Dark Angel (Casteel 2)

From September to August, not quite a year, had graduated high school, been accepted to college, and found a man to love, a man who really needed me, who didn't pity me as Logan had. I looked around at the other passengers, most of whom were dressed far more casually than I was in my pale blue summer pants suit that had cost more than the Casteels used to spend on a year's supply of food.

High above the ground, with only the billowing white clouds to see, I felt the strangest sensation of waking from an enchanted sleep that had begun the day I arrived at Farthinggale Manor. This was the real world, where sixty-one-year-old women didn't appear to be thirty. No one looked fastidious and impeccably elegant, even those seated with me in the first class section. Babies were crying back in the tourist section. And for the very first time I realized that not once since I entered Farthinggale Manor had I really left its influence. Even at Winterhaven its tentacles had reached out 4o let me know who was in full control of my life. I closed my eyes and thought of Troy, silently praying for his swift recovery. Had Troy spent too much of his life in that huge house, where the invention and selling of make-believe dominated? For now that I was away from the influence of Farthy, his cottage beyond the maze seemed but an extension of what could seem to some a make-believe castle.

When I arrived in Baltimore, I felt grateful to Tony, who had called to make hotel reservations for me.

So this was not truly an unmapped quest. Not when a limousine with a driver waited for me. Even on this journey to find my long lost brother and sister, the control and influence of Farthinggale Manor still pulled the strings of Heaven Leigh Casteel.

"You will have to make your own arrangements for visiting the Rawlingses," Tony had warned early this morning, "and I anticipate you are going to meet with a great deal of resentment from two parents who won't want you bringing back the past to children who may have adjusted to their new lifestyle very well. And you must keep remembering that you are one of us now, no longer a Casteel."

I would always be a Casteel; I knew this even as I pulled in my breath, rose from my luncheon table, and made my way to a telephone booth. In my mind I had pictures of just how it would be. Keith and Our Jane would be thrilled to see me again.

Hev-lee, Hev-lee, Our Jane would shriek, her pretty, small face lit up with happiness. She'd then race into my welcoming arms and cry from the relief of knowing I still cared and wanted her.

Behind her would come Keith, much slower and shyer, but he'd know me. He'd be thrilled and happy, too.

Beyond that I couldn't plan. The legal fight to take Keith and Our Jane from those substitute parents would take years perhaps, according to what the Tatterton attorneys had said, and Tony didn't want me to win. "It won't be fair to Troy to saddle him with two children who may resent him, and you know how sensitive he is. When you are his wife, devote yourself to him, and the children he will father."

Holding the receiver tight to my ear, I grew nervous and apprehensive as the telephone rang and rang. What if they had gone on vacation? Breathlessly I let their phone ring and ring, waiting for someone to respond. I waited for the swept voice of Our Jane. I didn't expect Keith to respond to a telephone, not that is, if he was still the reticent little boy I used to know so well.

Three times I called the number Troy had given me, and no one was home. I ordered another slice of blueberry pie to remind me of the pies that Granny used to make on rare occasions, and sipped my third cup of coffee.

At three o'clock I left the restaurant. An elevator took me to the fifteenth floor

of the magnificent hotel, the very kind of posh hotel that Tom and I used to dream about when we lay on mountain slopes and planned our exceptional futures. I was planning to stay in Baltimore only over the weekend, and yet Tony had thought it absolutely necessary that I have a suite of rooms instead of only one. There was a pretty sitting room, and adjoining that, a fully equipped small kitchen where everything was black and white and very shiny.

Hours passed. It was ten o'clock when I gave up on the Rawlingses, and put in a call to Troy.

"Now, now," he soothed, "perhaps they took the children on a special outing that lasts all day, and tomorrow they will be home. Of course I'm all right. In fact, for the first time I'm really excited by the future, and all it holds for both of us. I have been a fool, darling, haven't I? Believing that fate planned, even before I was born, to kill me before I reached the age of twenty-five. Thank God you came into my life when you did, just in time to save me from myself."

Dreams of Troy filled my sleep with

restlessness. Time and again he shrank to child size, and drifted away from me, calling out as Keith used to do, "Hev-lee, Hev-lee!"

I was up early the next day, impatiently waiting for eight o'clock. And this time when I called, a woman's voice answered. "Mrs. Lester Rawlings, please." "Who is calling?"

I gave her my name, saying I wanted to visit my brother and sister, Keith and Jane Casteel. Her sharp intake of breath communicated her shock. "Oh, no!" she whispered, then I heard the click of her phone. I was left with the dial tone. Immediately I called her back.

On and on the phone rang, until Rita Rawlings finally answered. "Please," she begged with tears in her voice, "don't disturb the peace of two wonderfully happy children who have adapted successfully to a new family and new lives."

"They are blood-related to me, Mrs. Rawlings! They were mine long before they were yours!"

"Please, please," she begged. "I know you love them. I remember very well how you looked that day when we took them away, and I do understand how you must feel. When first they came to live with us, it was you they were always crying for. But they haven't cried for you in more than two years. They call me Mother or Mommy now, and they call my husband Daddy. They are fine, mentally and physically . . . I'll send you photographs, health and school reports, but please, I beg of you, don't come to remind them of all the hardships they had to endure when they lived in that pitiful shack in the Willies."

Now it was my turn to plead. "But you don't understand, Mrs. Rawlings! I have to see them again! I have to make sure they are happy and healthy, or else I can't find happiness myself. Each day of my life I vow to find Keith and Our Jane. I hate my father for what he did, it eats at me night and day. You have to allow me to see them, even if they don't see me."

The reluctance expressed in her delayed reply could have turned aside someone less relentless than I was.

"All right, if you must do this thing. But you have to promise to keep yourself hidden from my children. And if after you see them they don't appear to you to be healthy, happy, and secure, then my husband and I will do everything within our power to see that we remedy that situation."

I knew at that moment that this was a strongwilled woman, determined to keep her family intact, and through hell she'd fight to keep them hers and not mine.

All that Saturday I prowled small shops, looking for just the right gifts to give Fanny, Tom, and Grandpa. I even bought several things for Keith and Our Jane to add to the others I was saving for that day when we would be a family again.

Sunday morning I awakened with high hopes and great excitement. At ten the limousine and driver put at my disposal drew to a slow, careful stop before an Episcopalian church that was almost medieval in design. I knew just where the two children I longed to see would be, in their Sunday School class. Rita Rawlings had given me detailed instructions on how to find their classroom, and what to do once I was there. "And if you love them, Heaven, keep your promise. Think of their needs and not your own, and stay out of sight."

The church was cool and dim inside, the many halls long and twisting. Well-dressed people smiled at me.

Somewhere in a back hall I grew confused, not knowing which way to turn . . . and then I heard children singing. And it seemed, above all the other voices, I could hear the sweet, high-pitched voice of Our Jane, as she tried earnestly to duplicate the soprano tones of Miss Marianne Deale, when she had sung hymns with us in Winnerrow's one and only Protestant church.