Dark Places In the Heart Read online

  Novels by Jill Barnett

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  SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

  DARK PLACES IN THE HEART

  IN A GOLDEN STATE

  MY SOMETHING WONDERFUL

  MY ONE AND ONLY

  WONDERFUL

  WILD

  WICKED

  BEWITCHING

  DREAMING

  IMAGINE

  CARRIED AWAY

  JUST A KISS AWAY

  THE HEART'S HAVEN

  A KNIGHT IN TARNISHED ARMOR

  SAVING GRACE

  DANIEL AND THE ANGEL

  ELEANOR'S HERO

  MY LUCKY PENNY

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  www.jillbarnettbooks.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

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  Jill Barnett Books

  Copyright © 2018 by Jill Barnett

  ISBN: 978-1-948053-57-0

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  A hardcover edition of this book was published 2006 by Atria Books. A mass market edition of this book was published by Pocket Star Books in 2006

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  www.jillbarnettbooks.com

  Cover design: Dar Albert

  Created with Vellum

  This writing life I’ve stumbled through has brought me

  an abundance of riches, the most valuable a

  friendship of twenty years.

  To Kristin and Benjamin Hannah, who have stood by

  my side and protected my back through all the wins and losses.

  Only the angels could have sent you.

  Life can only be understood backwards;

  but it must be lived forwards.

  —Søren Kierkegaard

  Part I

  1951

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  A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.

  —Simone Well

  1

  Southern California

  Warm and motionless nights were natural in LA, a place where so much of life was staged and the weather seldom competed for attention. There, events and people stood in the limelight. On most nights, somewhere in the city, searchlights panned the sky; tonight, in front of the La Cienega Art Gallery. All the art show regulars were there in force, names from the society pages, old money and new, along with enough existentialist poets and bohemians to fill every coffeehouse from Hollywood to Hermosa Beach.

  Well-known art critics chatted about perspective and meaning, debated social message. They adored the artist, a vibrant, exotic woman whose huge canvases had violent splashes of color charging across them, and wrote about her work in effusive terms as bold as the work itself, likening her to the abstract expressionists Pollock and de Kooning. Rachel Espinosa was the darling of the LA art scene, and Rudy Banning’s wife.

  Rudy came to the show late, after drinking all afternoon. His father was right: he was a sucker—something that was easier to swallow if he chased it with a bottle of scotch. The searchlights were off when he parked his car outside the gallery. Once inside, he leaned against the front door to steady himself.

  A milky haze of cigarette smoke hovered over the colorless sea of black berets, gray fedoras, and French twists. In one corner, a small band played an odd arrangement of calypso and jazz—Harry Belafonte meets Dave Brubeck. The booze flowed, cigarettes were stacked every few feet on tall silver stanchions, and the catering was Catalan—unusual—and done to propagate the lie that his wife, Rachel Maria-Teresa Antonia Espinosa, was pure Spanish aristocracy. This was her night, and her stamp was on the whole production.

  She stood near the back half of the room, under a canned light and in front of one of her largest and latest pieces, Ginsberg Howls. The crowd milled around her, but most managed to stay a few feet away, as if they were afraid to get too close to such an icon. A newspaper reporter for the Los Angeles Times interviewed her, while a staff photographer with rolled-up shirtsleeves circled around her, snapping photos with sharp, blinding flashes.

  Rachel turned on for the camera, striking a carefully choreographed pose Rudy had seen before: arm in the air, a martini glass with three cocktail onions in her hand. Tonight she wore bright orange. She knew her place in this room.

  Rudy helped himself to a drink from a cocktail tray carried by a passing waiter, then downed the whiskey before he was ten feet away from her. She didn’t see him a first, but turned with instinctive suddenness and looked right at him. What passed between them was merely a ghost of what had been—the days when one look across a room could evaporate everything around them. His wife’s expression softened, until he set his empty drink on a passing tray and grabbed another full me, then raised the glass mockingly and drank it as she watched him, her look so carefully controlled.

  “Darling!” Rachel said quickly, then turned to the reporter. “Excuse me.” She rushed forward, hands outstretched. “Rudy!” When he didn’t take her hands, she slid her arm through his and moved toward a corner. “You’re late.”

  “Really?” Rudy looked around. “What time was this charade supposed to start?”

  “You’re drunk. You reek of scotch.” She pulled him away from the crowd.

  “Are you trying to shove me off into a corner? I’m six foot four. A little hard to hide.” Rudy stopped bullishly and turned so she was facing the room. “You crave attention so much. Look. People are staring.”

  “Stop it!” Her voice was quiet and angry.

  “I know, Rachel.”

  “Of course you know. No one force-fed you half a bottle of scotch.” Her deep breath had a tired sound. "Do you have to ruin everything?”

  “You bitch!”

  Her fingers tightened around his arm. Murmurs came from those nearby, and people eased closer.

