Up on the mountain the morning was glorious. The Shenandoah Valley lay distant, far below, the view shredded with mists that dissipated as the sun rose behind the house. This was a cliff house, with a sheer drop below Christy’s window. Large black birds flew in and out of the crags below. They might be ravens, since someone had said there were ravens up here.
When she had showered and dressed, Christy went upstairs in search of coffee and found Nona in the kitchen. Lili was still asleep. She often stayed in bed late to recoup her energy after a session with Josef. Nona, in her dressing gown, with no scarf covering her head, looked tired and gloomy.
“What did Victor have to say after we left?” she asked.
Christy poured coffee for both of them and sat down at the counter. “Not very much. He seems to think Josef touched on some truths, even though we didn’t understand what he was talking about.”
“I don’t like what happened,” Nona said. “Someone got in here with Deirdre’s perfume. I had a sniff at the incense burners this morning, and they’d certainly been scented. And not by Lili! Her part in all this is genuine as far as she knows. How much she fools herself we can never be sure.”
“I don’t know,” Christy said. “Sometimes I wonder.”
“Wonder what?” Her aunt was turning bacon with a fork, dropping eggs into the pan.
“Mostly about me, I suppose. When I was small I hated what my mother did because it always took her away from me. So I was jealous. Sometimes people made fun of her, and then I was ashamed. You didn’t approve of her either, a lot of the time, and I was mixed up, confused. Perhaps I still am. Lili always seemed so happy in what she was doing—so serene. I wanted that for me. Instead, I had to share her with so many people who tugged at her and took her away from me—sometimes used her up, so she was tired and couldn’t give me what I wanted from her.”
“I know. I was jealous too—because I could never take her place with you.”
“But you always had your own place!” Christy cried. “No one else ever gave me what you did. You were the one I could count on—when I couldn’t count on her.”
Nona looked pleased as she transferred bacon and eggs to two plates and joined Christy at the counter. But talking about affection was not her thing, and she edged away from the personal.
“Victor must have said something more?” she prompted.
“Yes. He spoke about Hayden letting down his shield. What do you think he meant?”
“You’d better ask him—or Hayden.”
That was what Victor had said, but she could hardly ask Hayden. He had seemed terribly disturbed last night, and torn in ways she couldn’t fully understand. Losing Deirdre, perhaps not always loving her—but losing her, and never free of her—might leave him with a strong sense of guilt.
“I’m a total failure,” she told her aunt. “I want to be useful, but nothing comes to me. Except for glimpses that only concern me, I don’t see anything. Just when I might need—whatever this is—it vanishes.”
“Need it for what?”
Christy recognized that challenging tone. “I know you’ve always set yourself against Lili’s talents, and against whatever slight gift I have. Why? It’s in you too—though you never acknowledge it. You paint mysteries on canvas.”
“I’d rather see you happy than talented in that way,” Nona said sadly. “I never wanted you to follow in Lili’s steps. That road is fine for the dedicated woman she is. But I wanted a better life for you than she has had. You would know what you’d missed. I think you do know.”
She was beginning to know, Christy thought.
Nona continued wryly. “I’ve always believed that this genetic trait is due to something askew in the brain. It can skip generations, and I hoped it would skip you.”
“So I’m brain-damaged? Thanks! But what if this is perfectly normal for everyone, and just something that’s squelched out of us by our pragmatic, left-brain world, so it doesn’t develop?”
“God knows, I’ve tried to suppress it in you, Christy, and turn you in another way.”
“Sometimes I wish you’d succeeded. I’m not happy being different, so if these visions stop, I ought to feel relieved. But I wonder if they can ever really be suppressed?”
“If a talent isn’t used it grows weak, fades away. So why not let it go? That’s why you came to Redlands, isn’t it? To escape.”
“Instead, I’ve become more involved than I want to be. Last night I saw a rainbow—a vision of a rainbow. And it seemed to mean my own death.”
