I was glad to change the subject. “I’ve never understood exactly what Julian is writing. He’s told me the title: Sand, Stone, Fire and Ice. But I don’t know what it means.”
“Perhaps I understand a little, from what he’s told me. Sand for the sands of time. Stone stands forever. Perhaps because the Singing Stones mean so much to Julian. Fire—the inevitable conflagration that faces the world. Ice can melt, and Julian thinks of it in terms of man’s evil to man melting away. But Lynn, what the whole book is really about is reincarnation. You believe in past lives, don’t you?”
“I’ve never thought much about it,” I admitted. “I’ve been too busy trying to figure out this life.”
“But it’s so fascinating—once you begin to learn. When you see the way patterns repeat themselves over the centuries, so much comes clear. Julian has been able to regress several people and help them to deal with their present problems and understand them more clearly because of what’s gone before.”
“Has he regressed you?”
Her face seemed to glow with light. “Oh, yes! Julian and I have met in several past existences. Back in the great days of Greece I was a slave in his household, and he was a famous philosopher. He freed me because he came to love me.”
That was nicely romantic, I thought. Just what Vivian would enjoy. “And Larry? Did you know him in those other lives too?”
“Of course! Once I was a cabin boy on a ship where Larry was first mate. Once I was even Julian’s mother. He could regress you if you like, Lynn. It’s so interesting to go back.”
I thought of the book I’d read snatches of at the Quest today. That woman with the pain in her neck! “It can’t always be fascinating. Every one of the people I might go back to—if I really lived before—has died. What if I found myself in some dreadful situation where I was dying a violent, painful death? No thank you!”
“It’s possible, of course. But Julian knows how to prevent that from happening. He hypnotizes you first, and makes sure you won’t feel any pain or have any residue of distress when you wake up. No matter what might have happened, you wouldn’t feel it. What does come through may be enlightening. It can help us in our present lives.”
I was neither a believer, nor entirely a skeptic. I liked to think of myself as a seeker who was willing to push out walls and explore new territory. Except for one thing. I didn’t mean to rely on some fatalistic attitude to pull me out of whatever entanglements I got myself into in this life. At present I’d arrived at total confusion and I must somehow deal with this right now, and never mind the past.
Vivian’s antennae weren’t as sensitive as Julian’s, but she picked up something from me now. “You really do need to talk with Julian, so of course you must. That’s what he would want. You are more important than his book, and you must talk with him now.”
Reluctantly, not as sure as she was about this interruption, I went inside with her. This time Julian was immediately aware of my presence. He seemed to understand before Vivian spoke a word.
“Sit down, Lynn,” he invited, “and tell me what’s troubling you.”
What was troubling me was everything, but when he waved me into a reclining chair I sat down obediently, though I kept the chair upright. Vivian took her own place again, near a window, and made herself unobtrusive.
“This isn’t confession time,” I told Julian. “I don’t want to talk about my problems and worries—I just want to find a way to be calm. I wish I could stop being angry—but without losing my ability to act.”
“Sometimes we can act better when we’re calm, Lynn. Tilt your chair back and begin to let go.”
I didn’t obey at once. “I don’t think I’m ready to accept all the things you believe in, Julian. I don’t know how to recognize what’s real and what isn’t.”
“Who does? But perhaps we defeat ourselves by building up a protection we like to call fact. Sometimes we even call it scientific fact. We forget how such facts change over the centuries. Lately change has speeded up. It can happen in a generation—or a day. From the world-was-flat, to present impossibilities we all live with.”
I struggled for words. “Sometimes what’s happening now seems less tangible. It’s more—more—”
“Spiritual, perhaps? That’s all to the good, isn’t it. Relax now, Lynn. Lie back and let your anger go.”
I lay back in the recliner, but I couldn’t relax. “If I stop being angry, how can I act? Perhaps anger’s the spark that moves us to do what has to be done?”
