17

On a Friday, two weeks after Karin left for Cape Cod, Joyce Aparo was preparing to make the trip there herself with Dennis Coleman to pick up her daughter and go on with them to Nantucket for the weekend. She went into her daughter’s room and opened the drawer of the night table. It was a thing she did often. Karin never threw anything away, and neither did Dennis. Both kept every letter they had ever received and sometimes copies of letters they had written. And so in that drawer, Joyce Aparo found Karin’s diaries and a stack of letters. She read them.

The phone rang in the Hudners’ house on the Cape. The call was for Karin. The caller was her mother. “She was very angry and she was screaming at me. She told me that she had gone into my room and found notes from Dennis and now she knew we were sleeping together. She was calling me names and she said she was driving up to the Cape right then. And she said that when she got there she was going to take some drastic action.” Karin was terrified. She said she began to cry, and the tears, of fear as much as anything else, flowed for the next forty-five minutes while the Hudners tried to comfort her. They didn’t know what was happening; all they knew was that their baby-sitter was extremely tormented.

Six hours later Joyce Aparo arrived. With her was Dennis Coleman. It was his second trip to the Cape that week. Through the hours of that drive Joyce said nothing directly to him about her discovery in Karin’s bedside drawer. “She made some sly little remarks that I would never have caught if I hadn’t known,” he says. But he knew. Karin had called him as soon as Joyce hung up. She had told him about Joyce’s find and Joyce’s reaction. As they traveled through the late afternoon and into the evening, he waited for Joyce to attack him. She didn’t.

At the Hudners’ Karin was sure she knew what to expect when her mother arrived. She was not looking forward to the confrontation. Her first surprise was to see Dennis. She had been sure Joyce would call off her invitation to him. Her second was her mother’s demeanor. Joyce was in a good mood. She acted glad to see Karin, acted the loving mother, and said not a word about the letters she had found or the call she had made earlier in the day. “But then,” Karin later said, “my mother had wild and wide mood swings, and she was very unpredictable.”

They left the Hudners’ almost immediately, drove to Hyannis and stayed the night in a motel. The next morning Joyce, Karin and Dennis made a detour, driving to Provincetown. Joyce left them alone and went shopping by herself. Dennis and Karin did some shopping on their own.

“We went to Provincetown,” Karin wrote in her diary, “and Denny and I found a very nice diamond ring. $1300.00. He wants to buy it for me. [He did, paying for it in three installments, the final one in November, at which time the store, Thunder Road, sent it to him at Glastonbury and he then gave it to her.] It looks gorgeous on me. I tried it on. We both love it. We are engaged to be engaged. How interesting. Mom would kill me if she ever knew.”

Finished with their shopping, they drove back to Hyannis and then took the ferry across to Nantucket. They were to spend the weekend together on the small resort island.

That evening at the inn Joyce took Karin aside and handed her the letters and notes she had found in Karin’s bedside drawer. Until then Joyce had held her rage. Now she vented it, though coldly. Cool it, she ordered Karin. It was all right if she continued to see Dennis, but no more sex. That was over. If she learned that they were still going to bed together, she’d take steps to put an end to the situation, drastic steps if she had to.

But in front of Dennis, Joyce still did not mention her discovery, made no mention, either, of her order to Karin. She was pleasant and friendly and told them to go out and enjoy themselves. They did not. They went to Dennis’s room. Karin gave him back the letters, told him what Joyce had said. For more than an hour they debated the future, what they might do. They talked about Karin’s running away, about getting married, about her moving in with the Colemans, about Dennis’s becoming her guardian. It was something, they decided, they would look into as soon as they got back to Glastonbury. Then they made love; it was, according to Karin’s diary and to the markings she later made on the wall calendar in her room, where she noted such things, the fifth time they had gone to bed together.

Through the rest of the stay Joyce did not again mention the letters or her threats. They were much together, went shopping often. Joyce was suddenly in a warm and generous mood. She bought Karin a nineteenth-century Victorian black jacket for eighty-one dollars, a full-length black velvet skirt for her trips to New York and a diamond ring with seven diamonds, one more than the ring Dennis had bought for her. One might say she was competing with Dennis for Karin, but of course she did not know about the other ring then, found out about it only later. Still, that element of competition was there, as it was always when someone who might offer a challenge to Joyce for Karin’s affection and loyalty appeared.

It was an idyll, a momentary respite. On the surface everything seemed calm, serene, no trouble. But underneath, the trouble was there. Perhaps the precipitating cause was Karin’s fear of what Joyce would ultimately do about her discovery of those letters and diaries left so carelessly in that bedside drawer. She would, being Joyce, do something. Karin was determined to find a way to stop her.