Dark Angel (Casteel 2)

My heart jumped. "He's here? Troy is here?" I was going to see him again! Troy, oh Troy?!

Tony smiled crookedly. The kind of smile that twisted my heart and made it hurt.

His shoulders hunched to shorten his neck, and still he stared out to sea, forcing me to glance that way to find what big eyes kept watching. And with some difficulty I saw a wreath of flowers bouncing on the waves far out in the ocean. Golden glints of sunlight on the deep sapphire water made it exceedingly beautiful. The flower wreath was just a tiny, bright speck. Again my heartbeats quickened. The sea, always the sea had chased Troy. A sudden weight formed in my chest.

Tony sighed with the cool wind that blew always from the ocean. "Troy returned home very depressed. He was happy to hear that you and Jane and Keith had been reunited. But he was approaching his twenty-eighth birthday. Birthdays always depressed him. He believed, sincerely believed, that thirty was his cut-off day. hope it's not a painful illness,' he said a few times, as if that disturbed him more than anything. 'It's not that I'm afraid to die, it's only the road to death that terrifies me, for sometimes it can be so drawn out.' You have two more years, I kept reminding him, if your precognition is true. If it is not, you have fifty, sixty, or seventy. He'd look at me as if I knew nothing. I stayed close by just to see him through, fearing something would happen. We used to sit in his rooms and talk about you, and how strong you were when you cared for your brothers and sisters after your stepmother and your . . . your father went away. He told me that during the past semester he used to visit your college and hide on the campus just so he could see you.

Again his eyes swiveled to the sea. And by this time the wreath had disappeared, and I was scared, so terribly scared.

"I'm telling my story knowing you still love him. Please indulge me, Heaven. To take Troy's mind off that dreaded birthday, I planned a party to last over the weekend. I made everyone promise not to leave him alone for one second. There was a girl there that he had dated once or twice. She'd been married and was divorced. The kind of laughing, bright, and breezy girl I thought would lift his spirits, and perhaps help him to stop thinking about you. She had all kinds of tall tales to tell, about the celebrities she'd met, and the clothes she'd bought, and the huge mansion she was going to build on her own South Sea island . . . if only she had the right man to live with her. And she looked at Troy then. He didn't seem to see or hear her. No woman likes to be ignored like that, and that's when her humor ended. She became derisive, ugly acting. Finally Troy could bear no more of her taunts, and he jumped up, and left the house. I saw him head toward the stables. I didn't want him to go there, and if this idiot girl hadn't raced to follow me outside, I would have caught up with him in plenty of time to prevent what he did. But she seized my hand and she teased me about being my brother's keeper.

"And when I finally got away, Troy had saddled Abdulla Bar, according to a stable boy, and on horseback Troy raced through the maze, over and over through the maze. It was not a place that a sensitive horse liked and soon he leaped the last hedge hurdle, driven insane by the twists and turns of the maze he'd never been in before--and the horse headed for the shore!"

"Abdulla Bar . . ." I repeated, the name almost forgotten by this time.

"Yes, Jill's favorite stallion. The one nobody but her could ride, I saddled my own horse and rode to catch up with him, but the wind here on the shore was wild. Ahead of me about a hundred feet, a sheet of trash paper flew into Abdulla Bar's face. He reared and whinnied as if terrified, and he whirled about and ran straight into the ocean! It was crazy to sit on my horse, who refused to run into the wind, and watch my brother fight to bring that crazy horse back to shore! The sun was red and low on the horizon behind us . . . and the sea turned to blood . . . and then both horse and rider disappeared."

My hands fluttered to my forehead and hovered there. "Troy? Oh no, Tony!"

"We called the Coast Guard. All the men at the party put out in the boats I have, and we searched for him. Abdulla Bar swam back to shore with an empty saddle, and then, toward dawn, Troy's body was found. He had drowned."

No! No! It couldn't be true.

He went on, wrapping my shoulders with his arm and pulling me against his side. "I tried

desperately to find where you were staying in Maine, but I never was able to. Every day I have held my own small memorial service for him, waiting for you to return, and say your own goodbyes."

I thought I had cried all the tears I could cry for the love I'd had for Troy. Yet, as I stood there and gazed out to sea, I knew that throughout my life I would cry many more tears for him.

Time passed as I stood with Tony and waited for that floating wreath to reappear. Oh, Troy, years we could have had together! Almost four years that would have given you a fair share of life, and love, and normalcy, and maybe then you would have loved life enough to have stayed!

