Forever. : A Novel of Good and Evil, Love and Hope (Forever Trilogy)

Book by Deveraux Jude

Chapter 1

Darci looked over the job application again, checking that she'd been absolutely truthful on every line, with no "imagination" added. Her mother said that Darci's "imagination" was like a family curse. "Must have come from your father's side of the family," Jerlene Monroe would say whenever her daughter did something she didn't understand. "Whoever he may be," Uncle Vern could be counted on to add under his breath -- then there'd be a fight. When it got to the part where Uncle Vern was shouting that his niece wasn't "full of imagination" but was just a plain ol' garden variety blankety-blank liar, Darci would silently leave the room and open a book.

But now Darci was in beautiful New York City, she had a fabulous college education under her belt, and she was applying for what had to be the best job that anyone had ever seen. And I'm going to get it! she said to herself, closing her eyes for a moment as she clutched the folded newspaper to her chest. I'll apply my True Persuasion to this and I'll be sure to get the job, she thought.

"You okay?" asked the young woman in front of her in what Darci recognized as some type of Yankee accent.

"Wonderful," Darci said, smiling. "And you?"

"Feeling like an idiot, actually. I mean, can you really believe this thing?" she asked, holding up the same newspaper that Darci was clutching. She was a tall young woman, much taller than Darci, and, compared to Darci, she was downright fat. But then people were always describing Darci as scrawny. "She's 'fashionably thin,'" her mother would say. "Jerlene!" her sister, Thelma, would snap, "you ain't never fed that girl nothin' but Jell-O and sugar cereal. She's probably starvin' to death." This statement would produce a lot of anger from Darci's mother, then a torrent of words about how hard it was to raise a daughter single-handedly. "You ain't raised her; the neighbors has," Uncle Vern would say; then the fight would escalate.

Now Darci smiled at the woman in front of her. "I think it's a miracle," she said. Darci was pretty in a fragile sort of way, with wide-set blue eyes, a tiny nose, and a little rosebud mouth. She was only five-feet-two and weighed so little that her clothes always hung loosely on her. Right now, her little black skirt with the shiny seat was fastened at the waist with a big safety pin.

"You don't think you're really going to get this job, do you?" the woman in front asked.

"Oh, yes," Darci said, taking a deep breath. "I believe in thinking positively. If you think it, you can achieve it, is what I truly believe."

The woman opened her mouth to say something; then she gave a sly smile. "Okay, so what do you think the job is, exactly? It can't be sex because it pays too much money. I can't imagine it's for running drugs or that they need a hit man, because the announcement is too public, so what do you think they really want?"

Darci blinked at the woman. Her aunt Thelma had washed Darci's only suit in soap powder that she'd bought on sale, then had taken it out of the washer before the rinse cycle began. "Saves money that way," Aunt Thelma had said. Maybe it was cheaper, but now the dried soap in the fabric was itching Darci's bare arms inside the unlined sleeves of the suit, as her pink, ruffled blouse was sleeveless.

"I think someone wants a personal assistant," Darci said, not understanding the woman's question.

At that the woman laughed. "You really think that someone is willing to pay a hundred grand a year for a PA and that you are going to get the job because you....What? Because you believe you're going to get it?"

Before Darci could reply, the woman standing in line behind her said, "Give her a break, will you? And if you don't think you're going to get the job, then why the hell are you standing in line?"

Darci didn't approve of cursing, not in any way, and she meant to say something, but the woman three down in the line spoke up. "Does anybody here have any idea what this job is about? I've been waiting for four hours and I can't find out anything."

"Four!" a woman several people ahead said loudly. "I've been here for six hours!"

"I spent the night on the sidewalk," a woman standing half a block ahead yelled.

After that, all the women began to talk to each other, and since the line was nearly four blocks long, that made quite a noise.

But Darci didn't participate in speculating on what the job was really for, because she knew in her heart, in its deepest part, that the job was for her. It was the answer to her prayers. For the last four years, all through college, she'd prayed every night for God to help her with the situation she was in with Putnam. And last night, when she'd seen this ad, she'd known it was the answer to her prayers.

"Sure has your qualifications," Uncle Vern had said when Darci showed him the ad. His face was twisted into the little smirk Darci had come to know too well.

"I'll never understand why your mother let you choose that highfalutin fancy school," Aunt Thelma said yet again. "You coulda gone to a secretarial school so you could

get yourself a real job -- not that you'll need one after the weddin'."

