The Devil’s Daughter by Danielle Steel,Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Wilhelmina “Billie” Banks stood looking in the mirror in her dorm room at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just outside
Boston. She was wearing her cap and gown, a pair of high heels she had bought for the
occasion, the only ones she owned, and a serious expression. She felt as though her life
was beginning at that moment. In a few minutes, she would be graduating with her class,
magna cum laude. Without the heels, she stood just over five feet, had a slim figure and
delicate features, straight dark hair, and green eyes. Even with the heels and cap and
gown, she still looked like a little girl. Growing up, it had always frustrated her that
people mistook her for a child at times, especially when she was in jeans and running
shoes, with her hair in braids. Today she was wearing her hair in a neat ponytail under
her mortarboard with the tassel. She wished that her mother could see her, but she had
died when Billie was seventeen, in her senior year of high school, the year before she
had come to MIT. She still missed her terribly, especially at times like this. This was
the most important moment of her life.
Billie’s mother, Virginia Banks, was the only person in Billie’s life who didn’t think
she was a freak. Virginia had been passionate about education, and learning whatever
you could. Billie had majored in biology and minored in chemistry, and was a gifted
science student. She had come to MIT on a full scholarship thanks to her high school
counselor Virgil White, who had encouraged her to apply. He wrote the letter that got
her into MIT and got her the scholarship, which had changed her life.
Billie had grown up on her father’s modest dairy farm in Collins, Iowa, with a
population of just under five hundred people, northeast of Des Moines. She’d done her
chores every day, tending to the cows and helping her father, and then she would study
late into the night. Neither of her parents had gone to college, but her mother had taught
her that education was everything, even though she herself had married right out of high
school and had Billie ten months later. Virginia was thirty-six when she died of breast
cancer, but she was a wise, intelligent woman, who had educated herself and her oldest
daughter by reading voraciously. Virginia had a passion for French literature, and had
always encouraged Billie’s love of science. Billie would have liked to go to medical
school but she knew they couldn’t afford it, and she doubted that she could get a full
scholarship. She wanted to get a good job now, with a major pharmaceutical company,
preferably in research. She had taken summer jobs in local laboratories in Boston, and
she worked at the campus bookstore all year long for extra money. She usually spent it
on books for herself. When she packed up her things from her dorm room, she had sent
several boxes of books home, and hoped her father wouldn’t throw them away. She was
taking two boxes of books with her to the student hotel where she was moving that
afternoon. She could only afford to stay there for a month at most, until she found a job.
She had been studying so intently in the final months of school that she hadn’t taken time
to look for a job, so she was eager to find one soon. She would take almost any lab job
if she had to as an interim stopgap, but she was hoping to find one in the research
department at one of the big pharmaceutical companies. Her Bachelor of Science
diploma from MIT was sure to get her a good position. She was planning to go to
several employment agencies the Monday after graduation.
When she looked in the mirror, wearing her cap and gown, she saw the same familiar
face, but she felt completely different. She suddenly felt more grown-up. She’d gotten
her dark hair blown out for the occasion, and it gleamed in the neat ponytail. She hoped
she looked mature enough to find a good job. She had lived by her mother’s golden rule,
“Education is everything,” a theory her father didn’t adhere to. He thought education
was useless, especially for a girl. He hoped his daughters would find husbands,
preferably farmers in neighboring towns, and stay near home. He had great hopes for
Billie’s younger sister, Michaela. Mickie was a strikingly beautiful girl, worthy of the
son of any of the big farm owners nearby. Mickie was a rare beauty and the apple of her
father’s eye.
