The Mill River Recluse Page 21

  Pie from the bakery became a weekly treat at the marble mansion.

  In time, Father O’Brien, and through him, Mary, came to know Fitz and Ruth. The police chief’s wife, especially, was loved by everyone. She never spoke a judgmental word about anyone, never gossiped, never refused to help a neighbor in need. With Mary’s approval, Father O’Brien asked Ruth to become an assistant for Mary, to see to her shopping and other personal errands. He knew that Ruth would take as much care in selecting Mary’s groceries as she would her own. She would be discreet with what he told her of Mary and, most importantly, would be understanding of Mary’s refusal to meet her in person. He wasn’t surprised when Ruth wouldn’t accept a penny in return for her weekly assistance.

  ~~~

  It was the idea of finally meeting Ruth that prompted Mary to try one more time to try to interact with her neighbors. “I’m older than I was the last time,” she told Father O’Brien, “and hopefully wiser. I know now that I need to do this. To get away from here, somehow. Maybe this time, I will. It’s especially not fair to Ruth…I feel I owe it to her to try. She does so much for me.”

  “Well, why don’t we go to the bakery for coffee? It’s usually quiet after the morning rush, and I know Ruth would be thrilled.” Father O’Brien struggled to keep his excitement from his voice—he didn’t want it to scare Mary into reconsidering.

  Indeed, Father O’Brien arrived early on the designated morning, for he knew that Mary was likely to change her mind or at least put up stiff resistance to leaving her home. It ended up taking two hours just to get her to come down from her bedroom. Another hour passed before she would go with him out the back door to his truck, and her sobbing and quaking as they left the driveway alarmed him. He pulled over on the main road.

  “Mary, dear, it’s all right,” he said to her. She was cringing in the front seat of the pickup, wearing her eye patch and a light jacket. “Take some deep breaths. Yes, that’s it. You’re just fine, now. Mary, dear, look at me. Remember how you told me that you had to do this? Fight the anxiety Mary! It can’t touch you, not this time! Right?”

  “Yes, keep driving,” she wailed, and then said more to herself, “I have to do this. It can’t touch me.” He cringed in the seat and he stepped on the gas, tearing into town before she reversed her decision.

  They pulled up in front of the bakery. Mary was quieter now, but she still trembled in the front seat. He reached over to her. “Mary, we’re here. You’re doing wonderfully. There’s no one around. We can slip right inside. Ruth is waiting for us. I’ll come around for you--all you have to do is hold onto me.”

  He went to the other side of the truck to help her down. She clutched at his arm, shivering. Her face was as white as her hair.

  They made it to the front door of the bakery, with Father O’Brien talking to Mary all the while. As they were about to go inside, a group of teenage boys came out. The youths were pulling apart warm cinnamon rolls and stuffing their mouths full. It was well after eight o’clock. Father O’Brien knew the boys were late for school, but he didn’t dare say anything to them for fear of upsetting Mary.

  One of the boys looked curiously at him, then down at Mary, and sniggered. Father O’Brien recognized him at once. “Hey, you guys,” the young Leroy Underwood said, pointing at Mary, “it’s a real live pirate! Arrrgh, shiver me timbers!”

  The whole group stopped and stared. A few boys laughed nervously, looking from Leroy to Mary to Father O’Brien. Others just watched quietly. Only Leroy seemed totally unaware of the gravity of the situation.

  Mary’s scream silenced all of them. She pulled away from Father O’Brien. He expected her to run back to the truck, but she stood her ground, glaring at the youth who had addressed her so rudely, and then closing her eyes.

  “YOU CAN’T TOUCH ME! YOU CAN’T TOUCH ME!”

  “Dude, she’s crazy,” muttered one of the boys as they shrank away. Mary kept talking to herself with her eyes tightly closed as they ran off.

  “YOU CAN’T TOUCH ME! NOT THIS TIME!”

  “Mary dear, let’s go inside,” Father O’Brien said as he touched her arm, but she opened her eyes and screamed again.

  “Can’t touch me! Michael, I can’t, I can’t!”

  Through the glass front door of the bakery, he saw Ruth Fitzgerald approaching. He frowned at her, shaking his head, and she stopped and watched from inside.

