Echoes in the Walls Read online

  Now, Samantha said, “I’m not lying. He knew who I was. I just came from Ryder’s room.” She was determined to get one up on me. “I was going to bring his breakfast tray down.”

  “Sure you were,” I said. “You don’t even pick up after yourself in your own room. One of the maids told my mother that when she cleaned your room last week, she found a plate with some cookies on it under your bed, where you probably kicked it a week ago. There were ants or roaches or something crawling everywhere.”

  “There were not!” she cried, grimacing. She thought a moment and then, stamping her foot, added, “I want a new bed now.”

  That made me laugh. “The doctor bought you all new furniture two months ago because you said your furniture was too babyish.”

  “It was. I was embarrassed to invite anyone over.”

  She looked around my room, never sure if she should be jealous or not. Everything in it was as it had been here for decades, except for the mattress, which had been replaced just before I was moved back to the main house. I had no complaints. The classic old set was a dark oak Churchill five-piece poster bedroom set that Dr. Davenport’s mother had bought. It was a valuable antique now. The furniture in most of the mansion’s seventeen bedrooms hardly had been used. Overnight guests were never frequent. Compared with the much smaller spartan bedroom I had in the help’s quarters, my room looked as if it had been created for a princess, at least to me.

  Whenever I told Samantha that, she gazed around, wondering what she was missing, what I had that she didn’t. Surely, there was something. She thought that way because she took everything she had for granted and always thought she was a princess.

  “We’ll see what happens when I tell my father about the bugs,” Samantha said. “Emma should have told me about the creepy-crawlers.”

  “I’ve told you many times, Samantha. You call her my mother or you call her Ms. Corey. It’s not respectful for you to call her Emma.”

  She shrugged. “She never complains when I do.” She ran her finger over the bottom right post on my bed and then looked at the tip of it as if she expected to see dust. “Some of my friends think it’s funny that my half sister’s mother is my maid.”

  “She’s far more than your maid, Samantha. Most of your life, she’s been more of your mother than your own self-centered real mother. That’s what you should tell your snobby friends, and if I ever hear them say something like that . . .”

  “You won’t, you won’t. Don’t have heart failure,” she said quickly.

  Her expression of fear changed quickly to a sly smile. I never liked it, because whenever she had that expression on her face, I was reminded of Bea pouncing on me for one thing or another. It was gleeful and full of “wicked sauce,” as Mrs. Marlene might say.

  “I have a secret,” she said, “but you have to swear not to tell your mother or my father.”

  “People who swear to things like that usually get themselves into trouble,” I replied, and looked at my magazine to turn a page. Samantha had no tolerance for being ignored. I knew she was fuming, with bees buzzing madly in her stomach.

  “You’ll get Ryder in trouble, too,” she warned.

  There wasn’t anything better she could say to get my interest.

  “Why?”

  “I have to be sure you don’t tell. I don’t want to get into trouble.” She focused her eyes sharply on me. It was like playing poker. Who would give in first?

  “Why should you?”

  She looked away, thinking.

  I held my cards.

  “I did a sneaky thing,” she confessed.

  “Did it hurt someone?”

  “No,” she said.

  I shrugged. “So there’s probably nothing to tell anyone.”

  I looked down again, but I wasn’t reading anything. I was waiting.

  “When everyone’s downstairs, I peek in on Ryder sometimes.”

  “What does ‘peek in’ mean?”

  “I open his door a little more so I can see him. He doesn’t know I’m there. I’m very good at it,” she added, as if that really was an accomplishment.

  “And? So what?”

  “I saw him doing things.”

  Now I was holding my breath. The little demon, I thought. “What sort of things?”

  “He was completely undressed, and he was fondling himself. He did it until something happened,” she added. “You know what I mean,” she said with her licentious little smile.

  I felt like I had been slapped sharply across my face.

  “That’s disgusting!” I screamed, and threw the magazine at her. “Spying like that on your own brother who can’t help himself. It’s the most horrible thing I’ve heard. If you ever do that again . . .”

