“But . . . who would do something like that?”
“I can only think of one person. Bruce.”
Julia considers that. After an abusive marriage and bitter divorce, Lorraine’s ex has been evading court-ordered alimony and child-support payments. Lorraine threatened him more than once with legal action for the money he owes. He’s a loser, yes. But would he go this far to get her off his back?
“I have to get back in there,” Laura says, glancing at her watch. “I’ve been gone more than an hour. I want to be there when the doctor comes in.”
“Will you keep me posted, Laura? Call me later and let me know how she is.”
Lorraine’s sister promises to do so, then hurries off toward the intensive care unit.
Julia presses the down button again.
As she stands waiting for the elevator, she thinks about what Laura said. Was somebody really dying to hit Lorraine?
And if it wasn’t Bruce . . . then who?
Lorraine doesn’t have another enemy in the world.
Maybe it really was an accident, Julia thinks as the elevator arrives. Thank God she’s alive. It could have been worse. You never know. Maybe it would have been worse, if Lorraine hadn’t been wearing my orange coat . . .
BRIGHT MORNING SUNLIGHT filters across the attic floor, illuminating a thick layer of dust and a smattering of bat droppings. Standing at the top of the steep flight of stairs, Paine surveys the stacks of cardboard boxes, the rickety-looking nursery furniture, the trunks he’s already checked and found filled with cast-off clothing dating back a good forty years.
What am I going to do with all of this crap? What are the chances Dulcie will ever want any of it?
He sighs. With any luck, she’ll stay asleep downstairs for another hour, giving him time to look through the cardboard boxes for any belongings of Iris’s or Kristin’s that might have sentimental value. Everything else, he’ll leave for Rupert to sort through.
Paine makes his way over to the first cluster of cartons and lifts the interfolded flaps of the nearest one. The box is filled with old newspapers and magazines. The musty smell of yellowing paper wafts up. Rifling through them, glancing at the datelines, Paine sees that they were collected throughout the seventies. None of them seem to have any particular historical relevance. God only knows why Iris saved them. She was one hell of a pack rat.
Paine wonders whether Iris and Anson were as mismatched as he senses they were. He knows little about their relationship, aside from what Kristin told him. They met during what she described as her father’s “midlife crisis,” after he dumped his alcoholic spendthrift of a first wife and got back into the singles scene. Pretty, free-spirited Iris, who dabbled in pottery—and pot—and ran a health-food store in Fredonia, caught his eye. There were undoubtedly others, but to know Iris was to love her. Her marriage to Anson lasted nearly two decades, until the day he collapsed and died of a heart attack in her arms.
Paine shoves the first box aside and reaches for the next. This one is filled with baby clothes. Pastel little-girl dresses, ruffled bonnets, rumpled satin hair ribbons, lace-trimmed once-white anklets mellowed to ivory. Paine smiles, recognizing a little blue sailor dress with a red tie as having belonged to Kristin; she’s wearing it in one of the baby photos on the mantel downstairs.
Dulcie might want to keep these things, he thinks, carefully tucking the flaps in again and carrying the box over to place it at the top of the stairs. If Dulcie ever has a daughter, she might want her to wear Kristin’s baby clothes.
Dulcie as a mother . . . now there’s an amazing image. With it comes the usual pang of regret as Paine realizes that Kristin will never see their daughter all grown up . . .
Or will she?
Right before Dulcie drifted off to sleep last night in his arms, she murmured something about having been visited again by the pretty lady—and that the lady’s visited Julia, too, when Julia was here. Dulcie said Julia thinks the lady might be her mommy.
“I don’t think she’s here to hurt me, Daddy,” Dulcie said sleepily. “I think she’s here to watch over me. But, Daddy . . . I think somebody hurt her. When she was alive. I think she wants to tell me about that.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because she keeps coming back. And she has blood on her face. She keeps trying to tell me something. But I can’t hear her.”
“Then how do you know she’s trying to talk to you?”
