Grace Anne

chapter 4



Josephine Cunningham, or Joey to her friends, watched the two of them together. Actually, they weren’t so much together as the girl fought to be away from Michael. But she never said anything, even with the daggers she kept throwing at him. Trace seemed to be having the time of his life with her as well.

She laughed twice when Grace elbowed her son. Michael didn’t get upset, but seemed to find her avoidance of him funny. Strange, she thought. Normally, Michael backed off when someone gave him the cold shoulder. Not that it happened much, but it didn’t seem to faze him now.

Joey wondered why the girl was here. Not that she minded, but it had been more than curious. Trace had asked, begged really, if he could bring her to his party. Grace had even produced a gift for him. A very nice set of lamps that Trace said would be “awesomesauce” for his room. Whatever that meant.

“Would you like some more cake, dear? There is plenty and if you don’t have another piece, I won’t be able to either.” Joey handed her a plate of cake and sat down beside her.

“Thank you, Mrs. Cunningham. It’s delicious. And thank you for allowing me to come here today.” Grace took a big bite of the cake.

Joey watched her eat. She was happy to see that she didn’t pick at her food, but ate with gusto. She looked over at her son before she decided to dig a little information from her. The last that Joey had heard, this woman had made Michael very mad, and now here she was at his son’s birthday celebration.

“Call me Joey. And thank you. My daughter-in-law made it. To be honest, I think she buys it, but she won’t say.” Joey took several bites before she continued. “I hope the two of them didn’t force you into coming today. It was lovely that you’re… I’m going to be honest and snoop. What is the relationship between you and Michael?”

Grace laughed. It was a beautiful sound and Joey noticed that Michael turned to the sound as if drawn to her and it. She smiled. Curiouser and curiouser.

“Ask your son, Mrs. Cunningham or, better yet, your grandson. I’m just here because I’d been backed into a corner. After this party I’m sure that you’ll never see me again.” Grace looked over at Trace and the other children. “Do you ever wonder what they think about when they play together? What could be going through their minds when they get up in the morning?”

Joey looked at the children and then back at Grace. “Mostly I just enjoy them. Their laughter and their antics. Trace is such a joy and I see him more than any of the other grandkids. He and Michael lived here with us until about six months ago. Michael now has a house closer to town and Trace comes to the offices when he gets out of school. It works out well for the both of them.”

Joey waited for her to ask about Trace’s mom. When she didn’t, Joey wondered about it. But then she didn’t have a clue what the relationship was between them, and it didn’t look as though she was going to get any information from her. She watched Michael as he talked to his brothers. He seemed to keep his attention on Grace as well. Joey thought about Trace’s mother.

Victoria Hamilton had been a force to be reckoned with. Joey had never thought that Michael and she suited. They fought constantly and, when they were not fighting, they were arguing. Michael had told her there was a difference in the two, though Joey had never been able to figure out what it was. There was still loud voices and name-calling. But when Victoria had told Michael she was pregnant and was getting an abortion he’d made arrangements to keep the child.

He’d paid her a great deal of money to not terminate the pregnancy and if she delivered, then he would pay her a million dollars. She’d agreed and had even signed over all rights of the baby to Michael. Eighteen months after Trace was born she had been killed in a boating accident that took the lives of two others. It had been nothing more than an accident.

“I really should be going,” Grace said as she stood up a little while later. “I’ve called a cab. I have a lot to do tomorrow.”

Joey was about to protest her leaving when Marshall, the butler, came to say there was a taxi at the gate for Miss Waite. Smiling, Joey thought she’d just let her go and not tell her son. Walking Grace to the door, she told her that she was happy to meet her and wished she’d come back soon. With a firm handshake and no reply, the girl left. She was just shutting the door behind her when Michael came into the hall.

“Where’s Grace? I looked around and couldn’t find her.” He continued to look around as he continued. “I thought maybe I’d ask her to spend the night so that Trace could spend more time here tomorrow.”

“She left,” Joey said as she walked away. “She said she had a lot to do tomorrow and she—”

“What do you mean she left? How? And why did you let her get away?” He grabbed his coat and yelled at Trace he was going out. “I swear, that girl needs to listen to—”

“Michael Allen Cunningham, you wait right there.” He stopped moving toward the door when she snapped. “What do you mean, ‘let her get away?’ I didn’t realize that you’d kidnapped her and that I was somehow your accomplice.”

“She is the girl that…she won’t sell me the building and I thought that—”

“That you could what?” She saw him flush and realized he’d hoped to persuade her using other ways to sell it to him and to sleep with him. “You didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?” He looked to the door, whether to escape or to go after Grace she wasn’t sure. “I need that building and I mean to have it. And if I can go out with a beautiful woman while I’m doing it, then what’s the harm?”