Their nicknames were in lieu of the sons he didn’t have. Mickie was tall and blonde,
and looked like him. Jim Banks was a handsome man, and she was his pride and joy. He
had been born and raised in Collins, his father had built the dairy, and Jim had worked
there all his life. Mickie had as little interest in education as he did and she relied on
her looks and charm and artful ways to get whatever she wanted, particularly from her
father. She knew just how to work him. He hung on her every word, believed everything
she said, and lived to make her happy. She was three years younger than Billie, and had
been fourteen when their mother died. Billie had done the best she could to mother
Mickie during her final year at home, before she left for MIT, but their relationship had
never been easy. Unlike Billie, Mickie looked like she was in her twenties when she
was fourteen. She was fully a woman, with a spectacular figure. Men all over the county
had been noticing her for years, and she’d been boy-crazy since she was thirteen. She’d
been nearly impossible to control and Billie fought with her constantly when she
entered high school during Billie’s last year at home. She climbed out windows and
went to parties at the town hall or other kids’ homes. She was full of life and
exuberance, constantly in trouble of some kind but always managing to get out of it. She
usually blamed Billie for something she had done, and their father believed her. Most of
the time Billie wound up getting punished for her sister’s crimes, which Mickie thought
was funny. She had no conscience at all about it and somehow Billie always let her get
away with it. Their mother was wise to Mickie’s ways, and could usually guess when
Mickie was lying, but once their mother was gone, Billie felt an obligation to protect
her sister.
The worst thing Mickie had ever done was steal their father’s truck and run over the
dog he loved, killing it, while she was trying to sneak out to a school dance in the next
town. She ran over it and kept on driving and went to the dance. Jim Banks had been
heartbroken over the dog when he found him in the morning, and Mickie said she had
seen Billie do it. Billie didn’t think her father had ever forgiven her. But she didn’t think
he liked her much anyway. He thought her fascination with science was weird, and
unsuitable for a girl. Billie did all the chores at the dairy that Mickie took credit for. He
never hid the fact that Mickie was his favorite from the time she was born. He paid no
attention to Billie at all, except to punish her for whatever Mickie blamed on her.
Mickie had been a beautiful baby with golden curls and big blue eyes, and she had
her father wrapped around her finger ever since she could talk. Billie knew better than
anyone that her little sister had been lying all her life. She never hesitated to sacrifice
Billie to get what she wanted. The lies she told were totally credible, with those big
blue eyes and the face of an angel. Her lack of empathy for anyone else had always
worried their mother. Virginia was Billie’s only defender.
Everything was all about Mickie and whatever her goal was on any given day. She
loved clothes and boys and dancing and going out and having fun. She teased the boys
mercilessly and half the boys in their school were in love with her, and didn’t mind how
badly she treated them. She taunted them, and was a proficient flirt. She knew just how
to drive men crazy even at twelve and thirteen, and by fourteen she was really good at
it. Boys would come to visit her and they’d disappear, somewhere on the farm. Billie
could guess what they were doing. Mickie drove all the boys crazy with desire for her.
After their mother died, Billie found Mickie with the captain of the basketball team
where they kept the fresh hay. Billie scolded her for it afterward, and worried about her
getting pregnant, and later Billie found the contraceptive pills Mickie had been given by
a birth control clinic. When Billie confronted her with them, she said she’d used a fake
ID that said she was eighteen, even though she was just fourteen then. But at least she
never got pregnant. Billie could only imagine the heyday Mickie must have had once she
had left for MIT, and from then on. Their father never tried to control her. There was no
stopping her, especially when a boy was involved, and none of them could resist her.
She was too beautiful and too sexy.
Boys never looked twice at Billie, even in high school. She was small and skinny and
had no figure to speak of. The two girls didn’t even look related, except that they each
looked like one of their parents, who looked nothing alike. Virginia had been small,
delicate, and graceful, like her eldest daughter. Mickie was tall, slim, and blonde like
her father. She was the brightest star in the county, and Billie was the smartest, at the top
of every class. That’s what got her to MIT, which was just the escape she wanted.