“I sort of hear her. It’s like when we’re in the car, Daddy, and you press that seek button on the radio and it skips over the stations that aren’t coming in so well. That’s what it sounds like when she talks to me. The words are never clear.”
Paine lay awake long after Dulcie’s breathing became steady and her little body settled into slumber at last. He kept thinking about what she said, about the lady.
Blood on her face?
Kristin wouldn’t have blood on her face. She drowned. And anyway . . .
He doesn’t believe in ghosts. He never has, damn it. But . . .
Can Kristin’s spirit possibly be in this house?
“Why can’t I feel you if you’re here?” he whispers aloud now, standing still in the deserted attic. “Why won’t you let me see you? Just one more time. If it’s possible, babe, please. If you’re here, let me see you . . .”
He waits, listening, watching . . .
Hoping.
“All I want is to see you again, babe,” he says softly, wiping tears from his eyes with the hem of his T-shirt “I never got to say good-bye. All I want is to say good-bye. . . .”
There is nothing.
Nobody here.
Just Paine, alone, heartbroken, same as always. He stares into space, remembering Kristin, absently watching a tiny, floating speck of dust as it glints in the sunlight before finally drifting to the floor.
CLAD IN A hard hat, orange work vest over a T-shirt, jeans, and steel-toed boots, Edward lifts his mirrored sunglasses to wipe a trickle of sweat from his brow. Damn the sun, he thinks, and is struck by the irony. Just yesterday, he was damning the rain.
Well, this work sucks in any kind of weather.
Good thing Edward won’t be doing it much longer.
“Hey, Shuttleworth,” his supervisor calls. “Get to it!”
“Yeah, yeah,” he mutters, hoisting his square-point shovel again. They’re following the truck that is grading the thick new layer of stones, preparing the roadbed for paving.
After a few more minutes, Edward glances around to see if anybody is watching him. The others are concentrating on the job at hand, eager to complete this grueling part of the job and break for lunch.
Turning his back to the rest of the crew, Edward slips something out of his pocket and quickly drops it onto the roadbed in front of him. Moments later, he’s shoveled a pile of gravel over it.
There. It won’t be long before the spot will be sealed with layers of oily tar and asphalt.
Then there will be no chance of anybody stumbling across the letter, as Edward did. Lucky thing he happened to find it. If it fell into the wrong hands after all these years, it could ruin everything.
At first, it surprised him that Anson would save something like this. Now he’s grown certain that his father wasn’t the one who saved the letter. It had to have been Iris. The freaking pack rat saved everything: every art project Kristin ever made, every button that ever fell off a shirt, even old twist ties. It’s no wonder that she regained possession of perhaps the most significant letter she ever wrote to her husband, and decided to save it just in case . . .
Well, who knows why she did it?
The important thing is that Edward found it with several other papers—most of them important family documents such as Kristin’s birth certificate and the tide to the VW, sealed in a large manila envelope in a locked drawer of the desk in the upstairs study. It was surprisingly easy for Edward to pick the lock.
Now nobody else will ever read Iris’s heartfelt plea to her n
ew husband, forgiving Anson’s brief indiscretion and telling him that he was welcome to come back home again after all—that she and their infant daughter needed him. Iris also pointed out that they could put the affair behind them for good; that although Lily Dale might be the smallest of small towns, only three people in it knew Anson’s deep, dark secret: Iris, Anson himself, and the woman with whom he’d had a one-night stand.
Even Edward, as much as he has always resented Iris, grudgingly respects his stepmother’s ability to forgive the old dog.
Not many wives would take their husband back after something like that. His temperamental, insecure mother certainly wouldn’t have.
Not many wives would urge their husband to pay the requested hush money to ensure that the other woman would never reveal to another living soul that he fathered her newborn child.
And not many wives would later allow their husband’s illegitimate daughter to befriend their own little girl a few years later.
In his youth, Edward spent enough time with his father’s new family to know that Iris apparently got over any lingering resentment.
