“Yes,” Kayla said quietly.
“Edna was very hard on them, but what mother wouldn’t be? By October, Jacoba had missed her period, which she’d been having for over a year by that time.”
“Oh, God,” Kayla breathed.
“She was pregnant. Back then there was no way to determine who the father was, Jonnie or David, not before the baby was born. Abortion was out of the question. Edna wouldn’t hear of it. She let everyone know that the Lord’s work would be done. She was quite Catholic, you know. Each of the fathers was terrified for his son’s career, as you might imagine. The upshot of it all was that Victor Milliken paid Edna a hundred fifty thousand dollars to keep her from proceeding with criminal charges against his son.”
“And Edna got Wendell’s house,” I said.
“Yes. Not the deed, but the right to live there for as long as either she or Jacoba was alive, which might as well have been the same thing as far as Wendell was concerned, since Edna came from sturdy stock and Jacoba was a mere child. It was a rather odd agreement. I always suspected that its very strangeness was Edna’s idea, that it was a cunning way for her to further punish the Sjorgens, since Wendell would have no reasonable way to explain it.
“Wendell also gave Edna sixty thousand dollars. She demanded a full confession as well, signed by both Jonnie and David, witnessed by the fathers, the lawyers, and myself and several others. Edna took one of the original copies, of course. I imagine she put it someplace safe, insurance in the event that Wendell tried something underhanded once the dust had settled, which, of course, would have been entirely in keeping with his character.”
For a moment Kayla and I sat there in silence. Again, Jonnie’s out-of-control libido had bobbed to the surface, this time with a mentally retarded girl fourteen years old. I glanced at Kayla. She was staring out a window at the town below, at long shadows leaning eastward in the waning afternoon sun.
She turned to Emmaline. “Did Jacoba have the baby?”
“That I don’t know. Once Edna accepted their terms, a cloak of silence descended over everything. It’s likely Jonnie himself didn’t know, or David. I never heard about a baby, not that I would have. It’s always possible that Jacoba miscarried, but I simply don’t know.”
Kayla set her saucer on the table in front of her. “But, if she had the baby, wouldn’t it be common knowledge? Wouldn’t there be records?”
“I’m sure there must,” Emmaline said. “In Myrtle Beach.”
“Myrtle Beach? North Carolina?” Kayla said. “Or is it south?”
“South,” Emmaline said. “Edna sent Jacoba away to live with her sister. I forget the sister’s name, but I’m pretty sure she never married. To the best of my knowledge, Jacoba never returned to Reno.”
“Even though Edna doted on her?” I said.
“Yes. Seems strange, doesn’t it? Edna’s revenge was that the Sjorgens would never again step foot in their own house as long as she was alive, but the agreement was that either Edna or Jacoba had to inhabit it. It couldn’t be allowed to stand empty. I can only imagine that Edna went to Myrtle Beach often to visit Jacoba, but I really don’t know.”
Kayla got up and paced. “I suppose there’s no doubt that my father and Milliken knew Jacoba was retarded,” she said.
“Oh, heavens no. None whatsoever. Reno was much smaller then. Jacoba wasn’t in school or anything, but she lived nearby. The boys had known her for years.”
Boys, I thought. Nineteen years old. Risking it all for a moment of fun.
“And then, after all that, Jonnie and Dave simply went on with their lives,” Kayla said.
“Yes. Or so it seems. It also appears to have settled the boys down. There were no further…incidents after that. Victor Milliken had no trouble raising his part of the settlement. Wendell didn’t either, but he gave up the house and had to endure a great deal of speculation about him and Edna, which I’m sure pleased Edna. Certainly she did nothing to lessen it, although the terms of the agreement forbade her to mention the incident between the boys and her daughter. The entire point of the arrangements was to buy her silence. The house had been recently renovated. It was Wendell’s pride, his boyhood home. To give it up like that, without any explanation…well, in the end, the whole thing simply blew the Sjorgen family apart.”
“Jane divorced Wendell,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And then, later, we elected Jonnie mayor of Reno.”
Emmaline smiled sadly. “Nothing ever slowed him down. Jonnie was always quite the charmer.”
* * *
The sun was a molten gold speck in the west when we left the house. The Toiyabe Mountains were tinged pink under a pastel-blue sky full of high, thin clouds painted a gaudy rose.
“You hungry?” I asked.
“Not very.”
“Maybe in a while.”
“Maybe.”
She was taking it hard. Jonnie was her father. We walked along the highway without speaking, then turned and took the road that led toward Stokes Castle. The road was dirt and gravel, winding not quite half a mile into the hills. As we rounded a final bend, the castle was a dark mass against a burgundy sunset. It was a square, smallish thing of hand-hewn granite, three stories tall, surprisingly ugly for a so-called castle, built over a century ago by mining baron Anson P. Stokes, one of those bizarre anomalies you find in a land settled by eccentrics. We had it all to ourselves, and to Mormon crickets, and bats flitting dark against the sky, this monument to whatever strange dreams or mad flights of grandeur Stokes once had. He’d lived in it for only a month or two in 1897, then abandoned it. It looked cold and uncomfortable. I would’ve abandoned it after eight hours, or less.
In silence, we watched the last vestige of daylight leave the sky. Stars came out. The moon, almost full, floated up over
