Enthrallment

Enthrallment by Deidre Dalton is Book #4 in the Collective Obsessions Saga.

 

George Sullivan reunites with his long-lost love Susan O'Reilly. Their daughter Carly enters into an unholy alliance to secure her position as Liam Larkin's wife. As secrets unfold and more madness takes root, Carly plots a fatal and twisted scheme to exact revenge on the Larkin family . . .

From Chapter Seven

November 1990

Larkin City, Maine

 

    GEORGE SULLIVAN KNEW HE would experience a deep sadness at the death of his mother, more so than when Jean-Claude passed away, because he felt closer to Jennifer Sullivan despite her faults. They had reconnected in the five years since he reappeared on her porch, having tea most every afternoon and eating Sunday dinner together. It was as if they had never been apart.

    Jennifer's death was sudden. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just after Labor Day 1990, and by the dawn of Halloween she was gone. George stayed by her side almost around the clock, with Sara stopping by once a week to visit her grandmother. George took the opportunity to become reacquainted with his daughter, although he asked her not to let Linda know he was back in town and living under an assumed name. Sara took the request in stride, not seeming to be overly concerned by the cloak-and-dagger routine. It wasn't hard to do, seeing that Linda lived in Ellsworth with her second husband Richard Miles.

    However, Linda did return to Larkin City to attend her former mother-in-law's funeral. George skipped the service to avoid her, instead waiting for Sara at Jennifer's house on Curry Street. He wandered around, looking at the various rooms and shaking his head at the vast collection of cat figurines his mother kept. What was he going to do with all of her stuff? And the house? Should he sell the house, or give it to Sara? Or maybe sell the house and give the money to Sara?

    "I'll ask Sara what she wants to do," George said to himself as he walked into Jennifer's bedroom. He glanced at the bed, now neatly made after weeks of being the scene of Jennifer Sullivan's last days on earth.

    George kept staring at the bed, seeing his mother there as plain as day. She had accepted the fact she was dying without much fuss – as was her way – telling her son: "I'm just glad you came back into my life, and that we had a chance to be a family again." She seemed to have no regrets or recriminations of what her life might have been.

    He sat on the bed, feeling the firmness of the mattress. "A good, hard mattress is better for your back," Jennifer had told him once. "If you sleep in a cushy bed, you'll have back troubles for the rest of your days."

    "Maybe I should take the bed," George thought to himself as he bounced his frame on the mattress lightly. "And perhaps I'll sell the cat artifacts to the local antiques shop, and give the money to the local animal shelter. That would be quite fitting."

    He stood up, and then bent over to test the heaviness of the mattress by lifting it slightly. "Not bad for a queen-sized bed," he said aloud. "Not too heavy, but certainly comfortable. It should fit in my bedroom nicely."

    He started to leave, but paused in mid-stride. He glanced around again, seeing nothing else of any real value. Jennifer was as neat as a pin, so there was little in the way of clutter in the house aside from her cat collection.

    He looked in a few drawers, but found only clothes, tidily folded of course. The bed stand only contained a small tiffany lamp and a black cat figurine. The feline face was twisted into a hiss, the front paws perched and drawn as they rested on the base of the statue.

    "Where on earth did she find such a thing?" George wondered. "Who sells hissing cat sculptures, for chrissakes?"

    He began to turn away, but stopped when the tip of his shoe came against a hard object under the bed. "What the hell . . .?"

    He dropped to his knees and looked under the bed. He saw a strongbox, made of gray metal with a black latch. He slid the box from underneath the bed and to the floor in front of him.

    It wasn't locked. He flipped the lid open, peering at the contents inside. There was a small stack of papers and a few envelopes tied together with a red bow. He shuffled through the papers, noting the title to the house, a savings passbook and a life insurance policy worth $25,000 with "Ben Webb" listed as the beneficiary.

    He picked up the bound envelopes, untying the red bow to get a closer look.

    The first envelope was marked with his mother's own handwriting: Last Will & Testament of Jennifer Sullivan. He withdrew a sheet of paper and read the contents quickly, noticing his mother had updated the will just six months before. She left the house on Curry Street to Sara and the singular sum of $120,000 split between "my dear friend Ben Webb" and "my darling granddaughter Sara Sullivan."

    "That answers my question about what to do with the house," George thought. "No problems there."

