Wild Orchids Part 33

It was over.

Maybe not over over, but finished enough that we could all have lives and stop with the devil-story. I hadn't yet decided if I was going to write about what had happened. I think I'd have to discuss that with Jackie.

We were home now, and I'd managed to carry Jackie upstairs and put her in bed. I would have liked to undress her and snuggle down beside her while she slept, then, when she awoke, I'd let what happen, happen.

But I didn't do that. I pulled off her shoes and her jeans, but I left the rest of her clothed, then I sat on the chair beside her bed and looked at her. It had been a tough day and she slept like an infant.

At that thought, a little thrill ran through me. Kids. While I'd been with Pat, I hadn't thought much one way or the other about children. But since I'd met Tessa, I'd wondered, What if ? What if Pat and I had had children?

What would they look like? Whose talents would they inherit? Whose mechanical abilities? Would the child be able to spell?

All sorts of things went through my mind, and I knew that I was toying with the idea that maybe Jackie would have me and we could...

Oh, well, I thought. That would come later.

Last night we'd burst through that forest onto a dirt road and seen a small, run-down house on the opposite side. For a moment, Jackie and I had stood there looking at each other in silence. The road and the house were so ordinary, reachable by an automobile.

I looked back at the forest, dark, gloomy, silent. "So what the h.e.l.l was that about?" I asked.

Jackie looked as bewildered as me. "A shortcut through h.e.l.l?" she said, making me smile.

Still holding her arm, I started across the road, but when Jackie stayed where she was, I looked at her in question.

"What did you see back there?" she asked. "You know, where I met...

him?"

As we slowly walked across the road, I described the place, sparing no details.

Jackie didn't say anything, just nodded. I think she had the same thoughts as I did: Why? Over and over I'd asked that. Why? Why had the devil chosen Cole Creek? Why the woman Amarisa? Why Jackie?

By the time we were standing before the front door of the little house, I could feel Jackie trembling. I squeezed her hand, then knocked. A large woman in a white nurse's uniform answered the door and let us in. And inside, sitting up in a bed, was Jackie's grandmother.

Mary Hattalene Cole was in her eighties and, to my eyes, she looked as though she'd been wanting to die for a long time. There was loneliness, pain, and longing in those watery old blue eyes. She seemed to recognize Jackie instantly because she held out her hands, tears running down her wrinkled old face.

As I watched the two of them hugging each other-and Jackie had no reluctance or shyness-I couldn't imagine what it would feel like not to have relatives. I had so many of them that I got on planes just to get away from them. But Jackie'd had her father and no one else.

Neither Mrs. Cole nor Jackie seemed to want to talk about the devil or a woman who had been crushed by the townspeople. I knew that this woman had not partic.i.p.ated in the crus.h.i.+ng or she would be dead. And as a Cole by marriage, I guessed she'd been spared the can't-leave-town hex.

All Jackie and Mrs. Cole wanted to do was sit close to each other and talk about their mutual ancestors. Mrs. Cole had a two-foot-tall stack of photo alb.u.ms, and Jackie wanted to see every picture and talk about every aspect of every one of her relatives.

I looked at the dates on the spines of the alb.u.ms, chose one, and flipped through it until I found a photo of the woman whose face had been re-created by the forensic lab in Charlotte. "Who is she?" I asked.

Mrs. Cole gave me such a hard look that I turned red. She might be old but her mind was certainly intact. Obviously, she knew that I knew- Holding the photo, Jackie studied it. I was sure she also knew who the woman in the photo was and, unfortunately, I could see that she was struggling hard not to remember what she seemed to be seeing.

I was eaten up with questions that I wanted to ask, but I couldn't make myself voice them. Jackie seemed to think she had all the time in the world, but from the look of her grandmother and the machines by the bed, I didn't think they had much time at all.

Was it true? I wanted to ask. Did Amarisa see the devil? Had Jackie seen him? Why did the devil choose that woman? Who killed all the people who had been at the crus.h.i.+ng?

