Eyes of a Child (81 page)

Richie waited anxiously. ‘That's not the good stuff,' he said.

In that moment, Paget wondered if it was possible to hate another man this much. He did not look up, kept reading at his own pace. Richie's silence was like a caught breath.

Paget reached the final entry. When he stopped abruptly, staring at the page, he could feel Richie's eyes.

Paget finished the entry and then read the words again, trying to distance himself from their impact.

‘Well?' Richie said.

Slowly, Paget looked up at him. ‘How did you get this?'

‘I copied a set of Terri's keys.' Richie's voice held no apology. ‘So what do you think?'

‘Of you?'

Richie's eyes glinted. ‘It's not too good for
her
, do you think? Makes you wonder what kind of mother she'd make.' His smile held a certain pleasure. ‘If
I
were still sleeping with her, I'd sleep with one eye open. Although I
did
teach her how to give good head.'

Paget placed the diary back in Richie's hand. Softly, he said, ‘She was fourteen.'

Richie's smile faded. ‘A hundred thousand dollars,' he said. ‘Cash.'

Paget did not trust himself to speak.

Richie seemed to misread this. ‘If she's not worth it to you, maybe we can negotiate some sort of global arrangement. Covering all our outstanding issues.'

Paget stopped to consider just how he would respond. Knees bracing, he felt himself relax.

‘Your choice,' Richie said. ‘Maybe we –'

With all the force he had, Paget swung.

His fist crashed into Richie's face.

The shock ran through Paget's arm. Richie clasped both hands to his face, moaning, and fell half-sitting on the rug.

Gazing down at him, Paget felt his right hand throbbing. Softly, he said, ‘Carlo.'

Richie's hand still covered his face. Between his fingers, Paget saw a trickle of blood.

The diary lay at Paget's feet. He kicked it toward Richie. ‘Hand that up to me.'

Slowly, Richie looked up. His nose was swollen and bloody. ‘Pick it up,' Paget repeated.

Staring at Paget, Richie looked dazed and nauseated. He bent forward, crawling mutely to the diary, then he thrust it toward Paget.

As he took the diary, Paget sent the back of his hand cracking across Richie's face.

With a short cry, Richie fell sideways, one arm upraised to protect himself. Paget flinched at the pain in his hand. It felt tender, perhaps broken; blood from Richie's nose speckled the arm of his suit coat.

‘I suppose I should stop,' Paget said softly. ‘I'm getting you all over me.'

Richie's eyes had begun to water. Only now, remembering, did Paget seem to recall turning from him and then, as he walked toward the door, facing Richie again, resting his damaged hand on the answering machine on top of Richie's desk.

There had been something more to say.

‘If I let you do this,' Paget told him, ‘you'd be in our lives forever. So you may wonder what I'll do to
you
if you ever try to use this diary, or to ruin my son's life, or Terri's. The truth is, I have no idea. Because, whatever it is, it will be something I've never considered doing to anyone.'

Richie stared up at him, balanced on his hands and knees. Only his eyes moved.

‘I'll let myself out,' Paget said. ‘You just stay there. From all that I can gather, it really
is
your best position.'

Turning, he opened the door and left.

Terri studied his face.

‘Why were you there?' she finally asked.

He shrugged. ‘To talk to him, just as
you
wanted to. Perhaps to see whether we could make some end to this. It was foolish, of course.'

Terri shook her head. ‘No more lies, Chris. This isn't the night for it.'

Paget did not answer.

She clutched the front of his sweater; as she did, it struck her that she had done this to Rosa. ‘I just found out that my mother is a murderer and that my husband molested our daughter. So don't bullshit me about whatever
this
is.' She stared into his face. ‘You thought you knew why she killed him. But you didn't know about Elena.'

Chris's gaze was steady. But the look he gave her was one she had seen before, on the night she had lost Elena. More softly, she said, ‘I want her to hear
everything.
Just like you did.'

