Mittman, Stephanie (13 page)

Staring
back at her were two boys. The younger one, perhaps four or five years old, was
sitting upon the shoulders of the older one, whose legs were spread slightly to
juggle the young boy's weight. Both faces were vaguely familiar, and she felt
her knees buckle as she lowered herself to the bed with the two smiling boys
staring at her.

Cabot—without
the beard, the weight, and the years, was standing on two good legs, carrying
his baby brother, Ash. Behind them, nearly out of the picture, a dark-haired
woman was combing a young girl's hair while another waited her turn, apparently
unaware that the film was catching them before they were ready.

Kathryn!
But the little girls? Were they summer guests, some distant cousins, neighbors?
Charlotte looked more closely at the photograph. One girl's hand rested on
Kathryn's hip while her eyes were focused on the boys. The other girl held up a
ribbon toward Kathryn.

"I
didn't realize anyone was in here," Rosa said in her soft Mexican accent,
the door opened only a crack. "Oh, it's you. I'm sorry about the bunny,
señora, but nothing is the same with Mr. Whittier's
hermano
up
here."

Charlotte
nodded her head in agreement. Nothing had been the same since they'd brought
Ashford back from the courthouse into their home. She stood to put the
photograph back on the night table. "How long have you been with the
Whittiers?" she asked, her hand still clutching the leather case.

"I
come about a year before you, maybe less." She kept her eyes on the floor,
watching for escapees.

"What
about Maria? Or the gardener, Mr. Newcomb? Have any of them been here
longer?"

"Mr.
Newcomb was here a long, long time. Maybe twenty years. Since before."

Before.
That
would be before Cabot's accident. Like every family, the Whittiers told time by
some major occurrence. For Charlotte and her mother,
before
had meant
before Charlotte's father abandoned them. For Charlotte and her grandmother,
before
meant before her mother had died and Glenda had had to return from Europe.
For Rosa it was probably the year her family came north to the United States.

For
Davis it would either be the year his mother died, or the year he was taken
from his father. Better that, she reminded herself, than for Mr. Flannigan to
mark things by the year he killed his son.

She
looked at the photograph again and recalled the cameo Ash had brought his
mother. Four children. And now there were only the two. The frame back where it
belonged, she thanked Rosa for her efforts and headed back downstairs, lost in
thought.

From
the doorway to her own bright and sunny office, she could hear Cabot and Ash's
voices. She followed the sound through to Cabot's darker room.

"Sorry
to make you work on Saturday," Ash said, rising when she entered and
sitting only after she did. "I'm sorry to have dumped the whole mess on
you, but I didn't know where else to turn when the police showed up. It was all
so crazy. Still, I suppose things must be tough enough around here." His
voice dropped off and he worked at a hangnail on his thumb.

"Here,"
Cabot said, handing her several envelopes. "More letters of wild approval
for your efforts." His voice was heavy with sarcasm. She said nothing. The
popularity of a position had never determined its correctness for Cabot, yet he
expected her to buckle under because she'd gotten a few vitriolic letters.

"Wild
approval?" Cabot's brother asked. "May I see?" He held out his
hand, and with a shrug she put the letters into it. He'd know sooner or later,
living in the same house, that Charlotte wasn't winning any popularity awards
for taking Virginia's Comstock case.

Ash's
face fell.
"Baby Killer? The Antichrist?
What in hell is
this?" He put the papers under Cabot's nose.

"Why
don't you ask her?" Cabot said, putting on his best unruffled act.
"It's her case and I can't exactly forbid her from taking it."

Not
that he hadn't tried. And she understood his position, truly she did, but she
couldn't let it influence hers.

"My
client is being prosecuted for the dissemination of certain information which
is vital to women," she said simply, hoping that would be enough.

"Not
all women," Cabot corrected. "Some of them are your most ardent
enemies. This letter is from a God-fearing Christian, as she calls herself, and
she doesn't find your information vital. In point of fact, Charlotte,
you
don't—"

He
stopped and looked at Ash.

"I
never knew information to hurt anyone," the younger man said, sifting
through the letters with steam pouring from his ears. "And I never knew
you to side with those who did," he said to his brother.

"What
would you know about whose side I've ever been on?" Cabot demanded.
"What would you know about anything that's gone on in the last six or
seven years? What am I talking about? When have you ever been aware of anything
outside yourself?"

"Cabot!
What's gotten into you?" Charlotte asked, coming to her feet. "Don't
you dare take your anger at me out on your brother."

***

The
room went stony silent. It had been years since anyone had defended him to his
brother, years since his brother had shown any anger. Ash remembered his
mother, bless her, coming to his defense when Ash had been what, sixteen?
seventeen?

He's
jealous,
his
mother had told him when she'd gotten him alone.
Life isn't as easy for
Cabot as he makes it look.

Oh,
God, he'd been an idiot. Indiscreet and insensitive. Blind.

"I
don't really want to intrude," he said, standing and wavering. "Maybe
you two want to talk...?"

"You're
putting yourself in danger, Charlotte," Cabot said, slamming his fist
against the arm of his chair. "First the challenge to the Comstock Laws,
and now this boy. You can't just take a child from his father and harbor him in
your home."

"I've
already told Dr. Mollenoff that he can stay on the weekends until I can work
something out with his father or the judge. He can work for us to earn his
keep. I'm sure he'll want to do his share."

"Well,
he can't. Last time I looked, the deed on this house belonged to me, Charlotte,
and if you think I'll allow you to risk my home in addition to you risking life
and limb, taking in strays—"

Ash
coughed and Charlotte glared at him as if he'd actually thought that what Cabot
had said was funny. Cabot glared at him, too, and demanded, "I do still
have some say in whom I hire, don't I?"