When I looked outside, I saw that it was full dark around the house and not just in the surrounding forest. My imagination went into overdrive. Had the devil put up a protective force field around this house? Was this house like Brigadoon and only existed at certain times for a certain length of time?

To quieten my mind, I went into the living room and used my cell phone to call n.o.ble. When they told me that he and Allie had found Rebecca in a bar before she set any fires, I offered up a prayer of thanks. And it seemed that Allie'd had to search for Rebecca before so she'd asked no questions.

I went back into the bedroom and told Jackie the good news. She and her grandmother listened politely, but I could see that neither of them was interested. They were talking about the store that Jackie's father had run after he married her mother.

"How can we break the curse?" I blurted out, making both women pause to stare at me.

"I would have thought Essie would have told you that," Mrs. Cole said.

Looking at her granddaughter, she smiled, and I could see a world of pain in her eyes. There was a wheelchair poking out of a closet in the old house and I remembered the newspaper saying that she'd been in the car when her daughter had crashed. And I remembered that her daughter had taken two days to die. This woman must have had to lie there, trapped, and watch her daughter die.

"No one in town has told us anything," I managed to say, the images in my head making my throat swell. It occurred to me that my books appealed to so many people because so many had experienced as much pain as I had.

To love someone so much then lose them... What was worse on the earth?

"It's time that you know everything," Mrs. Cole said, then waved her nurse away when she started to say that her patient was too tired. Mary Hattalene told us the story her daughter had told her during the days they'd both been trapped under the wrecked car. The rescuers arrived just minutes after Harriet died.

We'd pieced together much of the story in our time in Cole Creek. Harriet Cole, who Jackie's grandmother admitted had been spoiled and cosseted all her life, had snagged the handsome young man-Jackie's father-who'd come to town to open a pottery business. But after the marriage, the pottery had closed and Reece Landreth-Jackie's father's real name-had wanted to leave town, but Harriet refused. Over the next few years the couple had come to despise each other, with only their love of their young daughter holding them together. Reece spent his days running a small grocery, while Harriet, her daughter in tow, spent her days with Edward Belcher-which explained why Jackie knew my house so well. She'd spent endless hours playing there as a child.

When Jackie was about two and a half, her father's older sister, Amarisa, had been widowed and Reece had invited her to live with them. Mary Hattalene said that while it was true Reece loved his sister, he also desperately needed her help financially as his salary at the store was minuscule.

Amarisa gladly came to Cole Creek. She was a quiet person, as gentle and kind as Harriet was turbulent. The problem started because Jackie adored her aunt. It was understandable that Jackie would want to be with her aunt who took her for long walks, and let her use her camera to photograph the flowers, rather than with her mother who spent her days with pompous old Edward Belcher. It wasn't long before Harriet began to hate Amarisa, blaming her for all her problems.

Mary Hattalene said that as the months pa.s.sed, Amarisa's life became difficult to bear. Harriet's anger and jealousy of the love that her husband and daughter, and even the town residents, bore for the sweet-tempered woman increased daily. It was when Jackie, just learning to talk, came home from a walk with her aunt full of words about the man they'd met, that Harriet went over the edge. When questioned, Amarisa, blus.h.i.+ng shyly, told of having met a man who had a lovely summer cabin in the mountains.

No, she said, the man wasn't married.

Harriet was terrified that if Amarisa got married and moved away that Reece would go with her and take Jackie. Harriet began a campaign to keep Amarisa from getting married, but when she extended an invitation to the man, she was puzzled as to why he wouldn't accept.

Curious, Harriet decided to secretly follow Amarisa and Jackie and see the man for herself.

What Harriet saw was not the lovely cabin that Amarisa had described, but a pile of rubble from collapsed stone walls. Yet, as Harriet hid and watched, she saw her daughter and Amarisa laughing and talking as though there was another person there. She even saw them making the motions of eating and drinking.