  “I know,” he said with emphasis. The music faded and the room quickly grew quiet. Rudy had the laughable thought that if it wasn’t a show before, it certainly was one now.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Apparently lying and persona were all that was left of the woman he’d married. Strange how confronting her felt nothing like he’d imagined. “You want me to shout it? Here? For everyone?” He waved his hand around. “For that reporter, darling?”His breath was shallow, like he’d been running miles. His vision blurred around the edges, and the taste of booze lodged in his throat. “I will shout it to the world. Damn you. Damn you, Rachel!”He threw his drink at the painting behind her, and the glass shattered in a perfectly silent room. He stumbled out the front door into the empty night air. At the curb, he used the car’s fin to steady himself then got inside.

  Rachel came running outside. “Rudy!”

  He jammed his key in the ignition.

  She pulled open the passenger door. “Stop! Wait!”

  “Go to hell.”

  She crawled inside and tried to grab the keys. “Don’t leave.”

  Rudy grabbed her wrist, pulled her across the seat until her face was inches from his. “Get out or I’ll drag you with the car.” He shoved her away and started the engine.

  “No!” She closed her door and reached for the keys again.

  His foot on the gas, the car raced down the street, straddling lanes as he struggled for control. Tires screeched behind them, but he didn’t give a damn.

  “Rudy, stop!” She sounde
d scared, so he turned the next corner faster. The car fishtailed and he floored it again. She hugged the door and seemed to shrink down into someone who actually looked human, instead of a goddess who painted intricate canvases and saw the world with a mind and eye unlike anyone else’s. Ahead, the stoplight turned red. He slammed on the brakes so hard she had to brace her hands on the dashboard.

  “You’re driving like a madman. Pull over and we can talk.”

  “There it is again, Rachel, that calm voice. Your reasonable tone, so arrogant, as if you are far above the rest of us mere mortals because you don’t feel anything.”

  “I feel. You should know. I feel too much. I know you’re upset. We’ll talk. Please.”

  “Upset doesn’t even come close to what I am. And it’s too fucking late to talk.” The light turned green and he floored it.

  “Rudy, stop! Please. Think of the boys,” she said frantically.

  “I am thinking of the boys. What about you? Can you ever think about anyone but you?” He took the next corner so quickly they faced oncoming traffic, honking horns, the sound of skidding tires. A truck swerved to avoid them. It took both of his hands to pull the careening car into his own lane. At the yellow signal, he lifted his foot off the gas to go for the brake, paused, then stomped on the accelerator. He could make it.

  “Don’t!” Rachel shouted. “It’s turning red!”

  “Yeah, it is.” He took his eyes off the road. “Scared, Rachel? Maybe now you’ll feel something.” Her whimpering sound made him feel strong. His father was wrong. He wasn’t a weak fool. Not anymore. The speedometer needle shimmied toward seventy. The gas pedal was on the floor. He could feel the power of the engine vibrate through the steering wheel right into his hands.

  “Oh, God!” Rachel grabbed his arm. “Look out!”

  A white station wagon pulled into the intersection.

  He stood on the brakes so hard he felt the seat back snap. The skid pulled at the steering wheel, and he could hear tires scream and smell the rubber burn. Blue lettering painted on the side of the station wagon grew huge before his eyes:

  Rock And Roll With Jimmy Peyton and The Fireflies

  The other driver looked at him in stunned horror, his passengers frantic. One of them had his hands pressed against the side window. A thought hit Rudy with a passive calmness: they were going to die. Rachel grabbed him, screaming. With a horrific bang, her scream faded into a moan. The dashboard came at him, the speedometer needle still shimmying, and everything exploded.

  2

  Seattle, Washington

  Three hours ago, a complete stranger had stood in the doorway of a downtown apartment and told Kathryn Peyton her husband was dead. The stranger, a local police detective, wanted to notify her before some reporter did, but the news flashed on the radio within minutes after she closed the front door.

  “Twenty-six-year-old singing star and entertainer Jimmy Peyton, whose fourth record went number one last week, died tragically tonight in a deadly car accident in Southern California.”

  Hearing the report on the radio made her husband’s death more real—how could this be happening?—and when Kathryn called Jimmy’s mother, she was told Julia Peyton was devastated and unavailable. So Kathryn dialed her sister in California and talked until nothing was left to say and staying on the phone was empty and painfully awkward.

  A few reporters called to question her. She hung up and unplugged the phone. Later came the knocks on the door, which hadn’t sounded as loud from her bedroom, and by midnight they’d left her alone. In her bedroom with the curtains drawn, it was easy to ignore the doorbell, to turn off the phone, to lie on their bed holding Jimmy’s pillow against her, holding on so tightly every muscle in her body hurt.

  The smell of his aftershave lingered on the pillowcase; it was on the sheets, and faintly recognizable on the oversized blue oxford shirt she wore. Sheer panic hit her when she realized she would have to wash the pillowcases and sheets; she would have to get rid of his shirt, all of his clothes, or turn into one of those strange old women who hoard the belongings of the one they’d lost and who kept rooms exactly as they had been—cobwebbed shrines to those taken at the very moment they were happiest. Now, alone in the dark, Kathryn cried until sleep was her only relief.