Charlotte
nodded, crossing her arms over her chest. "Indeed you do. He'll work for
me."

Ash
tried to remember anyone else standing up to Cabot the way Charlotte was doing.
His brother had ruled Whittier Court since their father had passed on. Before
that, Ash could remember very vaguely, as a little boy, the tirades his father
would hurl at his older brother.

The
last one was a week or two before the accident. Ash remembered that one because
Cabot had brought it up again after the doctors had told him he'd never walk.
He'd told his father he still wasn't sorry, and that he was sure to never be.

Well,
you're the only one with a reason to be sorry,
he could still
hear his father yelling.
And you've no one to blame but yourself. Keeping
all this from your mother is going to kill me.

Not
six months later their father was dead.

"Work
for you?" Cabot asked, wiggling his finger in his ear as if he hadn't
heard right. "And what is it a boy with one good arm is going to do for
you?"

"Teach
me to throw a lasso," Charlotte spat back at him. "Hold my left hand.
There are a million things he can do while he's mending."

"It's
a shame that talking isn't one of them," Cabot said, sighing deeply and
resting his cheek on his hand. "I swear, Charlotte, a person gets a
splinter and you're making up a cot for them in the guest room and sending a
note to the butcher to double the week's order."

"Cabot,"
Ash started, but Charlotte interrupted him.

"That
boy'll talk when he wants to," she said.

"Not
in this house, he won't," Cabot said. "If he's to be here, he'd
better know I won't tolerate that stuttering and stammering."

"What?"
Charlotte, obviously baffled, looked from Ash to Cabot, who smacked his
forehead and rolled his eyes at Ash as if to say
See, what did I tell you
about my wife?
when in fact Cabot had never told him a blessed thing.

"You
didn't notice, did you?" Cabot asked.

Her
eyebrows lowered over those lovely hazel eyes of hers, clearly revealing she
hadn't.

"Charlotte,
the boy can't spit out a single word. Dear one, he simply cannot talk. How you
can be so blind to a person's faults, I just don't know."

"Better
to be blind to their faults than to their virtues," Ash said softly,
enjoying the bewilderment on Charlotte's face as she tried to see that poor
beaten child as anything less than perfect.

"This
from a man with more faults than virtues, of course," Cabot said,
examining his fingernails as if the secrets of the universe were hidden there.

"I
want to help him," Charlotte said, ignoring the bitter words he and Cabot
were exchanging.

Cabot's
sigh of resignation was more eloquent than anything he could have said. As a
final touch he added, "You want to help everyone."

She
reached her hand out across the desk, palm up, as if she wanted Cabot to put
his into it. "Is that so bad?"

Cabot
put his hands up as if he didn't think he knew the answer, which was as close
to a joke as Cabot came, since everyone knew that he had all the answers.
"You can't help
everyone,"
he said matter-of-factly.

"You're
right, of course," she said, pulling her hand back into her lap.
"I'll only help the ones that come to me."

And
then she got up, turned on her heel, and, without so much as a look over her
shoulder, left the room. It was hard not to applaud at her exit.

Ash
heard her voice in the hall, along with his mother's and the boy's hesitant
attempts, and turned toward his older brother.

"You're
one cold son of a bitch."

"Circumstances
make a man what he is," he said. "And as Haliburton said,
circumstances
alter cases."

"Yeah,
yeah. And Pope said that
circumstance is not the thing.
Somebody's said
something wise about everything, but words don't change the facts."

"No,
they don't." Cabot rubbed his thighs with the heels of his hands.
"Some things can never be changed."

"Never
is a long time," Ash said, wondering if Cabot never took his wife's hand
when she offered it, never invited her into his room, never said her hair was
pretty or her
smile
could light a man's way home in the dark.

"Never
is forever," Cabot agreed, balling his fist and hitting his thigh soundly
so that the dull thud filled the room.

***

"How
are you feeling?" Charlotte asked Davis, whose bruises were receding to
reveal a tight jaw and narrowed eyes. "Better?"

He
stared at her, sullen.

Well,
any child whose father beat him, and on a habitual basis, was bound to be
downcast. She'd just have to try a little harder to win him over.

"Have
you seen a rabbit this morning?" she asked.

The
boy raised one eyebrow. "In the d-d-din..."

"...
the dining room," she finished for him. So he'd seen Van Gogh's attempt to
steal breakfast and her quick outmaneuvering of the rabbit. And if she read his
eyes right, he heartily disapproved of her handling of the matter. "Much
as I wish we could, we really can't let a rabbit, however adorable, have the
run of the house, now, can we?"

The
boy waited while she floundered around for an acceptable reason a grown woman
would hide the existence of a small bunny.

"Mr.
Whittier prefers that our pets..." What did Cabot prefer? That she have no
pets beyond the showy ones their neighbors could see, like Argus? What was it
he had said when she'd brought Griffin along with her meager belongings
following their wedding and the dear cat had jumped up into what it had
mistaken for Cabot's waiting lap?
That I have to abide the ease with which
two-legged creatures scurry about me while I sit confined is difficult enough,
Charlotte. To watch the four-legged, lesser forms of life perform feats I
cannot even aspire to is degrading. And beneath you to suggest.
The cat was
banished to the outdoors. Where Argus, the ingrate, poked his right eye out.
The poor cat had spent the rest of his life in a dark cellar waiting for
Charlotte's visits, which never lasted long enough.

"Mr.
Whittier doesn't like animals," she admitted, "so I pretend we don't
have any."

The
boy began to say something and then thought better of it. Instead he simply
pointed to himself and raised an eyebrow as if to ask if they would pretend he
wasn't there either.