Later, Harriet told her mother that, had it just been Amarisa, she would have thought the woman was insane, but that her daughter also "saw" this person horrified her.

Harriet ran down the trail to the minister's house and told him what she'd seen. It was he who said that Amarisa had been talking with the devil. That night he called a meeting of the town council, which consisted of a member of each of the seven founding families, and two from the Cole family, Harriet and her father. They concocted a plan.

The next day Harriet told Amarisa that Jackie wasn't well so she couldn't go with her aunt on her daily walk. Smiling graciously, Amarisa set off on the trail, while Harriet left Jackie with a neighbor. What Harriet didn't know was that minutes after she started to follow Amarisa, Jackie slipped through a loose board in the neighbor's fence and followed her mother and aunt.

Eight adults and one child were hiding in the bushes in front of the fallen cabin that day. When Amarisa started laughing with a person they couldn't see, the adults stepped forward, but little Jackie crouched down and stayed still.

Mary Hattalene said that when the people confronted Amarisa and accused her of consorting with the devil, they angered him.

"For a moment," Mary Hattalene said, "he appeared. One second they were standing in that fallen-down house, then the next, the house was beautiful and there was a man there, a very handsome man. He was smiling at them in a way that my daughter said tempted her to smile back at him. It was a jealous Edward Belcher who picked up a stone and threw it at the man-and when he did, for a second, they saw the devil as people believed him to look: red, with horns and cloven feet. In the next second, he disappeared in smoke, and the house was again rubble and charred wood.

"My daughter said that after that she wasn't sure what order things happened in. When Amarisa backed away from the people, she fell, then someone dropped a stone on her, then another. Within seconds they were all in a frenzy and minutes later Amarisa was buried under hundreds of rocks. When she was covered, the people followed the preacher down the mountain and all of them spent the afternoon in the church on their knees praying."

It wasn't until late that night that an exhausted Harriet returned home.

Reece wanted to know where his daughter and sister were. Harriet told him the lie she and the others had concocted, that Amarisa had been called away to an emergency in her late husband's family. One of the murderers had sneaked back and packed Amarisa's clothes and stored the suitcase in Harriet's father's attic. As for Jackie, Harriet said she was with a neighbor.

But when they went to the neighbor's house to get Jackie, the woman said she'd seen the child go up the trail right behind her mother so the neighbor thought Harriet had changed her mind and taken her. Frightened, shaking, Harriet realized what had happened, but she kept calm long enough to tell her husband that Jackie had probably gone to find her aunt in the woods.

Reece found his little daughter sitting in the dark forest next to a pile of stones in an almost catatonic state. It was two days later, when Jackie still had not spoken and Amarisa had not reached her late husband's family, that Reece got his wife to tell him what had happened.

Reece was enraged. He wanted to call the police, but he knew that to do so would further traumatize his daughter. She would lose her mother and grandfather as well as her aunt if Reece went to the police. Besides, he thought, who would believe him? It was his word against that of several people, one of whom was a minister. In the end, Reece's only concern was for the recovery of his daughter.

But not long after Amarisa died, the minister was killed when the marble altar in his church fell on him. Before he died-a slow, agonizing death while men tried and failed to get the ma.s.sive marble altar off of him-he told Edward Belcher that the devil had appeared to him. The minister said that two days earlier, in the midst of the snow, he'd seen a beautiful garden, with wild orchids growing everywhere. Minutes later, the devil, the handsome form of him, had appeared. He'd said that the seven families must stay in Cole Creek until they had been forgiven by "the innocent one."

They didn't know who "the innocent one" was until Harriet told them that her daughter had seen everything. But Jackie had regressed to babyhood. She was back in diapers and was no longer trying to speak. The child wasn't capable of saying that she forgave them.