Mickie was the prom queen every year in high school, and had managed to go to the
prom even as a freshman. She had convinced the proctor that she was a year older than
she was, and that there was a mistake on her student ID card. The proctor was an
assistant teacher, only a year out of college herself, and no match for Mickie, who could
charm anyone, especially a man, into doing what she wanted.
Billie had only gone to the prom once, junior year, with her best friend, not a
boyfriend, Tom Carter. It was his senior prom. He left for West Point the year before
Billie went to MIT. She missed him terribly once he’d left. They’d been best friends
since grade school. They shared their hopes and dreams and secrets. He was thirdgeneration West Point. His grandfather was a colonel. Tom went into military
intelligence when he graduated. He had majored in political science, and was currently
somewhere in the Middle East, at an intense antiterrorist training camp where he was
taking advanced classes for two months. He had told Billie that he loved working in
military intelligence. He felt like he could really make a difference there. She didn’t
know where he was now. He wasn’t allowed to tell her. Once in a while, she got a
letter from him, when he had a break and was on leave in a neutral place. He had
visited her often while he was at West Point, and she had gone to his commencement.
He would have been at hers if he’d been in the States.
Her father and sister didn’t come to her commencement, which wasn’t a surprise.
They couldn’t afford to. The dairy was being run on a shoestring. They’d had a couple
of bad years. Her father had been sick for a while the year before, and he couldn’t
afford good help. He drank more than he used to when his wife was alive. He was
lonely. There were no single women around on the neighboring farms. He hadn’t had a
girlfriend in a few years, and was no longer trying to find one. No one measured up to
Virginia. She had been patient and kind, a wonderful wife and mother, and she had put
up with his cold, unaffectionate ways. No other woman would have.
Billie hardly came home anymore. She’d been too busy with papers and exams during
her senior year. She came back for Christmas every year and she worked at the campus
bookshop all summer. Once a year in Iowa was enough. It was too depressing going
back there. Her father still treated her like a misfit, which to him she was. He thought
she’d gotten even stranger at MIT, being with others like her. He didn’t see that she was
thriving and comfortable among her peers at last. Coming back to the farm was a step
back into painful history for her, a whole town of people who thought her odd, a sister
who had tormented her, and their mother gone. Their father lashed out at her when he
was drunk, which was every night when she was home.
Mickie had dropped out of high school a few months before graduation the year
before, gotten her GED, and gone to L.A. to act in bit parts and model, mostly in trade
shows, which paid well and helped manage her share of the rent in an apartment with
two other girls. They all waited on tables at night at restaurants nearby, and she had told
her father she was going to make it big in L.A. You couldn’t keep a girl like Mickie on a
farm in a small town in Iowa. She was destined for a bigger world and had thirsted for
it all her life. She used to steal movie magazines and fashion magazines from the local
store, and planted them in Billie’s room so she’d get blamed for it. Billie didn’t care
about movies or fashion. She dressed in T-shirts and jeans all through high school. Her
mother had known who took the magazines and would take them back to the store when
she found them. But the images Mickie saw in them had marked her forever. She taught
herself to do her makeup like the models, and imitated their hair. She lightened hers
even more, which made her look glamorous, and she spent every penny she could on
secondhand clothes that made her look sexy and stylish. Billie had seen her last on
Christmas, and she was wearing a short hot pink dress that clung to her amazing figure,
and six-inch heels with red soles that she said were the brand worn on The Real
Housewives of Beverly Hills on TV. She looked totally out of place in her hometown,
and like a movie star. She made Billie feel more out of place than ever.
Their father was bursting with pride when she wore a sexy fake leopard coat to
church on Christmas Eve. Billie felt more like a freak and looked like Little Orphan
Annie in an old down jacket of her mother’s that was too big for her, but that she wore
out of sentiment. It still smelled faintly of the soap Virginia had used. People looked
right past Billie as they stared at Mickie. She thrived on the attention, and flirted with
the boys she had gone to school with, some of whom were married by then. Their wives
and girlfriends didn’t appreciate the attention she lavished on them. They didn’t bother
talking to Billie. She’d been gone for four years by then, and her only close friend had
been Tom.
