Grace Anne (4 page)

She could sell him the building.
He wanted it and she needed it gone. The caller had been able to find her in
New York, which wasn’t all that hard, but if they knew where she was it was
only a matter of time before they figured out where she was living too. And
they’d found her phone number easily enough. She frowned down at the cell in
her hand. It, too, would have to go. She closed her eyes against the sudden
pain there. And she’d have to leave everything she knew.

She had a cart in front of her
suddenly and she was checking things off her list. She had no idea what the
conversations were she participated in. She thought she was giving the correct
answers, but she didn’t really care. She was shopping, yes, shopping for food
she knew she’d never eat.

The drive to his parents’ was
surreal for her. She’d lived in New York for nearly ten years and had never
been this far out. The houses got bigger and the lawns much more lush the more
they drove. By the time they pulled around the circular drive she nearly had
her face smashed up against the window.

Trace was practically bouncing off
the seat when he saw the dogs come running toward them. As soon as the car
stopped he was out the door and tumbling in the yard with them. Before she
could get a few steps away from the car Michael pulled her back toward him. She
looked up at him.

“Thank you for allowing me to help
with this special time for Trace. I appreciate it. But I really have no…I
shouldn’t be here. This is your son’s birthday and you and I don’t even care
all that much for each other. I should just go home.”

He looked at her for several
seconds and didn’t say anything. She turned toward the house to call someone to
come and get her when he called her name. She turned back to him and waited for
him to speak. He was standing next to her when he finally spoke near her ear.

“This isn’t going to end however
you have going though your mind. I don’t know what happened, but it can’t be as
bad as you think it might be.”

“No,” she told him with a sad
shake of her head. “No, Mr. Cunningham, it’s much worse.”

Chapter 4

Josephine Cunningham, or Joey to
her friends, watched the two of them together. Actually, they weren’t so much together
as the girl fought to be away from Michael. But she never said anything, even
with the daggers she kept throwing at him. Trace seemed to be having the time
of his life with her as well.

She laughed twice when Grace elbowed
her son. Michael didn’t get upset, but seemed to find her avoidance of him
funny. Strange, she thought. Normally, Michael backed off when someone gave him
the cold shoulder. Not that it happened much, but it didn’t seem to faze him
now.

Joey wondered why the girl was
here. Not that she minded, but it had been more than curious. Trace had asked,
begged really, if he could bring her to his party. Grace had even produced a
gift for him. A very nice set of lamps that Trace said would be “awesomesauce”
for his room. Whatever that meant.

“Would you like some more cake,
dear? There is plenty and if you don’t have another piece, I won’t be able to
either.” Joey handed her a plate of cake and sat down beside her.

“Thank you, Mrs. Cunningham. It’s delicious.
And thank you for allowing me to come here today.” Grace took a big bite of the
cake.

Joey watched her eat. She was
happy to see that she didn’t pick at her food, but ate with gusto. She looked over
at her son before she decided to dig a little information from her. The last
that Joey had heard, this woman had made Michael very mad, and now here she was
at his son’s birthday celebration.

“Call me Joey. And thank you. My
daughter-in-law made it. To be honest, I think she buys it, but she won’t say.”
Joey took several bites before she continued. “I hope the two of them didn’t
force you into coming today. It was lovely that you’re… I’m going to be honest
and snoop. What is the relationship between you and Michael?”

Grace laughed. It was a beautiful
sound and Joey noticed that Michael turned to the sound as if drawn to her and
it. She smiled. Curiouser and curiouser.

“Ask your son, Mrs. Cunningham or,
better yet, your grandson. I’m just here because I’d been backed into a corner.
After this party I’m sure that you’ll never see me again.” Grace looked over at
Trace and the other children. “Do you ever wonder what they think about when
they play together? What could be going through their minds when they get up in
the morning?”