I was numb now, blind with tears I didn't want to share with Tony. On the walk back to the mansion I said goodbye to Tony quickly, though he clung to both of my hands and tried to force from me the promise that I'd return again.

"Please, Heaven, please! You're my daughter, my only heir. Troy is dead. I need an heir to give purpose and meaning to my life! What good is all of this that we have accumulated through the centuries if our line ends now? Don't go! Troy would want you to stay! Everything that he was is here in this house and in his cottage that he left to you. He loved you . . please, don't leave me here alone with Jill. Please stay, Heaven, please, for my sake and for Troy's! All that you see around you will be yours. It's your legacy. Take it if for no better reason than you can pass it down to your children."

I tugged my hands away. "Why you can go anywhere you want without Jillian," I said ruthlessly, stepping into my fine car. "You can hire help to take care of her, and not come back until she is dead. You don't need me, and I don't need you, or the Tatterton money. You have now exactly what you deservenothing."

The wind fanned my hair. He stood and watched me drive away, the saddest-looking man I'd ever seen. But I didn't care. Troy was dead and I had graduated from college, and life would go on, despite Tony, who needed me now, and Jillian, who had never needed anything but youth and beauty.

Twenty-three Revenge

. I WAS GOING BACK HOME, BACK TO WINNERROW. AT last it was time for me to put the past to rest, and to become that person I always wanted to be. For I knew now that our childhood dreams are often the most pure ones; I wanted more than anything to follow in Miss Marianne Deale's footsteps, to be the kind of teacher who could give a child like me a chance in life, who could open up the world of books and knowledge that provided a way out of the narrowness and ignorance of the hills. And it was not really hard to risk my Tatterton legacy--for I was no longer a scumbag Casteel, cowering on the fringes of society. No, I was a Tatterton, a

VanVoreen, and even if I planned never to tell anyone in my family the truth of my parentage, still, I was now ready to confront the man whose love I had needed so desperately as a child, who had denied me so relentlessly and brutally. For I didn't need him at all now. And I wanted him, and only him, to know just who I was.

It took me three days to drive to Winnerrow, and on the way I stopped in New York City, at one of the best hairdressers, and did something I'd wanted to do for years. All my life I'd wanted my mother's silvery blond hair color. All my life I'd been the dark angel, betrayed by what I had thought was my Indian Casteel hair. Now I would be the true, bright, shining angel, the rich girl from Boston who no one ever looked down on. I emerged from that salon a different woman--a woman with shining, silvery blond hair. No, I wasn't a Casteel anymore. I was my mother's true daughter. And I knew that to at least one man I would no longer appear to be the Heaven Leigh Casteel he hated--no, he would see how much like Leigh I was, he would finally understand how much he loved me. I would be a Heaven Leigh he loved-- for at last he would see in me his beloved Angel.

Grandpa almost didn't know who I was when I first arrived at the-new cabin in the woods. He seemed almost afraid when he first saw me, as if a ghost had truly come back from the dead. It was then I realized that if he ever really did catch sight of his "Annie" he'd probably have a heart attack. "Grandpa," I said, hugging his frightened, rigid body, "It's me, Heaven. Do you like my hair?"

"Oh, Heaven child, I thought ya was a ghost!" he heaved a mighty sigh of relief. And when I told him I was coming to live with him he was overjoyed. "Oh, Heaven chile, ever'body comin' home at once. Ya know Luke's circus is comin' to town next week. All the Casteels comin' back to Winnerrow. Ain't it grand tho!"

So, I wasn't the only Casteel come back to show who I was now. Now I could get on with my plans much sooner than I expected. Now I knew just what I had to do.

The circus was all that people in Winnerrow talked about. They stood on street corners, and in the pharmacy, and in the beauty shop and barber shops, and cluttered the one and only supermarket with their many speculations on whether or not it was "Godly" to attend a circus where so many performers wore so few clothes. Everyone was so busy with the circus, they barely had time to gossip about me and my white Jaguar driving through town.

I was busy that week before the circus was due to arrive--busy making the cabin as cozy and pretty as possible, busy washing an old dress that had to be carefully bleached so it would turn truly white. Then the dress had to be ironed, and I'd had no experience ever with handling an iron, even the best new one that money could buy. It just so happened that the day I was setting up the contraption called an ironing board, Logan dropped by to bring Grandpa his weekly supply of medications. He sucked in his breath when he saw me. "Oh," he said, looking uncomfortable, "I almost didn't know who you were."

"You don't like it?" I asked lightly, determined to keep my distance.