“Is that what you want, Paine?”
“No.” He scowls. “That’s not what I want.”
The trouble is, he doesn’t want his old life in L.A., either. Not anymore. Not now that . . .
Now that what? What’s changed?
“Then what do you want, Paine?” Stan asks.
I want Kristin back. I want to be married. I want a real family. I want to live happily ever after, and I don’t give a damn where, as long as I can shake this oppressive restlessness.
“I have no idea,” he says glumly.
DULCIE . . .
Dulcie . . .
Abruptly awakened by the sound of someone calling her name, Dulcie groggily assumes that it’s Julia. She sits up and pushes the blanket away, instinctively swinging her legs over the edge of the mattress, her feet onto the floor.
That’s when she sees the lady, beckoning to her. The image isn’t clear, but Dulcie can see her familiar blond hair, and her outstretched arms waving her forward. All around her is the black nothingness that is Dulcie’s constant, whether her eyes are opened or closed.
Mesmerized, Dulcie moves toward the lady, somehow forgetting to feel her way along the furniture and the wall. Somehow, her steps are assured. Somehow, there are no obstacles in her path.
She moves in barefooted silence across the room and out into the hallway, guided by the vision floating in front of her. A voice in the back of her mind reminds her that Julia said not to try to go downstairs alone, but another voice is louder.
The lady’s voice, calling her name.
I must be dreaming, Dulcie thinks, dazed. Otherwise I wouldn’t be able to walk like this, without bumping into anything.
In the hallway outside her room, Dulcie turns toward the stairway, but the lady wants her to go the other way.
A sound drifts up from the first floor.
Somebody is downstairs.
Dulcie opens her mouth, about to call out Julia’s name.
No! Shhh . . .
She realizes that whoever is down there isn’t walking across the floor like a regular person.
Dulcie can sense the stealthy movements of someone sneaking quietly through the house.
Somebody who shouldn’t be here.
Just like last night
Her heart pounding, she moves backward, away from the stairway, toward the lady. She can feel the pull, can feel the urgency in the lady’s guidance.
Dulcie’s outstretched hand encounters a doorknob.
Turn it.
She opens a door. Walks into a room. Disoriented, she has no idea which room it is; only knows that it isn’t hers. She closes the door softly behind her.
She can hear the lower stairs creaking. Somebody is coming up.
The lady wants her to come farther into the room. Dulcie walks blindly, yet swiftly and strangely assured, moving forward until her outstretched hands encounter a window screen on the far end of the room.
Open it. Open the window. Get out of the house, Dulcie. Hurry.
She pushes the window upward. It isn’t easy. The old wood barely moves a few inches, not enough of an opening for her to climb through above the screen. Dulcie’s fingers find the edges of the screen, the old-fashioned kind that isn’t built in, like the ones in the windows back home in L.A.
She can hear footsteps in the hall. One slow, steady step after another.
Dulcie shoves the screen until it contracts and falls forward, landing with a clatter on the hardwood floor at her feet.
The footsteps in the hall stop abruptly.
Then they start again, moving toward the door to this room.
Hurry, Dulcie. Get out.
Dulcie hesitates, reaching past the sill, feeling nothing on the other side but thin air. She tries desperately to remember Daddy’s description of the outside of the house, struggles to remember which way she went in the hallway before coming into this room.
Is she at the front of the house, where the porch roof runs under the windows?
Or is she in the back, where it’s a straight drop to the ground?
Get out, Dulcie. Get out. Hurry.
Her heart pounding, she raises a leg and straddles the windowsill. Her foot dangles into nothingness on the other side.
Trust me, Dulcie. Climb over the edge. You won’t get hurt. Just get out. Yell for help. Get somebody’s attention.
Her eyes squeezed tightly shut, the lady’s outstretched arms beckoning, Dulcie holds her breath and hoists herself over the windowsill.
“HELP! SOMEBODY HELP!”
