A Trick of the Light Read online

  A Trick of the Light

  Tina Wainscott

  A Trick of the Light

  Copyright© 2020 by Tina Wainscott

  ISBN: 9781945143786

  www.WrittenMusings.com

  www.TinaWainscott.com

  Cover Design www.AustinWalp.com

  U.S.A.

  This is a fictional work. All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are solely the concepts and products of the author’s imagination or are used to create a fictitious story and should not be construed as real. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means, without the prior permission in writing, except in the case of brief quotations, reviews, and articles.

  For any other permission, please visit www.WrittenMusings.com/contact.

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  CHAPTER 1

  The voices in her head were making Wanda McKain’s brain hurt. Urgent whispers, too many of them and louder than usual:

  Hide your son.

  Don’t let anyone know he’s different.

  Dylan doesn’t understand different people. You know how he is; everything has to look so freakin’ normal.

  She knew why, and she thought she could fit into his life anyway. When she’d fallen in love with Dylan, the voices had stopped. She thought their love had cured her. He was taller than a superhero, gorgeous like a movie star, with dreams of living a successful, normal life. It sounded like Heaven. All she’d had to do was keep her own past a secret.

  Then the voices came back, on her wedding day, no less. She backed away from him whenever the murmur of voices kicked in. Luckily he started working a lot after that first year.

  He’ll find out you’ve got crazy in your blood, maybe even put you back in the hospital.

  Just that terrifying thought reinforced her mission. Her dad had called her crazy. Mommy was too timid to defend her. The voices said her parents were the crazy ones, but those people in the hospital believed them, not her. She knew other people heard voices. They put bumper stickers on their cars that read: I do what the voices in my head tell me. Why was she considered crazy when they weren’t?

  She’d gotten good at pretending she was normal, giving the responses the doctors — and the world — expected. She’d even fooled Dylan. But the voices were getting more insistent. They told her she couldn’t fool Dylan much longer. Just the other day she’d answered out loud, and he’d looked at her funny. Three times now Camilla, their housekeeper, had caught her talking to them. It was only a matter of time, the voices said, until they’d take Teddy from her and put her away.

  Once she and Teddy and Mommy were hidden away, Wanda wouldn’t have to pretend. She could get fat, luxuriously fat, and not worry what people thought of her, because no one else would be around. The voices had worked out all the details. She’d been consumed with “the plan” for two months now. It was finally time to act.

  Get moving!

  But don’t drive too fast.

  Use your signals.

  “Shhh!” She waved away the voices. “I hate when you all talk at the same time.” She glanced back at her son. He was strapped in the back seat, lost in his own world. The doctor had confirmed her fears that Teddy was different. Wanda knew the doctor would ignore her pleas not to tell Dylan.

  “I’ll protect you,” she said to Teddy in a strangled voice she barely recognized as her own. “We’re going to go away together so no one will ever know.”

  She pulled into the nursing home complex where her mother lived. Ironic, wasn’t it, that Mommy was now in a home all these years later. Anne Dodson had Alzheimer’s, or that’s what they told Wanda. The voices said it wasn’t true, that the nurses were trying to trick them. Maybe they were performing experiments on the people who resided there. Anne was all right. She just forgot things once in a while.

  Wanda went through the procedure to sign out her mother, keeping the voices at bay. People looked at her strangely if she let them distract her. Sometimes she’d forget and tell them to shut up, only to find a startled cashier or waitress staring at her.

  “Have a nice vacation,” the desk clerk said as Wanda hurried her mother out of the cheery lobby. That’s what Wanda had told them, that she was taking her mother on a week-long trip to North Carolina.

  “Are you new?” Anne asked, blinking as Wanda pulled her out into the sunlight. “They keep hiring new people all the time, how’s a girl supposed to keep up with all those faces when they keep changing?”

  “Mommy, it’s me, Wanda. Your daughter. Remember how I told you I needed you. You gotta take care of Teddy for a couple of hours.” Once she had Anne strapped into the passenger seat, she said, “We’re going to the safe place now. No more nurses, nobody looking at you like you’re crazy, no more having to pretend you’re just like everyone else. I’m going to take you and Teddy to the safe place first, then I have to go home for a few minutes. It’s all part of the plan. Camilla won’t even know Teddy and I are missing until she leaves for the day, and maybe not even then. We’ll have plenty of time to get into place. You have to take care of Teddy while I’m gone.”

  Anne nodded. “That’s important, isn’t it? You said it with an important tone in your voice.”

  “Yes, it’s important.”

  “Take care of Teddy,” Anne repeated. “I can remember that.”

  As Wanda pulled away from the nursing home, the voices got louder. She shook her head, but that only made her dizzy. “Stop it! I’m taking care of Teddy. You hear? Nobody’s going to get to him now.”

  * * *

  Chloe Samms was led in to see Mr. Barnes, the senior partner of the Fifth Avenue law firm. She had to remind herself to shake his hand. Having grown up in a community of women, she usually greeted people with a hug.

