You'll Never Know Dear: A Novel of Suspense Page 14

  Jenny looked around, taking in the maroon and off-white history-of-transportation wallpaper. She crossed the room to the closet and opened the door, peered inside, and closed it. She crouched between the beds, raised one of the bed skirts and looked under it. Then she glanced at Lis. “Sorry. It’s an old habit. Because you never know what you’re going to find under a bed in a shelter. Rats. Roaches.” She looked under the second bed, then stood and brushed her hands off on her leg. “Sometimes a person, even.”

  “All clear?” Lis asked.

  “This wasn’t her room, was it?”

  “No. My brothers slept in here,” Lis said. Back then the room had had a bunk bed and a twin. There were still marks on the door where tape had secured a sign: no girls allowed, a rule that had been strictly enforced.

  Lis went out onto the landing and pulled a set of fresh towels from the linen closet. “If you need more towels, they’re out here.” She put the towels on the hamper in the bathroom. “And if you need another blanket or—” she started, but when she went back out onto the landing, Jenny wasn’t in the boys’ room. Instead, she was silhouetted in the sunlit open doorway to Janey’s bedroom.

  Lis followed Jenny as she entered Janey’s bedroom. Jenny looked all around, pivoting in place. Opened the closet and pushed aside Janey’s clothes that were still hanging there. Knelt down and looked under the bed. She gave Lis a thumbs-up and sat on the bed, running her hand across the pink-and-white-flowered bedspread. She picked up the stuffed kangaroo that was sitting on the pillow.

  “We lost Roo,” Lis said.

  “Roo?” Jenny said.

  “There used to be a baby kangaroo in its pouch.” When Jenny still looked puzzled, Lis added, “Kanga and Roo? Characters from Winnie-the-Pooh?” She picked up the copy of the book that sat on the bedside table. A faded cardinal feather one of the girls had found marked the place where Miss Sorrel had been reading the book before Janey disappeared. Now it was part of the mausoleum. Lis had had to buy a new copy so she could read it to Vanessa.

  Jenny sniffed Kanga and dropped it back on the bed. She got up and went over to the low bookcase, its top shelf packed with children’s books. “My mother subscribed to Christian Women and Woman’s Day. We didn’t have books, we had Bibles.” She opened the pink leather jewelry box on the top of the bookcase. A plastic ballerina in a tutu popped up and music tinkled as she pirouetted. “I had one like this, too,” she said. She picked through the gumball machine prizes and shiny jingle shells that Janey had collected, then looked across at Lis. “This was her room, wasn’t it? Evelyn told me that her bedroom window overlooked her house.”

  “What else did Evelyn tell you?” Lis asked.

  Jenny stood and gazed out the window at the big pink house next door. “Evelyn didn’t have to stay with me the way she did. No one’s ever done anything like that for me. Ever.”

  “She was Janey’s godmother.”

  “She told me all about Miss Sorrel and Janey,” Jenny said. “And you and your three brothers. I told her about my parents and growing up in Mount Royal. She really listens. I’ve never talked about any of that. Not to anyone. Maybe it was okay because she’s a stranger. Made me think I should tell Maggie. She deserves to know where she comes from, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe,” Lis said mildly. She’d never heard this much from Jenny Richards before. Was Jenny opening up now because she felt safe? Or because she wanted something from Lis? Or . . . was she a little manic?

  “I grew up an only child. More than anything I wanted an older sister.” Jenny put her hand over her heart. “It must have been hard to lose her.”

  Lis bit her lip and nodded.

  “Do you have any pictures of her?”

  “Let’s go downstairs,” Lis said. Truth be told, she wanted Jenny out of Janey’s room.

  In the living room, Lis showed Jenny the framed Christmas picture on the mantel. “That’s me,” Lis said, pointing to the little girl with dark straight hair cut short and blunt so that it cupped her face.

  “And that’s her,” Jenny said. In the picture, Janey’s hair was wispy and light and hung to her shoulders. Lis had heard it a million times: Rose Red and Rose White. Lis had dark eyes, like pots of ink, while Janey’s were light. Lis was shaped more like a dumpling with soft fleshy cheeks and squeezable arms while Janey, even at two or three years old, was starting to get long and lean.

