The Midnight Estate #5
Just three months after her parents died, Rupert took Marie out to dinner in the nicest restaurant in the town and he gave
her the biggest bunch of flowers she’d ever seen and he showed her a heavy silver ring with nine sparkling diamonds clustered
in the shape of a daisy.
“It just makes the most sense. You can quit that terrible job—it’s making you so miserable. Let me look after you,” he urged
her. The bookkeeping job wasn’t exactly her life’s dream but she had been enjoying it. Hadn’t she? Why was Rupert so sure
she hated it? Sensing her hesitation, he came up with the best argument of all—the one that sealed the deal and convinced
her to say yes. “Irving needs a father figure, Marie. He will come live with us until he finishes school and I’ll help him
get his life back on track.”
They eloped just two weeks after Rupert proposed and honeymooned in Tijuana, which felt like a dream to Marie.
But as news of the marriage spread upon their return home, she found the people she had known her whole life didn’t react at all as she expected them to.
Everyone she told—from the men at the station who knew both Rupert and her father, to her boss at the mechanic’s when she quit her job, and even the principal at the high school—reacted the same way.
They got a look of frozen shock on their faces, like they wanted so desperately to say something but just couldn’t form the words.
She put it together slowly. Through whispers she overheard here and there and a little bit of deduction, she eventually came
to the conclusion that Rupert was running some secondary operation outside of his work at the station. He worked much longer
hours than her father ever had. He had much more money than her father ever had. And sometimes, Rupert would come home hours
late from his shift, with bruised knuckles and spatters of blood on his clothing. The phone was always ringing at all hours
of the day and night. The shrill burst of sound would wake her but Rupert would leap out of bed and run down the hall to answer
from the second phone in his study, not the one in the hall outside their bedroom. If she crept out to follow him and stood
at the door, she’d hear the hum of his voice down low.
“Rupert,” she asked one night, ready to hear some perfectly logical and legal explanation for all of this. “Those calls you
take. And the extra hours you do sometimes—”
“Sweetheart,” he said gently. “We have our roles in this marriage. Your role is to run the house. To cook the meals. To clean.
When the time comes, to raise our children. My role is to bring home the money to enable us to live in such a beautiful home.
To ensure we can have not one but two nice cars.” He owned a Dodge Royal when she met him, but he’d recently purchased her
an AMC Rambler station wagon of her very own. “How I do that is not your concern.”
As much as Marie was confused by all of this, she wasn’t at all sure what to do about it.
Her inclination was to keep her eyes peeled.
To try to figure it all out over time. There would inevitably be some innocent explanation and she’d feel foolish and embarrassed for doubting Rupert.
After all, he was her white knight in shining armor, and everything else was perfect.
She and Irving had moved into Rupert’s beautiful home and Irving did indeed start to turn things around at school.
And Marie knew her brother adored Rupert. He told her so, and often.
“I want a house just like this one day,” he said.
“You live here already, silly.”
“No, I want my own house like this. A beautiful wife. Loads of money. Rupert is the kind of guy who makes things happen and
I want to be like that too.”
The adoration in her brother’s eyes when he spoke about her new husband eased the last of Marie’s discontent, and for a while,
she successfully ignored her concerns about Rupert’s “business.”
The first shift came when Irving started to pull away from Marie. Even in those troubled early months after the accident he
still talked to her about his grief and his anger and his fear for the future, but now he seemed to be going out of his way
to avoid her. When she tried to check in about his homework or his laundry or where he was going on a Friday night, he’d clam
up, or lash out.
“You’re my sister,” he’d snap. “Not my mother. Leave me alone.”
Rupert told her it would pass and so Marie tried to be patient, but then one ordinary afternoon Irving came home from school
and pushed himself up to sit on her clean countertop. She waved a tea towel at him in warning, but he ignored her.
“Now, sis, don’t overreact,” he began carefully. “I dropped out today.”
“What?” She genuinely thought she’d misheard him, but it only got worse.
“I know I’m in your way here and it’s better for me to stand on my own two feet.”
Marie tried her best to change his mind. Even Rupert said he’d tried to talk to him about it, but Irving would not listen.
He moved out two weeks after that, into a dingy apartment he shared with several young men, and he started work at the diner.