The Shadow Wife Read online

  Pelicans often made their gawky way across the sky behind their house, and in the winter, whales swam right through their backyard. Sometimes they had nightmares about the whales, or at least, Lisbeth did. Very little ever seemed to bother Carlynn. Although they were physically identical, right down to the unruly cowlick on the crown of their heads which their mother, Delora, complained about as she tried to force their pale hair to behave, they were two different girls. And Delora made sure the world knew it. She refused to dress them alike, or send them to the same school, or, if truth be known, treat them equally. Carlynn’s hair was long, its platinum waves cascading down her back, but Delora kept Lisbeth’s hair cut short, the curls bouncing around her face when she walked.

  Carlynn was in the second grade at the Douglass School, a private school in Carmel. The Mediterranean-style building was nestled in a stand of tall trees, and in addition to academics, it offered tennis and badminton, drama classes and riding lessons. Carlynn always had a healthy, rosy glow to her cheeks.

  Lisbeth, on the other hand, attended Esley Rhodes School, a less prestigious private school not far from her sister’s, but a world apart in amenities and in the quality of the teachers. Carlynn’s teacher had taken her class to the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in May, but Lisbeth’s teacher would never have thought of such a thing. Franklin ended up taking Lisbeth himself, not wanting her to feel left out of that celebration. The girls didn’t know the difference between their schools, at least not at the age of seven, but anyone familiar with the educational institutions in the area would know that Carlynn was getting the better education. And anyone who spent more than five minutes with Delora knew the reason for that difference.

  Franklin rested his hand on the back of Lisbeth’s head. “And you two are also wonders of the Seventeen Mile Drive,” he said. “Twins. Perfectly look-alike little girls. Wish your mama didn’t insist on chopping off your hair, Lizzie.”

  “I look like Shirley Temple, though,” Lisbeth said so quietly she could not be heard above the sound of the ocean. She was the quiet twin, a shyness borne of her uncertainty about her worth. People always spoke with wonder about Carlynn’s ethereal hair and barely noticed Lisbeth’s. But Rosa, their housekeeper, had told Lisbeth her haircut made her look like “that adorable Shirley Temple,” and Lisbeth carried that description of herself in her heart.

  Franklin Kling tried to be fair to both girls. Perhaps he went overboard in his caring for Lisbeth, he realized, because he had to make up for the little concern his wife showed her second daughter. That’s what Delora Kling always called Lisbeth—“my second daughter,” as if Lisbeth were years younger than Carlynn instead of a half hour. Delora might as well have said “second-best.” That was what Franklin heard, what made him bristle each time she said those words, and he feared that’s what Lisbeth heard as well.

  Delora had not known she was carrying twins when they checked into the hospital seven years ago. She’d been thrilled at being pregnant and cheerier than usual during those nine months. Ordinarily, she tended toward a moodiness that Franklin found hard to predict. Together, they’d fixed up one of the upstairs bedrooms in the mansion as a nursery, buying beautiful furniture and pasting up wallpaper that was both pink and blue, ready for any eventuality. But Delora had not counted on the possibility of two babies. Before she and Franklin got married, they’d talked about having a family, and she’d made it very clear she wanted only one child. “I barely have what it takes to be a mother at all,” she’d said in an honest assessment of her abilities, as well as of the amount of love she had to give. “So, promise me you’ll be happy with only one.”

  He had promised. He’d loved Delora, loved the spark in her when she was happy, and she had been happy most of the time back then, when he was first falling in love with her. It had been easy for him to dismiss her infrequent dour moods as aberrations. But her parents, with whom they’d first lived in the mansion, were killed in a car accident shortly after he and Delora were married, and since that time, she’d been depressed more often than not.