    He picked up the second envelope, reading his mother's handwriting again: To be opened by Ben Webb only upon my death.

    Expecting an emotional thesis about their last five years of family togetherness, George was therefore surprised to find something completely different.

    It was a long time before George finished staring at his mother's last words to him, and the 1948 letter from Susan O'Reilly he had never seen before now. It was longer still before he was able to rise from the floor. 

 

    SARA SULLIVAN PARTED COMPANY with her mother Linda and stepfather Richard Miles at the Larkin City Cemetery. The funeral service for Jennifer Sullivan was over, and Linda was anxious to return to her home in Ellsworth before dusk.

    "Are you going to be okay?" Linda asked her daughter as they walked toward the driveway leading to the burial plots.

    Sara nodded. "I'm fine, mother. Grandmother was sick for a few months, so I've been expecting the worst. She was wonderful and I'm going to miss her, but I'm okay otherwise."

    "What are you going to do now?"

    Sara shrugged. "Steve and I are going to grab dinner at Bruno's Café, and then head back to Bangor."

    "Oh dear," Linda said before she could stop herself.

    "Mom?"

    "I just shudder to think of you on the back of Steve's motorcycle all the way back to Bangor," Linda said quickly. "One of these days you're going to come down with pneumonia."

    "I'm as healthy as a horse," Sara assured her mother. "Don't worry about me."

    "Call me next week just the same, darling."

    After Linda and Richard left the cemetery in their blue sedan, Sara trained her eyes on her third and newest husband, Steven Halloway. He was sitting on the back of his Harley-Davidson Electra Glide, circa 1985, parked at an angle in the driveway next to Jennifer's burial plot.

    Steve was as different as night and day from her first and second husbands. He was tall and slender, and no matter the occasion always wore tattered black jeans, a short-sleeved black tee-shirt with a sleeveless black leather jacket, black fingerless gloves, black work boots with scuffed heels, and darkly shaded eyeglasses. A silver cross necklace adorned his neck and one small diamond stud pierced his left ear lobe. His hair was streaked blond and spiky, coming to points all over the top of his head. He had short sideburns, and a thin strip of blond hair ran straight down from under his bottom lip and over his chin.

    "Ready to go, bumblebee?" he asked, his voice surprisingly high-pitched despite his ultra-masculine appearance. He called her "bumblebee" because when he met her he claimed she stung his heart and "buzzed" his brain like a queen bee.

    Sara smiled at him, flashing her white teeth. At the age of twenty-nine, she was a beautiful woman. Her legs were long and slender, her eyes such a dark blue that they appeared violet in color, and her naturally blonde hair hung straight to her waist with twiggy bangs cut across her forehead.

    "I'm ready," she said, climbing behind him on the Harley. "We need to swing by Grandma Jennifer's house first. I told George I'd meet him there. Then we can go and have dinner at Bruno's."

    "Okey-dokey," he replied, revving the engine of his motorcycle with adroit flicks of his wrists. "I hope George has some beer in the cooler."

    As they pulled away from the cemetery, Sara glanced over her shoulder to look at the mound of dirt that was the final resting place of her grandmother. Next to Jennifer Sullivan was the headstone of Sara's brother Michael, where she placed a single rose after her grandmother's service.

    Turning her head back, Sara wrapped her arms around Steve and held on tight. She was enthralled by her new husband, even though they were an unlikely pair. He was a motorcycle mechanic with his own business in Bangor and a "biker" in the truest sense of the word. He was also a kind and decent man, with a loving nature and an infectious smile.

    After graduating from high school in 1979, Sara attended St. Joseph's College in Standish, Maine, where she obtained her Bachelor of Science degree in nursing. While at college she met her first husband, fellow nursing student Frank Hardy. They married in 1982, but shortly thereafter Sara began an affair with her chemistry professor, James Standish.

    James was somehow related to the founder of Standish Village, and was twenty years her senior. Sara left her first husband for James, filing for and receiving her first divorce in 1985. She married the professor the same year, and then moved with him to Boston where she worked at Massachusetts General Hospital. They lived in a spacious house in Cambridge, where James began teaching again.

    Their life together was very nearly perfect. On the outside, James was a strikingly handsome man with iron gray hair and the genteel air of a learned professor. It wasn't until a few years after their wedding that his strange behavior began. At first it was odd sexual games – such as handcuffs, whips and leathers – and then he started to bring other young women into their home to participate in what he called "tasteful orgies."