  Trembling, Mary turned to face the door of the bakery and saw Ruth looking on. She took a step forward. Father O’Brien stared as Mary saw Ruth’s expression of kindness and pity.

  “Oh, Ruth,” Mary said, and placed a hand over her heart. Just for an instant, a certain acknowledgment registered on Mary’s face, a shard of recognition and gratitude, a wisp of friendship. Then she bolted away from him back toward the pickup.

  Father O’Brien met Ruth’s eyes for an instant but had no choice except to run after Mary, fumbling for the key to open the door of the truck.

  He’d barely stopped the pickup outside the door of the marble mansion when Mary jumped out and ran inside. Father O’Brien followed her, but she locked herself up in her bedroom. He sighed and looked at his watch. When she finally emerged hours later, he was sound asleep on the sofa in the sitting room.

  Her hand on his shoulder woke him. He sat up slowly, blinking, relieved to see that she was finally calm again.

  “Michael, I—”

  “Mary, I didn’t hear you come down. Are you all right? I didn’t mean to fall asleep here, I just wanted to make sure—“

  “—that I’m all right, I know, and don’t worry, Michael, I’m fine. Disappointed in myself, but otherwise fine. But there’s something else. I owe you an explanation.”

  “An explanation? Of what? What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said, lowering herself onto the sofa beside him. “All these years, you’ve been so patient with me. When I get anxious and do what I do, you always take care of me. You try your best to help me, and look what happens. When I think of all the trouble I’ve caused you, I feel I’ve been a tremendous burden.”

  “That’s nonsense. You told me a long time ago that no one is perfect. Well, that’s true. We’re friends, regardless of our faults. Nothing will change that, and you will never be a burden to me.”

  Mary was quiet a moment. “That’s all the more reason I need to explain something to you. I should have done it years ago. It isn’t easy for me to even think about it, but you deserve to know what happened to make me the way I am.”

  Whatever trace of sleepiness Father O’Brien felt vanished. He straightened up against the sofa-back and waited for Mary to continue.

  “When I was a girl, in high school, I was shy, but I was normal. I loved school. My junior year, though, there was a new English teacher. He took a liking to me, always called on me, watched me during class, that sort of thing. He asked me to come to his classroom after school one Friday.” Mary was shaking now, but he didn’t move for fear of causing her to bolt upstairs again. She spoke her next words quietly, slowly, as if she were fighting to force them from her mouth.

  “When I got to his classroom, he locked us inside. And then he raped me.”

  “Dear Lord, Mary,” Father O’Brien said. Carefully, he reached out and took one of Mary’s hands, but she wasn’t finished.

  “I didn’t say anything about it for three days. Not even to my father. I suppose I was trying to convince myself it never happened. I even managed to go back to the classroom for English on Monday. But the teacher made me stand up and read a composition out loud. All the while, he was looking at me with his cold, dark eyes, and it was as if the whole thing was happening again, right there on the classroom floor. I felt so ashamed. Everyone in the class was staring, the room was spinning…it was all I could do to get out of there. I was only sixteen.

  “They fired the teacher, but I don’t think he was ever prosecuted. My father was determined to protect me, to keep me out of the whole mess once everything
came out in the open, even if it meant I wouldn’t testify against him at trial. And I don’t blame him, with what happened afterward. Even with that teacher gone, I never went back to school after that. I couldn’t.”

  “What a horrible, horrible…I’m so sorry, Mary,” Father O’Brien began, not knowing what he could say in response to such a dreadful story.

  Silently, her eyes full of tears, Mary looked at him. Her chin and bottom lip quivered, and she looked as if she were trying to continue, but couldn’t.

  “Shh, come here.” Father O’Brien slid across the sofa and wrapped his arms around Mary. She sobbed into his chest, heaving decades of repressed torment into his black jacket.

  “You don’t need to say anything else, dear girl. And you have no reason to be ashamed of anything,” he said, his chin pressed into her white hair. “No reason at all.”

  He held her for a long while, finally understanding why she feared so much.

