The Mill River Recluse (27 page)

Father O’Brien met Ruth’s eyes for an instant but had no choice except to run after Mary, fumbling for the key to open the door of the truck.

He’d barely stopped the pickup outside the door of the marble mansion when Mary jumped out and ran inside. Father O’Brien followed her, but she locked herself up in her bedroom. He sighed and looked at his watch. When she finally emerged hours later, he was sound asleep on the sofa in the sitting room.

Her hand on his shoulder woke him. He sat up slowly, blinking, relieved to see that she was finally calm again.

“Michael, I—”

“Mary, I didn’t hear you come down. Are you all right? I didn’t mean to fall asleep here, I just wanted to make sure—“

“—that I’m all right, I know, and don’t worry, Michael, I’m fine. Disappointed in myself, but otherwise fine. But there’s something else. I owe you an explanation.”

“An explanation? Of what? What do you mean?”

“I’ve been thinking,” she said, lowering herself onto the sofa beside him. “All these years, you’ve been so patient with me. When I get anxious and do what I do, you always take care of me. You try your best to help me, and look what happens. When I think of all the trouble I’ve caused you, I feel I’ve been a tremendous burden.”

“That’s nonsense. You told me a long time ago that no one is perfect. Well, that’s true. We’re friends, regardless of our faults. Nothing will change that, and you will never be a burden to me.”

Mary was quiet a moment. “That’s all the more reason I need to explain something to you. I should have done it years ago. It isn’t easy for me to even think about it, but you deserve to know what happened to make me the way I am.”

Whatever trace of sleepiness Father O’Brien felt vanished. He straightened up against the sofa-back and waited for Mary to continue.

“When I was a girl, in high school, I was shy, but I was normal. I loved school. My junior year, though, there was a new English teacher. He took a liking to me, always called on me, watched me during class, that sort of thing. He asked me to come to his classroom after school one Friday.” Mary was shaking now, but he didn’t move for fear of causing her to bolt upstairs again. She spoke her next words quietly, slowly, as if she were fighting to force them from her mouth.

“When I got to his classroom, he locked us inside. And then he raped me.”

“Dear Lord, Mary,” Father O’Brien said. Carefully, he reached out and took one of Mary’s hands, but she wasn’t finished.

“I didn’t say anything about it for three days. Not even to my father. I suppose I was trying to convince myself it never happened. I even managed to go back to the classroom for English on Monday. But the teacher made me stand up and read a composition out loud. All the while, he was looking at me with his cold, dark eyes, and it was as if the whole thing was happening again, right there on the classroom floor. I felt so ashamed. Everyone in the class was staring, the room was spinning…it was all I could do to get out of there. I was only sixteen.

“They fired the teacher, but I don’t think he was ever prosecuted. My father was determined to protect me, to keep me out of the whole mess once everything came out in the open, even if it meant I wouldn’t testify against him at trial. And I don’t blame him, with what happened afterward. Even with that teacher gone, I never went back to school after that. I couldn’t.”

“What a horrible, horrible…I’m so sorry, Mary,” Father O’Brien began, not knowing what he could say in response to such a dreadful story.

Silently, her eyes full of tears, Mary looked at him. Her chin and bottom lip quivered, and she looked as if she were trying to continue, but couldn’t.

“Shh, come here.” Father O’Brien slid across the sofa and wrapped his arms around Mary. She sobbed into his chest, heaving decades of repressed torment into his black jacket.

“You don’t need to say anything else, dear girl. And you have no reason to be ashamed of anything,” he said, his chin pressed into her white hair. “No reason at all.”

