Now she leaned forward. “I’m sure she’s here. Don’t you feel it? This house is. . . .” She let the sentence die.
“Don’t tell me you believe Bliss House is haunted. Has someone been telling you stories?” I poured two cups of coffee, my hand shaking slightly. Something to do. Something to feel. She didn’t know anything. The idea of J.C. seeing Eva, of being aware of Eva, set off a blaze of alarm inside me. Eva belonged to me.
“I’ve been trying to tell Press for years. You can’t hide from what’s here, Charlotte.” She got up to take a cigarette from the box on the smoking table and used her dying cigarette to light it. Then she stabbed the end of the first cigarette into the ashtray and came to stand over me. Her soft, manicured fingertips found my cheek. “Don’t be afraid, dearest. Why would you be afraid of your own child? I know she was the light of your lives. Press is devastated, but he doesn’t have a mother’s sensitivity.” Before releasing my face, her fingertips brushed beneath my chin and I felt a disturbing shudder of pleasure pass through my body.
Was it that touch, that small seduction that led me to listen to her that afternoon? I was cautious—no, that’s a lie. I wasn’t cautious. My very being felt raw and exposed and, God help me, needful of someone to hear me. Here was a stranger, and not just a stranger, but someone who lived outside the boundaries of my every idea of propriety. She might have touched my husband in the same ways I had, moaned with pleasure at his touch just as I had. Was I so lonely? So desperate? I only know that I wasn’t in my right mind.
She moved a hassock close to my chair and sat, her endless legs angled to the floor. I’d never seen gold eyes like hers. They were fiercely animated, as though she were seeing something wondrous and strange. She was watching me, but seeing something else.
“I had a brother. A twin brother, whose name was Jonathan Cortland. J.C., just like me. Though my mother hated that my father called us both J.C.” When she laughed, it sounded just as artificial and forced as I’d always heard it, but I kept listening. “Julianna Catherine. That’s my name, though I’ll deny it if you tell anyone, yes?”
I nodded. Another secret. Like her tryst with Hugh (or Terrance? Dare I ask her?).
“He was such a pretty little boy. We looked alike. ‘Girly’ is what people called him, because he looked so much like me. But he was all boy, I’ll tell you.” She smiled at the memory. “He was tough. And brave. Oh, my, was he brave. The morning it happened, we were out riding our ponies across an empty cattle pasture, and mine—well, Fancy wasn’t at all as sweet as her name—was almost dancing, as though she were trying to shake me off. The wasps were bad that summer, and I thought maybe one had crawled up under the saddle. And although I was twelve and had been riding for years, my mother had made me put on some ridiculous loose trousers and I didn’t want to change before going out to ride. I should’ve been able to calm her, or at least slide right off when I knew she was out of control, but the stupid trousers caught, you see, and Fancy was having a fit.”
Her hands were like nervous alabaster birds. When she took a long drag from her cigarette, she blew the smoke out forcefully, as though in a terrible hurry. I’d never seen her so earnest, and it made me wonder if I knew her at all. Did Press really know her? What did he see in her? Perhaps it was her sophistication he craved. I knew, at least, that she had no hesitation about performing a certain sex act that I found tedious if not distasteful.
“Terrified. I was terrified. We weren’t even at home, but were spending the summer at my grandparents’ farm in Arkansas. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t home, and I’m sure that’s why Fancy was so on edge. She just wouldn’t stop bucking and crying. We were both scared to death.” One of her busy hands rested gently against one ear as though she wanted to keep out the screams.
“John jumped off of King and threw himself at us. I had no idea what he was doing, and if I had I don’t know that I could have stopped him. Hell, I didn’t even really see him until he was right there. Right there.”
“What happened?”
It was just a flash of a look in her eyes, but I was sure I saw cunning. How could that be? It was quickly gone, and the anxiety reasserted itself.
“He was killed, of course.”
I put my hand to my mouth. “He was only twelve?”
“He didn’t die right away. Fancy swung around and kicked him in the chest, puncturing his lung. She didn’t mean it.” Her cultured voice had slowly been sliding into a drawl as she spoke. “Our daddy wanted to put Fancy down right then and there, as soon as he heard.”