  ~~~

  After the incident outside the bakery, Mary never again expressed any interest in leaving her home.

  Father O’Brien often looked up at the marble mansion and saw her increasingly frail form at her bedroom window. The vision in her good eye was beginning to slip, too, for she told him that the buildings along Main Street looked blurry to her. On her next birthday, he gave her a little spyglass that she could use to look out over the town. Binoculars would have been twice what she needed, and with the little telescope, she could view the goings-on in the town below just as she always had.

  Although it had been years since Mary had kept horses, he often saw her gazing out the library windows toward the barn and pasture. After Jester and Ruby had died, she refused to replace the horses, saying that she couldn’t bear to love and lose another friend. Together, they had created a horse cemetery, with Ebony’s marker in the center. The small circle of stones was visible from the library window.

  Upon Ebony’s death, Father O’Brien had finally returned to Mary the mare’s marble likeness. “Conor gave this to me for safekeeping,” he told her. “He wanted me to give it back to you when the time was right.”

  Mary accepted the figurine without hesitation. “What was done to me was not Ebony’s fault,” she said, and set the little statue on her bureau where she had first kept it.

  Her calm acceptance of the figurine was one of the many ways she surprised him. For his eightieth birthday, she presented him with a beautiful mahogany display rack she had mail-ordered from a company in New Jersey. “For your spoons,” she told him, and the case was indeed stunning. It had space for perhaps three dozen. “I couldn’t resist getting it for you, seeing as how after all these years, I feel almost like your partner in crime,” she said with her most feisty grin.

  He reminded himself then how she had sewn pockets into the sleeves of his clothing to help facilitate his theft.

  “It’s beautiful, “ he said, admiring the fine grain of the wood in the display rack, but found later that he couldn’t bring himself to choose from among his hundreds of spoons the thirty-six that would fit in it. This he hadn’t the heart to tell her.

  For Mary’s seventy-sixth birthday, Father O’Brien brought her a Siamese kitten. Despite her refusal to replace her horses, he thought that perhaps she would appreciate another companion, one that could be with her all the time. Seeing Mary gasp in delight, he chided himself for not thinking of it sooner. Mary named the kitten Sham, after its tendency to sleep on the sham-covered pillows on her bed.

  On a sparkling February afternoon just after Mary’s seventy-ninth birthday, Father O’Brien arrived at the back door of the marble mansion. She usually met him at the door, but this time she did not. He let himself in, calling to her. Perhaps she was in the washroom.

  She heard him and raised herself up off the sofa in the sitting room.

  “Oh, Michael! I’m sorry, I guess I dozed off,” she said. “I’ve got lunch all ready, I’ve just got to warm it.”

  She stood up and walked toward the kitchen, toward him. He started to say something, stopped, and squinted at her. He swallowed and looked again. She saw the concern on his face as she approached.

  “Michael, what is it?”