After all, he remembers noticing that Kristin’s friend Julia Garrity was more at home in the Shuttleworth household than he ever felt. Now he alone is left to appreciate the irony that it was the presumably unwitting Julia who looked out for Iris until her dying day.
“IS THIS IT?” the turbaned driver asks Pilar, as he pulls to a stop in front of a two-story raised ranch on a quiet, leafy suburban street.
She checks the address on the curbside mailbox. “I guess so.”
“You want me to wait, right?”
“Please,” she says, gathering her purse and her navy blazer from the seat. “I won’t be long.”
“No problem.” The driver turns up the radio a bit and the distinct strains of sitar music fill the car. He settles back in his seat and opens today’s edition of the New York Daily News.
Pilar opens the door and steps out into the sunshine. A sprinkler a few feet away spurts water in an arc across the thick green lawn in front of the house. A straight walk leads up to the door, bordered by blooming marigolds.
Nan doesn’t like marigolds, Pilar remembers as she starts up the walk. She says the orangey color is too harsh.
One glance around the yard shows that Nan’s daughter doesn’t take after her when it comes to gardening. There’s no sign here of pretty pastels and old-fashioned blooming perennials. Katherine obviously likes a splashier, more conventional look. The foundation of her house is bordered by a clipped juniper hedge fronted by heavily mulched beds containing a few thatches of ornamental grass, smallish red geraniums, and more marigolds.
Pilar mounts the three concrete steps to a small stoop edged by a black wrought-iron railing. The inner wooden door stands open, and the sound of a game show on television filters through the outer white vinyl screen door. Pilar hesitates, wondering if she should knock on the door, or ring the bell.
It’s not so much that she can’t decide as that she isn’t quite sure she’s ready for this confrontation. Now that she’s actually here, at Nan and Rupert’s daughter’s house, she wonders if this is such a good idea after all. She’s about to meddle in a family’s private matters at the most difficult time in their lives. Maybe she should just let well enough alone.
Besides, what if this Katherine Jergins isn’t even Rupert and Nan’s daughter?
True, she was the only Katherine in their address book. But that doesn’t mean Pilar has come to the right place.
It’s a strong possibility, yes. But what if Rupert and Nan haven’t bothered to write down their daughter’s address?
You know Christina’s and Peter’s addresses off the top of your head. Do you even have them written in your address book? Pilar wonders belatedly.
This is insanity. She doesn’t belong here. Whether this Katherine Jergins is the Biddles’ daughter or not.
She’s about to turn around and retreat to the car waiting at the curb when she hears footsteps inside, followed by a startled gasp.
“Oh! You scared me!” a woman’s voice says. “Did you knock? I didn’t hear you.”
Any doubt that Katherine Jergins is the Biddles’ daughter evaporates when Pilar lifts her head to find a familiar face—the very picture of a younger, healthier Nan—looking back at her through the screen.
“YOU SEEM QUIET. Are you all right?”
Miranda looks up at Kent, seated across the small table. They’re in the shady outdoor cafeteria having lunch. Rather, Kent is heartily munching his order of Buffalo wings. Miranda hasn’t touched her grilled cheese sandwich.
“I’m fine,” she says, poking at a sliver of pale green pickle. Her stomach is churning. “I’m just a little tired.” And hungover. And miserable.
“Late night?”
“Mmm-mmm,” she says noncommittally.
“Who is he, Miranda?”
She looks up sharply. “Who is whom?”
“Your latest obsession? The guy you were with last night.”
Her jaw drops.
“Look, I happened to wake up—Lord knows I’ve been sleeping enough with this medication—and I looked out the window and there you were, sneaking back into the inn.”
Miranda says nothing. I wasn’t “sneaking,” she thinks defensively.
“Was it a one-night stand?”
“No! Of course it wasn’t. You know I wouldn’t do something like that, Kent.”
“But you would spend the night with somebody you’ve known for less than a week.”
She lifts her chin stubbornly. “Maybe I was out taking a walk.”
“Wearing a black dress and heels? At night? In the rain? Okay, whatever.”
