The Unloved (3 page)

The first light of dawn was just beginning to turn the eastern sky a silvery gray when Kevin heard the creaking of floorboards in the foyer. A moment later his daughter came into the room, rubbing the last vestiges of sleep from her eyes. Kevin watched her for a moment, marveling as he always did at how much she looked like his sister.

Julie was fifteen now, and her light brown eyes had taken on the same slant as Marguerite’s. Her dark, slightly wavy hair framed her heart-shaped face in the same flattering manner that Marguerite’s had, and her body was even molding into the same lithely muscular proportions that Marguerite had had at the same age—the result of endless hours at the barre. But Marguerite had practiced her ballet with a deep intensity that Julie had never felt, and that neither Kevin nor Anne had ever encouraged. Privately, though, Kevin thought his daughter was already a better dancer than his sister had ever been.

He smiled fondly at her in the brightening light. “Shall I mark this day on the calendar? The day Julie got up without anybody having to yell at her?”

Julie grinned self-consciously and plumped herself onto the sofa. “I had a nightmare,” she admitted, blushing slightly at the confession. “I know it’s dumb, but I was afraid to go back to sleep.”

“Join the club,” Kevin offered. “I’ve been sitting here since four o’clock, for exactly the same reason, and I was just thinking of going back to bed.” He winked conspiratorially at his daughter. “On the other hand, there’s the possibility that the two of us could whip up a truly fabulous breakfast and surprise your mother and brother.”

Julie grinned her reply and followed her father into the kitchen, where she perched on a stool while he began expertly preparing eggs Benedict. “How come you never opened a restaurant? You cook better than anybody else.”

Kevin shrugged. “Economics. The restaurant business is the fastest way to go broke ever invented by man, and it always struck me that I’d rather feed you and your brother off a steady income than wind up broke feeding a bunch of strangers. Of course, when you two grow up and your mother and I have thrown you both out of here, I might change my mind.”

Julie took the whisk her father handed her and began stirring the Hollandaise sauce. “By then you’ll be too old, won’t you?” she asked with carefully studied innocence.

Kevin scowled deeply and did his best to sound offended.

“I beg your pardon. In ten years I’ll be fifty. Fifty, in case you didn’t know it, is now considered the bare beginnings of middle age, and—”

Julie giggled, her eyes rolling. “And old age doesn’t start until eighty,” she finished. Then her voice suddenly turned serious. “But don’t you get tired of working for someone else?”

Once again Kevin shrugged. “The Shannon is a good hotel, and I run it pretty well.”

“But you wish you owned it,” Julie stated flatly, her eyes meeting his. “Jeff and I hear you and Mom talking sometimes, you know.”

“Children are snoopy creatures, and shouldn’t listen to things they’re not supposed to hear,” Kevin observed mildly. “Besides, if the opportunity ever came up, I’d open a restaurant—or, even better, an inn—in a minute. But so far the opportunity hasn’t come up.”

Julie grinned mischievously. “Maybe Grandma will die and leave you a lot of money,” she suggested, then her eyes widened as she saw the blood drain from her father’s face.

Kevin turned to her, his voice tight and the muscles in his jaw knotting. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“I—I’m sorry,” Julie stammered. “I didn’t mean it. It was just a joke, Dad.”

“Not a funny one,” he told her, angry now. “You should never joke about things like that—”

Suddenly Julie felt herself getting angry too. “Why not?” she demanded. “You don’t even
like
Grandma! You’re always talking about what a mean person she is and how she makes Aunt Marguerite take care of her. What’s the big deal if I make a joke about her?” She slid off the stool and ran out of the kitchen.

For a long moment Kevin stayed where he was. He should go after Julie and apologize to her, for he knew what she’d said was the truth. If it hadn’t been for the dream, he wouldn’t have reacted to her words as he had.

So the dream was still bothering him.

He glanced at the clock. It was almost six-thirty.

Ruby would be up, fixing breakfast for Marguerite and his mother. If anything had happened, she would know.