“Dismiss it,” Nona said, but she looked concerned.
“I don’t believe anything is inevitable. This may be a warning—something I’m to watch for. But I can still make choices. I must believe that!”
“A rainbow is for joy and promise,” Nona reminded her. “It’s a bridge to something wonderful, and I don’t mean that pot of gold.”
“I know all that, but I still felt afraid, even though I seemed to be alone in the scene that came to me. As though someone had been there and was gone, or as if someone were still coming. It isn’t like a dream—I’m wide awake. A premonition has a different feeling from a dream. It’s much stronger. And when this happened I was sitting right here among all of you.”
“There was no resolution?”
“No. The fog that often comes with such pictures drifted in and wiped everything away. Nona”— Christy roused herself—“I wish you would paint Deirdre again. Just paint her from memory and let your brush go where it pleases. You might be able to tell us something.”
Nona stared at her, and then pushed her empty plate aside. “Believe me, I have never encouraged this—this parlor trick, or whatever you want to call it, in myself. It’s a bit like automatic writing for me. Sometimes I can’t help it. I don’t even know what my brush is doing, or what will appear.”
“Then try it for me. Try it now! I saw a pad on the desk in the living room. You could do a sketch of Deirdre, couldn’t you? And just see if anything takes over.”
Nona looked as though she might refuse. Then she shrugged and stood up abruptly. Christy followed her into the living room.
Apparently, Nona had been upstairs for a while, because the furniture was back in place, and all evidence of last night had been tidied up. She went to the desk and sat down, reaching for the white pad.
“I put this here yesterday, in case I wanted to make notes,” she said. “But there was really nothing specific enough to set down. Lili often uses a tape, but I didn’t bring a recorder with me.”
Christy sat in a nearby chair and watched Nona as she picked up a pencil, examined the point, cracking her joints. That was something Christy had loved to request as a child, and she smiled to herself as she watched her aunt relax and close her eyes.
For once, Nona wasn’t fighting whatever wanted to come, and in a few moments her pencil began to move on the paper. Christy could see that she was drawing a face, though from where she sat, she couldn’t make it out clearly. The old feeling of excitement crept in, as it had always done on the occasions when Nona had been willing to try this.
Now her pencil moved swiftly and with confidence. A figure took shape, filling the paper, though Christy knew better than to get up and look. Any interruption or distraction would break that flow of pencil across paper.
It was not just an outline she was drawing, but a figure dressed in jeans. Christy could see that much, but she received no feeling of Deirdre’s ethereal presence, and she was sure quickly enough that Nona wasn’t drawing Deirdre at all.
The pencil faltered, scribbled a meaningless line, and then seemed to fall over on the paper—released by whatever power had moved it. Nona opened her eyes.
“My God!” she said. “Look what I’ve drawn!”
The sketch was not as skillful as Nona would have managed with her conscious ability and it had been hurriedly
done. Yet it was quite recognizable as the portrait of a young boy. A boy with Hayden’s face, as he might have looked when he was about ten or eleven.
“Now why did I draw that?” Nona asked of the air about her.
Picking up the pad, Christy carried it to window light and studied it carefully. The boy’s face wore an expression of grief, and Christy saw that Nona had sketched a rabbit that he held in his arms. A very limp rabbit. She brought the paper back to her aunt.
“Now I remember!” Nona said. “Though I haven’t thought of it in years. There was a summer I spent out in northwest New Jersey near the little Moravian town of Hope. I went there to be with an old friend who was ill and needed me. That was the summer when you spent a couple of months with your mother—remember? So you weren’t with me. Hayden and his father lived on the next farm.”
“You knew him before you came here? You never told me that!”
“It never came up. But that incident has stayed with me apparently. Hayden’s mother died that summer, and he was brokenhearted. I never liked Bruce Mitchell, his father, and he didn’t like me. But Hayden and I became good friends. The boy was lonely and unhappy, and perhaps I was a temporary mother figure for him to talk to. I could treat him as an equal—which nobody else did.”
