She peered into the darkness. She could beg, she could demand. But her entreaties would only be met with silence. This she knew. While Richard Ripley demanded she live her life on his terms, so too did the Watchman demand she learn of his identity on his terms. Whether either man was truly her father or were both the masters of a game in which she was merely a piece they moved at their whim and fancy, Pippa knew she must choose which one she would let control her. And truth be told, neither of them made her feel safe.
Chapter thirty-three
Clive looked up as Pippa entered Lily’s stall. The elephant lifted her trunk and reached for Pippa. The recognition calmed Pippa’s flustered wits from the night before. She would never admit to anyone that she had sat at her bedroom window for hours, straining to see through the darkness. She’d only been greeted by the sight of her father—Richard Ripley—returning home. He was disheveled, his jacket slung over his elbow, and even his shirt unbuttoned at the top. Odd, how different the man looked in the darkness. More vulnerable, maybe. Or perhaps just different. More of a man and less of a demonstrative authority figure. And what was her father like as a man? Pippa wondered. Then she’d recalled her mother’s meekness when he was home, and Pippa realized he must be no more endearing as a husband than he was as a father. He was his own person and answered to no one. Not even his partner’s son.
For a moment, in the wee hours of the morning, Pippa thought she might understand Forrest a little bit. He was grappling for control of something of which he truly had little. He could control only her—and then only when Ripley released her to Forrest in marriage.
The circus brought little solace, but now, as Pippa met the dewy, black-eyed gaze of Lily, a part of her calmed. It was the empathetic bond. They were both unwanted in their own ways. Both misfits in worlds they weren’t born to live in.
Pippa reached in return and finger-kissed Lily’s trunk. The baby elephant wrapped its trunk around her wrist and pulled her in. Pippa couldn’t resist the smile that touched her lips, and she let the elephant mouth her hand. Clive’s smile wrinkled the lines on his face. A wisp of gray hair stood on the top of his head. The familiar reediness of his voice soothed Pippa further.
“Pippa Ripley, you’re that babe’s favorite person.”
“Hardly.” But she knew it was true. That Lily had shifted toward improving was evident, both in the life in the calf’s eyes and in the steadiness of her stance.
Pippa didn’t know why Jake wasn’t here. She’d seen Ernie out with the other elephants, walking them in their ring. He’d given her a nod of affirmation. He approved of her presence, but his face was serious. She’d seen Benard outside earlier, along with the man who was Jolly the clown, only sans his usual face paint. They too were stoic, almost sad. There was a pall over the circus. Ever since the tent had been sabotaged. It blew an ill wind, and they all sensed it.
Clive sat on a three-legged stool. He tipped his head and peered up at her. “Something’s bothering you.”
Pippa didn’t respond for a moment, weighing her thoughts. She leaned against the wall.
“I have questions.” She gauged Clive’s reaction. He waited. “About my birth.”
Clive nodded. He drummed his fingers on his knee. “I wish I could help give you answers, my dear.”
Pippa responded with a shaky smile, understanding his ignorance toward her birth but wishing it were different. Clive had been one of the first people Pippa had asked questions of many months before. He had been with Bonaventure Circus for as long as she’d been alive. It made sense that Clive would know something. A hint, a clue, anything.
“You know I was ill the year you were born.” Clive adjusted his position on the stool. “I’ve always struggled with my condition. I was in and out of the hospital then.”
His trousers were hitched above his ankles, the stitching well mended, as they’d been tailored for his short stature. Pippa briefly wondered if Patty was responsible for the excellent seam work.
Lily’s trunk pushed against her neck. Pippa stroked it as she moved it down until Lily curled it around her arm. “I know. I know you don’t recall much from that time. I just—” She stopped.
“Spit it out, Pippa,” Clive urged.
She gave a small laugh, knowing she would tell him. Knowing that Clive knew she would confide in him. She merely needed to find the words.
“My place isn’t with the Ripleys. But my father can’t see that. My place is here—at the circus. It always has been.”