  “I won’t,” she moaned, and started to back away, really frightened of me.

  I stood up and took a step toward her. I did feel like pummeling her. “If I even smell that you’ve told one of your nympho friends any of that, I’ll break your neck and dump your body in the lake at night, and no one will know,” I said in my most threatening tone. I had my mother’s violet eyes, and I could look forbidding whenever I had to.

  Samantha paled as if she was seconds away from fainting. Backing up faster and close to tears, she said, “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Why would I want to know that?”

  “Because when he was doing it, he had that picture of you in the silver frame in his other hand,” she said.

  Then she turned and ran out of my room.

  I thought she had taken all the air out with her.

  2

  BEFORE THE REVELATIONS, mainly because Ryder had wanted me to, I went on a double date to the school prom with him and Alison Reuben, his girlfriend at the time. She was one of the prettiest girls in school, if not the prettiest. I envied her for many reasons, not the least of which was that she was Ryder’s girlfriend. He had arranged for me to be Paul Gabriel’s date, also a senior and one of our school’s baseball stars. Paul was gangly and socially awkward, but I did it to please Ryder. I was only in ninth grade, yet at the end of the prom, I was chosen prom queen, and Ryder was chosen prom king.

  Afterward, we had gone to a house party where drugs were being freely used. Ryder, Alison, and I left when Paul got out of hand and forced himself on me, trying to get me to make love to him. My screams brought Ryder to the door of the bedroom we were supposedly using to take a rest from the bedlam in the basement below. Ryder then rushed Alison and me out of the house and home. Unfortunately, Paul overdosed on Ecstasy later that night, and Dr. Davenport, as well as the police and most of the community, found out everything. Paul was saved at the hospital, but he was expelled from school, along with some other students, because of the no-tolerance drug policy. The administration had taken the position that the prom and the after-party were all school-related.

  Ironically, the subsequent events, especially Bea’s outrage and Dr. Davenport’s disappointment in us, drove Ryder and me to become even closer. Since we didn’t do drugs, we felt we were being unfairly blamed. At the time, neither of us knew the truth about my lineage yet, so our romance began without any real hesitation. Bea was already on the warpath, making me persona non grata. Because my date was involved with the drugs, she blamed me for damaging her precious reputation. We thought it was solely because of her that Dr. Davenport asked Ryder to “cool it” when it came to socializing with me until things calmed down. Of course, I was soon to learn the real reason he wanted Ryder to do this.

  Nevertheless, we were both being somewhat defiant by secretly meeting in my room late at night and eventually going for that row on the lake, which was supposed to be romantic. After the disaster, when both my mother and Dr. Davenport realized what had begun between us, I finally learned the truth about my birth. My mother confessed first, and then Dr. Davenport came to see me to explain how it had all happened. Both claimed that they weren’t really lovers in the traditional sense. Dr. Davenport was in great emotional and
mental pain after his young wife’s accident. He sought comfort, and what happened between him and my mother was unintended. Regardless of their explanations, Ryder’s injuries and my realization that we could never be the lovers we thought we would be were devastating facts. It was an avalanche of injustice.

  But because of Ryder’s condition and my concerns about him, I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself. How could I complain that one of the many secrets in Wyndemere had blindsided me? Ryder’s near drowning and the side effects were so much more tragic.

  Subsequent events occurred with lightning speed. After Dr. Davenport had moved us back into the main house, I had new status as his daughter, and Bea eventually turned her shock into rage and her rage into vengeance in the form of a bitter divorce. Even though she had given up full custody of Samantha, she left with more than half of the Davenport fortune. Nevertheless, after the turmoil had ended, when I looked at Dr. Davenport, I thought I read his relief. He acted as if the results of the divorce had been a bargain. None of the servants, especially my mother, was upset about Bea’s departure. That was for sure.

  Mrs. Marlene said, “She was forgotten as quickly as a soap bubble.”