"I..." Darci began, but then she'd trailed off. She'd long ago learned that trying to explain was useless. Instead, she just let Uncle Vern and Aunt Thelma run down; then she went to the converted closet in their apartment that was now her bedroom and read. She liked to read nonfiction because she liked to learn things.

But Uncle Vern had been right: The ad was written with Darci's qualifications in mind.

PERSONAL ASSISTANT

No computer skills necessary. Must be willing to travel, so no family attachments. Must be young, healthy, interested. Starting salary $100,000 a year, plus medical, dental. Apply in person, 8:00 A.M. 211 West 17 Street, Suite 1A.

"What d'you mean that she's right for this job?" Aunt Thelma had said last night. "It says 'no family attachments.' If it's one thing Darci's got, it's family."

"On her mother's side," Uncle Vern had said, smirking. Aunt Thelma wasn't a fighter as her sister, Darci's mother, was, so she just tightened her lips and picked up the remote control on the TV and switched from the Discovery Channel program that Darci had been watching to QVC. Aunt Thelma knew the life stories of all the presenters on all the shopping channels. She said that the shopping channels made her feel at home even in a place as big and busy as New York. She'd often told Darci in private that she should never have left Putnam, should never have married an ambitious man and moved all the way to Indianapolis ten years ago. And when, three years ago, Vern's boss had asked him to go to New York to supervise a crew of lazy welders, Thelma said she should have refused to go with him. But she had gone and she'd suffered through every minute in the city she detested.

Now, waiting in line, Darci tried not to listen to the angry words that were floating around her. Instead, she closed her eyes and concentrated on the image of her being told that she had this perfect job.

As the day wore on, information trickled down the line. Once they entered the building, they were allowed into a waiting room, and, finally, they were allowed into the interview room. There was a heavy wooden door leading into the interview room, and it became known as "the door." As for what went on inside that room, they heard little, probably because no woman wanted to jeopardize her chance at such a great job.

It was nearly four P.M. when Darci was at last allowed inside the building. There was a woman standing in front of the doorway into the waiting room, and she only allowed into the room exactly as many women as there were chairs. Hours ago everyone in the line had seen that men weren't really being considered for the job. The men would go up the stairs, but they'd go back down just minutes later.

"Told you," a woman near Darci said. "Sex. This is for sex."

"And what do you have that's worth a hundred grand a year?" a woman asked, holding her shoe and rubbing her foot.

"It's not what I have so much as what I can do with it."

"Done with it, more likely," someone else said loudly, and for a moment Darci thought there was going to be a fistfight. There would have been had those words been said in her hometown of Putnam, Kentucky, but she'd learned that Northern women fought with words rather than fists. "Be a lot kinder to punch 'em in the nose," her mother had said after she'd heard a couple of Yankee girls arguing.

"Next!" the woman said sharply as the wooden door opened and out came the young woman who had first spoken to Darci while they were in line. Darci looked up at her in question, but the young woman just shrugged, as though to say that she didn't know if she'd done well in the interview or not.

When Darci stood up, she suddenly felt light-headed. She hadn't eaten since she'd left Uncle Vern's apartment early that morning. "I want you to have a good, solid breakfast," Aunt Thelma had said as she handed Darci a Pop-Tart and a plastic cup full of warm Pepsi. "Fruit's better for you than those cereals your mother gives you. And you need caffeine and sugar and somethin' warm inside you when you go job huntin'," she'd said kindly.

But now, when Darci stood up too quickly, the breakfast seemed a long time ago. She took a couple of deep breaths, put her shoulders back, and, controlling the urge to reach inside her jacket and claw the itchy place on her shoulder, she walked through the open doorway.

One side of the room was lined with windows so dirty she could barely see the building across the street. On the floor under the windows was a messy heap of metal folding chairs, most of them broken.

In the center of the room was a big oak desk, the kind that all used-furniture stores seemed to have an unlimited supply of. A man was sitting behind the desk on one of the metal chairs, and to his left, off to one side, sat a woman. She was in her fifties, dressed in a pretty twinset and a long cotton skirt, and around her neck and on her hands sparkled gold and diamonds. She had a perfectly ordinary face, one that no one would notice in a crowd, except that she had the most intense eyes that Darci had ever seen. Now, as she watched Darci enter the room, those huge brown eyes didn't blink.

