Dark Angel (Casteel 2)

"Jillian!" I hastily cried.

"Oh, yes, Jillian, of course." Absently he regarded me until I squirmed and grew hot. He was weighing me, judging me, tallying up my assets and my liabilities. Forever and ever it seemed to go on, even as he gave some small signal and Curtis appeared from nowhere to clear the table, then disappeared. Finally, he spoke.

"Suppose you and I strike a bargain. We will not tell Jillian that your mother died so long ago, for that information would hurt h

er too much. Right now you have her believing that Leigh had seventeen years of happiness with your father, and it seems a pity to tell her differently. She is not very stable emotionally. No woman can be stable when her entire happiness depends on staying young and beautiful, for it can't last forever. But while she still has a hold on youth, fleeting as it may well be, let's you and I do what we can to make her happy." His piercing eyes narrowed before he went on. "If I give you a home, and all that goes with it--the proper clothes and education, and so forth--I will expect something in return. Are you willing to give what I will demand?"

Thoughtfully, with narrowed eyes, he waited as I stared at him. My first thought was that I had won, I could stay! Then, as he watched me so closely, I began to feel he was a huge, fat cat, and I was a lean church mouse ready to be pounced on. "What will you demand?"

His smile was small and tight. Amused. "You are right to ask, and I'm glad you have a sense of reality. Perhaps you have already found out for yourself that there is a price that has to be paid for everything. I don't think anything I ask will be unreasonable. First, I will demand complete obedience from you. When I make decisions about your future, you will not argue about them. You will accept without quibbling. I was very fond of your mother, and I am sorry she is not alive, but I won't have you coming into my life to bring about complications. Understand right now, if you cause me trouble, or trouble for my wife, I will send you back from whence you came without the slightest regret. For I will consider you an ungrateful fool, and fools don't deserve a second chance." He opened his eyes and gazed at me steadily.

"To give you an idea of the decisions I will make for you, let's begin with my selecting your school and the college you will attend. I will also select your clothes. I despise the way girls dress today, ruining the best part of their lives with shoddy, common clothes and wild, uncared-for hair. You will dress as the girls dressed when I went to Yale. I will supervise the books you read and the movies you see. Not that I am going to be a prude, I just think when you fill your mind with trash you smother those wonderful ideals and ideas most of us have when we are young. I will have final approval of the young men you date, and when you date them. I will expect you always to be polite both to me and to your

grandmother. Jillian will make her own rules, I am sure. But right now I'm going to lay down a few.

"Jillian sleeps every day until noon, her 'beauty rest' she calls it. Don't ever disturb her. Jillian does not like to be around dull and boring people, so you won't bring any into this house. Nor will you speak of any unpleasantness in her presence. If you have school or health or social problems, bring them to me in private. It will be best if you never mention the passing years, or refer to events in time, or sad stories you read in the newspapers. Jillian has managed to condition herself like an ostrich, sticking her head in the sand whenever other people's problems arise. Let her play her little protective games. When it's necessary, I will be the one to pull her head into the here and now , . not you."

I more than suspected, as I sat there at that long table, that Townsend Anthony Tatterton was a ruthless, cruel man who would use me, just as he no doubt used Milan for whatever purpose he saw fit.

Still, I had no intention of turning down his offer to keep me here and to send me to college. My heart was racing happily toward that wonderful day when I would have my master's degree--suddenly only that seemed desirable.

Standing, I tried to find a voice that didn't quaver. "Mr. Tatterton, all my life I have known my future lay here in Boston, where I can attend the best schools and prepare myself for a life better than what my mother found living in the hills of West Virginia. I want more than anything to finish high 'school and go to an Ivy League college that will give me pride in myself. I have a desperate need to feel proud of myself. I want someday to go back to Winnerrow and to let everyone who knew me when I was poor see just what I've become--but I will not sacrifice my honor or my integrity to accomplish any of those things."

He smiled as if he thought me ridiculous to mention honor and integrity. "I am happy to hear you take those into consideration, though I knew from your eyes that you would. Still, you do expect a great deal from me. I ask only obedience from you."

"It seems to me that a great deal lies beneath the surface of your single demand."