  He didn’t know why, but in looking at her, he knew that something was terribly wrong.

  ~~~

  Chapter 17

  As Father O’Brien was finishing his pie and coffee at the bakery, Claudia was passing out her class’s weekly math quiz. “Ready, set, begin,” she said, and twenty-three papers were flipped over and twenty-three heads bowed over their desks. The only sound in the room was of pencils scribbling, erasing, being twirled and tapped. She would now have several quiet, uninterrupted minutes to think about last night’s date with Kyle. She smiled.

  A soft knock sounded at her classroom door. Joyce Rennert, one of the secretaries from the office, opened the door and leaned in to speak to her.

  “Miss Simon, there’s a delivery out front for you,” she whispered. “I would have brought them with me, but there were so many.”

  “So many?”

  “Roses,” Joyce said, giggling. “It looks like whoever sent them bought out the store.”

  “Oh,” Claudia said, and she realized that Leroy’s attempt to impress her must have arrived. “I’ll come down to the office when my class goes to music. Could you keep them down there for me until then?”

  “Oh, we’ll be happy to.” Joyce smiled wistfully. “Brenda and I’ll get to pretend that we were the lucky ones who got flowers!”

  If you knew who had sent those roses, you wouldn’t feel so lucky, Claudia thought, and went back to her students.

  A few hours later, Claudia went to see what was waiting for her. Despite the advance notice, she was still shocked. An arrangement of what looked like at least two dozen huge red roses, complete with baby’s breath and ferns, sat on the counter in the office. The vase was enormous. Claudia took the card nestled in the greenery and opened it. On the front of the card was a picture of a heart in flames, while the printed message inside read “My heart burns for you.” There was also a handwritten note:

  Claudia,

  Roses are red,

  Vilets are blue,

  Wouldn’t you know,

  I’ve been thinking about you.

  Have a nice day.

  Officer Leroy Underwood.

  She had to struggle to read the poem, as it was scrawled in terrible handwriting. She noticed right away that “violets” was misspelled. For a minute, she almost felt sorry for Leroy, until she remembered the way he had stared at her in her classroom. She shuddered. The roses were beautiful, but she wanted nothing more to do with them.

  Joyce came up beside her and sighed. “They sure are something else. I wonder if they’ll even fit in your car?”

  “I suppose I could get them in somehow. I think I’ll leave them down here until school’s out for the day.” The truth was, she really didn’t want to take them home. She started thinking of ways she could get rid of the whole lot.

  “The office already smells like roses! Just think how they’ll be in your house! By the way, who sent them to you? What’s the occasion?” Joyce’s eyes glittered in anticipation of learning a juicy tidbit of gossip.

  “Just someone I met a little while ago,” Claudia said. “No occasion. I think he wanted to surprise me.” She had no intention of letting word get out that she was the target of Leroy Underwood’s hot pursuit.

  Joyce’s expression dimmed.

  Just as Claudia turned to go back to her classroom, a man wearing a hat that read, “Kathy’s Flowers and Gifts” came up to the office. He set a bud vase holding a single, delicate pink rose on the counter. “Hello again,” he said to Joyce. “I tell you, this Miss Simon person is popular today. Second order for her, and it’s not even noon.”

  Hearing her name, Claudia backtracked to the office window. “I’m Claudia Simon,” she said.

  “Well, lucky lady, this was just called in for you.” He pushed the bud vase tow
ard her before turning to leave. “Have a good one.”

  Joyce’s eyes were wide with disbelief. She raised her eyebrows and looked at Claudia, but didn’t say a word.

  The little card hanging from the bud vase read, “Just wanted you to know I had a great time last night. Looking forward to Saturday. Kyle.”

  “Another recent acquaintance?” Joyce asked.

  “Yes,” Claudia said, picking up the bud vase. She never would have guessed that a single rose from one man would outdo two dozen from another, but Kyle’s choice had been perfect. She beamed down at it. “I’ll definitely take this one with me.”

  On her way home from school that afternoon, Claudia pitched Leroy’s Valentine’s Day card and dropped off Leroy’s mass of roses at a nursing home just outside Mill River. Mission accomplished, she sang along with the radio in her car all the way home. When her phone rang for the first time that night, she was sitting at the kitchen table with the bud vase, grading papers. Still feeling warm and fuzzy, she reached to answer it.

  “Hello?”

  “Claudia.” The drawl said it all.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Leroy Underwood. How are you doing tonight?” Claudia rolled her eyes at the ceiling. He sounded like a poorly-scripted telemarketer.

  “Fine, thank you,” she said. “I was pretty surprised this morning, shocked, really, about the roses. They’re beautiful. And the card, too. Thank you.” She had to force herself to say the words, didn’t care if it was apparent that they were spoken with all the feeling of a piece of cardboard.