  No way was she going to hug Mr. Barnes. He had bulging eyes in a wide, speckled face and reminded her of those Pacman frogs she’d seen in Petland. His chin didn’t pulse with his breathing … only when he swallowed. She pasted on an optimistic smile, but before she could say anything, he said, “You’ve come to see if I’m hiring your accounting firm.”

  “You said you’d have a decision by today.”

  A respectable law firm in the heart of Naples, Florida would be a nice way to lend credibility to C.S. Accounting. Lord knew she needed all the credibility she could get.

  “I’m afraid I’ve decided to go elsewhere.” He held up his hand, as though expecting a rebuttal. “It’s nothing personal.” His gaze slid over her, lingering on a chest she did everything to downplay. “You’re a cute thing and all —”

  Don’t let him see your disappointment. Be tough, be strong. “I’m not all that cute, really.” She grimaced. “I can be downright ugly if I put my mind to it. You should see me in the morning.” She rolled her eyes. “What I mean is …” She hated when she got this way, jabbering and making it more
than obvious that she was desperate for this account. She gestured toward her shoulder-length blond hair. “Beneath these curls is a brain, Mr. Barnes.” She picked up a ledger on his desk and glanced down the list. “The total is forty-two thousand, five hundred and fifteen dollars. Go ahead and check it.”

  He took the ledger back. “I’m sure you are smart, Ms. Samms. I like your spunk, and that’s why I even considered hiring your firm.”

  “But?” She’d tried to inject strength into that word, but it came out like a drizzle.

  “My partners felt that having someone associated with Lilithdale wouldn’t be a wise public-relations move.”

  She took a deep breath, not sure if she wanted to scream or cry. “Fourteen hundred twenty-two divided by twelve equals one-eighteen and a half. Seventy-eight times twelve equals nine thirty-six.”

  “Now, Ms. Samms, don’t embarrass us both by grovel — what did you say?”

  “Some people count to ten. I do calculations.” It was a habit that had started when she was six. Usually she did it in her head, but sometimes she was so mad, she had to say it aloud to keep anything else from spouting out. She nodded curtly and turned to the door.

  “Oh, Ms. Samms? I gotta know, is it true what they say? That you girls have drunken orgies out there?”

  “I hate to crush your lurid fantasies, but there are no orgies. On New Year’s Eve the residents take a skinny dip in the bay. It’s a symbolic way of shedding last year’s baggage, bad memories … and negative feelings toward pig-headed, demoralized men who have nothing but sex on their minds.”

  His expression didn’t change at all. “So … are you all lesbians or what?”

  It wasn’t a new question; heck, Chloe had had to answer this one hundreds of times. This creep wanted it to be true. “The women who live in Lilithdale are as heterosexual as you.” Her gaze slid over what she could see of the man. “Probably more so. They just don’t have any need for …” Let’s see if it sinks in this time. “pig-headed, demoralized men who have nothing but sex on their minds.”

  He sat back in his chair. His leering smile faded, but his smugness remained in place. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you meant that as a slanderous insult against me personally.”

  Not only him. It also applied to another man who had done more than made her angry; he’d shattered her heart into a hundred and twenty-one pieces. She gave Barnes her sweetest smile. “If I implied that you were a blunt-minded, frog-faced, depraved, sorry excuse for a man, I’m sure I meant it in the nicest possible way.”

  She walked out, leaving the door swinging open. Outside, she leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. I can’t believe I said that to him. She didn’t know whether she should feel ashamed, proud, or angry. At the moment, all three fought for dominance. She felt the slightest smile break free, then a choked laugh. Then the snorting kind of laughter that brought tears to her eyes.

  She pushed away from the wall and caught her reflection in a jewelry store window. Definitely she wore her hand-in-the-cookie jar face. Her smile faded. Maybe she could hack off her curls, deepen her voice. She didn’t dress cute, though her yen for pastels probably didn’t help. Cute was tiny, and she was too full-figured to be considered tiny. But cute wasn’t her biggest problem; Lilithdale was. The bane of her existence. The place she’d called home since her mother died of breast cancer and left her in her aunts’ care when she was five.

  Lilithdale started out as a refuge for a handful of repressed women back in the fifties. The newly independent women took over a small undeveloped part of east Marco Island. They built a large house and lived by selling seashells to tourist shops. More women came and settled in, but not because they were repressed. They were oddities in their own worlds. Many were psychic in nature, seeing visions, auras, or in the case of one woman, a person’s last moments on earth. One woman talked to dead people, and there was her Aunt Stella who communicated with animals.

  Belle had so much energy in her body she could light up a bulb by just holding it in her hand. Irina had once been billed “the strongest woman in the world.” She could pull a car with her teeth. And then there were women who believed they had some kind of gift, but nobody could say for sure whether they really did or not. No matter what ability you believed you had–whether it was real or not–you belonged in Lilithdale.