The night the minister died, the people who had crushed Amarisa, including Harriet, tried to leave town, but they couldn't. No matter what mode of transportation they used, they never got farther than fifty miles away.

It was after Mary Hattalene's husband, Harriet's father, told his wife that he'd seen wild orchids growing out of season, and two days later he was buried under a load of gravel, that the partic.i.p.ants saw how each of them was going to die.

For months, Reece stayed in Cole Creek and tried to act as though everything was normal. He spent as much time as possible with his daughter. But just when Jackie was beginning to talk again, beginning to again be able to go outside without crying in fear, Harriet told her daughter that "people who love the devil must die."

When Reece was told this, he realized that his wife had no remorse for what she'd done. That night, he put his daughter in a car and took her away.

Because he feared the people who'd killed his sister, feared that they'd use the Belcher money to take his daughter away from him, Reece changed his name and for the rest of his life, he moved often. From the time he left Cole Creek with his daughter, he was a man on the run. Every six months he'd hire a private detective to go to Cole Creek and snoop around. If the man heard anything, he'd call Reece and, often, the information he received would make him gather his daughter and move to another town.

When Amarisa's body was found in 1992, old man Belcher, who employed most of the residents, told the few people who had been living in Cole Creek when Amarisa was murdered that if anyone identified the picture the police were pa.s.sing around, they'd no longer have a job. In those days, Belcher's word was law.

What Reece didn't know, and wouldn't have believed, is that the people of Cole Creek were looking for him and Jackie so she could forgive them and release the curse put on them by the devil.

Even though within two years after Amarisa's death, all the people who'd put rocks on her were dead, the curse was still in effect. The oldest descendants of the murderers couldn't leave Cole Creek. Allie'd had to stay behind when her husband left to take a job in another state. Dessie, returning to Cole Creek for her friend's wedding, had been trapped there when her aunt had unexpectedly died the day before the wedding. Rebecca had started drinking when her husband, who refused to believe Rebecca's devil story, had left her to travel the world. Nate had been trapped when his young mother died in a car wreck.

When Mrs. Cole finished, she looked at Jackie. "The only way this can end is if you, who saw it all, will forgive them for what they did to your aunt. Can you do that?"

"Yes," Jackie said and I knew that she meant it. Some people might want revenge but not my Jackie. That thought made me smile. "My" Jackie.

Mrs. Cole took Jackie's young hand in her old one, tears sparkling in her eyes. I couldn't imagine how she must feel to be able to at last see the end of this horror.

It was late when the nurse, who'd listened to every word, said that Jackie and I had to leave. I felt frustrated because there were still thousands of questions I wanted to ask, but we'd run out of time. I told myself I was being ridiculous, but I felt as though we might never see this woman alive again.

When I'd called n.o.ble, I'd told him where I was and he'd asked Allie how to get there. I'd heard Allie ask why we were at Mary Hattalene's-as everyone seemed to call her-and when n.o.ble said that she was Jackie's grandmother, Allie had gone into such hysterics of crying that he hung up on me.

When n.o.ble called back he said he couldn't figure out what Allie was saying. The only sentence he could understand was, "We've been looking for her for years."

I knew I'd have to explain everything to my cousin and father later-and that thought surprised me. When had my relatives gone from being my enemies to being my confidantes?

When the nurse finally made us leave, I wasn't surprised when we walked outside and, standing in the moonlit yard, were the descendants of the seven founding families of Cole Creek. Allie had called them all together.

Some of them we knew and some we didn't.

In spite of her fatigue, Mary Hattalene insisted that I help her into her wheelchair and we all went outside for the impromptu ceremony. One by one, Jackie forgave each of them for what they'd done to her aunt. It was a quiet group, but if the emotion could have been heard, it would have rivaled the trumpets of the angels.

It was late when the people began to leave, all of them too drained to be happy-or maybe they didn't yet believe their imprisonment was over.

n.o.ble had left my truck, so I had transportation to take Jackie home. I wasn't surprised when she fell asleep beside me. With all that she'd been through in one day, I knew she was exhausted.