For whatever reason, Joey thought maybe it was more than just a building for both of them and she secretly hoped that Grace held out for as long as she could. Without a word to her son she went back into the living room. Five minutes later he came in as well. She thought maybe she’d have to go and see this building and its owner soon. Very soon, if her son was perusing her this hard.

~~~

The offer on the building was going to make disappearing so much easier. She had money, of course, but getting to it and everything else would be something she’d have to take time to do and she didn’t think she had a great deal of it. She looked at the figures for what she had in cash. She’d been planning for this for a very long time and now that it was time to move she found herself reluctant to do so.

There was enough money hidden around the building for her to never have to work again. She looked at the glossy pictures hanging on the walls. There were the covers to her catalogues along with every magazine cover she’d ever been on or even in. And there were a great many of them. She would simply have to leave everything behind. Including the new bed, which there was no way to cancel the order for.

She wanted to call her sister. She wanted to call Jazzie and tell her…everything. But she couldn’t. She hadn’t been able to tell them when she’d been down on her luck and homeless, nor had she been able to tell them when she’d made it big. They’d known, of course. There was no way not to when they knew who she was, but this person who’d called… Grace knew things too. Things that were scary. Things that she still had trouble believing. She knew more about her mom than a child should ever know.

Grace shuddered when she thought of the woman who’d given birth to them all. The woman who, on occasion, would do things that not only seemed out of character for the whipped woman, but bordered on insanity. She knew exactly what her mother was and she also knew most of the players involved.

Her mother had split personality disorder, or sometimes known as disambiguation. She knew that there was at least three other “people” that her mother lived with. Ginny was one and the most prominent. Then there was Verrie, one who only showed herself when things were too tense for the other two to cope, and Guinnie. Verrie was by and far the most violent and she would just as soon kill you as to look at you.

Guinnie was the one that seemed the most childlike. She rarely came out, Grace was sure, and the only times that Grace had seen her was when one of Guinevere’s children were hurt or ill. She was the one who’d told Grace about the others.

Guinevere Waite was insane. Not only that, but Grace was afraid she was also a killer. Grace had seen things, heard things, that made her run. Even after the rape when she was seventeen she’d not been as afraid as she’d been when she heard the screams coming from her parents’ room. Screams that still, to this day, made the hair on her arms rise and the back of her neck feel like something was dancing there.

It had been the night before her graduation. She’d been in her room daydreaming about the day she’d be able to leave home for good. Her sister Jazzie was asleep and the other two, Sin and Lilliane, were watching television in the bathroom so they wouldn’t get caught. At first she thought it was coming from the bathroom, but when she got up to tell them to turn it down the noise got quieter. She went into the hallway and listened.

The moaning made her think her parents were having sex and she nearly turned back to her room and then the bath to throw up, but then she remembered her father was in jail again. Grace, knowing that she would regret it, tiptoed down the hall to the shut bedroom door.

The moaning was so low she had to press her ear to the door to hear it. Now, even after all these years, she wondered why she didn’t just think her mom was having an affair and leave it at that. But she didn’t. Couldn’t, if the truth be told. She was still listening at the door when she heard the pop.

Standing stock still Grace knew that it was a gun shot. And when the second, then the third pop sounded, she heard her mother laughing hysterically. It took her several seconds, too many for her to get back to her room, before she realized that someone was turning the knob on the door. She’d just had time to press back against the wall when the door opened.

There she stood. Her mother was naked and covered in…Grace had always hoped she’d imagined the blood that dripped from her mother’s elbows as she walked down the hall toward the closet. But as she turned her head and looked in between the door and the jamb that opened into her parents’ room, she saw the man lying there.

He was naked as well as covered in blood. But his was pooling beneath him. The dark stained the rug that he lay on and the sheet that lay next to him. There was an axe in his chest and a gun lying beside him. But what had Grace putting her hand over her mouth and silently sobbing behind it was that he was looking at her. There was no doubt that his dead eyes were staring right directly at her.

When her mother came back down the hall, a stack of towels in her arms, Grace heard her muttering about the man. Also about the mess he’d made and that when “Ginny” came back she’d have a fit.

“Better get a start on it or there will be hell to pay,” she said in a voice that Grace remembered from the rape. “Yeppers, gotta make sure things are in order or she’ll not let me come out and play again.”

When the door shut, again, behind her mother, Grace stood there for several minutes. It was too much. All of it was too much. When she felt safe enough to move she went to the room she shared with her sisters and changed her clothes. Gathering up all the money she could find, even some that didn’t belong to her, she left without a word to anyone.

She didn’t call the police, though she probably should have. But she was terrified. And sickened. Then, when she’d been in New York for awhile, she’d tried to convince herself that she’d been dreaming. But that had never felt right. She knew with all her heart that her mother, or one of her others, had killed that man.

Grace got up and pulled the plank of wood from the floor. She took out the small metal box, sat back, and opened it. Inside was a list of every place she’d hid money throughout the building, a gun that she kept loaded and had never used, and several new identities. She frowned when she thought she should have used them at the beginning of her career and not the end. She looked over the new names and decided she wouldn’t choose one until she was ready to leave, and put them back in the box. She opened the small notepad and looked over the list. It wasn’t until she stood up that she realized how late it was. Two in the morning was no time to start this big of a project. She tucked it all back in the box and put it under her bed. After replacing the wood she stripped down and climbed into bed. The first nightmare hit her an hour later.