For a long time, Chris simply looked at her. When he spoke again, his voice was flat. ‘He tried to sell me information.'

She nodded. ‘Some sort of journal – the one Georgina Keller saw.'

‘Yes.'

‘What did you do with it?'

For the first time, Chris turned from her. He stared into the fireplace, darkened now, and then walked to the mantel. ‘It's here.'

‘Where? The police turned the house inside out.'

‘Not quite.' Chris knelt, pushing the brick backing of the fireplace; a line of bricks turned sideways, exposing a square compartment. ‘The man who built this place was paranoid,' he said quietly. ‘And the cop who searched it very young. I managed to distract him.'

Terri felt herself tense. ‘Why?'

Reaching into the square, Paget withdrew a journal. He stood holding it in both hands, as if still deciding what to do. And then, hesitantly, he gave the journal to Terri.

She walked to the sofa, sitting beneath the light. Chris stayed by the fire.

Terri opened the journal. The handwriting was her mother's. The first entry was dated shortly after Tern's birth.

‘Last night,' her mother had written, ‘Ramon beat me until my cries awakened Teresa.

‘It seemed to stop him. When he let me go, I went to the bathroom to clean my face, and then tried to comfort Teresa. After a time, she stopped fussing.

‘It was dark, and she is only an infant. She could not see me.'

Tears stung Tern's eyes. Suddenly she wanted to reach across the years, to the woman Rosa had been. To the nineteen-year-old girl who had written this.

Terri turned the page, and then the next. She felt Chris only in his silence.

Day by day, for fourteen years, her mother recorded what Ramon Peralta had done to her.

The words were flat, emotionless. But it was only here, Terri realized, that Rosa could tell her story. There had been no one else to tell it to.

Some of the entries stirred Terri's memory. Most did not. Only rarely did her mother's words raise a sudden image, vivid as a welt. When Terri reached that night in the living room, Ramon beating her mother, she set the book aside.

How could she have lived? Terri wondered bleakly. But part of her knew the answer: She lived for
us.
She lived for
me
.

Chris came toward her.
‘No,'
Terri said. ‘Let me finish.'

He stayed there. She resumed reading the march of words, one after another, as relentless as Ramon Peralta's hands and fists.

Before she reached it, Terri knew that date of the final entry.

She felt a tremor running through her. She breathed in once, and then out again. But when she began reading, she heard her own soft cry.

‘I cannot be certain,' her mother had written, ‘that the shadow was Teresa. Or, if it was, what she chooses to remember.'

There was someone in the house. Half asleep, Terri could hear this, a whisper in the silence. Just as she knew that the sound was not made by her sisters, too frightened of the dark and of her father.

Perhaps it was Ramon Peralta, returning filled with whiskey and the poison of his own rage. But Terri knew his sounds – the stumbling irregular footsteps, the shallow breathing as he climbed the stairs.
This
sound was like a parting of a curtain, the footsteps of a cat.

Perhaps it was a dream. But the crawl of fear across her skin drew her into the hallway, to seek her mother. Or, pehaps, to know that Rosa was safe.

Her parents' door was ajar. Her mother was not there.

Terri was frightened now. Part of her wished to believe this a dream, to return to her bed, where dreams belonged. It
felt
like a dream: an empty house, sounds she did not know. And then, again, the whisper.

She would not abandon her mother, Terri decided. Not after all that she had seen. She must know that Rosa was safe.

Slowly, feeling her way along the wall, Terri crept down the stairs. As if in a dream, her feet made no sound.

The living room was empty.

Terri stood there, listening. Felt, rather than heard, someone else.

A creak, somehow familiar.

It made Terri shiver, even before she could place it. And then, gazing into the dining room, she saw something. A difference in the quality of the darkness.

It was the back door to the kitchen. That would be the creak; the door opening, to admit light.

Terri stood there, afraid to move forward, yet fearing to return upstairs. And then, remembering Rosa, she crept through the dining room.