    Sara went along with the romps for awhile to make her husband happy, but she found his new perversions repulsive. She assumed he was attempting to relive his youth, but as they neared their fifth wedding anniversary she realized she'd had quite enough. She left James and filed for her second divorce, taking a job at the Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, where she worked in the pediatric ward.

    Within weeks she met Steve Halloway at a horseshoe tournament at the Whig & Courier Pub in Bangor. Sara liked to unwind and relax in the company of her fellow nurses. They loved nothing better than to play competitive horseshoes after work and on weekends.

    Sara and Steve only knew each other for six weeks when they married at Bangor City Hall on Harlow Street near the end of July 1990. It was a rather spontaneous wedding, so Sara did not invite her mother or stepfather but instead showed up on their doorstep in Ellsworth for Sunday dinner with Steve in tow. Surprisingly, Linda liked Sara's new husband, declaring in private that "he was more level-headed and polite than the other two."

    The new couple bought a small house in Glenburn, a short distance from Bangor, and continued on with their lives: she as a nurse and he as the mechanic and owner of his own motorcycle shop dubbed Knightshades, which employed ten people.

    Before Grandmother Sullivan became ill, Sara only went to Larkin once every few months. However, when Jennifer was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer she made the effort at least once a week, often accompanied by Steve.

    As Steve slowed the Harley near Curry Street, Sara thought there was no reason to come to Larkin City anymore. She was sadly ambivalent about her father, glad he was back in her life but not anxious to upset her routine to accommodate him.

    GEORGE WAS WAITING FOR Sara, sitting on the front porch of the Curry Street house just as his mother used to do. He was sipping from a snifter of peach brandy in honor of her. In his other hand he held her last letter to him and the letter from Susan, now both read more than a hundred times. On the table next to him rested several bottles of Geary's Autumn Ale, kept cool by the early November wind coming from the harbor.

    He watched as Steve Halloway parked his Harley in front of the house. George liked Steve, although he did not know him well as yet. Despite his rather unconventional appearance, Steve seemed to be a down-to-earth man who loved Sara and had her best interests at heart.

    As the couple came up the walkway toward the porch, George waved. "I had just about given up on the two of you."

    As they stepped on the porch, George noticed Steve eying the bottles of ale on the table. "Help yourself," George said generously with a grin.

    Sara crossed her arms. "If you don't mind, I'd rather go inside and make some coffee. I'm freezing."

    Steve retrieved the ale bottles one at a time. "I can drink inside as well as outside," he said jokingly, although Sara knew it to be all too true. It was her husband's only fault as far as she could determine – he liked his beer and ale a little too much.

    The threesome traipsed into the house, where Sara prepared coffee in her grandmother's percolator. She handed Steve a tall glass from the cupboard above the sink, and then sat next to him at the rounded kitchen table. He twisted the red cap from the amber bottle of ale and poured it slowly into the glass at an angle.

    For the first time, Sara noticed the pieces of paper in George's hand. "What have you got there?" she wanted to know.

    George took a sip of peach brandy and slid the papers across the table toward her. "See for yourself," he said lightly. "Read the one on top first."

    Puzzled, Sara took the paper and began reading. After a moment her eyes went wide, than darted in the direction of her father.

    "I have a sister?" she whispered.

    "It appears that way," George replied, refilling the snifter with more peach brandy.

    "Do you know this Susan O'Reilly woman?" Sara asked.

    "I used to know Susan, many years ago. The last time I saw her was in 1948, when I was told she ran away from home. Apparently my own mother lied to me, and didn't think I could handle the truth until after she was laid to rest."

    "What are you going to do?" Sara was curious. She had a sister! "Are you going to try and find Susan again, or the child you had together?"

    "Yes," George said without hesitation. "My mother left out information regarding Susan's whereabouts, but I'd still like to find her and explain what happened."

    Sara agreed. "It's the only decent thing to do. Do you need my help?"

    "Not yet. I think I'll start by looking for birth records in Perry, and by paying a visit to the Sisters of Mercy Convent."

    Sara shook her head, setting the letters down on the table. "It's just unreal. To think grandmother hid the facts for all these years. Why would she keep that kind of information from you? What purpose did it serve?"

    George shrugged. "I thought mother liked Suz back in those days, but I guess I was wrong."