  Delora’s delivery of Carlynn had been remarkably smooth, given that the baby was her first, and she’d even refused the twilight sleep her doctor had offered her. She and Franklin had already selected a name for the child if it turned out to be a girl. Delora wanted to name her after her beloved parents by combining their names: Carl and Lena. Franklin had said little in the matter; he was an easygoing man and he hoped that, through this child, Delora might finally be able to lay her grief over her parents’ deaths to rest. It didn’t occur to him until later that she was trying to re-create her own family—a father, mother and one doted-on child, all living together in the family mansion on the Circle of Enchantment.

  Franklin had paced dutifully in the waiting room while Delora was delivering, and he’d been overjoyed when a nurse came out to tell him about the birth of his daughter.

  “But we’re not done, yet.” The nurse had smiled at him. “There’s another one.”

  “Another one?” He had not understood.

  “You are going to have twins.”

  He’d sat down at that, amazed, grinning, and forgetting Delora’s staunch opposition to having more than one child. What was taking place in the delivery room, though, would forever color his wife’s feelings toward her children. Carlynn had slipped easily into the world, causing her mother the least pain necessary. But the second baby had struggled. She was breech, “backward from the start,” Delora would say later—and often. Delora writhed in pain, finally begging for the twilight sleep which promised her relief. When she awakened, she discovered she had been cut open to deliver this second daughter. Every tiny movement, every flick of a finger or blink of an eye, made her cringe with pain. For days the unexpected baby went nameless, and while Carlynn took quickly to the breast, Lisbeth could not get the knack of it, as if she was somehow able to discern, to feel, her mother’s disdain for her. Sometimes, Franklin watched her struggle with the nipple, and it seemed to him that the tiny infant was so afraid of doing anything to upset Delora that, in her anxiety, she simply could not get the sucking right. Franklin understood his daughter’s anxiety all too well. He experienced it much of the time around Delora himself.

  In those first few days in the hospital, when he bottle-fed the nameless infant while Delora nursed Carlynn, Franklin decided he would like to name the baby Lisbeth after his own mother, who was still living at the time. Delora did not get along well with his mother, and he doubted she would agree to the name. When he broached the subject with her, though, Delora said, “I don’t care what we name it,” and he’d recoiled in horror. “Name her,” he said, thinking protectively of the little white-haired angel he held in his arms.

  The nurses told him Delora’s antipathy toward the second twin would pass in time. She would love both her babies equally, they said. Right now she was in too much pain to think about anyone other than herself. They did not know, and neither did he at the time, what Delora had known all along: she truly had room enough in her heart for only one child.

  Lisbeth didn’t help matters. She was a difficult baby, colicky and forever waking her sister with her howling and fussing. But Franklin often blamed himself for Delora’s attitude toward the little girl. He never should have named her Lisbeth, because it set up yet another negative association between the infant and something Delora loathed: his mother. He should have let Delora pick a name. Make that baby hers.

  “Mr. Kling?”

  Franklin turned now to see Rosa at the door to the terrace.

  “Supper,” Rosa said, her voice still tinged with a Mexican accent, although she had been in this country three decades. “Come inside, girls, and get washed up.”

  Dinner was served in the grand dining room, which looked out over the sea. Rosa served them, as she had served Delora’s family before Franklin had moved in. She was not the best housekeeper in the world, but she had a warmth about her that had charmed Franklin from the start. He liked that sh
e treated the twins equally, and she had even complained to him once, with apologies for overstepping her role, that she thought it unfair that only Carlynn went to the Douglass School while Lisbeth did not.

  Over dinner, Delora questioned Carlynn about her day at school, while Lisbeth nibbled her food, a small shadow in the room. When Delora stopped for breath, Franklin broke in.

  “Who wants to go sailing with me tomorrow?” he asked and saw the instant sparkle in Lisbeth’s eyes. He’d asked the question just to bring that joy into her face.

  “I do!” she said.

  “How about you, Carlynn?” he asked his other daughter.