“Of course, your father won’t support you. You want to find his replacement.”
Pippa had never considered that. She edged closer to Lily and rested her palm on the elephant’s cheek. “He has no fatherly instincts toward me.”
Clive’s expression was awash with disbelief. “I find that difficult to believe. He has cared for you since your birth. Fed you, clothed you, seen to your welfare, and even given you quite the amount of liberty in spite of how it may feel.”
“He’s arranged a marriage for me, he’s told me what I can and cannot do, he’s lied to me, hidden my past from me . . .” Yes. She met Clive’s eyes with an unspoken challenge. He could say what he wanted, but she knew the other side. That she was Ripley’s greatest regret in life.
“He was chosen to care for you by someone.” Clive’s argument pierced her.
“I was abandoned there as his responsibility. He owned the circus. He employed my dead mother—whoever she was.” Pippa’s retort stung her tongue, just as the truth of it stung her heart. “He may provide for me, may see to my future, but he is a stranger to me. I don’t have fond memories of him as a daughter should. I don’t really have memories of him at all. He is gone so often. The circus is demanding of his time, his passions, his . . .” Pippa dropped off. She didn’t know where she was going with her thoughts.
Clive shook his head. “You have to believe it will work out for the best.”
“God works all things together for good?” Pippa didn’t mean to mock the Scriptures, but Clive’s faith was sometimes exhaustingly positive.
Clive raised an eyebrow. “To them that love Him. Do you, Pippa?”
“Love God?” Pippa picked at her fingernail.
“Yes.” Clive nodded.
She didn’t respond. Loving God, as a father, was a difficult concept when she had no father with which to compare Him to, other than Richard Ripley and, perhaps, the Watchman. Did she wish to love God? Most certainly. But wishing and understanding how were two concepts that warred with each other. They were not easily reconciled.
“I want to,” she finally conceded. “I want to believe He cares. That the crucifix stands for something bewilderingly heroic.”
“It does,” Clive was eager to reassure her.
Pippa smiled sadly. “No one has ever been bewilderingly heroic for me, Clive. And the ones who should have been specifically chose not to.”
Clive didn’t respond. How could he? She’d left him little room.
There was no holding back. Not now. Pippa rifled through her mother’s dresser drawers and pushed aside undergarments, lace-edged handkerchiefs, and stockings. Nothing. No zebra toy. No clues to her birth, abandonment, or whatever circumstances drove it all in the first place.
Pippa slammed the drawer shut and leaned against the white bureau with its scalloped edge and tall mirror. She stared at her reflection. She looked harried, tired, and frantic. Pippa loosened her grip. She needed to calm down. To think. The last message had arrived. This time by a knock at the front door, much in the same way his original message had arrived when it all began two years prior.
Hurry.
The one word injected itself into her psyche like ink on the tattooed lady. The message was clear. Definitive. Even the Watchman felt it. Time was running out. The circus was in trouble, and with it the plausibility of their meeting.
Pippa opened the wardrobe doors and hesitated. A row of her mother’s elegant dresses hung neatly, organized by color. A whiff of her perfume
drifted into Pippa’s senses. She vaguely remembered sitting on Victoria Ripley’s lap as a child, her hand brushing back her hair, a melody hummed in her ear. That feeling of being cherished. It was a fleeting memory. Stuffed deep inside her. Pippa pushed it back down.
“What are you doing?”
Pippa yelped and spun, her breath catching in her throat. Franny. Her cousin stood in the doorway of the bedroom, curiosity etched onto her pretty face. Her calf-length dress had a beaded fringe, and she’d wrapped her long hair with pins and netting to make it look short. Short like Pippa’s. Even Franny hadn’t the audacity to bob her hair. Her brilliant eyes sparkled with interest.
“Are you snooping in Auntie’s things?” Franny took another step into the room.
“Did you let yourself in?” Pippa inquired. She knew her father was gone, her mother at the Mulrooney mansion preparing for the upcoming Autumn Formal, somehow hoping to save face for the circus by putting forward her best foot.