“And the rabbit?”
“That was pretty awful. It died cruelly in a trap. Hayden had named it Maxwell, and Max was the source of the worst quarrel I ever saw between Hayden and his father. I’d never known his mother, but I gathered from one thing and another that she possessed the same genetic flaw that runs in our family, Christy. Bruce hated it. He wanted to make sure no such nonsense cropped up in his son. So any hint of precognition, anything vaguely psychic, was stamped out of the boy. His father ridiculed and raged until all that went underground. His wife couldn’t help when it surfaced, but Bruce would have none of that in Hayden.”
“Just as you did with me—that is, discourage it. Though you never ridiculed or got angry.”
Nona’s chin came up and she grimaced. “I was never as bad as Bruce! I wanted to help you, not hurt you—though I may have been wrong too.”
“Did Hayden see that his rabbit was going to die?”
“Yes. He told his father one evening just before it got dark. He’d had a vision of Max caught in a trap that Bruce had set out for beavers. He knew what had happened, and he led his father to the very place. The trap was hardly the humane sort, and the rabbit must have died painfully. When Bruce took it out of the trap and told Hayden to bury it, the boy just stood there with the rabbit in his arms and told his father what he thought of him.”
Christy could remember with all of a child’s hurt the death of her own little poodle, and how she had known that the accident had happened, and even where. How strange to have this in common with Hayden.
“Of course this was the beginning of a complete estrangement between Hayden and his father,” Nona went on. “The boy hated him after that, and as soon as he was able he went off on his own. When Bruce died a couple of years ago, Hayden had never forgiven him. I think he blamed him in a way for his mother’s death too. The one heritage he kept from his father, and that’s been working in him ever since, is a rejection of anything psychic. Whenever this crops up in himself, he rejects and stifles it. And of course that made him impatient with Deirdre’s whimsies—though perhaps it was the very quality that attracted him to her in the beginning. The same sort of magic he’d glimpsed in his mother—and had come to hate in himself.”
“Was that what Victor was talking about last night? When he said Hayden needed to let down his guard?”
“It’s possible. Victor can’t know any of this, but he senses a great deal. I suspect that Deirdre, with all her other-worldliness, was the last woman Hayden would have wanted to fall in love with. Perhaps he was drawn to the same fragility he’d known in his mother. He’d been taught to abhor his mother’s gifts, but he had loved her deeply. I think Deirdre, who was a gentle, rather helpless little thing in many ways, even tried in the beginning to be the sort of wife he wanted. But her own nature could never keep her on that course. The result for Hayden has been a great deal of confusion that he’s tried to suppress. It’s strange that I sat down here to draw Deirdre, and pulled Hayden out of my unconscious—or whatever—instead. The boy Hayden used to be.”
This might have been a bridge by which she could reach Hayden, Christy thought. But instead, it was a further barrier, and explained some of his antagonism toward her. He hadn’t wanted to ask for her help, yet had been forced to, and resented that very fact. All his deeper feelings and reactions were mostly submerged, hidden. Perhaps even from himself. So that much of the time only anger remained.
“Well!” That was Lili speaking suddenly from the doorway. “I see you didn’t wait breakfast, my dears. And that’s perfectly all right. I’ll manage for myself.”
Christy could never remember her mother looking like someone who had just risen from her bed. Her hair always seemed miraculously combed. And of course her dressing gown was a designer’s item—green and floaty and trimmed with real lace. Even her bedroom slippers had satin heels, and her complexion was so beautiful that she needed no makeup to look perfect at any hour of the day. Though she didn’t believe this, and always took a great deal of time to enhance it after breakfast.
When she held out her arms to her daughter, Christy went to her as she’d always done as a little girl, and allowed herself to be folded into Lili’s sweetly scented embrace. This morning, however, her water lily perfume seemed a little cloying.