Joey looked at the children and
then back at Grace. “Mostly I just enjoy them. Their laughter and their antics.
Trace is such a joy and I see him more than any of the other grandkids. He and
Michael lived here with us until about six months ago. Michael now has a house
closer to town and Trace comes to the offices when he gets out of school. It
works out well for the both of them.”

Joey waited for her to ask about
Trace’s mom. When she didn’t, Joey wondered about it. But then she didn’t have
a clue what the relationship was between them, and it didn’t look as though she
was going to get any information from her. She watched Michael as he talked to
his brothers. He seemed to keep his attention on Grace as well. Joey thought
about Trace’s mother.

Victoria Hamilton had been a force
to be reckoned with. Joey had never thought that Michael and she suited. They
fought constantly and, when they were not fighting, they were arguing. Michael
had told her there was a difference in the two, though Joey had never been able
to figure out what it was. There was still loud voices and name-calling. But
when Victoria had told Michael she was pregnant and was getting an abortion he’d
made arrangements to keep the child.

He’d paid her a great deal of
money to not terminate the pregnancy and if she delivered, then he would pay
her a million dollars. She’d agreed and had even signed over all rights of the
baby to Michael. Eighteen months after Trace was born she had been killed in a
boating accident that took the lives of two others. It had been nothing more
than an accident.

“I really should be going,” Grace
said as she stood up a little while later. “I’ve called a cab. I have a lot to
do tomorrow.”

Joey was about to protest her
leaving when Marshall, the butler, came to say there was a taxi at the gate for
Miss Waite. Smiling, Joey thought she’d just let her go and not tell her son. Walking
Grace to the door, she told her that she was happy to meet her and wished she’d
come back soon. With a firm handshake and no reply, the girl left. She was just
shutting the door behind her when Michael came into the hall.

“Where’s Grace? I looked around
and couldn’t find her.” He continued to look around as he continued. “I thought
maybe I’d ask her to spend the night so that Trace could spend more time here
tomorrow.”

“She left,” Joey said as she walked
away. “She said she had a lot to do tomorrow and she—”

“What do you mean she left? How?
And why did you let her get away?” He grabbed his coat and yelled at Trace he
was going out. “I swear, that girl needs to listen to—”

“Michael Allen Cunningham, you
wait right there.” He stopped moving toward the door when she snapped. “What do
you mean, ‘let her get away?’ I didn’t realize that you’d kidnapped her and
that I was somehow your accomplice.”

“She is the girl that…she won’t
sell me the building and I thought that—”

“That you could what?” She saw him
flush and realized he’d hoped to persuade her using other ways to sell it to
him and to sleep with him. “You didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?” He looked to the
door, whether to escape or to go after Grace she wasn’t sure. “I need that
building and I mean to have it. And if I can go out with a beautiful woman
while I’m doing it, then what’s the harm?”