“Of course not. I knocked. I was told everyone was out but you, and I insisted you’d be fine if I came upstairs. Your butler is so old-fashioned. Anyway, here I am! I needed company.” She flounced onto the bed. “Georgiana hasn’t any rallies today, and gosh, if it isn’t so boring just sitting at home. What are you looking for?”
Pippa didn’t answer but pushed her mother’s dresses and parted them in the middle like circus tent flaps. If she found the toy, she would confront her parents and it would all come out, so there was no reason to shoo her cousin away.
“Can I help?”
Genuine, or driven by Franny’s insatiable curiosity, Pippa didn’t know. But she nodded.
“The more the merrier.” Her uncharacteristic sarcasm didn’t register with Franny, who drifted to her side like an ethereal angel of spontaneity.
Pippa pulled out hatboxes jammed in the back of the wardrobe and handed them to Franny.
“What am I looking for?” Franny stacked the boxes without opening them.
“A toy zebra.”
Franny held a blue box Pippa handed her, a quizzical slant to her dark brow. “A toy zebra?” she repeated. “Whatever makes you want to find that?”
Pippa pulled herself from the innards of the wardrobe to cast her cousin a bewildered look. “You know of it?”
Franny shook her head. “No.”
Pippa released her breath. She resumed her quest to dive for more boxes. “Open those.” She waved her hand behind her toward the hatboxes Franny had stacked but not opened.
“Why do you need to find a silly old toy?” Franny fumbled with the lid of a hatbox.
Pippa pulled a yellow hatbox with her as she stood. “I just—want it.”
“Because you think it will connect you to your birth family?” Franny slipped papers from the inside and revealed a hat.
Pippa didn’t answer. Franny was more astute than she’d given her credit for.
Franny lifted a hat and hovered it over her head like a child playing dress-up. “Goodness, this hat is horrible.” She dropped it back into its box. “I never understood that.”
“Understood what?” Pippa opened the yellow box.
“Why you have this insatiable need to be at the circus. To know who you came from, or at least uncover why they gave you away.”
Pippa didn’t have the energy to respond to Franny’s musing. She couldn’t find the words to explain it anyway. Franny would never understand. How could she? She didn’t know what it was like to be unnecessary. To be crippled. To be someone’s unspoken and unwanted regret.
Franny moved on to her fourth box. She lifted the lid. “I always wished you could just be happy.”
Pippa’s chest constricted at her cousin’s voice, which had lost its vivacious harmony and instead fell to a wistful melancholy. That her cousin had even considered her—well, it meant something. Pippa wasn’t sure how to process the feeling that spread through her. She searched the yellow box instead. A velvet winter hat of blue and no toy.
“Is this it?” Perched in Franny’s hand was a wooden zebra. The very sight of it made Pippa immobile. It had to be what she’d been looking for, and yet it was unassuming in its simplicity. Certainly this could not be a key to uncovering who she was or the identity of the Watchman. The zebra’s hooves were carved onto a square base that had wooden wheels attached to the bottom. It was a pull-toy. Aged paint of white and black, the wheels red, and the base yellow.
Pippa couldn’t reach for it. She couldn’t move.
Franny ran a finger down the back of the zebra. “It’s rather cute, though I’ve no idea why on earth you’d care about a silly toy like this.” She turned it over. “Oh! There’s an etching on it!”
Pippa waited of no choice of her own. Her body had paralyzed itself by the mere sight of the elusive and mysterious toy.
“That’s odd.” Franny lifted wide eyes and held the toy toward Pippa as if she wanted nothing to do with it.
Pippa didn’t take it.
“It says ‘I love you.’”
I love you . . .
Finally, Pippa reached for it. Her hand trembled. That wasn’t at all what she had expected. Of course, she wasn’t entirely sure what she had expected when she found the toy, but those three words? While full of potential depth and meaning, it wasn’t his name, nor his identity, and certainly not something that would tell her anything unique about the Watchman.