"Yes, perhaps," he agreed, smiling pleasantly. "You see, my wife and I are influential in our own circles and we want nothing to mar our reputations. Members of your family could show up here and be embarrassing. I sense that your father and you are not loving, and at the same time, you are protective of him and your grandfather. And from what I already know about you, you adapt quickly. I suspect in the long run you will soon be more Bostonian than I myself am, and I was born here. But I want no hillbilly relatives of yours showing up, not ever. Nor any of your former friends from West Virginia."

Oh! That was asking too much! I had planned, later on when I had won his confidence and approval, to tell him the whole truth! Tell him all about Pa's having had syphilis that terrible autumn when Sarah gave birth to a deformed dead baby, and Granny died, and Sarah moved away and left her four children and me in that mountain cabin to make do the best we could. And then that horrible winter he'd sold us, sold all five of us for five hundred dollars apiece! Sold us to people who abused us! And how could I ever invite Tom here for a visit, or Fanny, much less Keith and Our Jane?--when I found Keith and Our Jane . .

"Yes, Heaven Leigh, I want you to cut off your family ties, forget the Casteels, and become a Tatterton, as your mother should have done. She ran from us. She wrote only one time, just once! Did anyone down there ever mention why she didn't write home?"

My nerve ends twanged. He was the one to know more than Granny or Grandpa, or even Pa! "How would they know unless she told them?" I asked with some resentment. "From what I've heard, she never talked about her home, except to say she came from Boston, and she was never going back. My granny guessed she was rich, for she brought such pretty clothes with her and a small velvet box of jewelry, and her manners were so elegant." And for some reason I didn't say a word about the portrait bride doll she'd hidden in the bottom of her single suitcase.

"She told your father she was never coming back?" he asked in that strange, tight voice that showed he was affected. "Who did she tell that to?"

"Why, I don't know. Granny used to wish she'd go back to where she came from, before the hills killed her."

"The hills killed her?" he asked, leaning forward and staring at me hard. "I had presumed inadequate medical care took her life."

My voice took on intonations that reminded me of Granny, and the spooked way she used to make me feel. "Some say that there isn't anyone who can live in our hills happily unless they are born and bred there. There are sounds in the hills that no one can explain, like wolves howling at the moon, when naturalists say that gray wolves disappeared long ago from our area. Yet we all hear them. We have bears and bobcats and mountain lions, and our hunters come back with tales of having seen evidence that gray wolves still live in our hills. It doesn't matter whether or not we see the wolves, not when the wind carries their howls and cries to wake us up at night. We have all kinds of superstitions that I tried not to pay attention to. Silly things like you've got to turn around three times when you enter your home, so devils won't follow you inside. Still, strangers who come to live in our hills fall sick easily, and sometimes they never get well. Sometimes there's nothing wrong with them, and still they fall into silence, lose their appetites, grow very thin, and then death comes."

His lips grew so tight and thin a white line developed around them. "The hills? Is Winnerrow in the hills?"

"Winnerrow is in a valley, what the hillfolks call a `holler.' I tried all my life not to talk as they do. But the valley isn't any different from the hillsides. Time stands still back there, on the hills, in the valley, and not in the way it does for Jillian. People grow old quickly, too quickly. Why, my granny never had a powder puff,-Much les

s put polish on her nails."

"Don't tell me any more," he said somewhat impatiently. "I've heard enough. Now why in the world would a smart girl like you want to go back there?"

"For my own reasons," I said stubbornly, lifting my head and feeling the tears sting behind my eyes. I couldn't tell him how I wanted to lift up the name of Casteel and give it something it had never had before

--respectability. For my granny I'd do this, for her.

So I stood and he sat. For an eternally long time he sat with his elegant, well-manicured hands templed under his chin, saying nothing, and then he lowered those hands and drummed a mindless beat on the crisp white breakfast cloth, and on my nerves. "I've always admired honesty," he said at length, his blue eyes calm and unreadable. "Honesty is always the best gamble when you don't know whether or not a lie will serve you better. At least you get to state your case, and if you fail, you can keep your 'integrity.'" He flashed me a brief, amused smile. "About three years after your mother ran from here, the detective agency I hired to find her finally traced her to Winnerrow. They were told she lived outside of the city limits, and those who were born or those who died in the county didn't often make it to the city records. But many residents of Winnerrow remembered a pretty young girl who married Luke Casteel. My detective even tried to find her grave for a record of the day she died, but he never found a grave with her name on the headstone . . . but long ago I knew she was never coming back. She made good her word . ."

Were they tears I saw in his eyes? Had he loved her in his own way?