Her voice hoarse, Julia rams the cellar doors again with the broom handle. This time, it splinters in two.
She tosses it aside in bitter frustration and looks around once again in a futile attempt to find another way out of here. No windows, no other doors have magically appeared. She’s been trying to get out of here for what seems like hours, yet she knows it can’t have been longer than five minutes, maybe ten.
What if nobody finds her?
Exhausted, Julia slumps on the bottom step.
Dulcie doesn’t know where she is.
Paine might not think to look for her here.
The old house is solidly built. Yet surely whoever was walking around upstairs could hear her thumping with the broom handle on the cellar doors, and, at one point, on the ceiling.
Julia feels sick inside as she allows herself to wonder who is up there with Dulcie—and whether that person deliberately locked her down here.
She’s been telling herself that it had to be an accident. That perhaps Paine came home, saw the doors open, and closed them, thinking she had merely been careless.
But that doesn’t make sense.
Paine would have seen the light, heard the radio, checked down here for Julia. He knows she’s been working on the dresser.
Something tickles Julia’s bare leg, just above her knee. She glances down.
A large brown spider with jointed, furry legs is crawling lazily upward there, toward the hem of her shorts.
With a piercing shriek, Julia bolts to her feet, flinging the loathsome creature away, not seeing where it lands.
Shuddering, wary, she brushes off her arms, her legs, her hair, feeling as though her skin were crawling with whatever lurks in the crevices of this musty old cellar. Spiders, centipedes, mice, bats . . .
Julia snatches up one half of the cracked broom handle and climbs back up the stairs. She has to get out of here. What if the lone lightbulb burns out and she’s trapped here in pitch-blackness?
She lifts the splintered wood above her head, but before it makes contact, the door moves.
Stunned, Julia realizes that somebody’s outside, opening it.
She’s been saved!
Breathless, she watches as a crack of light falls through the opening. As it grows wider, blue sky and green branches appear, along with the silhouette of a person.
Julia blinks, momentarily dazzled by the sunlight.
Then she sees her rescuer’s face looking down at her, his eyes masked by a familiar pair of sunglasses.
It’s Andy.
PILAR PACES IN front of the bank of pay phones, one eye on the nearby set of glass doors. Any second now, Christina and her husband and children are going to burst through with their luggage. Then it will be time to board the massive ship that looms just outside, and set sail to the Caribbean.
With a disinterested glance at the dark-suited businessman barking orders into one phone and the pudgy, Hawaiian-shirt couple sharing the receiver of another, squealing farewells into it, Pilar walks, not for the first time, to the last phone in the bank, farthest away from the others.
She picks up the receiver, fumbling in her pocket for a plastic long-distance calling card paper-clipped to the small scrap of paper that bears the three numbers she’s considering dialing.
Katherine Jergins’s.
Lincoln Reynolds’s.
The Biddles’.
Again, uncertainty seeps in.
Shoul
d she make a call?
Whom should she call?
What on earth should she say?
She settles on Lincoln’s number. Perhaps there’s something he didn’t tell her, something he can share that might shed light on Katherine’s reaction to the mention of her parents.
It seems to take an eternity to punch in the numbers on the calling card and wait for a line to open up so that she can dial.
When she finally does, the phone at the Reynolds residence rings . . . and rings . . . and rings . . .
With an anxious glance at her watch, and then at the glass doors, Pilar hangs up, consulting her list of numbers.
Katherine or Rupert?
Why can’t you leave it alone? Just forget about it and go on your vacation. Stop meddling.
The paper trembles in her hand. Pilar thinks of Nan, lying—dying—in that small, unadorned room. Of Rupert, hovering at her side, anguished, alone. She has to help them.
Even if it means admitting to the old man that she’s stolen his daughter’s phone number from his address book and contacted her behind his back?
Pilar exhales heavily. He’ll be furious.
Katherine or Rupert?
She makes up her mind and begins to dial again.
Katherine answers on the second ring.