The “cool girls” in school had been mean to Billie when they were younger and
eventually dismissed her as just too weird. Only a few of them had gone to the state
college. Most had stayed on their farms and gotten married as soon as they graduated
from high school. When Billie went home, she was shocked by how many of them had
children. In an entirely different way, Mickie was as big a freak as she was and didn’t
fit. She just looked better in her expensive secondhand wardrobe, and the other girls
envied her. More than ever now, since she was single and free and lived in L.A. She
had the life they wished they had but didn’t have the courage, the looks, or the means to
go after. The education Billie had gotten was of no interest to them, and she looked no
different than she had in school. Mickie was the epitome of glamour, and had escaped
their fate. It was always a relief to Billie when she left and went back to Boston, to the
world where she was comfortable and fit in.
She hadn’t expected her father or Mickie to come to her graduation. MIT was on
another planet for them. But she wished her mother could have been there and seen her.
Mickie would have laughed at her in her cap and gown, and her father hadn’t worn a
suit since her mother died. He wore his work clothes and rubber boots at the dairy.
Billie took a last look in the mirror and left her dorm room to hurry down the stairs to
line up for the ceremony. The graduates were lining up in alphabetical order so she was
close to the front of the line. She glimpsed familiar faces in the crowd and smiled and
nodded. It felt bittersweet knowing that after today, she wouldn’t see them again, even
though she had no close friends there. She had dated a few of the men, but hadn’t had a
serious romance. She’d been too busy studying and getting good grades. She’d lost her
virginity her senior year, on a drunken night with her chemistry partner. It hadn’t been
love, just beer. He was a virgin too. They dated a few times afterward, and slowly
slipped away from each other. It just seemed awkward and not romantic. It was a rite of
passage and nothing more. She saw him from a distance a few times after their class
together ended, and they never spoke again. His last name was Ziegler and he was the
last one in the lineup for graduation. They nodded to each other as she walked past to
take her place.
She assumed that everyone had family or friends there for the commencement, and
thought she was the only one who didn’t, but she didn’t feel lonely or out of place. MIT
had been her home for four years now, and she was far more at ease there than she was
on the farm where she grew up. Most of the students at MIT were like her. In her
hometown, she was unique.
She took her seat with her classmates, and walked onto the stage when her turn came
to accept her diploma, which was a symbolic one. The real one would be sent in the
mail. She shook hands with the dean of students, had her picture taken, and went back to
her seat, beaming with pride as her name was read from the list of honors as magna
cum laude. The commencement speech was given by a senator. Billie threw her
mortarboard in the air with the others, after shifting the tassel once she was officially a
graduate, and was filing out, still smiling with a feeling of victory, when a boy she knew
from her physics class stopped her. They weren’t close but had studied together a few
times. He was from Atlanta, and his parents and two sisters were standing near him
when he stopped her.
“Congratulations, Billie,” he said.
“Thanks, you too, Ben. Good luck.” He had noticed that she was alone, and wasn’t
looking for anyone in the crowd. The others were all joining up with their families.
“Do you want to come to lunch with us at Harvest?” he said, waving vaguely at his
family. “My grandma got sick and couldn’t come. We have an extra seat at the table.” He
was so nice about it that she was taken by surprise and didn’t know what to say.
“I . . . uh . . . your family won’t mind?” She felt warm and friendly toward everyone.
There was suddenly a feeling of camaraderie among them, as people hugged and said
goodbye.
“They’d love it.” He smiled at her.
“Okay, thank you very much.” His name was Ben Hewitt, and he introduced her to his
parents and his two older sisters, and all of them were pleasant and welcoming to her.
