“She knows you love her. She’s always known. I am sure of it.”
“I don’t see how. I left them. I left them both. Just before Kat’s fourth birthday. I... I just... I wanted to disappear. I went to the beach at the Venice Midway and I was going to step into the ocean and just keep walking until it took me...”
Her voice falls away. I can almost believe she let the sea have its way except that here she is next to me.
“And then?” I gently ask.
She blinks, long and slow, as if she’s being pulled back from the frothing surf. “There were some people on the beach who had opium, and they invited me to... to be with them. Share their pipe. Share everything. So I did. And I let whoever wanted to touch me touch me, and I lay with whoever wanted to lie with me. It seemed an easier way to dissolve than walking into theocean and drowning. And it was working. I was disappearing, a little more each day. It almost worked.”
“But something happened?” I ask, because something surely did.
She is slow to answer.
“My father had heard from one of his club friends that I had been seen down there, in the company of scum, as he said,” she finally replies. “He found me and brought me home. Home to Martin, that is. Martin hadn’t even been looking for me.”
Candace sighs heavily. I can see how exhausting this is for her. “I picked it up there in the alleys near the Venice Midway, this disease that is killing me.” She laughs lightly, and it is a laugh empty of all mirth. “So, you see, I am disappearing after all. I am getting what I thought I wanted.”
Again I squeeze her hand. It is all I can do. I cannot undo what has been done. I cannot give her back her husband or her dead children or her health or the wasted years with Kat.
“It was all—too much—for my mother,” Candace says, a sob cracking her words into pieces. “She couldn’t bear to see me the way I was. She died less than six months later. I’d broken her heart.”
“I’m sure you didn’t.”
“No. I did.”
Candace is quiet for several moments. She closes her eyes against the anguish of having lost her mother and feeling responsible for that loss. “It makes perfect sense now,” she says many seconds later, eyes still closed and her voice void of strength.
“What does?”
She opens her eyes and looks across the patio to Kat’s sleeping form. “Martin hadwantedme to take my own life. It was goodenough for him that I came down with consumption instead. That’s why he was against my coming here. He wanted me dead because he had Kat. And Kat would inherit the trust.”
I know she is right about that, but it doesn’t explain everything. It doesn’t explain why Martin left Los Angeles. Why he placed that advertisement. “Why, then, do you suppose he fled with her to San Francisco?”
Candace ponders this for only a moment. “It can only be because Father threatened to expose him. He’d found out that before me, Martin had trifled with other wealthy young women at the riding club in hopes of winning their affections. I didn’t want to believe him. He told me this when he whisked me away to this sanatorium. Father said he was going to inform the police that Martin had wanted the consumption to kill me and that they should look into all of Martin’s past activities.”
“So Martin came to San Francisco and placed the ad...” I let the observation trail away as I contemplate this. It still makes no sense why he sought me out. I don’t fit his pattern in any shape or form. “Why would he marryme, then?” I wonder out loud. I am little more than a pauper without Martin.
“You don’t have money?” Candace says, a look of wearied puzzlement on her face.
“I don’t have anything,” I say, and even as the words leave my mouth, clarity falls over me. Of course. My poverty was the reason. If the police had caught up with Martin in San Francisco, his marriage to me would have been evidence only that he is a polygamist, not that he seduces women for their money and then plans for their demise after he marries them. “That’s why he married me, Candace. He wanted proof that he’s not a man who tricks wealthy women into marrying him. I’m the proof.”
And that’s why Martin took Kat with him, I muse to myself. Not to torture Candace. He doesn’t care about Candace. He took Kat because she will inherit Candace’s trust. Kat was money to Martin, the only thing he did care about.
We sit there with sweat trickling down our necks for several long moments while I wait for Candace to ask me again how Kat and I got out of the house but Martin did not.
She will ask.
And I must tell her.
We sit quietly for a long time, Candace’s forehead lowered in her hand. Just when I think she has instead nodded off to sleep, she slowly tilts her head to look at me.
“What happened to Martin?”
I look about the patio to see who else is braving the worst heat of the day. The elderly man on the far side of the paving stones is snoring as he sleeps. The nurses are inside. Kat still slumbers.
I turn back to Candace.
“You need to know something before I tell you the rest. What I did, I did for Kat. It’s important that you keep that in mind. I’m... I’m asking for your trust with what I am about to tell you.”