  Maybe for everyone else it was easy to forget her, but it was not so easy for me. For too many years, I’d had to tiptoe through the shadows in Wyndemere. Bea’s condemning brown eyes haunted me in dreams, in which her dark brown hair was always witchy black, streaking down her face and neck like ink. She was tall, almost as tall as my father, with thin, hard features. When she did smile, it looked like it was made of porcelain and it would shatter any moment and the shards would fly off at me. For quite a while after my mother and I had moved back to our bedrooms in the main house, I walked timidly up and down the stairs. If I heard a door slam or someone talking, I immediately froze, anticipating Bea pouncing on me and demanding to know how I dared show my face in these “royal palace rooms.”

  Although Dr. Davenport had come to me to confess and explain, and although he had swept away any pretense and welcomed—in fact, insisted on—acknowledging me as a real part of the Davenport family, to me he was still an intimidating and somewhat aloof figure. Perhaps I was unfair to judge him so harshly. His only son, a bright and handsome young man, had been significantly diminished and nearly completely lost.

  Even without Ryder’s serious injury and the guilt Dr. Davenport felt, it would have been difficult for him to suddenly become as warm and loving as a father should be with his newly recognized daughter. In so many ways, we had been strangers for most of my life. I was sure he was trying in his own way, but now those dark shadows that were always so comfortable sliding along the walls of Wyndemere were even bolder. The secrets that were whispering behind and around us most of my life hardly retreated. Confessions and revelations didn’t send them rushing back to the dark corners. I easily imagined that empty rooms still echoed with the cries of past tragedies, like the death of Dr. Davenport’s little sister, Holly, and his first wife’s fatal accident. Sometimes I wondered if we hadn’t been better off when my mother and I were relegated to the help’s quarters on the other side of a short, dark hallway and stuffed away like some afterthought.

  Mrs. Marlene, probably intending to cheer me up once I had mentioned some of this, told me that no one’s life is a road of continuous happiness, rich or not. “Being alive means you will suffer; you will be frightened and sad. There are weddings, but there are funerals, too. That’s the only promise you’re given the day you are born. Endurance,” she said while rolling the dough for her famous homemade bread, “fortitude, and perseverance, thank heaven for that.”

  I cherished her words, but they didn’t really comfort me, especially on the day Dr. Davenport finally brought Ryder home. He had gone from the hospital to a clinic for therapy for over ten weeks. It was finally decided that he was ready to come home. I hadn’t seen him at all that whole time. I wasn’t sure if that was because of what the therapist wanted or what my father preferred. He brought us periodic reports, but there was nothing in any of them to predict or confirm a miraculous recovery, and I was afraid to pursue him too aggressively with more questions. I didn’t want him to think that despite the Revelations, I still had romantic intentions and that I hoped when Ryder regained his memory, he would still be in love with me.

  Finally, just before we had our dinner one night, Dr. Davenport asked Samantha and me to join him in the living room. I looked at my mother, who nodded slightly. Her eyes told me that something significant was about to happen.

  Samantha and I sat together on one of the settees. My mother stood to the right side of us, and Dr. Davenport sat across from us. Seeing him with his perfect posture and his regal air always impressed me. My father was an important man and, despite the Revelations, was highly respected. He did loom in the community as the man who held life and death between his skilled fingers.

  “As you two know,” he began, “Ryder has been undergoing intense therapy at the Seymour Clinic. Dr. Seymour himself has been Ryder’s therapist. When someone suffers what Ryder has suffered, he feels like he’s living in a thick fog. Faces and voices might sound familiar, but placing names with them could be difficult, even the names of your closest relatives. What’s particularly hard is recalling the recent events, especially the ones that put you in this condition.”

  “You mean he doesn’t even remember almost drowning?” Samantha asked.

  “No, he doesn’t. And that’s why I wanted to speak with the two of you tonight. We’re bringing him home tomorrow.”

  “Oh, good,” Samantha said. “About time,” she added, with her mother’s sour grimace, as if Ryder’s absence was his fault.

  “Dr. Seymour feels Ryder is ready to reconnect with Wyndemere, and our hope is he will have a quick recovery once he is here,” my father said, ignoring her.

