Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil Love and Hope Read online

  “Oh, but I do!” Darci said fiercely. “You see—” she began, but then she broke off and caught her lower lip between her teeth. Her mother was constantly warning her not to tell everybody everything there was to know about her. “Leave some mystery,” her mother said. If there was ever such a time, Darci was sure that now was the time to leave a bit of mystery. And maybe it wouldn’t hurt to add a little “imagination.”“Putnam won’t inherit for years, so we have to make it on our own. I came here to New York to earn as much as I can so I can return to my beloved home and marry the man I love.” She said all this in one breath, while behind her back, the fingers on her right hand were crossed.

  For a while the man looked at her hard, and she stared back at him just as hard. As for the woman, she had neither spoken nor even blinked as far as Darci could tell.

  “If you’re in love with a man, you won’t be able to travel. And if you have relatives here in New York, you’d miss them if you were away for weeks at a time.”

  “No, I wouldn’t!” Darci said too quickly. But she didn’t want the man to think that she was an ungrateful person, certainly not after all her aunt and uncle had done for her. “They, uh . . .” she began.”They have their own lives, and as much as I love them, I think they’d do quite well without me. And my mother has....”What could she say? That her mother had a new boyfriend twelve years her junior and she probably wouldn’t notice if Darci fell into a hole? “My mother also has her own life. Clubs, charities, that sort of thing.” Could Putnam’s Spuds and Suds be considered a “club”?

  “And your young man?”

  She had to think for a moment to know whom he meant. “Oh. Putnam. Well, he has lots of interests, and he, uh....He wants me to have a whole year of—” She almost said “freedom,” which would have been close to the truth. “He wants me to have a year to myself before we begin on our lifelong journey of love together.”

  Darci thought this last was a rather nice turn of phrase, but she noticed there was a teeny tiny curl of the man’s upper lip that made him look as though he were going to be ill. She wasn’t sure what she was doing wrong, but she knew that she was blowing this interview. She took a deep breath. “I really do need this job,” she said softly. “And I’ll work very hard for you.” She knew that her voice was pleading, almost begging, but she couldn’t help herself.

  The man turned to the woman who was sitting slightly behind him. “Do you have what you need?” he asked, and the woman gave a tiny nod. As the man turned back to Darci, he picked up her application and put it on top of a pile of others. “All right, Miss, uh—”

  “Monroe,” Darci said. “No relation.” When the man looked blank, she said, “To the other one.”

  “Oh, I see,” he said. “The actress.” He didn’t pretend to think the joke was funny but kept his solemn expression. “As you have seen, we have many applicants, so if we’d like to interview you again, we’ll call you. You wrote your telephone number on here?”

  “Oh, yes, but don’t call between eight and ten. That’s when my uncle Vern watches TV, and he. . . .” Her voice trailed off. Slowly, she stood up, then paused as she looked at the man. “I do need this job,” she said again.

  “So do they all, Miss Monroe,” the man said, then looked back at the older woman, and Darci knew that she’d been dismissed.

  It took all her willpower to keep her shoulders erect as she left the office and looked into the hopeful eyes of the women sitting in the little waiting room. Like all the others she’d seen leave the office, she shrugged in answer to their silent inquiries. She had no idea how she’d done in the interview. Once she was on the street again, she opened her handbag and checked her wallet. How much food could she get for seventy-five cents? Sometimes the greengrocers would charge her very little for bruised bananas that they couldn’t sell.

  With her head up, her shoulders back, Darci started walking. Maybe she was going to get the job. Why not? She had all the qualifications, didn’t she? They wanted someone who had few skills, and that certainly fit her. The spring returned to her step, and, smiling, she began to walk faster, occupying her mind with planning what she’d say when the man called and told her she had the job. “That’s how I’ll act: gracious,” she said aloud. “Gracious and surprised.” Smiling more broadly, she picked up her step. She needed to get home so she could apply her True Persuasion to this problem.

  Adam signaled to the woman at the door to hold the applicants for a while. He needed to stretch and to move around. Walking to the windows, he clasped his hands behind his back. “This isn’t working,” he said to the woman behind him. “We haven’t found one woman who’s even close to being right. What do I have to do, canvass the elementary schools?”

  “The last one was lying,” the woman behind him said softly.

  Adam turned to look at her. “That one? The little Kentucky hillbilly? Poor thing. That suit she had on looked as though it’d been washed in a creek. And, besides, she has a boyfriend, a rich one. Is that what she was lying about? Those factories she says his family owns? He probably has a twenty-year-old pickup with a gun rack in the back.”

  “She was lying about everything,” the woman said, staring up at Adam.

  He started to speak, but he’d learned long ago that Helen used her mind and abhorred normal human ways of communication—which meant that she hated to talk. Many times she’d said to him, “I told you that.” Afterward, he’d racked his brain until he’d finally remembered that she had indeed said one short sentence that had told him everything.

  But now Helen had repeated this one sentence, so he knew it was very important. Tired as he was, he nearly leaped across the room to grab the girl’s application off the top of the stack and handed it to the woman. Staring into space, she took the paper and ran her hands over it, not reading it, just touching it. After a while, she smiled; then the smile grew broader.

  She looked up at Adam. “She’s lying about everything there is to lie about,” she said happily.

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend, no aunt and uncle? Doesn’t need the job? Exactly what is she lying about?”

  Helen waved her hand in dismissal, as these questions weren’t important to her. “She’s not what she seems, not what she thinks she is, not what you see her as.”

  Adam had to work to keep his mouth shut. He hated the convoluted, cryptic talk of clairvoyants. Why couldn’t the woman just say what she meant?

  Helen, as always, read Adam’s thoughts, and, as always, they amused her. What she liked about him was that he wasn’t in awe of her abilities. Most people were terrified that clairvoyants could read their innermost secrets, but Adam was trying to find out his own secrets and those of others, so she held no fear for him.

  “You want to tell me what you’re really saying?” he asked, glaring down at her.

  “She’s the one.”

  “That undernourished waif ? The Mansfield girl?”

  Puzzled, Helen glanced down at the paper. “‘Darci T. Monroe,’ it says. Not ‘Mansfield.’ “

  “It was a joke,” Adam said, knowing he’d not be able to explain. Helen could tell you what your dead grandfather was doing at any given moment, but he doubted if she’d ever watched a TV show or movie in her life.

  Taking the application from Helen, he looked at it, trying to recall all that he could about the tiny girl who’d sat before him just minutes ago. Since he’d seen hundreds of women today, they were all blending together in his mind.

  Small, delicate, with an air of poverty hanging about her. But, still, she was a pretty little thing, like some tiny bird. A goldfinch, he thought, remembering her blonde hair that hung limply about the shoulders of her cheap suit. She’d had on sandals, no stockings, and he remembered thinking that she had feet the size of a child’s.

  “I’m not sure—” he began as he looked up at Helen. But she had “that” look on her face, the one that meant that she was in a semitrance as she looked deep into something. “All right,” he s