    Steve finally spoke up, turning his head toward Sara. "If you have a sister and she's still alive, then she'd be about forty years old now."

    Sara stood from the table and poured herself a cup of coffee. "My mother would have a fit if she knew."

    "Whatever you do, don't tell Linda about this," George warned his daughter. "I'd rather she not know or become involved. It would probably upset her. I'm sure by now I'm just an unpleasant memory from her past, so she doesn't need to know I had a child before I married her."

    Sara sat back down at the table, coffee cup in hand. "I won't say anything to her." Inside, however, she rebelled. She thought: "I just discovered I might not be an 'only' child anymore and George wants me to clam up. We'll see about that."

    "I do have some brighter news," George said, sensing his daughter's anxiety. "Jennifer left this house to you, and we get to split her $120,000 savings account. How does that grab you?" He stubbornly refused to mention the $25,000 life insurance policy Jennifer left to him alone.

    Steve seemed to come alive. "What?"

    Sara laughed, patting her husband's hand. "Don't get too excited, Stevie. We have to pay for grandmother's funeral, you know, and pay taxes on the portion of her estate I receive."

    "Yeah, but your half – which is sixty thousand by my calculations - is an awful lot of money," he pointed out. He slapped his forehead. "Holy smokes!"

    Sara ignored him, instead glancing around the kitchen. "I have no intention of living here, so I'll probably sell the house, too. What do you think I can get for it, George?"

    "The house is close to the harbor and it's in good shape," he replied. "You could probably sell it for $75,000 or up to $100,000. I don't really keep current on the property markets, but I'm sure any realtor would be glad to help you."

    Steve listened to George and Sara converse back and forth, sipping his second bottle of ale. While he was surprised by the amount of money his wife was suddenly coming into, Steve was rather taken aback at the callous way in which Sara and George were discussing the spoils of Jennifer Sullivan's estate. He knew Sara to be a kind and loving woman, so her abrupt coldness puzzled him.

    The older woman was barely in the grave, but it seemed her only kin had already dismissed her relevance.

    GEORGE WOULD LATER FIND it ironic that Susan O'Reilly had been living in Bangor for more than forty years.

    He didn't have to visit the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Perry after all. The day after his mother's funeral, he went to the Larkin Public Library and combed through telephone books available in the area. He found what he was looking for almost immediately in the current Bangor directory:

O'REILLY Susan    179 E Downing Road BANGOR 04401 . . . . . . (207) 942-0099

    "It couldn't be that simple," he thought. "All those years I lived in Bar Harbor and Suz was just forty miles away in Bangor."

    He held the information close to his vest for several days, not telling Sara about it and fighting the urge to jump in his car and race to Susan's doorway.

    Should he call her first? No, she might run away, make herself scarce. Should he send her a letter? No, she still might run away and make herself scarce.

    There was only one choice left to him.

    George would simply show up on Susan's doorstep and hope for the best.

November 1990

Bangor, Maine

 

    IT WAS RAINING ON the day George decided to pay Susan a visit on Downing Road in Bangor. It was mid-November, and the colorful orange foliage was already falling into slick, leafy heaps on the roads and sidewalks.

    He was a nervous wreck, like a teenage boy waiting for his first date. Going to Susan was similar to being transported back in time to when he last saw her forty-two years ago. Thereafter both had been left with the impression that their relationship was over, thanks to Jennifer Sullivan, who falsely portrayed her son as a homosexual to Susan and Susan as a fortune seeker to George.

    If George was honest with himself, he knew Susan was the only woman he had ever truly loved. He once held great affection for his ex-wife Linda, but theirs had never been a deep, gut-wrenching type of passion. Their sexual romps had also been less than satisfying. Linda never seemed to like the physical aspects of marriage, although she adored being a mother.

    To be fair, Linda had been a good wife in all other regards. She had cooked his meals, cleaned his house and washed his clothes. She never raised her voice in anger to him; in fact, she rolled with the flow without complaint. George likened it to living with a semi-robot, which he grew to resent in short order. He realized then that he wanted a woman who spoke her mind, who challenged him on a daily basis and who enjoyed coming to his bed without reservation.

    The marriage with Linda never had a chance, not with the memory of Susan O'Reilly poised over them from start to finish.