Miranda watches Kent dunk a miniature drumstick into blue cheese, then, in a few bites, strip it of its spicy red skin and fragments of dark meat.
“For someone who’s been deathly ill, you’ve gotten your appetite back pretty quickly,” she observes.
“I haven’t eaten in days.”
“I’d think you’d want to start with something bland.”
“You’d think wrong.” He tosses the bone aside, reaches for another wing, and regards her thoughtfully. “Look, Miranda, you don’t have to tell me who he is. Just be careful, okay? And remember—we’re out of here in a few days. With all the rain and my being sick, we’re behind schedule as it is.”
“I know.”
“So don’t start getting any thoughts about hanging around here longer.”
“Believe me, I won’t.” The sooner we get out of here, the better.
“I’m getting the idea you aren’t going to tell me what you’ve been up to, or who he is. You think it’s none of my damn business.”
“Exactly.” She gives up on her sandwich. She has no appetite. She keeps thinking about last night, with Andy. She should never have had that second glass of wine with him. Or the third. She should have walked out when she intended to—right after he arrived.
Instead, she stayed long enough to get a little tipsy—okay, flat-out wasted—and make a fool of herself. She told him about her failed marriage and string of broken relationships. She told him all she wanted was to find someone who would love her, and settle down to have a couple of kids. She told him she was incredibly attracted to him, and that she wanted to see him again. That she hoped he would visit her in Boston.
He couldn’t get out of there fast enough, leaving her to drive drunkenly back to Lily Dale in Kent’s Jeep. She’s lucky she managed to keep the car on the road and make it back in one piece.
Having picked the last wing clean, Kent tosses it onto the plate and looks at her. “What’s the plan for the rest of the afternoon?”
“I think I’m going to go back to my room and lie down,” Miranda says. “I’ve got a raging headache.”
It’s the truth.
But Kent looks at her for a long moment, as though he doesn’t believe her. “Fine. But don’t back out on me tonight. We’re doing Leolyn Woods, right?
”
“Right.”
“And did you want to see if you can talk to the owner of that house on Summer Street again and see if he’ll give us permission to check out his property?”
“No,” Miranda says hastily. “That’s okay. I’m over that.”
Again, Kent gives her a long look as though he doesn’t believe her.
Then he shrugs. “Good. I don’t think the guy is going to change his mind.”
Her hands clenched on her lap, under the table, Miranda lets out a breath she didn’t even realize she was holding.
RUPERT HURRIES IN the front door and goes straight to the kitchen, depositing his paper grocery bag on the counter. He woke up this morning to find that they’ve run out of milk. He forgot that he used the last of it yesterday afternoon in the instant vanilla pudding he made for Nan, hoping to entice her appetite.
He wound up tossing the pudding into the trash can. She wouldn’t touch it, and Rupert never has liked vanilla.
Now, he hurriedly places the new carton of milk in the refrigerator and opens the bread box to put away the fresh loaf of whole-wheat bread. Already inside is an identical loaf he bought only a day or two ago.
I’m losing my mind, he thinks, noticing that both loaves bear the same expiration date. Oh, well. He’ll feed the extra to the birds.
Seeing the unopened box of shredded-wheat cereal still on the counter where he left it earlier, he puts it back into the cupboard, his own appetite for breakfast long gone.
At last, he hurries into the bedroom to check on Nan, certain he’ll find her asleep, as always.
To his shock, she’s awake. Her weary blue eyes stare up at him from the pillow.
“Are you all right, darling?” Rupert asks, going to sit beside her on the bed. He picks up her skeletal hand. The skin is almost transparent, crepe draped over bones.
“I’m . . . tired . . .” Nan says. “So . . . tired . . .”
He nods, stroking her hand.
The only sound in the room is the sound of her breathing, the air making a rattling sound as it passes over the mucus collecting in her mouth and throat.
“I have news for you, darling,” Rupert says abruptly.
In the Blink of an Eye Page 25