  “I don’t have pictures of me when I was little,” Jenny said. “Or my family. That doll was the only thing I kept.”

  “That’s so sad,” Lis said, wondering how much of Jenny’s story she should believe. “Do you know where your momma or—”

  “Momma?” Jenny barked a laugh. “Let me tell you something. She’d slap you silly if you called her Momma. She was always Mother. Formal and proper and always grammatically correct. I’d ask, ‘Can I go outside?’ and she’d say, ‘You can, but you may not.’ Never went downstairs in bedroom slippers or a bathrobe. Hot as Hades, she’d have on nylon stockings.”

  That pretty much described Miss Sorrel, too. “That was the generation,” Lis said. “Three-course meals. Cloth napkins.” In a singsong she added, “Good manners never go out of style.”

  Jenny laughed and added, “Don’t take food you don’t eat. Hush your mouth, Jesus can hear y’all. She used to look at the mess in my room and then at me, like I was some kind of heathen.” Her look turned serious. “I was never quiet enough. Never neat enough. She used to put lemon juice in my hair to lighten it and scrub my face with scouring powder. But most of all I was never godly enough.” Jenny laced her fingers together, her knuckles going white. “Always praying on this and praying on that. I swear, that woman was in that church every time the door opened.”

  Even if Jenny had taken someone else’s name, there was no question in Lis’s mind that this was a deeply held personal narrative, not a fabrication. “I can understand why you had to get out of there.”

  “Well, they threw me out. I’ll admit I was a handful. Skipped school. Smoked. Drank. Stayed out past curfew with kids they didn’t approve of. But basically? They got mad at me because I wouldn’t drink the Kool-Aid. Father locked me out of the house in the middle of the night when I was fifteen.”

  Lis remembered what she’d been like at fifteen. Smoked: check. Drank: check. Hung out with the “wrong” crowd: check. If Miss Sorrel had known half of what she’d gotten up to, she’d have been grounded for months. No TV. No phone. But thrown out of the house like a piece of trash? Never. Nor could Lis imagine anything that Vanessa could have done, even when she’d been a monstrous mouthy fifteen-year-old, that could have induced Lis to lock the door behind her. “What did you do? Where did you go?”

  “I stayed with my boyfriend for a few days until I realized that wasn’t going to work. But he had cash so I helped myself to some of it and hopped a bus to Columbia. Minute I got there, know what I did? Got myself some Lady Clairol and dyed my hair. Radiant auburn—I loved the name of that color, but it made me look like Raggedy Ann’s wicked stepsister. Permed it, too. I didn’t want anyone to recognize me.” Jenny looked at herself in a mirror hanging on the wall, tracing the part in her dark brown hair where light roots were growing in. “A year later, I was pregnant. Which only would have proved to Mother that she was right to turn me out. Ironic, isn’t it.” Jenny shook her head. “Maggie’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “Your parents never came looking for you?”

  “They probably thought I’d come crawling back. That I’d never survive without them. Lord knows it wasn’t easy.”

  “Did you change your name?” Lis asked carefully. Maybe this was the opening Jenny needed to explain why the real Jenny Richards had died when she was four years old.

  Jenny gave her an odd look. “I should have, you know. I really should have. But I didn’t. What I did was what I had to do, and a lot of the time what I had to do wasn’t very pretty, or legal, for that matter.” She gave Lis a wry smile. “Now you’
re probably worried that I’m going to steal your family jewels.”

  Lis remembered Evelyn’s warning about the spoons and felt her face go hot.

  28

  Vanessa stayed up that night long after Lis and Grandma Sorrel and Jenny Richards had gone to bed. Resigned to staying in Bonsecours long enough to convince herself that Jenny (or whoever she really was) wasn’t going to steal the spoons (or worse), she stayed up working on her grant proposal. Overhead she could still hear occasional footsteps. A door opening and closing. Water going on and then off. Less and less until silence settled and the only sound was the clicking of her keyboard.

  She was logged in to the university library, finding citations to beef up her literature review and rationale. Aristotle had been the first to describe lucid dreaming, and there’d been plenty of junk science in the 1970s and 1980s to discredit it. But more recent work published in places like the Journal of Sleep Research, Neurology Review, and the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease offered the support she needed for her grant proposal.