But she fooled me. As we got near home, she opened her eyes and said, "I want to see the place."

She didn't have to elaborate. I knew she meant she wanted to see the place where she'd met Russell Dunne.

Part of me wanted to say that it was late and we were both tired and we could do it tomorrow, but the larger part of me knew that I was being a coward. I was afraid of that awful place.

Jackie's courage fueled me. If she could take it, so could I. I turned the truck on a dime and went back to where I knew the trailhead was, but when I started to turn the engine off, Jackie gave me a wicked look and said, "You can't drive us into there?"

I couldn't help smiling. Years fell away; I was a Newcombe after all and I had a town girl beside me. I was sure there were several places on the trail that were too narrow for the truck to pa.s.s between the trees, but I was going to give it my best shot.

It was one h.e.l.l of a ride! I'd gone with n.o.ble and some of my other cousins over what I'd thought of as rough terrain, but it was nothing compared to what I went down with Jackie that night. If it'd been daylight and I could have seen what I was narrowly missing, I'm sure I wouldn't have continued. On the other hand, there was a giggle from Jackie now and then, and there was the thrill of seeing her bounce so high on the seat that she hit the ceiling, so I went on.

When we reached the clearing, I put the truck in park and we sat there looking at that awful place. It wasn't possible, but it looked even creepier in the headlights.

I didn't look at Jackie. Was she seeing roses? Wild orchids?

"It's horrible," she said at last, and I was so relieved that I wanted to shout and sing.

Instead, I turned on the radio and out came acid rock. Old-fas.h.i.+oned and mean. I glanced at Jackie, sending her a mental message, then raised my eyebrows in question.

She gave me a little smile, grabbed the handle above the door, braced her feet against the glove box, and nodded. She had read my mind, and she was ready!

I used the truck to tear up that place in the woods. Jackie whooped in delight as I ran over the fence and that odious bench. I felt a tire give, and I was pretty sure I'd done some major damage to the undercarriage, but as long as the truck went, I was going to keep smas.h.i.+ng.

When everything in the area was flat, I backed down the hill and pointed the headlights toward the blackness that was the forest, toward what Jackie and I had earlier walked through. Again, I looked at her in question and she nodded a resounding yes!

I drove up the hill, dodging trees and rocks and unidentifiable shadows.

And when we made it to the top and saw Mary Hattalene's house, with all the lights out, so peaceful and still, Jackie and I shouted in triumph.

The poor truck limped back to my house, sputtering, one tire flat, black smoke pouring from under the hood. I knew I was going to catch it from n.o.ble tomorrow. Newcombes didn't say a word when a woman or a kid showed up with a couple of bruises, but you didn't do to a truck what I'd done to that one.

By the time we got back to the house, I was on top of the world and I was wondering if there were any olives around. I still had my little fantasy about Jackie, and I thought that tonight might be the time to enact it.

But when I turned off the engine, I saw that Jackie was sound asleep, and when I tried to wake her, I couldn't.

I was going to have to wait to get my hands and mouth on Jackie's sweet little body.

I opened the pa.s.senger side, caught her before she fell out, and ended up carrying her into the empty house and all the way up the stairs. To keep my mind off the way my heart was pounding from the exertion, I chanted, "I am Rhett Butler and you are Scarlett," all the way up. Of course I was hoping that Jackie would wake up, laugh, and we'd end up in bed together.

But that didn't happen. Instead, I pulled off her jeans, gave a couple of ferocious sighs full of self-pity, then went downstairs.

No one was in the house. I was sure that n.o.ble and Allie were together somewhere, and no doubt Toodles was with Miss Essie Lee, and both thoughts made me feel even lonelier.

I went into the kitchen, poured myself some bourbon, and walked back into the living room.

There was a man sitting there. A tall, slim man who was devastatingly handsome.