Read Online The Bluest Blood by Gillian Roberts - Free Book Online

isn’t his partner, she’s—”
    “She started—oh, who cares. Forget Vivien. He’s the one who’s immoral. I heard him. That wasn’t the way a good man talks. Those were threats.”
    “Jake,” I said. “This probably isn’t the place for whatever you’re talking about.” My mind and energy were mostly out in space trying to absorb the idea that a school principal had agreed to remove good, even classic, works because a fanatic said so. But a part was here, increasingly worried about this boy-man, who was having the air crushed out of him.
    Betsy, who wasn’t concerned about the future of the world, or anything except herself, seized my message and ran with it. “Jake!” she said in her fire-engine siren tone, “she’s right. What we talk about in our home is private !”
    But Jake was two steps beyond propriety. He wheeled toward me. “He said some guy was a pervert and he—Harvey—would make him pay for pretending to be what Harvey calls normal.” He turned back to his mother. “That’s blackmail. You call that good and moral? Is that who I have to live with? Is that what I’m supposed to become?”
    “You’re deliberately misunderstanding. Again.” Betsy sighed.
    “He said!”
    “He said pray. He meant prayer, repentance.”
    “Pay, not pray. People don’t pray through the nose!”
    “You might want to get us back on track here,” Rachel said softly. “See if we can find a—”
    Betsy Spiers ignored the counselor. “He was talking about a hypocrite, a person pretending to be what he is not. That’s the immorality and the problem that needed to be addressed, but you do that all the time. You deliberately misunderstand Harvey and you cause trouble, and you never consider what you’re doing to me.” She dabbed at her eyes again.
    Poor-Li’l-Me’s give women a bad name, and leave me with a bad taste. I wanted to remind her that not every happening on the planet was a chapter in the epic saga How Betsy Was Victimized, that she had a vulnerable, stranded son begging for attention.
    “Don’t preach to me about good ,” Jake said. “My father doesn’t burn books or blackmail people or run around—why can’t I talk to him, okay? Or visit.”
    “It’s too far, Jakey,” she said in a new, wheedling voice. “A foreign country…he might kidnap you, and I’d never get you back.”
    “It’s Canada, for God’s sake! I’m taller than he is! I’m not a baby!”
    She sat immobile. I’d bet she had been one of those kids who held her breath and turned blue until she got what she wanted.
    “It’d be all right for Mr. Ulrich to visit Jake here, wouldn’t it?” Rachel Leary’s voice was like a therapeutic tool, a sort of trowel smoothing down rough emotions. “When it fits both their schedules,” she added, heading Betsy off at the pass.
    “Loren won’t want to.” Betsy pursed her lips. “If he’d wanted to, he’d have done so, long ago.”
    “For Christ’s sake—”
    “You stop using the Lord’s name in—”
    “—he didn’t know our address! You wouldn’t let me write to him. If I hadn’t gotten onto e-mail, I wouldn’t have ever—”
    “Why are you doing this to us?” Betsy asked Rachel and me. “Why did you drag me here to create a situation, make trouble. Do you see what you’ve done? Why?”
    “But if Mr. Ulrich does want to?” Rachel persisted. “Jake, if he does, if he can, would you like that?”
    He nodded. It wasn’t a solution, but it was something.
    “This is a ploy,” Betsy said. “You think Loren will sweet-talk me into giving up my son, don’t you? Take him out of the only stable environment he’s ever known.”
    “Stable!’ The veins on Jake’s neck showed. “Like where animals live! Why are you pretending to be so blind, when I heard you fighting with him about her? Is it stable when Harvey says he can’t control Vivien? If she throws him out before he can—”
    “ He’s the organization. Nobody’d let