  Vanessa was particularly interested in ways that investigators had attempted to induce lucid dreaming and then measure it. Neuroimaging. EEG. Transcranial direct current stimulation. As the house quieted and Vanessa got deeper into the research archives, her rationale for her own approach grew more solid. Her own work was so much more practical than what had been done up to now, oriented as it was to problem-solving, not to measurement and analysis or discrediting straw men. She took lucid dreaming as a given and assumed it could be learned. Her goal was to teach people to use it to their advantage.

  She was copying a few final citations when she heard a cry. At first she thought it was coming from outside. Maybe an owl or a nighthawk. She went into the front hall. Heard it again, followed by the distinctly human sound of sobbing. It was coming from overhead.

  Vanessa climbed the stairs. Light spilled into the hallway from Miss Sorrel’s room. Vanessa hurried to it, but found the room empty.

  The sobbing was coming from the boys’ room where Jenny was staying. Vanessa opened the door just enough to see in. There was Grandma Sorrel sitting on the edge of the bed, her arms wrapped around Jenny. Jenny was crying. Grandma Sorrel was talking to her, too quietly for Vanessa to hear.

  Vanessa went into the bathroom for a box of tissues. “Can I do anything?” she whispered as she set the box down next to Jenny’s bed.

  Grandma Sorrel shook her head and motioned for her to leave.

  A half hour later, just as Vanessa was dozing off in bed, there was a tap at her door. Vanessa opened it to find Grandma Sorrel on the other side. “I’m sorry to wake you, but I need your help,” she said, and she pulled the little pink chintz-covered chair up to the side of the bed. She had a shredded tissue clenched in her hand.

  Vanessa nodded and yawned, trying to clear her head.

  “Jenny’s having terrible nightmares.”

  Vanessa wasn’t surprised. She remembered Maggie commenting on how much better her mother had been doing once she’d started taking oxycodone. Oxycodone kept you from reaching REM sleep, which meant you didn’t dream at all. Go cold turkey and your brain would spew a bottled-up torrent of dreams—and nightmares. Eventually they would subside, but a pattern of disturbed sleep was one of the many reasons recovering addicts relapsed.

  Grandma Sorrel went on, “She’s terrified, poor thing. Afraid to fall asleep. She’s finally dropped off. You can help her, can’t you? Aren’t you working on a cure for nightmares?”

  Cure seemed too strong a word. It smacked of quack medicine. Vanessa’s dream catcher wasn’t a cure so much as a tool to harness nightmares. It was a powerful idea, and the grant would give her a chance to realize it. If Jenny tried using the prototype, it could help them both—Jenny with her nightmares and Vanessa with her research.

  “For me to help her she’d have to trust me,” Vanessa said. “Do you think she would?”

  “Maybe we can figure out a way that makes it feel like it’s her idea.”

  Vanessa woke up the next morning smelling the breakfast she’d been dreaming about. That’s the way dreams worked; real-life sensations shouldered their way in. She really didn’t want to get out of bed. By the time she got to sleep last night it had been after three. But the smell of breakfast sausage got her to pick her head up off the pillow. Coffee, too.

  Vanessa got up and put on jeans and a T-shirt. When she entered the kitchen, Grandma Sorrel looked up at her from the table where she and Jenny and Lis were sitting. Evelyn was at the stove, cooking sausage meat. She turned to get some flour to make gravy. Vanessa could smell biscuits in the oven. Her mouth watered. Biscuits and sausage gravy were pure Low Country comfort food.

  “Morning, ’Nessa,” Grandma Sorrel said.

  “Good morning, y’all,” Vanessa said. She poured herself a cup of coffee and took the empty seat between Lis and Jenny.

  Evelyn pulled the biscuits from the oven and popped a pair of them onto each of the five plates. “I hope this tastes all right,” she said as she ladled thick sausage gravy over the biscuits.

  “Oh, Evelyn, there’s no one makes biscuits and gravy like you,” Lis said, rolling her eyes at Vanessa.

  “Some fool got the wrong kind of sausages,” Evelyn said. “Musta been on sale. I did the best I could.”