  “I’ll help,” Samantha said. “I’ll tell him about everything he’s missed and . . .”

  “You’ll listen to me first before you do anything or say anything,” Dr. Davenport said sharply. He never had to raise his voice to command respect and obedience. His words were like darts. Samantha sat back, pouting as usual. “We’re to follow Dr. Seymour’s orders. He does not want you to bring up the accident. What you, we, don’t want to do is cause him to feel even more lost. We don’t want those memories thrust upon him. He’ll remember them in his own way, in his own time. We won’t blurt things out. Understood?”

  “Yes,” I said. Even though he was looking at Samantha, I knew he was saying that mainly for me.

  “Good. We’ll take everything very slowly. He’s still under medication. No matter what he does or says, you don’t want him to feel incompetent.”

  “What is that, exactly?” Samantha asked.

  “Inadequate, inferior, helpless, stupid,” he rattled off, visibly irritated. “Especially if he appears not to know something obvious about the house, about us. Do you understand, or do I have to explain it further?”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” Samantha said.

  “Okay. We’ll be limiting his contact with people who aren’t part of our regular household for a while obviously. Do not bring any of your friends here to see him,” he told Samantha clearly. “In fact, until further notice, do not invite anyone here for any reason without my explicit permission.”

  “That’s not fair,” she moaned. “My friends like to come here. They think it’s a big deal to come to Wyndemere. I’ll lose them as friends. Not fair,” she repeated.

  “What’s happened to Ryder isn’t fair, either,” my mother told her. “And if the only reason they’re your friends is to get inside this house to brag about it, they’re not very good friends anyway.”

  Samantha held her grimace for a while and then folded her arms and returned to her usual pout.

  “Unless you’re asked specifically to do something for him, do not do anything without permission,” our father continued.

  “Anything?” Samantha asked.

  “Anything,” our fath
er emphasized. He looked at me. “Until he makes some progress, don’t pressure him to realize what his place is in this house. Let him grow to know you in his own way.”

  “You mean, he doesn’t remember who I am?” Samantha asked.

  “Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t. Don’t pressure him to remember, and don’t make him feel bad about forgetting.”

  “How can he not remember me?” she insisted. “I’m his real sister,” she added. That was something she was fond of saying, especially when I was present. The truth was we were equally his half sisters.

  “He’ll remember you completely in due time, remember you the way you were before his accident. Dr. Seymour is confident of that.”

  “Then he won’t know Fern’s his half sister, either,” Samantha said gleefully. “He’ll think she’s just our maid’s daughter.”

  “My mother is not your maid,” I snapped.

  “Fern,” my mother said, closing her eyes softly and opening them again.

  “He’ll know everything he has to know in due time,” my father said.

  I had no doubt in my heart what that meant, the meaning between the lines. He wanted him eventually to know me only as his half sister.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s hope for the best and do all we can to make him comfortable.”

  Samantha bitched to me afterward. Her main complaint continued to be about being restricted in inviting friends. I told her that her middle name should have been Selfish. She was already learning how to rationalize.

  “It’s selfish not to let poorer girls see Wyndemere. When you’re as rich as we are, it’s your obligation to be generous, like a queen or something.”

  “Spoken like your mother’s true daughter,” I replied. “You’re no princess, Samantha.”

  Wasted breath, I thought. Whatever I said was water off a duck’s back.

  But who wanted to spend time on that now that Ryder was coming home? Despite how he had sounded, secretly in his heart, even with all his medical knowledge, I believed my father still hoped for something like a miracle the next day the moment Ryder stepped through the main entrance and gazed at what should have been familiar, something he had seen every day, every time he came home his whole life: the open staircase, molded cornices, and red marble fireplace. The hope was that somewhere in Ryder’s mind, those electric impulses would awaken the sleeping brain cells and rekindle his memories. It would be the beginning of a real homecoming. With every step he took toward the stairway and his room, he would draw closer and closer to who he was. All would be well again.