Maggy's Child (9 page)

“I let Dad down.” David spoke so quietly, in such a miserable tone, that Maggy’s heart constricted. She longed to wrap her arms around him, but once again she didn’t quite dare. Instead, she was quiet for a moment before she responded.

“David, did you ever think that maybe Dad let
you
down? That maybe he should have been proud that you played well enough so that you two came in seventh, instead of being angry because you didn’t play quite well enough to come in first?”

David glanced at her, arrested. For a moment, just a moment, Maggy thought she might have knocked the rosy glasses through which he had always viewed Lyle from his eyes. Then his face twisted into a terrible scowl, and he jumped to his feet.

“What do you know about it anyway?” he shouted. “Dad says that with your background, we shouldn’t even expect you to understand about golf. He said you were the next thing to a hooker before he married you, and hookers don’t play golf.”

“What?” Maggy was dumbfounded.

David didn’t answer. He flushed, shot her an indecipherable look, and then without another word turned and ran. Within minutes he disappeared around the side of the clubhouse, headed toward where the other children,
whose shouts and laughter echoed faintly beneath the grinding of the incinerator, could be seen tumbling all over a grassy knoll. Maggy was left sitting where she was, feeling as if she had taken a body blow. It was all she could do to breathe.

How dare Lyle say such a thing to her son! Maggy felt a flash of white-hot fury that found vent in mentally calling Lyle every filthy name she could think of. Not for the first time, she took the true measure of just how ruthless Lyle was prepared to be in their war over David. She had to face the truth: Lyle would use any weapon that came to hand to turn David finally and absolutely against her, even if he hurt David in the process. To tell a young boy that his mother had once been the next thing to a whore was absolutely unforgivable.

Maggy remembered the “present” Nick had given her that morning and went cold.

Lyle did not know about her brief career as a dancer. He must never find out. He must never come into possession of those pictures, or that tape. If he did, one use he would make of them would be to show them to David. She knew it now with a hideous certainty. What David would think of her then she shuddered to imagine.

There was one defense left to her, of course. But unless she was prepared to break her husband’s hold on the boy by destroying David himself, she could not use it. It was too late now to tell the truth.

“Mrs. Forrest, your husband sent me out to fetch you. He says will you please come in now, as your guests will be arriving soon.”

Maggy glanced up, surprised to find a wooden-faced waiter addressing her. She had been so lost in thought that she had never even seen him approach. In honor of her birthday, Lyle was hosting a dinner party for family, friends, and business associates. He did so every year, as an official kickoff to the Derby festivities, and to prove to the world what a devoted husband he was. The hypocrisy of
it made Maggy sick, but there was nothing she could do but smile and bear it. She just hoped she didn’t overhear any comments about how surprisingly well Lyle’s unfortunate marriage had worked out, as she had the previous year.

If she did, she feared she might vomit.

“What time is it?” Maggy was surprised to discover that it was twilight. So intent had she been on David that the sun had set without her noticing.

“A little after six, ma’am.”

The party was scheduled to begin at seven. The dress she had chosen for the evening would have been packed by Louella in a discreet garment bag along with appropriate accessories and matching shoes, and passed from Tipton to the ladies’ locker room attendant by now. Tipton was then supposed to round up David and convey him home. Louella would be there, as would Virginia, who had pronounced herself too old and unfit for dinner parties several years earlier. David would very likely pass a pleasant evening watching TV and playing cards with his grandmother in her suite, so there was no sense worrying about him. Virginia might not choose to champion her daughter-in-law, but she adored David. She would see at a glance that he was upset, and do her best to cheer him up.

David would be fine. With the resiliency of childhood, he had probably already put their last exchange out of his mind. In the morning would be soon enough to talk to him about what Lyle had said. Maybe she should tell David more about her past, or at least the parts that he could know. He knew she had grown up poor, that she had no family left alive, and that she had never lived the way the Forrests did and had done since time immemorial. But that was really all he knew. Maybe it was time to tell David her own story, or at least the parts of it that were safe for him to hear.

But she would think more about that later. Now she
had to put on a happy face for their guests, or face Lyle’s wrath.

She was not up to that twice in one day. Winging another mental ill-wish at her husband, Maggy got to her feet.

“Tell Mr. Forrest that I’m getting dressed, and I’ll join him directly,” she said. The waiter bowed and hurried off.

Not quite an hour later, Maggy emerged from the Club’s plush locker room, freshly showered and made-up, her hair washed and blow-dried so that it hung in a thick fall of auburn waves down her back. The diamond drops that dangled from her ears sparkled only a little more brightly than her short, full-skirted, strapless dress of iridescent sea-green taffeta strewn with translucent sequins, which made the dress look as though it were fashioned of shimmering fish scales. Pale hose showed off her long legs, and deeper green satin high-heeled mules were on her feet. A wide, bejeweled gold cuff adorned her uninjured wrist. Maggy knew she looked good, as well as slightly outrageous and very expensive, which would please Lyle no end.

He got a kick out of showing off his beautiful, obviously pampered young wife. Almost as much of a kick as he got out of terrorizing her.

Maggy was unsmiling as she walked along the broad, parquet-floored hall to the party room where, if the sounds that were emanating from it were anything to judge by, a number of guests were already assembled. Either it was later than she had supposed, or people had started arriving early.

She slipped through the wide double doors, hoping to enter unnoticed. But her hope was in vain.

“There she is, the birthday girl! Happy birthday, Maggy!” The voice came from her left, and if she wasn’t mistaken it belonged to Sarah. Maggie glanced in the direction from which it had come, forcing a smile as the
other guests, perhaps a hundred strong at this early hour, began to clap and yell “Happy Birthday!”