But after only one glance at the woman, Darci looked away, because the man behind the desk was the most gorgeous person she'd ever seen in her life. Oh, maybe he wasn't movie-star beautiful, but he was the kind of man that Darci had always liked. For one thing, he was older, at least in his midthirties. "You can't get a father by marryin' one," her mother had said more than once, but that didn't stop Darci from being attracted to men past thirty. "Past thirty and they may as well be past seventy" was her mother's philosophy, but then Jerlene's boyfriends seemed to get younger every year.

"Please have a seat," the man said, and Darci thought he had a lovely voice, deep and rich.

He was a tall man, at least he looked as though he would be tall if he stood up, and he had beautiful black hair, lots of it, with wings of gray above his ears. Like a lion's mane, she thought, staring at the man with her eyes so wide open they were beginning to tear. But she didn't want to blink in case he was a product of her imagination and didn't really exist.

Besides his beautiful hair, he had a strong jaw with a lovely square chin with a little cleft in it (just like Cary Grant, she thought), small flat ears (she always noticed men's ears) and deep-set blue eyes. Unfortunately, they were the eyes of someone who seemed to be carrying the weight of the world. But then, maybe he was just tired from asking so many women so many questions.

"May I see your application?" he asked, holding out his hand to her across the desk.

May I? Darci thought. Not "Can I?" but a proper "may," as in asking permission. With a smile, she handed the paper to him, and he began to read it as she sat down. While she was waiting, Darci tucked her hands under her knees and began to swing her legs as she glanced about the room, but when she looked at the woman to the man's left, she stopped swinging and sat still. There was something about the woman's eyes that were a bit unnerving. "Nice day," Darci said to the woman, but her face gave no indication that she'd heard Darci, even though the woman was staring at her hard.

"You're twenty-three?" the man asked, drawing Darci's attention back to him.

"Yes," she answered.

"And college educated?" At that he looked her up and down, and his eyes said that he didn't believe her. Darci was used to that. She didn't quite understand it, but it often happened that people looked at her machine-washed suit and her fine, flyaway hair and thought that she didn't look like a college girl.

"Mann's Developmental College for Young Ladies," Darci said. "It's a very old school."

"I don't think I've ever heard of it. Where is it?"

"It's anywhere, actually," she said. "It's a correspondence school."

"Ah, I see," the man said, then put down her application. "So tell me about yourself, Darci."

"I'm from Putnam, Kentucky, and I've lived there all my life. I'd never been more than fifty miles out of Putnam until two weeks ago when I came here to New York. I'm staying with my aunt, my mother's sister, and her husband, until I can find a job."

"And what do you want to become when -- " He stopped himself, but she knew he'd been about to say, When you grow up? The smallness of her often made people mistake her for a child. "And what did you study to be?"

"Nothing," Darci said cheerfully. "I studied a little bit of everything. I like to learn about different things." When neither the man nor the woman responded to this, Darci said meekly, "I know nothing about computers."

"That's fine," the man said. "So tell me, Darci, do you have a boyfriend?"

Alarm bells started ringing in Darci's head. Had she given herself away already? Had this beautiful man seen that Darci was attracted to him? Was he thinking that he wasn't going to get a worker but some love-struck girl mooning over him all day?

"Oh, yes," Darci said brightly. "I'm engaged to be married. To Putnam. He's -- "

"The same name as your town?"

"Yes. Putnam owns the town." She tried to laugh in what she hoped was a sophisticated, big-city way. "Although Putnam's not much to own, what there is, belongs to Putnam. Or to his family, anyway. All of them own it, the town, I mean. And the factories, of course."

"Factories? How many factories?"

"Eleven, twelve," she said, then thought. "No, I think there're fifteen of them now. Putnam's father builds them at a prodigious rate."

"'Prodigious,'" the man said, then bent his head down, and Darci wasn't sure, but she thought he smiled a bit. But when he looked back up, his face was once again solemn. "If you're to marry a rich man, then you don't need a job, do you?"

"Oh, but I do!" Darci said fiercely. "You see -- " she began, but then she broke off and caught her lower lip between her teeth. Her mother was constantly warning her not to tell everybody everything there was to know about her. "Leave some mystery," her mother said. If there was ever such a time, Darci was sure that now was the time to leave a bit of mystery. And maybe it wouldn't hurt to add a little "imagination." "Putnam won't inherit for years, so we have to make it on our own. I came here to New York to earn as much as I can so I can return to my...