She speaks in a rush. “Hello, this is Pilar Velazquez and we met earlier, when I stopped by your house. I’m so sorry to bother you again, but there’s something that I think you should know.”
The woman says, icily, “First of all, I told you, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You must have me mixed up with someone el—”
“No, Katherine, please . . . I understand that you must have your reasons for denying—”
“Look, what are you? Some kind of scam artist?”
“Scam artist?” Pilar echoes incredulously. “No! I’m—”
“I saw your business card. I know what you people are like.”
Her business card. Pilar Velazquez, Registered Medium and Spiritual Counselor.
“I have to go,” Katherine says brusquely.
“No! Please don’t hang up.” In desperation, Pilar seizes the one name that might keep her on the line. “Please—I have a message for you from Lincoln. He says he wants to hear from you. Please don’t—”
Too late.
The dial tone buzzes in her ear.
DRIVING SLOWLY BACK through the gates of Lily Dale, Paine waves at the teenaged boy in the booth. He waves back with a grin.
Friendly kid. His name is Ben, and he always says hello to Dulcie when they pass. She shyly told him one of her favorite knock, knock jokes the day he introduced himself.
Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Ben.
Ben who?
Ben out here knocking forever, open the door!
To his credit, Ben found that hilarious. Now he’s Dulcie’s local hero. And of course, Julia is her local heroine.
“Hey,” Ben calls to Paine through the open car window, “where’s Dulcie?”
“She’s home.”
“Tell her I’ve got a new knock, knock for her. It’ll crack her up.”
“I will.” Smiling, Paine drives into the now-familiar maze of winding streets.
He waves at an elderly couple out with their poodle for an afternoon walk. The Coopers. They live a few houses down on Summer Street. Mrs. Cooper brought a handpicked bouquet and some homemade sugar cookies for Dulcie the second day they were here.
Funny how any place can start to feel like home, Paine muses. If you let it.
But he won’t let Lily Dale feel like home. He doesn’t want this. No matter what crazy thoughts might have flown into his head back there when he was talking to Stan, he doesn’t want to stay here.
He slows the car to let two little girls on bicycles cross in front of him. He recognizes one of them from the playground. She invited Dulcie to teeter-totter with her.
Sweet kid, Paine thinks, rounding the comer onto Summer Street. Dulcie has never teeter-tottered before. She loved it.
And the little girl giggled at all of her knock, knock jokes, too.
Paine parks in the usual spot at the curb in front of the house. As he gets out of the car, he wonders idly whether Dulcie napped while he was gone. If not, he’ll put her into bed extra early tonight. That’ll give him a chance to finish going through the things in the attic and—
Halfway up the walk, Paine stops short.
“Daddy!”
Dulcie is calling him. He looks up to see her in the side yard, near the cellar doors. Julia is there, too. And that man she’s been dating. Andy.
Paine frowns. What’s he doing here? There’s something about that guy that Paine doesn’t like.
He strides across the grass toward the three of them. Something is wrong here. He can feel it. Can see it on Dulcie’s face.
“What’s going on?” he asks, giving his daughter a hug and looking at Julia. She, too, is obviously troubled.
She opens her mouth to speak, but Andy beats her to it. “Looks like you’ve had a prowler sneaking around here, Mr. Landry.”
Mr. Landry? Paine’s immediate reaction is that this guy is too young to be calling him Mr. Landry. There’s a false aura of respect in the way he says it.
Damn, he rubs me the wrong way, Paine thinks.
Then he realizes what it is that Andy’s telling him, and a chill slips down his spine. A prowler?
“That’s what your daughter claims, anyway,” Andy says. “But there aren’t a lot of prowlers around here. It’s pretty safe.”
What she claims? Paine doesn’t like the guy’s insinuation. He looks at Julia, but Andy is still talking.