Her goal was merely to reach the alcove between the dining room and the kitchen. To peer around the corner, at her fears.

Softly, she skirted the dining table, so that she could not be seen. Then crept along the wall. Until, heart racing, she reached the alcove and gazed into the kitchen.

A crack of light. A shadow, standing in the doorway.

The shadow faced the porch. But Terri knew it, slim and still. And then her mother turned a fraction, and the porch light caught her face.

She was staring down, through the doorway. Terri followed her gaze.

Ramon Peralta stared up at her. There was a trickle of blood on his face; his eyes were stunned, beseeching, like an animal's. ‘Please,' she saw him whisper. Less with his lips than his eyes.

Silent, Rosa gazed down at him. Terri saw the blood beneath his head now, black in the half-light.

Rosa seemed to consider him. Then she straightened, closing the screen door. A whisper.

The latch clicked shut. In the light, Terri saw her father's hand, clawing at the door. His nails scraped the screen.

The image froze there: her father's hand, her mother staring through the wire. And then, it seemed quite calmly, Rosa Peralta switched off the light.

Terri felt herself gasp.

The shadow spun, facing the darkness where Terri stood. It was less movement than sound; without light, Terri could hardly see.

With blackness between them, Terri and her mother faced each other. Terri could not be sure if Rosa saw her; without the light, her mother's shadow was a lingering image on the retina, vanishing quickly.

There had been something in her mother's hand.

Terri was still.
Go,
she imagined her mother saying. I'm giving you time now. Go back to your room, and dream.

It was a dream, Terri told herself. A dream.

She turned without speaking and tiptoed across the dining room. There was no sound behind her. And then, reaching the foot of the stairs, she heard the wooden door of the kitchen softly shut.

As if walking in her sleep, Terri climbed the stairs. A dream, she told herself. A dream, made vivid by her own desires, the ones she could not confess.

‘I'm sorry,' Chris murmured. ‘I'm so sorry.'

As he reached for her, Terri crumpled.

She sobbed against him uncontrollably, her body shuddering. Cried as Christopher Paget held her – cried for Elena and for Rosa, for Carlo and Chris and all the things that had come between them. And for herself, the child Teresa.

‘It's all right,' Chris kept saying. ‘In time, everything will be better.'

In her grief, she did not know how. But she clung to this, even as she wept for all that she had never forgotten, as fiercely as she had wished to forget, and paid for her wish in dreams.

Somewhere, in the minutes of the night, Terri found herself again. At least she could look at Chris, and speak to him. Tomorrow she might start to face the rest.

‘Why did you do all this?' she asked.

He smiled a little. ‘Because I'm foolish, as I said. But that's not for tonight.'

Terri nodded; whatever it was, she did not believe she could comprehend it. She felt unspeakably tired.

In her lap, where it had fallen, was her mother's diary. ‘What shall
I
do with this?' she murmured.

Chris's eyes narrowed. ‘Take it to your mother,' he said. ‘Tell her it's a gift from me.' There was a certain tone in his voice, the absence of mercy. And then Terri remembered Carlo.

‘Carlo needs to know,' she said. ‘About Richie, and about Elena.'

Chris nodded. ‘I meant to tell him.'

Terri sat straighter. ‘We both should.' She paused, adding quietly, ‘If that's all right with you.'

He did not answer. But when he climbed the stairs to Carlo's room, Terri was at his side.

The Family

Chapter
1

It was over a year before Chris and Terri returned to Italy, and when they did, it was not to Venice but to the hill town of Montalcino.

Terri did not know why she was relieved that the church on the hillside was as before: little about Montalcino had changed in centuries. But that the church matched her memories pleased her deeply. So many of her memories, retrieved from the darkness of her childhood, had been difficult.

They took in the view together, quiet. The spring morning was fresh and still; the trees surrounding the white stone church were in the first vigor of renewal, and the valleys beyond were verdant, rising and falling in the green undulations until, miles away, the last ridge met the sky.