Puppet Page 35

  “I’m not very hungry,” Hope tells her mother when Spenser reemerges.

  “You’ll eat what you can,” Hayley says.

  “I hear they have a great buffet table,” Ben says.

  “Go on now,” their mother cajoles. “I’ll join you straightaway.”

  “If you’re not down in twenty minutes,” Spenser warns, “I’ll scream for the police.”

  “Twenty minutes then,” Hayley says, looking to Amanda for confirmation.

  “Twenty minutes it is,” Amanda agrees.

  Ben opens the door and watches as Spenser and Hope walk through, Hope stopping in the doorway, turning back just as he is about to close the door. “See you in twenty minutes,” she repeats, the intensity of her gaze remaining even after she is gone.

  “They’re lovely children,” Amanda says.

  Hayley’s eyes fill with tears. “How did you find us?”

  “Does it really matter?”

  “I suppose not. What is it you want?”

  “I think you know.”

  “I think you should stop beating around the bush and get to the bloody point,” Hayley snaps, losing her temper for the first time, and slapping her hands against her sides in frustration.

  “I know you’re not Mr. Walsh’s daughter,” Amanda tells her. “Mr. Walsh didn’t have a daughter.”

  “Is that what your mother told you?”

  “My mother hasn’t told me anything. She’s in the hospital.”

  “The hospital?”

  “She tried to kill herself.”

  “What?” Hayley looks stricken. “Oh, God. Is she all right?”

  “She will be,” Amanda says, startled by the other woman’s unexpected concern. “Why would she do something like that, Hayley? What secret would she be willing to protect with her life?”

  “How would I know?”

  “I don’t know, but you do.”

  Hayley becomes agitated, starts pacing back and forth in front of the bed. “You have to leave. Now. Before more people get hurt.”

  “Tell me who you are.”

  “I can’t.”

  “I’m not leaving till you do.”

  Tears fill Hayley’s eyes. “You don’t know? You really don’t know?” The same question Mrs. Thompson asked earlier.

  “I know your name isn’t Hayley.”

  “No. You’re wrong.”

  “I know your real name is Lucy.”

  “No, please. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I know you’re my sister,” Amanda ventures, bracing herself for more of the woman’s vehement denials.

  There are none.

  “Oh, God,” the woman moans, clutching her stomach. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

  “You’re my sister,” Amanda repeats incredulously as the other woman bolts past her into the bathroom. Seconds later, the room fills with the sounds of violent retching. Amanda wills herself to be calm, to think nothing at all until Hayley returns. She assures herself this is all a mistake, that Hayley is playing with her head. Payback for all the trouble she’s caused. “I don’t understand,” Amanda says when Hayley reenters the room, perspiration dotting her forehead, a washcloth at her mouth. “How is that possible?”

  Hayley sinks to the bed, stares toward the window. “You still haven’t figured it out,” she marvels.

  “Tell me.”

  Hayley shakes her head. “I can’t. Please. I can’t.”

  “How can we be sisters?” Amanda presses. “I’m twenty-eight. You’re … what?”

  “Forty-one next month,” Hayley says, her voice a monotone.

  “That’s a difference of more than twelve years. My parents were only married a few years before I was born, so obviously we can’t have the same father.”

  Hayley nods, says nothing.

  “And before that my mother was married to—”

  “—my husband.”

  “So what are you saying, that my mother has another ex-husband I don’t know anything about?” Like mother, like daughter, she is thinking.

  “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Then I don’t understand. Who is your father?”

  “My father,” Hayley repeats, as if she doesn’t understand the word.

  “Yes. Who is your father?”

  A pause that lasts a lifetime, followed by a voice that is barely a whisper. “My husband,” Hayley says as she said only seconds ago.

  For a second Amanda thinks that Hayley has misunderstood the question. What other explanation can there be for her strange response? Surely she can’t be suggesting … Amanda stops, her breath freezing in her lungs. No. It can’t be. It’s impossible. Beyond impossible. Trembling fingers reach into the pocket of her new winter coat. They withdraw the picture she found hidden in her mother’s house. She raises it to her disbelieving eyes.