  Carlynn shook her head. “No, thank you,” she responded, as he knew she would. Carlynn had hated the water ever since their sailboat capsized in Monterey Bay a couple of years earlier. The girls had been wearing life jackets, but the water was freezing and the whole experience had been frightening, particularly for Carlynn. Lisbeth still loved to sail, but Carlynn decided she would never go on the water again. That was fine with Franklin. Carlynn had many opportunities for adventure at school, and he wanted Lisbeth to have one for herself. A pastime she could love, at which she could learn to excel.

  At the end of the meal, Delora looked across the table at Franklin, and he knew she was asking him if they should remain in the dining room to tell the girls about Presto. He mouthed the word library, and Delora stood up.

  “Let’s go into the library, girls,” she said. “Your father and I want to talk with you.”

  Franklin led his family across the foyer into the library, dreading the conversation he knew was coming.

  Delora and Carlynn sat on the love seat near the window, while Franklin and Lisbeth opted for the wing chairs. The girls looked apprehensive. They were rarely invited to participate in family discussions such as this.

  “You tell them, Franklin,” Delora said.

  Franklin looked from one daughter to the other. “Presto is very sick,” he said.

  Both girls glanced in the general direction of the kitchen, where they knew Presto slept by the stove. Neither of them spoke.

  Clearing his voice, Franklin continued. “I’m afraid he’s going to die.”

  “No!” Carlynn cried, instantly in tears, and Delora pulled her close, trying to smooth her unsmoothable hair.

  “Hush, darling,” she said. “It will be all right.”

  Lisbeth’s hands were locked on her lap and she sat motionless, quiet. But her eyes glistened.

  “Tomorrow,” Franklin said, “we will take him to the veterinarian to have him…put down.”

  “Killed?” Carlynn wailed. “Please don’t, Daddy. Mommy?” She looked at her mother with hope.

  “He’s suffering, Carlynn,” Delora said. “He’s having trouble breathing, and you know how he can hardly walk these days.”

  “He’s nearly blind,” Franklin added. “And we want to end his misery, Carly. It’s not fair to make him go on like this when we can help him die, so he doesn’t have to be in pain any longer.”

  Carlynn nestled against her mother’s breast, sobbing quietly now, and Franklin saw the tears in Delora’s eyes. She was not an insensitive woman, just limited in her capacity to love. Lisbeth’s mouth was downturned and quivering, as though she was struggling to control her emotions, and a fat tear spilled from each of her eyes. Franklin walked over to the ottoman in front of her chair and sat down on it. Leaning forward, he covered her hands, still folded in her lap, with his own.

  “Are you all right, Lizzie?” he said.

  Lisbeth nodded, biting her quivering lip. She was brave. Stoic. He felt a lump in his throat. No one appreciated this child except him.

  But that was not exactly true. Carlynn drew away from her mother to see the pain in her twin sister’s face. Jumping up from the love seat, she ran across the room to hug her. “I won’t let them do it, Lizzie,” she said, as though she had forgotten she was only a child.

  But Lisbeth knew the limitations of a seven-year-old. She nodded, as if she was humoring her sister, but Franklin saw that the sorrow never left her eyes.

  That night, Carlynn slept on the kitchen floor, her arms locked around Presto’s failing body. Franklin and Delora tried to force her to come upstairs to bed, but she wouldn’t budge from the dog’s side.

  “Let’s let her be,” Franklin finally said to his wife. “Let her have one last night with him.”

  Delora agreed. She watched as Franklin covered the little girl with a comforter, squatted down to kiss the top of her head, and stroked Presto’s side. Then he and Delora went to bed.

  The dog’s rasping breaths could be heard throughout the mansion. Carlynn spent the night whispering words to him, of comfort or love, or pleading, no one really knew, but the fur on his neck grew wet from her tears.

  In the morning, everyone in the house awakened to the sound of Presto’s barking. They came downstairs to find him sitting up next to Carlynn, his breathing even and strong. Carlynn put her arm around the dog’s broad shoulders.

