Fuck them all. He was going to Phil. He was going to take what was his.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Caroline
IT WAS NEARING SEVEN A.M. when Caroline went downstairs to the dining room. No one appeared to be up yet except Margaret, who brought her some toast and tea and gave her an encouraging pat on the shoulder. “Don’t fret, my Caroline. Someday he’ll get what’s coming to him.”
“Margaret, I’m surprised at you. Such venom.”
“I wish I had a little snake venom. I could’ve stuck it in his whiskey.” With that, Margaret walked out of the dining room. Caroline smiled for what seemed like the first time in days.
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