As she had expected, she spotted Sarah, gaunt-looking in a tight black sheath, in a huddle with scarlet-clad Buffy, another woman in a pale blue dinner suit, and two men in dark suits with their backs to the door. Sarah waved, saluting her with a half-empty glass. Maggy, always a little shy in these gatherings of the local bluebloods with whom she had never felt quite at ease, moved to join Sarah and her friends, smilingly accepting congratulations from everyone she passed as she went. She was nearly at Sarah’s side, having paused to make an inane reply to a question about how it felt to be on the shady side of the big three-oh, when one of the men with Sarah turned to watch her approach.

Maggy felt the color slowly drain from her face as she glanced up and found herself looking through a drift of cigarette smoke into Nick’s narrowed hazel-green eyes.

T
he place was ritzy. Nick had to give it that. He’d never had much use for country clubs, but he could see now, glancing around, that they had their merits. If you wanted to impress the pants off someone, this was the place to bring him. The whole setup reeked of class.

Take the room he was standing in, for instance. They probably called it the ballroom, or perhaps the east ballroom or the little ballroom. A place like this would likely have more than one. It was perhaps forty feet long and half as wide, with a marble fireplace in use at one end and a buffet table crammed with silver and china and all sorts of exotic-looking edibles set up at the other. The ceilings were sparkling white and at least twelve feet high, the walls were a tasteful shade of silver-gray, and the dark, highly polished wood floor sported three bright red Oriental carpets that looked, to his unknowledgeable eye at least, to be ruinously expensive. Two enormous crystal chandeliers sparkled overhead. Champagne flowed as easily as conversation, and the hors d’oeuvres were so fancy that he couldn’t identify a single one of them by sight. In one corner of the room a tuxedoed pianist played soft background music next to a sunken pit that was clearly meant for use as a small but adequate dance floor. The advantage of having a live musician over a tape player, which was what they’d usually had at the parties he’d been to, was that a live musician would take requests, if
accompanied by a bill of sufficiently large denomination. In this case, a twenty had sufficed to insure that the song Nick wanted would be played when he wanted it.

A half grin curled his mouth as he reflected that he intended to haunt Magdalena as thoroughly as any ghost.

“Would you look at Maggy’s dress! I wish
I
had a husband who could afford to keep me in Valentinos,” the woman beside him—Buffy—said half enviously, glancing beyond his right shoulder. Nick turned to see for himself. His gaze found Maggy, and his surroundings ceased to exist.

She looked like a mermaid, was Nick’s first thought. A drop-dead-gorgeous redheaded mermaid. The effect the sight of her had on him caught him by surprise. It was immediate and devastating, like a baseball bat to the stomach. It was all he could do not to gasp for air. After twelve years, he hadn’t guessed that his emotions where she was concerned were still so raw, so sharp.

He had never gotten over her. He had long since come to doubt that he ever would.

So he’d come back for her. That was the bottom line. He could tell himself all he wanted to that he had come back to wreak bloody vengeance on Lyle Forrest. Not that that wasn’t true as well. He meant to destroy Lyle, to explode his world as thoroughly as Lyle had once exploded his. And he had the firepower to do it. He was only biding his time.

Magdalena’s little belly dance wasn’t the only interesting piece of film that had lately come into his possession.

He’d put out the word that he was looking for dirt on Lyle Forrest, and the amount of sewage that had come rolling back in at him had surprised even him. For a southern gentleman of means and lineage, old Lyle got up to some pretty nasty tricks.

It was the inbreeding, most likely, Nick had decided with a sneer as he went over the material. Like pedigreed dogs, the fine old families from which Lyle was descended
had mated with one another for generations, and what they eventually produced wasn’t in the original gene pool. Give him a mongrel anytime, Nick thought. Which was how he’d always seen himself, as a mongrel.

Just like Magdalena.

Though no one would have guessed it, the way she looked tonight.

Pride in her was mixed with a certain degree of resentment at her upgraded station in life as Nick registered that in her fancy duds she looked more “to the manner born” than any of the other equally dolled-up women in the place. She’d always been beautiful, of course. Even as a ragged, dirty little girl of seven or eight, she had had a grace and a delicacy of form and feature that set her apart from the rest. But now, adorned in the trappings that came with pots of money, she was dazzling. Just looking at her took his breath away.

She was going to be his again. Hell, she had always been his. From the time they were kids, it was always Magdalena and Nick, Nick and Magdalena, all but abandoned by their respective drunken parents, the two of them against the world. Her marriage to Lyle Forrest had almost killed him in more ways than one, but it had been a mistake, a young girl’s mistake. He saw that now. He wouldn’t hold it against
her
. For years, he’d been ragingly angry about the way she’d left him, hating her almost as much as he hated
him
. But even then, even when he’d hurt inside as if someone had pistol-whipped his heart and had been crazy with rage as well, he’d understood why she’d done it: for the money. When you never had so much as two quarters to rub together, money became very important, the most important thing in the world.

Finding enough to eat each day had been a major goal of their childhood. The threat of eviction for nonpayment of rent had been a monthly thing. Clothes—his eyes once again moved over Maggy in her drop-dead dress, narrowing this time with wry remembrance—their clothes had
come from the Salvation Army. If they were lucky. If they weren’t, they’d worn rags.

Especially as Magdalena had gotten older, become a teenager, she had minded about the clothes. Minded so much that he had more than once gotten her some new ones, stylish and pretty and never worn and size six, shoplifting them from tony stores at the malls. She’d been his, and no one who was his ever went without if he could provide. Whatever it took.