  What Amanda sees: John Mallins, also known as Rodney Tureck, the man her mother shot and killed, holding his young daughter on his lap. The girl is about eight or nine, with dark hair and piercing eyes. “Oh, my God.” Amanda staggers back against the desk, as if she’s been pushed. The young girl isn’t Hope. She’s the woman sitting in front of her.

  “John Mallins was your father?” Amanda says, her voice so low it seems to be coming from the floor.

  “John Mallins was my husband,” the other woman corrects, shaking from head to toe. “Before that, he was Rodney Tureck.” A sharp cry escapes her throat to stab at the air. “My father.”

  Amanda’s mouth opens, though no sound emerges. She tries to move, but her arms and legs have disappeared. She hangs suspended in the air as Hayley crumples to the floor.

  “Please don’t let them take my children away from me,” Hayley begs, rocking back and forth. “You can’t let them take my children away from me.”

  The full horror of the situation only now begins sinking in. “Your children? Oh, my God. His children.”

  “He told me if anyone ever found out, they’d take them away from me.”

  Amanda drops to the floor beside the other woman’s feet. “Nobody is going to take your children away from you. Do you hear me?”

  Hayley nods her head, although the look on her face says she’s far from convinced.

  “You have to tell me what happened. Please, Lucy,” Amanda says, using the woman’s real name for the first time, watching the years fall away from her face, as if a horrible burden has suddenly been removed. “Please tell me what happened.”

  “He was my father and I loved him. You loved your father, didn’t you?” Lucy asks plaintively.

  “Very much.”

  “Yes, your father was a lovely man. He was so wonderful to me.”

  Amanda nods, conjuring up her father’s kind face.

  “But he wasn’t my father. And I missed my dad so much. He’d always been my hero, always taken my side whenever I was having problems with Mom. She’d say I couldn’t have something, and he’d run right out and buy it for me. She’d say I couldn’t do something, and he’d tell me I could. Of course, I thought he was the best father on earth. And then he and Mom got a divorce, and he disappeared from my life. All of a sudden, he was just … gone. And after a while Mom married Mr. Price, and then, pretty soon, you were born. And it made me miss my father even more.

  “And then suddenly, there he was, standing in front of the house as I was coming home from school. My mother forbade me to see him, of course, so we had to sneak around. He said Mom was an evil woman who’d stolen a lot of money from him, and he asked me to help him find it. I tried, but when I couldn’t find anything, he said he had to go away again. The thought of losing him a second time was unbearable, and I begged him to take me with him. He said we’d have to change our names and go into hiding. I thought it sounded terribly exciting, a big adventure. We went to England, and we moved from town to town, and it was okay at first. But after a while, I started missing my mother, and my friends, and especially you. He said we could never go back home, that
he’d be charged with kidnapping, and I’d be responsible for him spending the rest of his life in jail. Then he said he’d give me a baby of my own one day.”

  Amanda buries her head in her hands, unable to hide her growing revulsion.

  “You have to understand how isolated I was. We’d spent two years moving from place to place. I had no friends. No one but him. We were never apart. He was everything to me. My father, my teacher, my best friend. Eventually even my lover. Then my husband. We settled in Sutton. He bought a small shop. After a while it started to feel almost … normal. I had a string of miscarriages, and then two stillbirths. God’s punishment, I told myself, and then I got pregnant with Hope. And she was all right. Better than all right—she was perfect. And then Spenser came along. And then, well, what was I supposed to do? I’d married my own father. I’d had children with him. Surely he was right—they’d take away my children as soon as anyone found out.”

  “Nobody is going to take away your children,” Amanda assures her again.