“There are other, quieter sparks—more useful for good energy. Let’s look for them. Close your eyes, Lynn, and breathe slowly and deeply.”
Even the way he spoke my name seemed loving, calming, and I began to relax a little in spite of a residue of inner resistance. Gradually, as I listened to his quiet voice, my tension began to lessen. But before I could let myself go completely, I opened my eyes and stared at him.
“No past lives, Julian!”
His laughter seemed sympathetic. “I promise. I’m not going to hypnotize you. I only want to help you find your own quiet place. A place where you can go whenever you choose—and renew yourself. Think of such a place, Lynn. Perhaps a real place where there’s beauty and serenity around you and you can be calm and relaxed. Or if you prefer, a place you make up in your imagination. Even a combination of the two can work.”
In a way, this was what I did with my children who were ill, helping them to calm their own spirits with scenes they could remember or imagine—places in their minds where they could be happy and not afraid.
“I know all this, but somehow it never works as well for me as it does for the children who are brought to me.”
“Because you don’t really let everything go. You cling to what you think is real and safe—when it may not be that at all. Where would you be if you went to your own quiet place?”
Because Julian wanted me to, I tried. “There’s a mountain I remember in northwest New Jersey, over near the Delaware River. I loved its name—Jenny Jump. I remember visiting it with my parents when I was about twelve. It was still a wild area, but a path had been cut through the woods. I remember how peaceful I felt walking there, with only birds singing. And a deer that came and looked at me when I sat very still. I walked there alone and it was heavenly.”
“You can go there now. Put a bench out in the sun where it can warm you. Notice all the details around you. Count the leaves on that nearest branch—or the needles on a pine tree. Look at the way the cones are made. Feel the sun. Smell the scent of pine and sunny air. What else is there, Lynn? Tell me.”
So I began to tell him, dreamily. The bench was marble—because I chose it to be. There hadn’t been any bench in the real woods I remembered. But it was there now, and I felt the stone cool under my hands even in the summer sun. The path at my feet was thick with brown pine needles—not red earth, like the paths of Nelson County.
I shouldn’t have remembered red earth. With a wrench I was back in my chair in Julian’s study. A breeze had risen outside, and I could hear the faint music of the Singing Stones.
“It didn’t work,” I said. “I couldn’t stay there and let everything go. I thought of red earth and came right back here.”
“Tell me how you feel.”
Strangely, I felt better. Quieter. My unhappy problems were still there and as impossible to work out as ever. But I didn’t feel quite so angry and helpless as I had been.
“You did hypnotize me,” I accused.
“In a way. These are the same means you can use to hypnotize yourself. You can learn, with practice, to stay there a little longer. As long as you please, in fact. This isn’t the sort of hypnotic trance that puts you deeply under. You always know what is really around you, and you can come back at any time.”
Vivian stirred in her corner, smiling. “Julian does this for me sometimes, and it’s wonderful. I feel so tranquil afterward—as though nothing bad could ever touch me.”
Julian regarded h
is wife with affection. I wondered if he could do for himself what he could manage for others.
“Thank you, Julian,” I said, and felt lovingly grateful.
It seemed strange that only recently I had been exhorting him to action, reproaching him for giving up. Now our roles were reversed, and he was leading me.
We all heard someone coming along the hall just then, and I looked at Julian as a sense of apprehension touched me. His face told me that he had felt it too. Sometimes he seemed to have a power of precognition, and I was suddenly sure that whatever this messenger was bringing, it wouldn’t be good news.
Paul burst in with that unpleasant sense of the dramatic which he relished. “Stephen wants you right away, Mr. Forster. There’s been an accident, and the sheriff is with him downstairs now. Carla Raines has crashed her car. She’s dead.”
I felt sick with shock, and Vivian jumped to her feet with a cry of dismay. Only Julian seemed hardly surprised. “I’ve felt something coming,” he said, and left his desk without haste to follow Paul. Vivian started after them, wide-eyed and fearful, and I went with her.