  Vanessa got up to help Evelyn distribute the plates. She was about to dig in when Lis elbowed her from the side. Everyone else was sitting, head bowed, holding hands. Vanessa put down her fork and took Lis’s and Jenny’s hands.

  Evelyn smiled and sighed, closed her eyes and began, “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts . . .” Vanessa didn’t close her eyes. She noticed that Jenny didn’t either.

  In the middle of the blessing, a cricket chirped. And chirped again. A cell phone on the table in front of Lis lit up. Lis swiped it to ignore the call.

  “Amen,” Evelyn said. Lis’s phone dinged with a message. Vanessa picked up her fork. The biscuits were fluffy, the thick gravy studded with tasty nuggets of sweet, salty sausage. If she’d been alone, she’d have run her finger across the plate to scrape up every bit of gravy. No one in Rhode Island understood biscuits and gravy.

  “Vanessa was up late last night working on the computer,” Grandma Sorrel said. “Weren’t you, darlin’? She’s a psychologist.”

  Grandma Sorrel nudged Vanessa under the table in case she missed her cue. “I study dreams,” Vanessa said.

  “I once saw a hypnotist,” Jenny said. She’d barely touched her food, just poked at it with her fork. “He made this woman climb up on a table and squawk like a chicken.”

  “Actually, what I study are nightmares,” Vanessa said. “Not ordinary, garden-variety bad dreams. Everyone has those occasionally. I’m talking about terrifying dreams that people get over and over again. They’re so terrifying that you wake up in a blind panic, soaked with sweat, your heart pounding in your throat.”

  Jenny’s eyes widened. Vanessa could tell the description was striking home.

  “It can be so upsetting that you’re afraid of falling asleep, which only makes things worse. Because if you can’t sleep, you end up with all kinds of other physical and psychiatric problems.”

  “Tell us about your research,” Grandma Sorrel said.

  Vanessa felt everyone’s eyes on her. “I watch people sleep,” she said, trying to sound calm and confident. “I monitor things like their brain waves and heart rates and eye movements. And I’m working on a gadget that helps people gain control of their dreams. It can be lifesaving. No exaggeration. I’ve worked with trauma survivors who were so severely impaired by nightmares that—” Vanessa broke off, realizing that her voice was escalating and Jenny had dropped her fork, her portion still half eaten. “It’s noninvasive. I’ve used it myself and lived to tell about it.”

  “Do you have nightmares?” Jenny asked.

  “Sure. Everyone does. On a scale of one to ten, mine are about a five. Upsetting but not terrifying.” Vanessa remembered that wave app
roaching, feeling her feet anchored in place. The panic she’d felt when Grandma Sorrel tried to thrust that bundle into her arms. “The point is, I’ve taught myself to control my dreams.”

  Jenny said, “How did you even know you’re dreaming?”

  “Ah. That is a brilliant question, because that is exactly the challenge. I’ve assembled a device”—she held her hands inches apart to show how big—“just a sleep mask with sensors in it connected to a little computer, just a souped-up cell phone. I go to sleep, and when the mask senses that I’m dreaming, it sets off a vibration just strong enough to penetrate the dream. It doesn’t wake me up, but it alerts my subconscious. And if I’m having a nightmare, it tells me I’m dreaming.”

  “So?” Jenny asked, her eyes widening. “How does that help?”

  “I direct the dream. Like it’s my movie and I can bend it to my will. Rewrite the ending. Of course it takes practice, but it’s empowering. Instead of being at its mercy, I’m in control.”

  Jenny looked intrigued, but Vanessa didn’t press it further. Best to let her think about it, let the possibilities sink in.

  Sure enough, after breakfast Jenny joined Vanessa at the sink, drying dishes while Vanessa washed. Keeping her voice low and masked by the water running, Jenny asked, “How hard is it to learn?”

  29

  After breakfast, Lis left Jenny and Vanessa doing the dishes and ducked out onto the porch to listen to her phone message. The caller ID said the call had come in from Laurel Bay, the DNA testing service she’d hired to perform a siblingship test.

  She swallowed a wave of anxiety. She had to go somewhere private to listen to the message, so she grabbed her coat and scarf and jingled Binty’s leash. The dog woofed and scrabbled to meet her at the front door. The poor dog may have been losing her battle with old age, but her hearing was sharp as ever.