  “And then John’s mother died. And John insisted we come back to settle her estate. He said there was a lot of money involved, and that it would be safe after all this time. The kids were pretty excited. They’d never been anywhere outside of Sutton. And so we came to Toronto, to the Four Seasons hotel.”

  “And my … our mother was in the lobby, having tea.”

  “Yes. Can you imagine? She was having tea with a friend.” Lucy laughs through her tears. “Call it what you will—coincidence, fate, divine intervention. Whatever. There she was—having tea.”

  “And she saw you with the children …”

  “And she knew immediately what had happened.”

  “And she came back the next day and killed him.”

  “The minute the policeman showed up at my door and told me John had been shot,” Lucy says, “I knew it was her.”

  “How did you know?”

  “Because I would have done the same thing.” Lucy releases another deep breath of air, as if she’s been holding her breath for twenty-five years.

  And maybe she has, Amanda thinks, taking her sister in her arms. “Any mother would,” she tells her, drawing her close. “Any mother would.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  SOME of the crazy thoughts racing through Amanda’s mind when she sees her mother on Friday morning: that her mother looks surprisingly beautiful for a battered sixty-one-year-old woman who recently had her stomach pumped; that the awful green of her prison uniform actually complements the color of the bruises on her face; that behind those bruises she can make out faint traces of the sister she only just discovered she has; that she wants to take her mother in her arms and magically kiss away those bruises, and tell her that she understands.

  “That was one hell of a stupid stunt you pulled,” she says instead, stubbornly refusing to feel sorry for the woman, to allow the small measure of insight she has gleaned into her mother’s behavior to sway her sympathies. Sympathy can’t erase guilt. Understanding can bridge only so many gaps. And she has been angry with her mother for far too long to simply let it go. Her anger has fueled her since she was a child. It has defined her. If she relinquishes it, who will be left standing in her stead? Who will she be?

  “Yes, it was very stupid,” her mother agrees, glancing from Amanda to Ben. They are standing in the hallway of the new courthouse, in roughly the same spot where they’d convened earlier in the week. Several guards watch from a discreet distance away. Court has yet to be called into session.

  “How are you feeling, Mrs. Price?” Ben asks.

  “Much better, thank you. Eager to get this over with.”

  “We have to talk, Mother.”

  “I know.”

  Did the fact her mother had lost one daughter justify her neglect of the other? Did it give her the right to drink herself into oblivion and medicate herself into psychosis? Did it give her permission to take the law into her own hands?

  “Why don’t we sit down?” Ben motions toward a bench against the far wall.

  Amanda braces herself for an argument, is amazed when none is forthcoming. She finds herself standing alone in the middle of the hall as Ben leads her mother toward the long wooden seat, and she glances around selfconsciously before following after them. She is trembling, she realizes, as she lowers herself slowly to the seat beside her mother, Ben perching on the other end of the bench. “We talked to Hayley Mallins,” she begins. “We know—”

  “—everything,” Gwen Price says softly. “Yes, I believe you mentioned that in the hospital.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What exactly was I supposed to tell you?”

  “Everything,” Amanda says, using her mother’s word, the only word that seems appropriate under the circumstances.

  “What was I going to say? Where was I going to start?”

  “How about with the fact that Hayley Mallins is my sister?”

  Gwen Price nods, tears immediately filling her eyes and spilling down her cheeks. “How is she?”

  “Obviously she’s very upset.”

  “She must hate me.”

  “She doesn’t hate you.”

  “Really? Is that true?”

  Amanda shrugs, wondering, Who knows what’s true anymore?

  “And the children? How are they?”

  “They’re holding up. They still don’t know the whole truth.”

  Again Gwen nods. “No, they’re far too young to understand.”

  “We’re all too young to understand,” Amanda says. “I know I can’t comprehend it, no matter how many times I repeat it, no matter how hard I try to force the words to make sense. So you tell me, Mother, how could something like this have happened? And how could you have kept it from me all these years?”