On the stairs she touched my arm. “He knew! Julian always knows when someone is going to die.”
From the stairs we could hear music from the top floor, where Oriana was still dancing. I hadn’t seen Jilly around and I wondered if she was with her mother. This would be terrible news to break to them both.
When we reached Stephen’s rooms he introduced us to Sheriff Williams. “John and I went to school together in Nelson County. Will you tell them, John?”
The sheriff spoke directly to Julian. “The woman has been dead for some time. A hunter found her a couple of hours ago. She was still at the wheel of her car—what was left of it. We think it was suicide.”
Paul said, “With Jilly away, I suppose we never missed her,” and I thought his words a sad epitaph.
The sheriff went on, talking to Stephen. “There are circumstances you should have a look at, if you can come with me. I knew Miss Raines took care of your daughter, Steve, so I came directly here. Will you join us, Mr. Forster?”
“Of course,” Julian said.
Stephen looked as though he were barely holding on to his control. “It happened at White Moon,” he told Julian.
Julian spoke quietly to Vivian. “Please find Oriana and Jilly and tell them what’s happened, will you, dear?”
Vivian looked so shaken that I wondered about her ability to deal with this news, but Julian held her hands for a moment, and his touch seemed to strengthen her.
“I’ll tell them, Julian. Just let us know when you get back.”
Paul didn’t want to be left out. “You’ll need me along, Stephen, so—”
Stephen cut him off. “No, Paul. You stay here—I don’t need your help.”
I didn’t ask if I could come—I wouldn’t risk refusal. Stephen’s state alarmed me, and I couldn’t stay behind and worry.
We went out to the sheriff’s car, and Stephen took his crutches with him to the front seat. Julian and I sat in back, and on the way to White Moon, Julian spoke to me sorrowfully.
“This is the anniversary, Lynn. A year ago today the tragedy happened at that place. A tragedy to all who were there.”
This would be part of what was troubling Stephen. He must feel that he too had died that day, as well as Luther Kersten. And now there had been another death.
I felt guilty about Carla—since I’d never liked her and I hadn’t paid enough attention to what must have been driving her to this sad solution. Somehow, in spite of everything, I found the idea of her committing suicide hard to accept.
“I wonder if she really killed herself,” I said to Julian. “Can you feel anything else?”
“Nothing has come through,” he said. “And I haven’t asked for answers. It doesn’t matter, you know. Carla has gone to something better.”
“Or something worse? Besides, it does matter to those who are left.”
He had no answer for that, and when we reached the building site, he got out of the car and went with Stephen and the sheriff to a place farther along the ridge. No one paid any attention to my presence—probably unwelcome—so though I followed, I stood back from the others.
A deputy waited for us. Stephen, balancing on his crutches, looked white and shaken as he stared down at tire markings in a patch of red mud not far from the cliff’s edge.
“We figure she stopped here for a while,” Sheriff Williams said. “The tracks show that. Then she must have run straight off the cliff.”
He and Stephen moved down an incline toward other cuts in the earth made just before the car plunged into space. Julian put out a hand to steady Stephen. Feeling queasy, I stood near the others and looked down. The car must have bounced against rock walls so that it had been flung out into space to crash on the valley floor far below. Miraculously, it hadn’t burned, but it had rolled and smashed, with parts flung about and flattened. Men stood around the wreckage and one of them was working with a blowtorch to free Carla’s body.
Julian was the first to turn away, and he stood a little apart, his eyes closed. He was praying, I thought—someone needed to pray for Carla.
“It had to be suicide,” the sheriff told Stephen. “The engine was off, and she only needed to release the brake for the car to roll toward the cliff. I wanted you to see the way it looks up here. Maybe she just sat there for a while thinking about a year ago when Luther Kersten died.”
“It’s my fault,” Stephen said.