Making up his mind, he reached for the phone.…

Ten minutes later he went slowly up the stairs and woke Anne. As soon as she saw his face, she knew something was terribly wrong.

“We have to go down there,” Kevin said, his voice flat. “I just talked to Marguerite. She says Mother is dying and is asking for me. I can’t put it off any longer. I have to go home.”

Anne looked at her husband in silence for a moment, then pushed the covers aside and got out of bed.

So it was finally going to happen.

For the first time in the eighteen years of her marriage, she was going to meet her husband’s family.

“How much farther?” Jeff Devereaux demanded from the back seat of the Dodge station wagon. Outside, what seemed to him to be an endless expanse of flat land dotted with mossy pine trees rolled past. For the last two hours even looking at the wide sandy beach between the left side of the road and the sea beyond had bored him.

“You just asked that five minutes ago,” Julie told him. “So if it was fifteen minutes then, how long is it now?”

“I wasn’t asking you,” Jeff retorted. “I was asking Mom.”

“It doesn’t matter who you asked. It’s still ten minutes. Why can’t you just be quiet and watch the scenery like everyone else?”

Jeff glared at his older sister, wishing for the millionth time that it were possible for an eight-year-old boy to beat up a fifteen-year-old girl. But whenever he’d tried, Julie just held him away from her and started laughing, which only made him madder. Well, maybe he couldn’t pound her, but he didn’t have to let her boss him around. “I don’t have to do what you say,” he grumbled. “You don’t know everything.”

“And you don’t know anything!” Julie shot back, then realized that was probably exactly the response Jeff had been hoping for. Before she could say any more, Anne twisted around in the front seat to give both her children a warning look.

“Ten more minutes,” she said. “And we can do without any quarrels for the rest of the trip. All right?”

“I didn’t start it,” Jeff piped. “All I did was ask a question. How am I supposed to learn anything if I can’t ask questions? Dad always says—”

In spite of herself, Anne began laughing. “All right, all right! I don’t care who started it, I just don’t want it to go any further. And if you want to ask questions, go ahead.”

Jeff’s response was instantaneous. “How come we’ve never been here before?”

Once again Julie answered her brother’s question before her mother had a chance to say anything. “Because Dad doesn’t like Grandmother,” she said.

“Why not?” Jeff pressed. “What’s wrong with her?”

Out of the corner of her eye Anne saw Kevin’s jaw tighten, and his knuckles whiten as he squeezed the steering wheel, “It’s not that,” she said quickly, hoping to distract Jeff’s attention. “It’s just that it’s a long way from Connecticut, and we’ve never really had the time.”

“But we go on a vacation every year,” Jeff argued. “Why couldn’t we have come down here? It’s a better beach than the one on Cape Cod.”

“I thought you liked False Harbor,” Anne replied, welcoming the chance to change the subject.

“It’s okay,” Jeff reluctantly agreed. Then he spotted a sign as they passed it:
DEVEREAUX
—10
MILES. “WOW
,” he breathed. “Is there really a whole town named after Dad?”

For the first time in more than an hour, Kevin spoke. “It’s not named after me,” he said, his voice tight and his words clipped. “It’s named after my family, and it’s been there for a couple of hundred years. And it’s not much of a town.”

The tone of his father’s voice made Jeff glance uneasily at his sister, but Julie didn’t seem to know what was wrong with their father either. “What’s wrong with it?” he finally ventured.

“In a few minutes you’ll see,” Kevin replied. Then he lapsed back into the heavy silence he had maintained all morning. For the next ten miles no one in the car spoke.

And then, abruptly, Kevin pulled the car off the road and stopped. “There it is,” he said. “That’s Devereaux. That’s where I grew up.”

Jeff opened the back door and scrambled out, then climbed to the top of a low bank that separated the road from the beach.

Ahead, another half mile down the road, was a worn-looking
collection of buildings, some of them almost hidden in a tangle of vines. He could see a church steeple, an Exxon sign, and what looked like a row of shabby stores. There was also a scattering of houses, most of them fairly run-down, a few of them clearly abandoned. He looked up at his father, who was standing beside him now, Jeff’s disappointment clear on his face. “Is that all there is?” he asked.