He had asked their permission first and they felt bad that she was alone, as Ben did, and
they told him to ask her. She followed them out to the parking area, enjoying being part
of a family suddenly. One of his sisters was asking about her major. She was in med
school at Georgetown, and his other sister was working in New York. They made Billie
feel at home on the drive to the restaurant, and by the time they got there, she felt at ease
with all of them, and had a lovely time at lunch. It was after three by the time they left
the restaurant, and she thanked them, and said she had to get back to the dorm to move to
the hotel. She had to be out by five. The Hewitts had made it a special day for her. She
had planned to go back to her room after the ceremony and skip lunch, since she had no
one to be with, and they had changed everything for her. Ben’s mother hugged her when
they said goodbye and wished her luck, and said to call and come visit if she ever came
to Atlanta. She had the accent of the Deep South and Billie was grateful for how kind
they had been to her.
“Thanks, Ben,” she said, and he hugged her too. “That was really nice of you, and
your family.”
“It’s a big day. What are you going to do now?” he asked her. “You heard the senator
today, tomorrow is the first day of our adult lives.”
“I’m looking for a job. I want to try to stay here in Boston.” He had said he was going
back to Atlanta for the summer, and then he was coming back to MIT for graduate
studies in engineering.
“Maybe we can get together when I come back in the fall,” he said with a smile,
wondering why he had never gone out with her. She was very small and graceful, pretty
and very smart. He’d had a girlfriend until a few months before, and now he was free.
“I still have your number. I’ll call you when I get back in August,” he promised, and she
wondered if he would.
“I hope I find a job so I can stay in Boston. I love it here,” she said.
“Me too. We’re going to Aspen in July. Are you going home?” She shook her head
and didn’t bother to explain. There was nothing to go home to except her father, drunk at
night, pretending she didn’t exist and making her feel weird, and a barn full of cows, in
a town where she had lived all her life and never fit in. MIT was home now, and
hopefully Boston and a job.
“I’ll be working,” she said, hoping it would be true. If not, she might have to go
home. She had about a month’s worth of money saved up from her job at the bookstore.
It would run out pretty fast. Ben’s family looked as though they had money. His mother
and sisters were well dressed, his father was wearing a nice suit. They owned fast-food
franchises all over Georgia—McDonald’s and Pizza Hut, she had learned at lunch. Ben
had never mentioned it before. He was a nice boy, and she hoped she’d see him again.
She went back to her dorm room after they left, changed back into jeans and a
sweater, folded her dress into her only suitcase and closed it, and looked around the
room to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. She had a framed photograph of her
mother in her suitcase, and none of her father or Mickie.
She knew how proud her mother would have been on that day. The Hewitts had been
so nice to include her in their celebration of Ben, and he’d been kind to her too.
She carried her two boxes down the stairs one by one, took a last look around the
room that had been home, and carried her suitcase down the stairs. She saw familiar
faces leaving the dorm, but no one she knew well. Some of the girls were crying as they
said goodbye to each other. Billie’s Uber came a few minutes later, the driver loaded
her boxes and suitcase into the trunk, and she gave him the address of the student hotel.
As they drove off the campus, she looked at the familiar sights that had been her home
for four years, and felt half excited and half scared. She remembered how terrified she
had been when she arrived, afraid she wouldn’t measure up. They had been the best four
years of her life.
“Graduated today?” the driver asked her with a smile, and she nodded.
“Yes, I did,” she said, smiling, and wiped a tear from her cheek.
“Congratulations! That’s a big day. It’s a great school.” She nodded again, as they
drove off the campus. It felt like flying suddenly, and she realized when he said it that
she hadn’t heard from her father or Mickie. They probably didn’t even remember what
day this was for her. One day seemed like the next on the farm, and Mickie was
probably having fun in L.A. But Billie knew that she would remember this day for the
rest of her life, every detail. She was a grown-up now, and no longer a freak. She was a
graduate of MIT. She had done it, and no one could ever take this accomplishment away
from her, or this day. It was the best day of her whole life.