Mother and Daddy are dead.
Daddy did it. He was still laid off, and still not able to get other work, and too proud to take help from all these Federal things. So he killed them both. I hope it was an agreement… oh I can't…
ENTRY TWELVE
That was yesterday. There's a big tear-blotch on the paper; these felt point pens run when they're wet.
Daddy and Mother were found dead in the car in the garage with the door shut and overcoats and rugs stuffed against it and the car windows down and the key on and the gas gauge on empty. Carbon monoxide poisoning. No note. There was an overdrawn notice on the living room table beside the lamp, and a piece of baloney and a half-pint of milk in the refrigerator. We went, with Aunt Isobel taking charge and bustling me along, thank God, and somehow we got through the funeral and burial and the life insurance man told her they would pay even though it was suicide: Daddy had a thousand-dollar policy and another one for thirty-five-hundred. The house was rented, of course, and the car worth about a hundred dollars.
She sat me down and stared into my face; she had to hold my chin up with one kid-gloved hand.
"Tory. Listen a moment, and think carefully. Do you want anything from here?" I shook my head.
"Nothing? Not even a remembrance? A letter-opener or an old lamp or an old teddy-bear or whatever? Nothing?"
I shook my head.
She told somebody she knew to sell the car for whatever it brought, auction or give away everything else, take anything he wanted, pay off the funeral home and anything else Daddy owed, and keep what was left as his fee. She turned aside when he started to talk, probably to say no, he'd do it for nothing, and she scribbled something out and signed it. She handed it to him.
We left. We returned to Denver. A week later a box came in the mail. She showed it to me, told me it was a memento from home, and asked if I wanted to open it. I didn't. She put it in the top of the front hall closet. It wasn't all that simple; we both had to sign legal thing and all that, but I think all that's over by now. I am an orphan. I live in Denver, with my fairy Godmother, who was my father's sister – and whom I call Isobel because she's tired of hearing "Aunt" and says it's a terrible waste of breath to preface her name with it all the time.
I wished I were dead for a long while, wished I'd been there to die with them. I'm over that now.
CHAPTER TWO
ENTRY THIRTEEN
I don't know what to do. It's been a long month since I have written anything here, and I am not the lame person as she who wrote the last entry. And that girl, Tory, was not the same as the Victoria who first began this diary. Now I don't know what to do, and I should… I must… tell it to someone SO… this little book with all its blank pages and empty lines.
There is so much.
Our nearest neighbor, although there are eight acres here, is less than one mile away. Straight through the woods out back. I met him a few weeks after… after their deaths. He is Mr. Parker, and Aunt… I mean Isobel… calls him Erik. Erik Parker. A tall man, thin or rather slim, with large hands with long fingers. A great deal of black-and-gray hair, combed straight back from a high forehead. Beautiful gray sideburns, almost white in places. A very well-trimmed beard. Is he fifty? Forty-five? Fifty-five? I don't know. He has eyes every bit as piercing as Au… as Isobel's, but his are a deep brown.
He is a very handsome man.
He lives in a strange stone place that was some sort of gamekeeper's lodge long, long ago when not only our property and his but a lot of the surrounding area was one vast estate. His place ii surrounded by trees and grapevines and all sorts of underbrush. I don't think the grapevines bear. He isn't interested in agriculture.
He is as strange as Isobel. He lives alone… well, no. That's another strange part. There are a young man and woman living with him. She cooks and launders and does the housework, and the young man, I assume, does everything else there is to do.
I was very shocked to learn that they are not married. It is not only a strange, but doubtless a sinful household.
Mr. Parker, of course, has money. He reads a great deal, he says, and thinks, he says, with his great dark eyes piercing while he speaks and his beard writhing a bit, and he writes. Articles, and he says he is doing the story of his life and of all humankind. Whatever that means.
It is to his place that Aunt Isobel has been going at nights. Walking, through the woods, all alone, to return sometime before I awake. It is all too strange, and a little scary. I know why I have begun to write here but even as I write I am trying to talk myself out of it, what I am thinking, but the mystery, the suspense, is far too much for anyone, certainly, and definitely far far too much for anyone with my curiosity. I must try to dissuade myself.
No, I have only steeled my resolve.
I shall.
I shall follow her.
ENTRY FOURTEEN
Oh no, no, no! I must be crazy, I must be going out of my MIND, I must have been dreaming! It just couldn't be! Nothing like that could be, surely! Not in this country, not in this century! Oh my God, I can't even write about it. No, No. NO!
It happened. I wasn't dreaming. I am sure, now. I was not dreaming, or hallucinating, or anything else other than seeing exactly what I thought I saw.
I will try to record it here, in every detail.
To begin with, it's been five days… or rather five nights, since I watched Aunt Isobel slip from the house and begin that strange and lonely walk through the woods behind the house. She wore a blouse and skirt, both navy blue, and boots. Since I had planned to follow her, I had slipped into one of the snug-sleeved blouses she recently purchased for me, and slacks, and I wore soft-soled house slippers so as not to make noise. I too wore dark colors; the blouse is red and the slacks black. And I followed her, through the woods. I was very careful to move from tree to tree and make no noise, and now and again when a branch rustled at my passage or a twig snapped beneath my foot I froze behind a free or squatted and froze. But to my knowledge my aunt Isobel did not even glance around. She just moved swiftly on through the frees, scrambled easily over the old rock fence at the place where it has fallen nearly to the ground, and approached the old house where Erik Parker lives with the young man and woman who are his servants: Lois and Miles.
The house was dark, but she went right up to knock at the door, anyhow, and I slipped in as closely as I could, behind a huge old oak not thirty feet froth the door. I saw her knock, and then I heard the voice from inside. "Who's there?"
"A wayward woman in need of counsel," she called back. Strange words! I frowned, wondering.
"There is no counsel here for wayward women, whore of the night!" I beard Mr. Parker's voice call back from inside, and I had to press my hand over my mouth as if to physically hold back my gasp. He used that word to my aunt; he called her that awful name! AND he was going on:
"Here there is only chastisement for your sinful body, which you must accept without question."
"I accept it," she replied, and I felt a prickling under my arms. "Strip, then, right where you are."
My eyes flared wide. Even in the darkness I could see that she obeyed, stripping off her clothing and dropping it right there on the little porch of that old stone house with its charming tiled roof. When she had finished, she announced that she was now naked… she said naked, not "nude"… and suddenly the door opened. She went into the dark house.
I stood there and stared and stared, listening without hearing anything at all. I was fearful, horrified, frightened… my emotions were many, and I trembled. I was sure that I had heard and partially witnessed some strange rite, and I felt certain that it was not the first time just such words and actions had taken place here.