“It goes on for about half a mile,” Kevin told him. “But it all looks pretty much the same. I suppose there are still a few nice places, but it just keeps getting worse.” He smiled wryly. “Still want to spend your vacation here?”

“But what happened to it?” Anne asked. “It looks like it must have been a nice town once.”

“It was,” Kevin agreed. “A long time ago, before I was born. Probably before my father was born. It used to be cotton plantations, until the land wore out.”

“But which house is yours?” Julie asked. “Where do Grandmother and Aunt Marguerite live?”

“Out there,” Kevin said quietly, turning away from the town and pointing to a low island two hundred yards off shore, connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway built up from the shallow seabed. “That’s Sea Oaks, where I grew up.”

Julie’s eyes widened as she stared at the immense white house that dominated the north end of the island. From where they stood, only the chimneys and a few gables were visible, for the building was surrounded by enormous live oak trees, their branches heavily laden with streamers of Spanish moss. Dotted among the oaks were a few white-blooming magnolias and some pines, but it was the wide, spreading branches of the ancient oaks themselves that caught Julie’s eye. They seemed to cradle the house, as if trying to protect it from something.

“It—It’s a mansion,” she breathed.

“It’s a white elephant,” Kevin replied. “In its day it served a purpose. Now it’s just a huge house that’s outlived its usefulness, and unless something’s changed since last time I was here, it’s getting just as run-down as the rest of the town.”

Julie cocked her head and looked up at her father curiously. “But if Grandmother lives there, she must be rich, isn’t she?”

Kevin’s lips twisted into a smile that was both wry and bitter. “There hasn’t been a rich Devereaux in three generations,” he replied. “My grandfather and my father hung onto the island by selling off the rest of the property bit by bit. A hundred years ago the family owned most of the county, and before the Civil War, a lot more. By now there can’t be much left except the island.”

“Grandmother owns the whole island?” Jeff asked, his voice reflecting his awe. “All of it?”

For the first time that day Kevin grinned, for he suddenly remembered when he was Jeff’s age and spent endless days exploring the hundred fifty acres of the island—discovering the ruined remains of the slave quarters which were all but lost in the overgrown tangle of vines that had long since been allowed to reclaim the once cultivated tracts; combing the beaches after storms, in search of lost treasures that might have washed up; hunting the marshes and patches of forest for rabbits, squirrels, and an occasional deer. For the first time since he had grown up, he saw the island through the eyes of a boy, and reached down to tousle Jeff’s blond hair. “Every acre of it,” he said. “And if you can’t find anything to do out there, then you’re going to be condemned to a life of boredom.” His mood suddenly lighter, he winked at Anne. “Come on. Let’s go see just how bad things have gotten in the decadent South.”

A moment later the family was back in the car, moving slowly toward Devereaux. As they came into the town, it was apparent to Kevin that nothing had changed. The main street was just as he remembered it, slowly rotting away in the heat and humidity. There was a somnolence about the place; even the people seemed to move in slow motion. A dog slept in the middle of the road, flies buzzing around its head, but even when Kevin tooted the horn, the animal refused to bestir itself, and finally Kevin had to maneuver the station wagon around it.

It didn’t occur to him until he had passed the animal that it might be dead.

Just like the town, he reflected silently to himself. The whole place is dead, but nobody’s noticed.

The scratchy sounds of the final moments of
Swan Lake
emerged from the speaker of the old phonograph in the corner of the ballroom on the third floor of Sea Oaks, and Marguerite Devereaux glanced quickly at the clock. For the first time in her memory, the hour-long ballet class seemed to drag on interminably and she was actually looking forward to her girls going home. Of course, she’d had to leave them twice already, going down to the second floor to explain to her mother that they couldn’t expect Kevin to arrive much before eleven, and she knew that in letting her excitement about Kevin’s arrival distract her from the lesson, she wasn’t being fair to the girls.