For whatever reason, Joey thought
maybe it was more than just a building for both of them and she secretly hoped
that Grace held out for as long as she could. Without a word to her son she
went back into the living room. Five minutes later he came in as well. She
thought maybe she’d have to go and see this building and its owner soon. Very
soon, if her son was perusing her this hard.

~~~

The offer on the building was
going to make disappearing so much easier. She had money, of course, but
getting to it and everything else would be something she’d have to take time to
do and she didn’t think she had a great deal of it. She looked at the figures
for what she had in cash. She’d been planning for this for a very long time and
now that it was time to move she found herself reluctant to do so.

There was enough money hidden
around the building for her to never have to work again. She looked at the
glossy pictures hanging on the walls. There were the covers to her catalogues
along with every magazine cover she’d ever been on or even in. And there were a
great many of them. She would simply have to leave everything behind. Including
the new bed, which there was no way to cancel the order for.

She wanted to call her sister. She
wanted to call Jazzie and tell her…everything. But she couldn’t. She hadn’t
been able to tell them when she’d been down on her luck and homeless, nor had
she been able to tell them when she’d made it big. They’d known, of course. There
was no way not to when they knew who she was, but this person who’d called… Grace
knew things too. Things that were scary. Things that she still had trouble
believing. She knew more about her mom than a child should ever know.

Grace shuddered when she thought
of the woman who’d given birth to them all. The woman who, on occasion, would
do things that not only seemed out of character for the whipped woman, but
bordered on insanity. She knew exactly what her mother was and she also knew
most of the players involved.

Her mother had split personality
disorder, or sometimes known as disambiguation. She knew that there was at
least three other “people” that her mother lived with. Ginny was one and the
most prominent. Then there was Verrie, one who only showed herself when things
were too tense for the other two to cope, and Guinnie. Verrie was by and far
the most violent and she would just as soon kill you as to look at you.

Guinnie was the one that seemed
the most childlike. She rarely came out, Grace was sure, and the only times
that Grace had seen her was when one of Guinevere’s children were hurt or ill. She
was the one who’d told Grace about the others.

Guinevere Waite was insane. Not
only that, but Grace was afraid she was also a killer. Grace had seen things,
heard things, that made her run. Even after the rape when she was seventeen she’d
not been as afraid as she’d been when she heard the screams coming from her parents’
room. Screams that still, to this day, made the hair on her arms rise and the
back of her neck feel like something was dancing there.

It had been the night before her
graduation. She’d been in her room daydreaming about the day she’d be able to
leave home for good. Her sister Jazzie was asleep and the other two, Sin and
Lilliane, were watching television in the bathroom so they wouldn’t get caught.
At first she thought it was coming from the bathroom, but when she got up to
tell them to turn it down the noise got quieter. She went into the hallway and
listened.

The moaning made her think her
parents were having sex and she nearly turned back to her room and then the
bath to throw up, but then she remembered her father was in jail again. Grace,
knowing that she would regret it, tiptoed down the hall to the shut bedroom
door.

The moaning was so low she had to
press her ear to the door to hear it. Now, even after all these years, she
wondered why she didn’t just think her mom was having an affair and leave it at
that. But she didn’t. Couldn’t, if the truth be told. She was still listening
at the door when she heard the
pop.

Standing stock still Grace knew
that it was a gun shot. And when the second, then the third pop sounded, she
heard her mother laughing hysterically. It took her several seconds, too many
for her to get back to her room, before she realized that someone was turning
the knob on the door. She’d just had time to press back against the wall when
the door opened.

There she stood. Her mother was
naked and covered in…Grace had always hoped she’d imagined the blood that
dripped from her mother’s elbows as she walked down the hall toward the closet.
But as she turned her head and looked in between the door and the jamb that opened
into her parents’ room, she saw the man lying there.

He was naked as well as covered in
blood. But his was pooling beneath him. The dark stained the rug that he lay on
and the sheet that lay next to him. There was an axe in his chest and a gun lying
beside him. But what had Grace putting her hand over her mouth and silently
sobbing behind it was that he was looking at her. There was no doubt that his
dead eyes were staring right directly at her.

When her mother came back down the
hall, a stack of towels in her arms, Grace heard her muttering about the man. Also
about the mess he’d made and that when “Ginny” came back she’d have a fit.

“Better get a start on it or there
will be hell to pay,” she said in a voice that Grace remembered from the rape. “Yeppers,
gotta make sure things are in order or she’ll not let me come out and play
again.”

When the door shut, again, behind
her mother, Grace stood there for several minutes. It was too much. All of it
was too much. When she felt safe enough to move she went to the room she shared
with her sisters and changed her clothes. Gathering up all the money she could
find, even some that didn’t belong to her, she left without a word to anyone.

She didn’t call the police, though
she probably should have. But she was terrified. And sickened. Then, when she’d
been in New York for awhile, she’d tried to convince herself that she’d been
dreaming. But that had never felt right. She knew with all her heart that her
mother, or one of her others, had killed that man.