  “When was I supposed to have told you?” her mother asks. “When you were a baby and your sister disappeared off the face of the earth? When days became weeks and weeks became months and then years, and the police had long since moved on to other, more pressing cases? When I was lost in a maze of booze and antidepressant drugs? When I was too zonked out to get out of bed, or too drunk to see straight? When every time I looked at you, I saw your sister?”

  “And so you stopped looking at me? Is that it?”

  Her mother bows her head. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Oh, well, I guess that makes everything all right,” Amanda snaps.

  “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “You never gave me a chance to understand.”

  “You were a child.”

  “Not for long, I wasn’t. You made sure of that.”

  “I’m so sorry,” her mother says again.

  Amanda isn’t about to let her mother off the hook with anything as simple as an apology. “What about later? When I was all grown-up. Why didn’t you tell me then? Why didn’t Daddy?”

  “He wanted to,” her mother says simply. “I wouldn’t let him. I made him promise …” Her voice sputters to a halt. “Besides, by then it was too late. I was a bitter, angry woman with a bitter, angry daughter who wanted nothing to do with me.”

  “You’re saying it was my fault you didn’t tell me?”

  “No. God, no,” her mother says quickly, reaching for Amanda’s hands. “How could it be your fault? It was my fault. Everything was my fault. He warned me. He said if I didn’t give him back the money I stole from him, he’d get even. He told me, but I didn’t listen. I didn’t imagine even he could be so heartless. So evil.”

  Amanda feels the touch of her mother’s fingers like an electric shock, and she jumps to her feet, burying her hands in the pockets of her blue pants. “And so … what? I’m supposed to feel sorry for you? I’m supposed to forgive you? Is that it?”

  “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

  “Good. Because it’s not going to happen. Trust me—it’s never going to happen.”

  “Tell us about that afternoon when you saw Rodney Tureck with your daughter in the hotel,
” Ben advises calmly from his seat.

  Gwen Price leans back, resting her head against the ivory-colored wall behind her and closing her eyes. “I’d been to a movie with my friend, Corinne. And then we’d gone to the Four Seasons for tea, something we did every week. And we were finishing up, I believe we were just about to leave, it’s hard now to remember exactly what happened. But I remember hearing the sound of children laughing, and looking toward the middle of the lobby. And there they were.”

  “You recognized them after all these years?”

  Gwen opens her eyes, stares at the opposite wall as if the scene is being replayed across its smooth surface. “I saw the young girl first. It was like seeing a ghost. She looks just like her mother did at her age. Well, you’ve seen the photograph. You know. For a second, I actually thought it was Lucy, and then I realized that was impossible. Twenty-five years had passed. It couldn’t be Lucy.” Gwen’s eyes shoot from side to side. “I thought my mind was playing horrible tricks on me, like when I was drinking, and I was about to turn away, get the hell out of there, when I saw Rod. And, yes, I recognized him immediately. It’s like when you bump into someone you haven’t seen since grade school, and it’s been decades, and yet you think they haven’t changed a bit. Besides, there was no mistaking that face, no matter what he tried to do to it.” She rubs her forehead, as if trying to rub the unpleasant image away. “And then I saw the little boy, and then the woman holding on to his hand. His mother. My daughter. And suddenly I knew. It was all so horribly, terribly clear.”

  “Why didn’t you confront them?”

  “You have to understand that the whole episode took place in a split second. I was too stunned to do anything,” her mother admits. “And then in the next instant, they were gone. I was a complete mess. I don’t know how I even made it home. But next thing I knew I was standing in front of my medicine cabinet, with all my pill bottles in my hands, those awful pills I’d saved to remind me how low I’d sunk and how far I’d come, and all I could think of was that I was right back where I’d started, that I was sinking faster than ever, and that if anything, things were far worse than I’d ever imagined. And I thought of swallowing all those pills, of putting an end to my pain once and for all.” She laughs, a sharp bark that snaps at the air. “But then I realized they’d all expired, and they’d probably just make me sick. And what would be the point in that?”