    George slowed his Buick Regal as he turned onto Downing Road from Union Street. A few minutes later he saw Susan's house, a white brick split-level, with the numbers "179 E" stenciled on the curb. He parked in front of the house, his eyes going to the tall windows that overlooked the lawn. The blinds were open, but he could see no activity within.

    "It's now or never," he muttered, getting out of the car.

    Inside the house, Susan O'Reilly walked into the living room with her afternoon cup of latte in her hands. She had spent the morning designing a marketing campaign for Panda Software, one of the new clients just acquired by her advertising firm, Impression Media Works. Since her office was only a short distance away on Union Street, Susan often worked from home. She found the peace and quiet more conducive to her creative flow, and since she was the boss no one questioned her.

    She sipped her latte as she walked toward the tall windows in the living room. It was a dreary day, the pelting rain now turned to a drizzle, but the sky was leaden gray and threatening more to come. The weather aggravated her recently diagnosed arthritis, but thankfully her condition was not dire yet. She felt only mild stiffening and discomfort in her hands.

    "Maybe I should retire," Susan thought as she looked out the window. "I'm in a good place financially, and if I had more time on my hands I could spend it with Carly and Megan." She paused. "Well, at least Megan might have time for me but I'm not so sure about Carly."

    She could hardly blame her daughter for her work ethics. Carly was driven and ambitious, just as Susan had been in her younger years. After giving birth at the Sisters of Mercy Convent in 1949, Susan had taken the money give to her by Jennifer Sullivan to make a new life for herself and her baby daughter.

    Susan had rented a small house in Bangor, and then worked as a waitress while attending business classes at Eastern Maine Community College. She was fascinated by the mechanics of marketing, and since she was a fairly good illustrator she finally decided to major in advertising. The program offered instruction on the creation and execution of commercial "messages" in various media to promote and sell products, services and brands. She studied advertising theory, marketing strategy, advertising design, campaign methods, media management, and related principles of business management.

    Because of the era in which she found herself, Susan was the only woman in her class. At first none of her fellow male students took her seriously, but when her grades and techniques put her ahead of the rest, they began to fight over being her partner in the various labs and workshops.

    After graduating with a master's degree in advertising, Susan took work where she could find it. She started low on the totem pole because she was a woman, but her skills and natural instinct made her stand out amongst her contemporaries and her peers. She was promoted to junior partner at Gould & Bachman, where she worked for more than sixteen years. In 1970 she finally took the plunge and opened her own ad agency - Impression Media Works – and now, twenty years later, she was a veteran of the business with an impeccable reputation of extraordinary success.

    No, money was not a worry. She could not use poor finances as an excuse to avoid retirement now. Aside from her ad agency, Susan had also inherited her father's seafood restaurant chain, The Sand Trap, when he died in 1978. She sold the company for nearly $2 million, having neither the time nor the desire to take over a slew of eateries. While she reconciled with her parents shortly before Sam O'Reilly's death, she did not want to carry on her father's business legacy. It simply did not interest her.

    Susan finished her latte as she continued to look out the front window. "That was a nice break," she thought. "Now it's back to work."

    Before she could turn away from the window, she noticed a car parked at the curb in front of her house. She paused, taking in the dusty plum color of the Buick Regal. The car was of an older make, probably about ten years old, with tinted windows. She groaned out loud. She was not in the mood for a traveling salesman or a lost tourist.

    She watched as a man alighted from the car, locking the door behind him. He was tall, with a slight paunch. His hair was close-cropped and gray, but he had a full beard that appeared well-kept although it covered the lower half of his face. He wore a dark purple windbreaker and jeans, with blue-striped sneakers. She saw him glance at the house, and then he began to make his way up the walkway towards her front door.

    "I'm going to nip this in the bud before he utters a word," Susan thought angrily as she strode to the door. "His sales pitch will be wasted on me."

    She flung open the door before he had a chance to ring the bell or use the knocker. "Can I help you?" she snapped.

    He stared at her, momentarily speechless.

    "I said, can I help you?" Susan repeated irritably.

    He found his voice. "Suz?"

    She knew his voice. It might have been decades ago since she last heard it, but the lilt and tone of his voice had not changed.

    "George?" She was dumbfounded.

    He grinned. "Hi, Suz. How have you been?"

    She thought she might faint, but George quickly stepped forward and took her gently into his arms.

    "We have a lot to talk about," he whispered in her ear. "Don't faint on me now."