  “Presto’s hungry,” she said simply, and Lisbeth ran over to embrace first the dog, then her sister.

  The vet would later say that he must have misdiagnosed Presto’s condition, that he had judged it to be far more serious than it actually was. Maybe that was so.

  And maybe it wasn’t.

  7

  T HE CALL CAME JUST AS J OELLE WALKED IN THE DOOR OF HER condo that evening. Dropping her purse and appointment book on the kitchen counter, she picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m trying to reach Shanti Angel.” It was the voice of an older, possibly even an elderly, man—a deep, rich voice with an edge of refinement.

  “This is Shanti,” she said.

  “I’m calling you for Carlynn Shire,” the man said. “She got a message that you would like to meet with her?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I would.”

  “And you have some special connection to her?” he prompted, and she repeated the story of her birth to him.

  “Well, Dr. Shire said that if you’d be willing to come over to the house, she’d be happy to talk with you.”

  “Does she remember me?” Joelle asked.

  “She says she does.”

  Joelle couldn’t help but smile. “I’d be happy to come to her home. Just tell me where and when.”

  “She could see you next Tuesday at noon.”

  That would be right in the middle of her workday, but she didn’t dare ask for a different time.

  “That will be fine,” she said. “What is the address?”

  “Are you familiar with the Seventeen Mile Drive?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. Everyone knew the Seventeen Mile Drive. The Carmel entrance was not that far from her condominium. She’d only been on the drive a few times, though, since there was a fee for the privilege of entering it. It was visited mainly by tourists who wanted to view the wonder-filled coastline of the Monterey Peninsula—and by the residents lucky enough to live along the route.

  He gave her the address, telling her the house was near Cypress Point. This would be no simple “house,” she thought.

  “When you turn into the driveway,” he continued, “you’ll need to press the buzzer on the column to your left. You’ll see it. I’ll open the gate to let you in.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh, and just let the fellow who takes the toll for the Seventeen Mile Drive know that you’re coming here, to the Kling Mansion,” the man added. “I’ll let him know to expect you. You won’t have to pay.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “That will be great.”

  She hung up the phone and wrote down the appointment time in her book. It would be interesting to meet Carlynn Shire, if nothing else, and it would be fascinating to hear her side of the dramatic story of her birth. She would tell Carlynn about Mara and see what she had to say. But she wouldn’t tell Liam what she was doing. He would think she’d gone off the deep end.

  And, she
thought, he might be right.

  The following day, Joelle found herself sitting at the nurses’ station in the maternity unit next to Rebecca Reed, the perinatologist in charge of the department, as they both wrote notes in medical charts. Joelle wished she could tell Rebecca about her pregnancy. From the corner of her eye, she watched the doctor’s slender hand move across the page as she wrote, her handwriting far neater than most of the other physicians’ in the hospital. Even when she wrote, Rebecca had an air of confidence, of taking charge. She was thirty-nine and beautiful, her long blond hair pulled back from her face with a clip at the nape of her neck.

  Rebecca had helped Joelle find a fertility specialist when she and Rusty were going through their failed attempts at conception, but, although Rebecca was a skilled and respected physician, she possessed little warmth. She was not a nurturing sort of doctor, not a hand-holder. Joelle would have loved it if, right then, as they were sitting side by side, she could have confided in the doctor. She couldn’t bring herself to talk with her that easily, though. Joelle could converse with almost anyone, but she’d never felt completely comfortable around Rebecca. The few times they’d been at parties together, small talk had been awkward and difficult.

  Still, until she moved away, which she had definitely decided to do, she wanted Rebecca to be her obstetrician. Her plan was to tell the doctor when she was twelve weeks pregnant, at the end of her first trimester. Joelle, herself, would have scolded any woman who waited that long for a first prenatal appointment, but she simply didn’t want to let anyone in on her pregnancy until it was absolutely necessary.