“What have you done?” Richard Ripley’s voice ripped through the room as his chiseled features twitched with suppressed emotion. The bedroom door was propped open, his hand gripping the doorframe as though, if he were to let go, he might launch himself at the toy.
“Oh, gosh!” Franny exclaimed. She dropped the zebra toy on the bed. “Gosh, Uncle Richard,” she fumbled again.
“You, out.” Richard Ripley moved into the room and pointed at his niece, then toward the hallway. Franny edged past her uncle, cast Pippa a lingering look, and closed the bedroom door behind her. The soft click of the latch echoed in the room, the few yards between Pippa and her father as wide as a chasm left empty by the past roars of floodwaters.
“What have you hoped to accomplish by ransacking your mother’s private quarters?”
Pippa’s chest clenched. An ache that had taken root as a child bubbled up inside her like a geyser that had long been ready to burst. “How could you hide this from me?”
She held the toy toward him, like an accusation, the evidence of a crime that had been committed against the heart of a little girl whose only dream was to be cherished. “You held this back from me. And Mother? Does she know about this toy?”
His glare ran her through like a sword into a mannequin. “How do you know about the toy?” Ripley yanked off his coat and tossed it on the bed. With a few quick steps, he crossed the floor and shut the wardrobe doors as if somehow it would shut out the past.
“Did she know?” Pippa pressed for an answer, refusing to explain herself. There was no way she was going to even broach the subject of the Watchman with her father—least of all before she had even sorted him out.
Ripley raised an eyebrow. It was a formidable one, as eyebrows went, and it took everything in her power not to shrink back as it winged upward in a dark swoop of condescension. “I forbid you to—”
“To what?” Pippa interrupted, but her voice shook. “To find the truth in this godforsaken house?”
“God has never forsaken this house.” Richard Ripley laughed scornfully. “You forsook it.”
Pippa snatched the zebra toy from the bed and clutched it to her chest. “You can’t make this my fault. You hid this from me. What else are you hiding from me?” She twisted the toy and held it toward him, the etching pointed in his direction. “I love you. This was from my family, wasn’t it? My father?”
“I am your father!” Richard Ripley kicked at a hatbox and sent it sliding across the wood floor.
Pippa’s hand dropped to her side, the toy with it. “You’re—you’re not. Not really.”
Ripley ma
rched toward her, and before she could react, he had grabbed her upper arm and pulled her toward him until Pippa’s shoulder touched his chest. “That toy is a lie. What it says is a lie. We are your family.”
“My family?” Pippa’s voice trembled. The anguish was too deep and the wounds too open not to argue. She tugged her arm away, and he released her but with a meaningful slowness that exemplified his concealed power. Pippa paced away from him, stopped in front of the window of her mother’s room, and stared out at the sky. Dusk was settling in, and with it large thunderclouds in the distance.
She turned. “You left me. Every summer. You’ve no desire to be a father.” Her whisper sounded louder than if she had shouted it. Pippa gripped the zebra toy with both hands and lifted it to her mouth so her trembling lips could press against its cold wood.
She was loved.
She was loved.
She was loved.
“You never held me.” Pippa grew in confidence, spurred on by Ripley’s dark silence. “You hardly spoke to me. You left me for weeks. I became a castoff. Are you ashamed of me? My leg? Where I come from?”
“Stop.” Ripley’s voice was chilling. “You don’t know what you speak of.” His chin lowered, and he glared down his nose at her, striding toward Pippa until she backed into the window. He leaned down until he was eye to eye with her. “You will tell me how you found out about that toy.”
“No.” Her refusal was a trembling whisper.
“Tell me now!” Ripley’s roar bounced off the bedroom walls and silenced Pippa, the piercing strength of it matching the thunderclap that rattled the crystal beads hanging from the lamp by the bed.
She shook her head, clasping the toy tighter to her chest. Rain began striking the windowpane, a tiny cadence of musical notes without order.
The Haunting at Bonaventure Circus Page 28
