Part 1 (1/2)
No Place Like Home.
BY.
MARY HIGGINS CLARK.
Lizzie Borden took an ax And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done.
She gave her father forty-one!.
Prologue.
Ten-year-old Liza was dreaming her favorite dream, the one about the day when she was six years old, and she and Daddy were at the beach, in New Jersey, at Spring Lake. They'd been in the water, holding hands and jumping together whenever a wave broke near them. Then a much bigger wave suddenly rushed in and began to break right over them, and Daddy grabbed her.
”Hang on, Liza,” he yelled, and the next minute they were tumbling under water and being thrown around by the wave. Liza had been so scared.
She could still feel her forehead slamming into the sand when the wave crashed them onto the sh.o.r.e. She had swallowed water and was coughing and her eyes were stinging and she was crying but then Daddy pulled her onto his lap. ”Now that was a wave!” he said, as he brushed the sand from her face, ”but we rode it out together, didn't we, Liza?”
That was the best part of the dream-having Daddy's arms around her and feeling so safe.
Before the next summer came around, Daddy had died. After that she'd never really felt safe again. Now she was always afraid, because Mom had made Ted, her stepfather, move out of the house. Ted didn't want a divorce, and he kept pestering Mom, wanting her to let him come back. Liza knew she wasn't the only one afraid; Mom was afraid, too.
Liza tried not to listen. She wanted to go back into the dream of being in Daddy's arms, but the voices kept waking her up.
Someone was crying and yelling. Did she hear Mom calling Daddy's name? What was she saying? Liza sat up and slid out of bed.
Mom always left the door to Liza's bedroom open just a little so that she could see the light in the hall. And until she married Ted last year, she had always told Liza that if she woke up and felt sad, she could come into her room and sleep with her. Once Ted moved in, she'd never gotten in bed with her mother again.
It was Ted's voice she heard now. He was yelling at Mom, and Mom was screaming. ”Let go of me!”
Liza knew that Mom was so afraid of Ted, and that since he'd moved out she even kept Daddy's gun in the drawer of her night table. Liza rushed down the hall, her feet moving noiselessly along the padded carpet. The door of Mom's sitting room was open and inside she could see that Ted had Mom pinned against the wall and was shaking her. Liza ran past the sitting room and went directly into her mother's bedroom. She hurried around the bed and yanked open the night table drawer. Trembling, she grabbed the gun and ran back to the sitting room.
Standing in the doorway, she pointed the gun at Ted and screamed, ”Let go of my mother!”
Ted spun around, still holding onto Mom, his eyes wide and angry. The veins in his forehead were sticking out. Liza could see the tears streaming down her mother's cheeks.
”Sure,” he yelled. With a violent thrust, he shoved Liza's mother at her. When she crashed into Liza, the gun went off. Then Liza heard a funny little gurgle and Mom crumpled to the floor.
Liza looked down at her mother, then up at Ted. He began to lunge toward her, and Liza pointed the gun at him and pulled the trigger. She pulled it again and again, until he fell down and then began crawling across the room and tried to grab the gun from her. When it wouldn't fire anymore, she dropped the gun and got down on the floor and put her arms around her mother. There was no sound, and she knew her mother was dead.
After that Liza had only a hazy memory of what happened. She remembered Ted's voice on the phone, the police coming, someone pulling her arms from her mother's neck.
She was taken away, and she never saw her mother again.
Chapter 1.
Twenty-four Years Later.
I cannot believe I am standing in the exact spot where I was standing when I killed my mother.
I ask myself if this is part of a nightmare, or if it is really happening. In the beginning, after that terrible night, I had nightmares all the time. I spent a good part of my childhood drawing pictures of them for Dr. Moran, a psychologist in California, where I went to live after the trial.
This room figured in many of those drawings.
The mirror over the fireplace is the same one my father chose when he restored the house. It is part of the wall, recessed and framed. In it, I see my reflection. My face is deadly pale. My eyes no longer seem dark blue, but black, reflecting all the terrible visions that are leaping through my mind.
The color of my eyes is a heritage from my father. My mother's eyes were lighter, a sapphire blue, picture perfect with her golden hair. My hair would be dark blond if I left it natural. I have darkened it, though, ever since I came back to the East Coast sixteen years ago to attend the Fas.h.i.+on Inst.i.tute of Technology in Manhattan. I am also taller than my mother was by five inches. Yet, as I grow older, I believe I am beginning to resemble my mother in many ways, and I try to distance myself from that resemblance. I have always lived in dread of someone saying to me, ”You look familiar...” At the time, my mother's image was splashed all over the media, and still turns up periodically in stories that rehash the circ.u.mstances of her death. So if anyone says I look familiar, I know it's her they have in mind. I, Celia Foster Nolan, formerly Liza Barton, the child the tabloids dubbed ”Little Lizzie Borden,” am far less likely to be recognized as that chubby-faced little girl with golden curls who was acquitted-not exonerated-of deliberately killing her mother and trying to kill her stepfather.
My second husband, Alex Nolan, and I have been married for six months. Today I thought we were going to take my four-year-old son, Jack, to see a horse show in Peapack, an upscale town in northern New Jersey, when suddenly Alex detoured to Mendham, a neighboring town. It was only then that he told me he had a wonderful surprise for my birthday and drove down the road to this house. Alex parked the car, and we went inside.
Jack is tugging at my hand, but I remain frozen to the spot. Energetic, as most four-year-olds are, he wants to explore. I let him go, and in a flash he is out of the room and running down the hall.
Alex is standing a little behind me. Without looking at him, I can feel his anxiety. He believes he has found a beautiful home for us to live in, and his generosity is such that the deed is solely in my name, his birthday gift to me. ”I'll catch up with Jack, honey,” he rea.s.sures me. ”You look around and start figuring how you'll decorate.”
As he leaves the room, I hear him call, ”Don't go downstairs, Jack. We haven't finished showing Mommy her new house.”
”Your husband tells me that you're an interior designer,” Henry Paley, the real estate agent, is saying. ”This house has been very well kept up, but, of course, every woman, especially one in your profession, wants to put her own signature on her home.”
Not yet trusting myself to speak, I look at him. Paley is a small man of about sixty, with thinning gray hair, and neatly dressed in a dark blue pin-striped suit. I realize he is waiting expectantly for me to show enthusiasm for the wonderful birthday gift my husband has just presented to me.
”As your husband may have told you, I was not the selling agent,” Paley explains. ”My boss, Georgette Grove, was showing your husband various properties nearby when he spotted the FOR SALE sign on the lawn. He apparently fell in love with it immediately. The house is quite simply an architectural treasure, and it's situated on ten acres in the premier location in a premier town.”
I know it is a treasure. My father was the architect who restored a crumbling eighteenth-century mansion, turning it into this charming and s.p.a.cious home. I look past Paley and study the fireplace. Mother and Daddy found the mantel in France, in a chteau about to be demolished.
Daddy told me the meanings of all the sculptured work on it, the cherubs and the pineapples and the grapes...
Ted pinning Mother against the wall...
Mother sobbing...
I am pointing the gun at him. Daddy's gun...
Let go of my mother...
Sure...
Ted spinning Mother around and shoving her at me...
Mother's terrified eyes looking at me...