Williams looked his question, and Stephen went on. “She came to talk to me day before yesterday. Maybe if I’d listened—but I’d had enough of hashing over what happened in this place, and I didn’t hear her out. Though maybe that was what she needed.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Steve,” the sheriff said. “She came to me too one time a few months ago. She wanted me to look into the possibility that Kersten’s death was murder. But she had nothing but her own instincts to go on, and neither you nor Jilly could back her up.”
I stepped closer to Stephen. “What are you thinking? What did Carla say?”
He told us bleakly. “She claimed that Luther’s death was no accident, and that somebody had pushed him off the cliff. Once she’d even thought it was me, since we fought up there. But then she had another idea—though with no proof to go on. She was pretty sure that Luther was blackmailing the mysterious person who killed him. I just thought she’d brooded too long and was concocting a story that it would suit her to believe. Now I’m not so sure.”
“What if Carla’s death is the proof that she was right?” I asked.
Stephen and the sheriff stared at me. Julian still stood apart with his eyes closed.
I went on. “It’s hard to believe that she’d kill herself now. She was too anxious for revenge on the person she blamed for Luther’s death. What’s worse, I think Jilly knows who that person is, and it’s tormenting her.”
Julian came back from whatever faraway place he’d gone to, and apparently he had been listening. “Blackmail’s an ugly word, Stephen. Maybe it’s time to talk to Paul Woolf. I think he knows something about that subject.”
Stephen said nothing, and I wondered if he knew about Meryl and Paul. Though what either of them might have to do with Carla’s death, I couldn’t imagine. He swung himself around on his crutches and started back toward the car. I went with him, not too close, but watchful, and he seemed unaware of my presence until I spoke.
“Carla tried to talk to me too,” I told him, “and I didn’t listen either. She wasn’t the sort to inspire much confidence.”
He got into the front seat of the police car and pulled his legs inside. We drove back to Stephen’s house with very little to say. The sheriff told Stephen he would let him know about anything else that came up after Carla’s body had been examined.
Vivian was waiting for us on the lower deck, and she came to Julian at once. “I couldn’t tell Oriana! I just couldn’t! She was fond of Carla and th
is will be a shock. But I’ve phoned Meryl and she’s coming out. Meryl will take care of everything.”
“It’s all right,” Julian assured her. “You did the right thing.”
Stephen didn’t think so, however. “Will you tell Oriana and Jilly, Lynn? You’ll do it more gently than Meryl will, and I’m not up to it right now.”
He looked beaten, exhausted, and I reassured him quickly. “Of course I’ll do it,” I said.
I didn’t welcome the assignment, but I would do what I could to break the news, and I went upstairs.
The music had stopped, and when I reached the top rooms, Oriana had just come out of the shower, wrapped in a white terry robe. Her high-arched dancer’s feet were bare, the toenails perfect and delicately tinted. Jilly was still not with her.
“Where is Jilly?” I asked. “I have something to tell you both. Some unhappy news.”
Oriana was suddenly alert, as though she anticipated what I had to tell. “Jilly’s out in the summerhouse.” Oriana gestured. “You can see her through the window.”
When I’d glanced outside to make sure of Jilly, I went on to Oriana, “There’s been a car crash and Carla Raines is dead. I know she was your friend, and I’m sorry. The sheriff thinks it was probably suicide. Her car went off the cliff at White Moon.” There was no way to tell any of this gently, though I tried to soften my voice and manner.
Oriana dropped down in a dressing room chair, and for once her air of serenity vanished. “How terrible! I’ve known how troubled she was since I came home this time. But I didn’t dream she would move in such a direction.”
“You do know why she came here?”
Oriana seemed not to hear me. “She changed so much after she became obsessed with that dreadful man. She was a promising dancer until she damaged her knee, but she could still teach, and I’d hoped she would be helpful to Jilly. She needed the work and she begged me to let her come here.”
“Is that really why she came?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve told you she believed that Luther was murdered, and she wanted to uncover the truth about his death. Perhaps she did.”
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