He thought about what he had done that morning, and he was surprised to feel no regrets.- He knew there’d be fallout over the mess at the DRMO, and that he wasn’t going escape all of it, but he was hoping his resignation would take him out of the direct line of fire once the big guns at DCIS headquarters got embroiled in the Army’s problem. He had been ready to accept Gwen’s invitation to stay at the house, except that now John Lee’s insistence on her going into hiding somewhere might have upset that plan. He wondered again if John Lee’s motive was to get Gwen out of harm’s way, with harm having multiple definitions.
He got up and moved around her small office, looking at the certificates and the family pictures. That one must be her father, he thought. Same strong face and eyes. Strangely, there were no “pictures of any women who looked like Gwen. There was one somewhat faded local newspaper picture of Gwen getting her degree down at the university, with her father standing proudly beside her. He peered closer to read the caption identifying them, and he saw the last name: Hand. Dr. Winfield Hand and his daughter, Gwinette Hand.
He looked around at Owen’s desk, saw the nameplate: Gwen H. Warren. And where was Owen’s mother? Owen had said her mother had died, but nothing about a divorce. He remembered her saying mat her father had helped to found the orphanage. He heard sounds of Gwen returning, and he went into the kitchen to meet her. The kids had just finished lunch and were being shepherded upstairs by Mrs. Benning while the cook cleaned up. Gwen led him out the back door and onto the lawn behind the house. The sheriff, apparently, had left. He asked her what was going on.
“John Lee wants me to disappear for a little while, with Jess,” she said. “Part of me says that’s a good idea; the other part is worried about the little ones. I don’t like leaving them alone with all this trouble brewing.”
“John Lee might be right, Gwen. It’s not the little kids who would be the focus of the government’s attention, assuming it’s coming this way, I mean.”
They reached the barnyard gate and turned around to go back toward the house. The sun burned through the high mountain air with a vengeance. “I know that,” she said. Then she stopped. “I think John Lee might have another reason than just getting us clear of trouble.”
He nodded and kicked a pebble off the path. “Yes, I understand. I’ve been thinking about what you said last night. And you are right: I’m quite attracted to you. But John Lee’s also right: You and Jess ought to bail out. The best thing I can do is to stay here, hold down the fort, until we see what happens.”
She nodded. “Those feelings are not necessarily just one way, Dave. I like you very much. But there’s too much you don’t know about me, and with all this other—”
“I could just go,” he said. “Get out of here, get out of your hair entirely.”
“I’d feel a lot better if you stayed, especially since you’re one of them — the government, I mean.” She faced him then, and there was some pain in her expression. “John Lee has been making the same assumptions that you have,” she said. “I like you very much, but a lot of that is sympathy for your situation — what you’ve been through this past year, with your job, your wife, your injury. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m simply not ‘available,’ not the way you imagined. I — we — do need your help. But not—”
“I understand,” he replied, suddenly anxious to shut this off. The message was clear, and he was beginning to feel acutely embarrassed. “I helped bring this thing into your world, so the least I can do is to see it through. If the FBI or the Army comes here, I do know the beast when I see him, and I can talk the talk. Will you stay with relatives?”
She nodded absently but did not really answer his question. He did not pursue it. If he didn’t know where she was, no one could make him tell.
He took a deep breath and asked her about the pictures. Once again, she didn’t look at him, turning instead to look back at Howell Mountain.
“Jessamine Hand is my half sister,” she said finally. She gave him a moment to absorb that news before continuing. “By marriage. It’s a bit complicated. As I told you, my mother passed away in 1974. My father remarried two years later, to a woman named Hope, who was much younger than he was. In the course of time, three children came along. Jess is Hope’s youngest child.”
Stafford kept quiet. Maybe this would explain why she did not want to enter into a relationship. A breeze stirred the willows; Gwen turned and began walking toward them, and he followed.
“Hope had an older sister, Charity, who drowned in a quarry when she was sixteen. Officially, it was ruled an accident, but most folks who knew about it said she jumped. Charity was quite beautiful, and apparently, also quite mad. So, unfortunately, was Hope. The difference was that it took a lot longer to manifest in Hope. She was twenty-eight when she married my father. He was fifty two. The marriage was fine for a while, until the kids came along.”
“What was her illness?”
“You’re in the north Georgia mountains, Dave,” she said with a bitter smile. “Specifics of that nature are rarely discussed in these parts.
Suffice it to say, Hope’s descent into madness was not graceful. By the time Jess was born, she was hi full cry. My father was a doctor, so he knew. In retrospect, we all knew, but this is a small southern mountain town, and decent people averted their eyes.”
“What finally happened? Was she committed somewhere?”
“No.” There was another pause, and Stafford could see that she was dredging up some painful memories. “No, it ended one terrible winter night in 1986 when my father was not here. She apparently had one of her visions, as she called them, killed two of her children, and then turned the gun on herself, although she failed to kill herself. Jess was the only survivor.”
“Good Lord. And how did Jess survive?”
Gwen paused again before answering. “No one knows, or no one was willing to say at the time. I was married by then and living with John Lee.”
“But you have an opinion?”
“Jess was not quite three,” she said softly, staring out at the willows.
“I think perhaps her mother just could not bring herself to shoot her baby. But there’s another possibility. Knowing what I know now, I think perhaps her mother, crazy as she was, recognized something hi Jess. I think it’s entirely possible that Hope’s insanity was somehow caused by or reinforced by unformed mental acuity of her own. As I mentioned, she claimed to see visions, hear voices.”
“She was schizophrenic.”
“Yes, that was the official diagnosis. But no one really knows what’s going on in a schizophrenic’s mind; we have only their word for it, you see. She’s down in Milledgeville now, at Central State. Quite hopeless now.” She smiled a sad smile at the unintended play on words, then turned back toward the house.
“So Jess has been at the Willow Grove Home from the start,” she continued. “She was withdrawn as a child, but no one told her until she was seven what really happened that night.”
“And when did she stop talking?”
“She never spoke after that night. I had hopes that she was going to be able to grow away from all that, until the manifestations of her … ability began. Now I just don’t know.”
“So you kept her here first because she was family, and second, because you’re not sure of what’s going on in her mind.”
“That’s correct. Consider her antecedents: Hope and Charity, both violently, self-destructively insane; her own two sisters cut down before we could know anything about their mental development. And now Jess is manifesting mental — what, irregularities? I didn’t know what else to do.”
Stafford let out a slow breath as he thought about this history and the fact that everything he had been assuming up to this point had been wrong.