He held her for a long while, finally understanding why she feared so much.

~~~

After the incident outside the bakery, Mary never again expressed any interest in leaving her home.

Father O’Brien often looked up at the marble mansion and saw her increasingly frail form at her bedroom window. The vision in her good eye was beginning to slip, too, for she told him that the buildings along Main Street looked blurry to her. On her next birthday, he gave her a little spyglass that she could use to look out over the town. Binoculars would have been twice what she needed, and with the little telescope, she could view the goings-on in the town below just as she always had.

Although it had been years since Mary had kept horses, he often saw her gazing out the library windows toward the barn and pasture. After Jester and Ruby had died, she refused to replace the horses, saying that she couldn’t bear to love and lose another friend. Together, they had created a horse cemetery, with Ebony’s marker in the center. The small circle of stones was visible from the library window.

Upon Ebony’s death, Father O’Brien had finally returned to Mary the mare’s marble likeness. “Conor gave this to me for safekeeping,” he told her. “He wanted me to give it back to you when the time was right.”

Mary accepted the figurine without hesitation. “What was done to me was not Ebony’s fault,” she said, and set the little statue on her bureau where she had first kept it.

Her calm acceptance of the figurine was one of the many ways she surprised him. For his eightieth birthday, she presented him with a beautiful mahogany display rack she had mail-ordered from a company in New Jersey. “For your spoons,” she told him, and the case was indeed stunning. It had space for perhaps three dozen. “I couldn’t resist getting it for you, seeing as how after all these years, I feel almost like your partner in crime,” she said with her most feisty grin.

He reminded himself then how she had sewn pockets into the sleeves of his clothing to help facilitate his theft.

“It’s beautiful, “ he said, admiring the fine grain of the wood in the display rack, but found later that he couldn’t bring himself to choose from among his hundreds of spoons the thirty-six that would fit in it. This he hadn’t the heart to tell her.

For Mary’s seventy-sixth birthday, Father O’Brien brought her a Siamese kitten. Despite her refusal to replace her horses, he thought that perhaps she would appreciate another companion, one that could be with her all the time. Seeing Mary gasp in delight, he chided himself for not thinking of it sooner. Mary named the kitten Sham, after its tendency to sleep on the sham-covered pillows on her bed.

On a sparkling February afternoon just after Mary’s seventy-ninth birthday, Father O’Brien arrived at the back door of the marble mansion. She usually met him at the door, but this time she did not. He let himself in, calling to her. Perhaps she was in the washroom.

She heard him and raised herself up off the sofa in the sitting room.

“Oh, Michael! I’m sorry, I guess I dozed off,” she said. “I’ve got lunch all ready, I’ve just got to warm it.”

She stood up and walked toward the kitchen, toward him. He started to say something, stopped, and squinted at her. He swallowed and looked again. She saw the concern on his face as she approached.

“Michael, what is it?”

He didn’t know why, but in looking at her, he knew that something was terribly wrong.

~~~

Chapter 17

As Father O’Brien was finishing his pie and coffee at the bakery, Claudia was passing out her class’s weekly math quiz. “Ready, set, begin,” she said, and twenty-three papers were flipped over and twenty-three heads bowed over their desks. The only sound in the room was of pencils scribbling, erasing, being twirled and tapped. She would now have several quiet, uninterrupted minutes to think about last night’s date with Kyle. She smiled.

A soft knock sounded at her classroom door. Joyce Rennert, one of the secretaries from the office, opened the door and leaned in to speak to her.

“Miss Simon, there’s a delivery out front for you,” she whispered. “I would have brought them with me, but there were so many.”

“So many?”

“Roses,” Joyce said, giggling. “It looks like whoever sent them bought out the store.”

“Oh,” Claudia said, and she realized that Leroy’s attempt to impress her must have arrived. “I’ll come down to the office when my class goes to music. Could you keep them down there for me until then?”

“Oh, we’ll be happy to.” Joyce smiled wistfully. “Brenda and I’ll get to pretend that we were the lucky ones who got flowers!”

If you knew who had sent those roses, you wouldn’t feel so lucky
, Claudia thought, and went back to her students.

A few hours later, Claudia went to see what was waiting for her. Despite the advance notice, she was still shocked. An arrangement of what looked like at least two dozen huge red roses, complete with baby’s breath and ferns, sat on the counter in the office. The vase was enormous. Claudia took the card nestled in the greenery and opened it. On the front of the card was a picture of a heart in flames, while the printed message inside read “My heart burns for you.” There was also a handwritten note:

Claudia,

Roses are red,

Vilets are blue,

Wouldn’t you know,

I’ve been thinking about you.

