Twenty
Vivian Kingsley stood naked in front of the bedroom
mirror, comparing herself to the memory of long dead Katrina, and to
Katrina's daughter, Caitlin. Even as a young woman, she had never matched
the beauty of either.
What had she expected? Had she thought she could
take Katrina's place at Leon's side and raise Caitlin as her own child?
She had certainly tried. She had allowed Leon to have his way with her to
fulfill that role, although she had never for a moment loved him. Men had
always been strangers to her. She had never trusted any of them. Leon
had taken what she had offered, but she had been no more able to take
Katrina's place in his heart than a lump of coal could have filled in for
a diamond.
Vivian closed her eyes to the visage of the old woman
she had become. She cried for her lost youth, and for Leon's as well.
For the first time, she sensed the depth of despair from which the
self-hatred of all suicidal urges arose. Katrina had ended her life when
things were bad, but hardly before discovering how truly torturous life
could become. She had once imagined Katrina happy in God's heaven,
smiling down at her thriving daughter and her dutiful half sister. Leon
and his typical male pragmatism had undermined and destroyed her naïve
fantasies, but she could see now that he had been right. How could simple
death hope to undo a life of suffering? Heaven would be forever a place
of torment beneath the weight of such memory.
Vivian looked upon herself and imagined Leon putting
his hands upon her. She wanted his attention and his affection, but she
felt no passion stir in her, giving her nothing of any value to share with
the only man in her life. If she was honest with herself, she understood
Leon's obsession with Caitlin, and she was jealous, just as Leon had
accused. Leon committed no sin. They were all simple victims of human
nature.
She dressed and went downstairs and busied herself
with an early dinner, clear minded, at the very least, about her value to
Leon as a housekeeper. She put a pot roast in the crock pot to simmer and
peeled potatoes.
She could not keep her mind off the past. She
remembered how a young Katrina Kingsley and Frank, the son of Iris Isbek,
had ran off into the hills to have sex in the late afternoons, how she had
followed and watched, thinking that Katrina was being exploited by the
hands and body of that handsome young man. How utterly naïve she had
been. When Caitlin had been born, she had practically raised the infant
while Frank and Katrina made the rounds of the taverns and bars in
Culverton at night. Often, they didn't even bother to come home at all.
She had been critical, but Katrina had accused her of living in a sterile
fantasy world, watching on the sidelines while real people lived real
lives.
But if real living meant enduring the abuse Katrina
had suffered, she had wanted nothing of it, although it had never been
young Frank who had beaten Katrina. The two should never have defied
Iris, the Isbek matriarch, at a time when a feud between the Kingsleys and
the Isbeks raged among the hills outside Culverton.
Vivian had left with her half sister, sharing the
same father, rather than have Caitlin taken from her. They hadn't
traveled far before finding refuge. Leon had taken them in, captivated by
Katrina's beauty, never seeing the pain behind her shallow smile.
They had all harbored their own destructive
misperceptions of the world. Katrina's difficulties had never justified
suicide in Vivian's opinion. Leon had naively assumed that feminine
beauty implied a loving and emotionally balanced woman. He had thought
his house, his position of power, and his money would be enough to win
Katrina's heart. And then he had allowed Caitlin become his last anchor
to a relationship that had slipped so tragically through his fingers.
And Vivian’s own personal undoing? Fear of human
passion. Passion drove men and women to procreate and to murder. She had
thought she could live without both and be a superior, far more moral
individual. Instead, she had only isolated herself and fostered a
dependency she could not escape.
Vivian cooked and pondered the past and the error of
her ways, waiting for Leon to return from the barn. She had heard him go
out the back way. She supposed he had gone in search of Caitlin, and
pressed her thin lips together, slicing the spiraling skins from a bowl of
potatoes with renewed vigor. Caitlin had her own pitfalls to contend
with, the typical ignorance and inexperience of youth. The young believed
that love could conquer all.
Caitlin came bounding into the kitchen right in the
middle of Vivian's upset. Vivian studied her radiance in shock,
suspecting with dismay that the girl had finally managed to seduce the
young deputy. "Don't look at me like that, Aunt Vivian,” Caitlin
chortled. “It's a beautiful morning, don't you think?"
But her eyes were too bright and her smile too
strained. "Have you seen Leon, child?" Vivian asked cautiously.
Something terrible had happened. Caitlin was masking panic.
Caitlin gave an exaggerated shrug. "Who cares?
Maybe he's turned into an old bag of dried up bones and won't ever bother
either of us ever again."
Caitlin looked over Vivian's makings for dinner and
wrinkled her nose. "Yuk!"
"How can you not be hungry?" Vivian asked
soothingly. "Where have you been all night? What have you been doing?"
Caitlin shook her head disdainfully and bounded back
out the back door rather than face the interrogation. "I'm going out to
play in the woods, Aunt Vivian! It's such a beautiful day!"
Vivian followed as far as the door. She watched as
Caitlin took an orange fur off the side of a tree in the yard. She put it
about her neck and ran off in strides so long that her shift flew up past
the swell of her tanned hips.
The knife Vivian was holding slipped from her fingers
and clattered to the floor. Something was dreadfully wrong with what she
had just seen.
"Leon?"
Leon had been feeling poorly. He could not have gone
so far that he wouldn't have come rushing back at the sound of Caitlin's
voice. She wandered into the back yard calling his name, softly at first,
then louder. She stopped at the barn and stood gazing into the maw of
gray shadows.
"Leon!"
Fear bubbled inside her and had nowhere to go. She
could feel him up there in the loft somewhere, dead or dying. Caitlin had
taken refuge here during the night. There had been a strange metallic
odor about her, and she could detect the same peculiar smell here as
well. Besides, where else could she have found shelter from the storm?
Leon had investigated and he had most certainly found her. What terrible
thing was happening?
Burdened with a deadly feeling of dread and a choking
sensation of being utterly alone, she hurried back to the house. She
tried the phone in the kitchen, but the handset was rife with more static
than ever. The car was parked in the drive, and Rex had given her a spare
key, but too rattled to think straight, she fled down the drive on foot,
imagining she could run like the wind like she had seen Caitlin do. She
stumbled to a crawl within mere yards, gasping for air, then pivoted in
place in the middle of the highway, round and round, screaming from the
depths of profound helplessness for somebody to help her.