  The ringing of the bedside alarm startled her awake, then made her sick to her stomach, because every night when Jimmy was on the road, he would walk offstage and call her.

  I love you, babe. We brought down the house.

  But in this surreal world where Jimmy no longer existed, the alarm kept ringing while she fumbled in the dark for the off switch, then just threw the damned clock against the wall to shut it up. A weak, incessant buzzing still came from a dark corner of the room, and she wanted to put the pillow over her head until it stopped, or maybe until her breathing stopped.

  Eventually, she got up and turned off the alarm. A deep crease on the wall marked where she’d thrown the clock. The paint was only three weeks old and blue like the sheets, like the quilted bedspread and the chairs, blue because Jimmy’s latest hit song was Blue.

  Kathryn dropped the clock on the bed and walked on hollow legs into the bathroom, where she turned on the faucet and drank noisily from a cupped hand. She wiped her mouth with Jimmy’s shirtsleeve, then opened the medicine cabinet.

  His shelf was eye level. A clear bottle of golden Vitalis she had bought last week. A red container of Old Spice without the metal cap. She took a deep breath of it and utter despair turned her inside out. The bottle slipped from her fingers into the wastebasket. Seeing it as trash was more horrific than seeing it on the shelf. Didn’t that then mean it was all true? When all was in order on the shelf, life still held a modicum of normalcy.

  She carefully put it back exactly where it belonged, next to a small black rectangular case that held Gillette double-edged razor blades, which she looked at for a very long, contemplative time, then she reached for a prescription bottle with “James Peyton” typed neatly in epitaphic black-and-white. Seconal. Take one tablet to sleep. Count: 60.

  Take one tablet to sleep. Take sixty tablets to die. She turned on the faucet and bent down, a handful of red pills inches from her mouth.

  “Is that candy, Mama?”

  “Laurel!” Kathryn shot upright, the pills in a fist behind her back, and looked down at the curious face of her four-year-old daughter. “What are you doing up?”

  “I want some candy.”

  “It’s not candy,” she said sharply.

  “I saw Red Hots, Mama.”

  “No. It’s medicine. See?” Kathryn opened her hand, then put the pills back inside the bottle. “It’s just medicine to help me sleep.”

  “I want some medicine.”

  Kathryn knelt down. “Come here.” Laurel would have found her. Laurel would have found her. Shaking and numb, she rested her chin on her daughter’s head, surrounded by the scent of baby shampoo and Ivory soap, a familiar, clean smell. It took a long time for Kathryn to let go.

  “I can’t sleep.”

  Jimmy’s face in miniature stared up at her. Every day she would look at that face and see the man she loved, and Kathryn didn’t know if that would be a gift or a curse. “Let me wash your face. You can see tear tracks.” She used a warm wash rag to clean Laurel’s red face. “There. All done.” Kathryn straightened and automatically shut the mirrored medicine cabinet. In her reflection she caught a flicker of a pale, shadowed life and had to brace her hands on the cold sink. It was achingly painful to realize she was here and Jimmy wasn’t.

  Eventually she would clear out the medicine chest; she would put things in the trash without panicking, wash the sheets, and do something with his clothes. They weren’t him, she told herself; they were only his things.

  “Does the medicine taste like candy?” Laurel pointed to the prescription bottle.

  “No.” Kathryn made a face. “It’s awful.” She dumped the pills into the toilet and flushed it. “We don’t need medicine.”
<
br />   It was amazing how skeptical a four-year-old could look.

  “It’s late,” Kathryn told her. “You can sleep in our—in my bed.”

  Laurel jumped up, all excited and so easily distracted. “Because Daddy’s gone?”

  “Yes. Because Daddy’s gone.”

  The last time Laurel Peyton waved good-bye to her father was from the backseat of a long black Cadillac that belonged to the Magnolia Funeral Home. Waving goodbye was normal when your father was on the road all the time, but the camera flashbulbs and reporters alongside the car were anything but normal.

  The three women inside the car—Kathryn, her sister, Evie, and Julia, Jimmy’s mother—tried to shield Laurel from the faces at the car windows, until the press, dressed in their amphigoric darks, were left behind and stood crowlike at the edge of the grave site while the Cadillac continued down the hill.

  Behind them Kathryn saw only a monochrome Seattle sky, and scattered all over the lush green lawn were absurdly bright clumps of fresh flowers, bits of life scattered over a place that was only about death. The tires crunched on the gravel drive and sounded as if something were breaking, while rain pattered impatiently on the roof of the car and the electronic turn signal ticked like a heartbeat.

  Jimmy’s mother tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Young man. Young man! Can’t you hear that? Turn off that turn signal!” Julia Laurelhurst Peyton looked as if she were carved from granite. Only Jimmy could ever seem to crack through her veneer.

  Laurel began to sing one of Jim’s hit songs in a slightly off-key young voice. Feeling sickened, Kathryn glanced at Julia, who was looking out the car window, her face away from everyone else in the car.