Have a nice day.

Officer Leroy Underwood.

She had to struggle to read the poem, as it was scrawled in terrible handwriting. She noticed right away that “violets” was misspelled. For a minute, she almost felt sorry for Leroy, until she remembered the way he had stared at her in her classroom. She shuddered. The roses were beautiful, but she wanted nothing more to do with them.

Joyce came up beside her and sighed. “They sure are something else. I wonder if they’ll even fit in your car?”

“I suppose I could get them in somehow. I think I’ll leave them down here until school’s out for the day.” The truth was, she really didn’t want to take them home. She started thinking of ways she could get rid of the whole lot.

“The office already smells like roses! Just think how they’ll be in your house! By the way, who sent them to you? What’s the occasion?” Joyce’s eyes glittered in anticipation of learning a juicy tidbit of gossip.

“Just someone I met a little while ago,” Claudia said. “No occasion. I think he wanted to surprise me.” She had no intention of letting word get out that she was the target of Leroy Underwood’s hot pursuit.

Joyce’s expression dimmed.

Just as Claudia turned to go back to her classroom, a man wearing a hat that read, “Kathy’s Flowers and Gifts” came up to the office. He set a bud vase holding a single, delicate pink rose on the counter. “Hello again,” he said to Joyce. “I tell you, this Miss Simon person is popular today. Second order for her, and it’s not even noon.”

Hearing her name, Claudia backtracked to the office window. “I’m Claudia Simon,” she said.

“Well, lucky lady, this was just called in for you.” He pushed the bud vase toward her before turning to leave. “Have a good one.”

Joyce’s eyes were wide with disbelief. She raised her eyebrows and looked at Claudia, but didn’t say a word.

The little card hanging from the bud vase read,
“Just wanted you to know I had a great time last night. Looking forward to Saturday. Kyle.”

“Another recent acquaintance?” Joyce asked.

“Yes,” Claudia said, picking up the bud vase. She never would have guessed that a single rose from one man would outdo two dozen from another, but Kyle’s choice had been perfect. She beamed down at it. “I’ll definitely take this one with me.”

On her way home from school that afternoon, Claudia pitched Leroy’s Valentine’s Day card and dropped off Leroy’s mass of roses at a nursing home just outside Mill River. Mission accomplished, she sang along with the radio in her car all the way home. When her phone rang for the first time that night, she was sitting at the kitchen table with the bud vase, grading papers. Still feeling warm and fuzzy, she reached to answer it.

“Hello?”

“Claudia.” The drawl said it all.

“Yes?”

“It’s Leroy Underwood. How are you doing tonight?” Claudia rolled her eyes at the ceiling. He sounded like a poorly-scripted telemarketer.

“Fine, thank you,” she said. “I was pretty surprised this morning, shocked, really, about the roses. They’re beautiful. And the card, too. Thank you.” She had to force herself to say the words, didn’t care if it was apparent that they were spoken with all the feeling of a piece of cardboard.

“Not as beautiful as you, and I was hoping you’d be surprised. I just wanted to know, are your legs tired?”

“My legs? No,” Claudia said, wondering why he could possibly be asking about her exercise routine. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, ‘cause ever since Kyle and me visited your classroom, well, they’ve been runnin’ through my mind. By the way, you had a
real
pretty blouse on that day.” His words came out thick and numb, as if he had been gnawing on them for some time. He paused, and Claudia could almost see his mouth stretching into a slimy smile on the other end of the phone. Revolted, she said nothing, and Leroy blathered on, although he lowered his voice to a husky whisper. “And what that card said was true, you know. I got it on my way to work the other day. So I was thinking, how’d you like to go out with me sometime this week?”

Absolutely not
, Claudia thought, but she struggled to remain polite. “Oh. To be honest, I have a lot of papers to grade in the evenings, for my class. And lesson plans to prepare.” She hoped her tone of voice would convey the message to Leroy, but he persisted.