“I happened to stop by to see Julia, and I found your daughter out on the front porch roof, yelling her head off. She had climbed out the window and she was—”
“On the roof?” Paine thunders. “What the hell? Dulcie, what were you—” He turns on Julia, his heart pounding. “How could you let this happen?”
“I was trapped in the cellar.” She is clearly shaken. “I was down there and somebody locked the—”
“You were down in the cellar and my daughter was climbing out windows?” Fury courses through Paine. He can barely see straight. “My God, she could have fallen. She—”
“Lucky for her, I came along,” Andy cuts in heroically. “I told her not to move, and I raced into the house—all the doors were open—so I went upstairs and climbed out the window and got her.”
Paine rakes a shaky hand through his hair, unable to digest the bizarre scenario. He turns to Dulcie. “Sweetheart, what were you doing on the roof? Why would you do a thing like that?”
“I was taking a nap,” Dulcie says in a small voice, taking a step closer to Julia, “and then I—”
“Were you sleepwalking?” he asks incredulously. Dulcie has never sleepwalked, but . . .
“No.” Her voice grows smaller still. She is almost cowering behind Julia as she says, “Somebody was sneaking around the house, and the lady told me to go out there.”
Paine’s heart seems to land with a thud.
For a long moment, all of them are silent.
Then Paine turns to Julia. “Can you please go now?”
She opens her mouth. Closes it again. He sees a streak of dirt on her cheek.
“Go,” he repeats, and turns to Andy. “You, too. Just go.”
“Daddy, please don’t be mad at Julia,” Dulcie begs in a choked voice.
“Go!” he bellows, reaching for his daughter. He pulls her against him, stroking her tousled blond hair.
She struggles in his grasp, her arms outstretched toward Julia, who looks almost dazed as she walks away, head bent.
Andy catches up to her, putting one arm around her shoulders and quietly saying something in her ear.
“No!” Dulcie cries, trying to break away.
Paine holds her fast against him. “It’s okay, Dulcie. It’s going to be okay. We’re going to get
away from here just as soon as—”
“I don’t want to get out of here,” Dulcie wails. “I want Julia. She takes care of me!”
“Yeah. She takes great care of you,” he says flatly, shaking his head. He trusted Julia. How could she let this happen?
His scrambled thoughts run over the scenario again.
Prowler?
“Julia understands about the lady!” Dulcie sobs.
Paine freezes. The lady. Again.
He crouches beside his daughter, his arms still around her, holding her close. “Tell me about the lady, Dulcie,” he says gently.
“I tried to tell you. You didn’t listen, and you didn’t believe me.”
She’s right
She did try.
He didn’t listen.
And he didn’t believe her.
But maybe, he thinks with a shudder, looking up at the house, he should.
“Tell me again, Dulcie,” he says resolutely, stroking her hair. “This time, I promise I’ll listen.”
Chapter Twelve
“NAN?” STEPPING INTO the darkened room, Rupert leans close to his wife. A shaft of light from the kitchen illuminates her profile on the bed. She’s completely motionless. Silent Rupert’s stomach turns over.
“Nan!” He grabs one of her hands, folded on top of the quilt “No, darling, please—”
He breaks off in sheer relief, realizing that her flesh is soft and warm. Bending closer still and putting his ear to her lips, he can hear the faint sound of air passing over the mucus in her lungs. He touches his mouth to hers. He rubbed lotion into them earlier, but her lips are again cracked and dry, a microscopic pink streak of blood escaping a split in the parched skin at the corner of her mouth.
“Oh, Nan,” he whispers, a wave of sorrow breaking over him, threatening to sweep him into utter despair.
No.
He has to remain strong for her, until the end.
And this isn’t the end. Not yet, he thinks stubbornly.
But it isn’t the sheer force of Rupert’s will alone that’s keeping Nan here.
He walks to the bathroom, taking a clean, folded washcloth from a neatly organized drawer in the narrow linen closet. He runs water over it.
No, it isn’t just that he isn’t ready to let her go yet. Her will is keeping her here.
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