  Unless you had no special ability like Chloe. Besides her gift with numbers (which didn’t count since it was left-brained and too ordinary), she had nothing, not even good instincts. Her ordinariness made her an anomaly in Lilithdale; her connection to Lilithdale made her an oddball to the rest of the world. The only person Chloe could intimately relate to was Marilyn of the Addams family, who was pitied for her normality.

  “Can I … help you?” An attractive blonde dressed in silk and linen was leaning out of the doorway. She didn’t want to help, not by the way her gaze disdainfully took in Chloe’s pantsuit or the way her lip lifted at the sight of Chloe’s green Keds. There was nothing wrong with her Keds. Thanks to her grandma, the dyeing guru, her shoes were a perfect match to her outfit. What the blonde was really saying was Stop blocking our first-class window with your second-class self.

  Just like she’d done for years, Chloe swept her gaze down the woman’s attire, pretending to find something amiss. “I can’t imagine a thing you could help me with.” Head and shoulders high, she spun around and walked away. It didn’t hurt. Not even a tiny bit.

  The sun sparkled on the Porsches and BMWs parked along Fifth Avenue. Her green ’66 T-Bird didn’t stand out like a bruised knuckle. It didn’t.

  A gorgeous guy was eating a sandwich on the whale’s tail of his Porsche. She smiled at his cleverness of finding a table, but he looked right through her. Men in suits and women in outfits that probably cost more than Chloe’s whole wardrobe passed her on the sidewalk. She heard snatches of conversations, this stock going up, the Heart Association’s gala that weekend, look, new Ferragamos in the window, I’m going to try them on. Not even a mention of going fishing that afternoon, good vibes, or getting their chakras cleared. What was she even doing there?

  Forget the Porsches, the snooty blonde, and the frogman, she told herself. Enjoy the perfect winter day.

  In Naples, winter meant the temperature barely had the decency to dip into sweater-wearing weather. It was too warm, but the snowbirds that migrated from the North to take up residence in their condos weren’t complaining.

  She pulled out the list Aunt Stella had given her. Buy a bacon-scented chew toy for her session with the troubled Great Dane. Pick up plum foot cream from the Day Spa for Gisella. Then Sangeeta needed Chloe’s help at the tea house for a few hours while she went to regress to her previous lives at Aunt Lena’s Total Balance Women’s Center. Oh, and she was supposed to pick up Nita’s books so she could work on the monthly accounting.

  Two hundred and fifty women now lived in Lilithdale, most having moved down once they’d packed their kids off to college. Chloe had been the only child to grow up there. Over the years the surrounding communities had taken notice of their psychic neighbors and started going for readings. While they were there, they had tea and tofu and sometimes stayed for dinner. Slowly it had become a Mecca for women seeking anything from a psychic reading to advice, from animal counseling to a bookstore specializing in women’s tomes.

  While the residents welcomed visitors, they abhorred leaving town, so they always loaded Chloe with errands whenever she drove into Naples. Since their requests were accompanied by hugs, how could she resist?

  Chloe’s smile faded when she remembered Gisella’s warning: “Be extra careful today. I feel something bad’s gonna happen.”

  * * *

  Dylan McKain met with Judge Neely late that morning. When a judge asked for a meeting in her chambers, Dylan thought it unwise to tell her that most of his clients came to his office.

  Neely told him to make himself comfortable in the wood-paneled office. “We almost met two months ago. The may
or’s open house party. You did a fabulous job designing his house.”

  “Thank you.” The mayor had made him the official guest of honor. Not only did Dylan hate being the center of attention — although for his firm’s sake, he’d suffer it — Wanda had manufactured her usual crisis before every important social event. People were beginning to wonder if he’d made up a wife since she never made any appearances.

  “I understand you’re doing the Kraft Theater on Third Street. N Magazine said you were the sole architect. The kind of project to elevate your firm to national status.”

  “It’s an exciting project. The exposure is just a bonus.”

  “My husband and I are planning to build a home in Pelican Bay, and we want you personally to design it for us.”

  Dylan usually had a hard time saying no to opportunities like this. But he’d made himself a promise that morning and he was going to stick with it. “I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve already had to delegate my projects to my associates because of the theater. But I have talented people who do great work.”

  The judge surprised him with her pout. “But we want you.”

  He smiled. “I appreciate that, but the theater is going to take all of my professional time for the next several months. If you’re not in a hurry, I’d be glad to schedule an appointment as soon as the theater requires less time.”

  “Sure you can’t put in some evening hours if I pay you a bonus?”

  “Afraid not. I already work too many weekends and evenings. Frankly, I need to spend more time at home.” This morning he’d eaten his bagel at the empty table and realized the sacrifice he was making. He never saw his son anymore. Teddy was still asleep when Dylan woke, and Wanda usually had him put to bed by the time he got home. Whenever he made a point to spend time with his son, Teddy was either sick or tired from playing.

  Neely’s pout disappeared. “All right, I can understand that. Family should always come first. Put me on your schedule.” She gave him a wink. “I want to be first on your list.”