“I’ll get your breakfast, Mother,” Christy offered—as of course someone always did—and Lili thanked her affectionately.
“Just coffee and a roll, if there are any,” she said.
But before Christy went to the kitchen, Lili noticed the pad in front of Nona, with its sketch of a young Hayden. “What’s this? Is it one of your channeled drawings, Nona? Of course, it’s of that young man who was here last night. The one whose wife is missing. Tell me about the boy and the rabbit.”
“I don’t agree that it was channeled,” Nona said, but while Christy fixed her mother’s breakfast, she repeated the story she’d told Christy earlier.
Lili said, “Mm,” and “Ah,” along the way, and thanked Christy when she brought her tray into the living room.
Bright daylight poured in from windows along the valley side, unshaded by trees, and the cool morning air was heavenly. It swept out what Christy still felt was a sort of miasma left over from the night before. There had been inimical forces in the room during the session with Josef, but she had no idea of their source.
Nona stood up. “I’d better get dressed. We’ll need to start back before long. When is your limo coming to Redlands for you, Lili?”
“The time was to be this afternoon,” Lili said. “But I’ll call and tell Brewster to cancel. I’ve decided to stay for a while. Can you put me up, Nona? I think Josef and I are not yet through with what is happening here, and I want to remain until this mystery concerning Deirdre is cleared up. I have a very strong sense that Christy needs my protection—so I really must stay.”
Christy felt ridiculously pleased, as she always did when her mother interrupted her own life to take care of her daughter.
Nona was less happy. “I’ve got plenty of room. But don’t expect to be waited on, Lili. And I don’t want any of your entourage coming in.”
“No waiting on. No entourage. I’ll send Brewster home,” Lili said meekly. “Besides, I want to know more about Hayden Mitchell. You’re interested in him, aren’t you, Chrystal?”
Nona said sharply, “Don’t meddle!”
Christy felt no surprise at her mother’s perception. She even wondered if she might talk to Lili openly about matters that troubled her—without having her consult Josef. She had never been altogether convinced about channeling. Was Josef simply another, useful part
of her mother—even perhaps an unconscious part? Or was he really some outside entity who had lived in the past and whose present task was to be an adviser to Liliana Dukas? The old question. Yet there had been evidence at times of knowledge on Josef’s part that Lili couldn’t possibly have had. So was it ESP? Or what? These, of course, were questions that both believers and non-believers had wrangled about for years, and there were fanatics on both sides. Christy neither accepted wholly nor rejected. She couldn’t explain what happened in her own clairvoyant experience. How could she know these things? Once Josef had said to her through her mother, “You don’t need to understand.” But she could never accept that. She wanted to understand—and that was impossible in this stage of existence. One had faith, or one didn’t. An open mind helped.
Lili always knew a great deal about what was happening—too much! She looked at her daughter now with her special radiance and smiled warmly. “It will all come clear for you, Chrystal dear. Just be a little patient.”
Nona went off to leave them alone, and Lili drew Christy into the living room. “Tell me,” she said.
“I don’t know how. I don’t know where to begin, because most of the time I feel confused and discouraged and—helpless. I’m not patient, the way you are. How do you keep so calm, no matter what happens?”
Lili’s smile was warm, loving. “I haven’t always managed that. When all this started to come to life in me, I was frightened. I didn’t know how to deal with it. But my mother had been there herself, and she helped me. She told me I needed to be quiet and go down inside myself, where I could ask for help. Not that it came to me right away. But one day I touched something. I reached a place where I could feel a special joy and serenity. It isn’t always easy, and I still fail at times. I had to learn to accept myself. Accept my own gifts, so I could use them. You’ve fought yourself all the way. You weren’t ready to change, and I had to wait. Now perhaps you are ready, and help will be there—when you accept. Accept and make peace with your own nature.”
Lili put her hands upon Christy’s, and strength seemed to flow from her touch. Christy relaxed a little, let some of the tension fade away. She had never felt closer to her mother.
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