Imprints

by Rachel Ann Nunes

  When I dared looked again, Dar had disappeared. I’d begun to think he’d followed the others to the white van when I sensed another movement and spotted him farther from the bank, his head bent as he talked intimately with a man who was strangely familiar. Where had I seen him before? Never in person, I was sure.

  Wait! He was the thin man imprinted on Dar’s watch, the wild-eyed brother who’d left the commune to be near his wife’s grave.

  They spoke, heads close together. Dar reached into his shirt and withdrew a packet, handing it to his brother. The two embraced, and then Dar strode away, heading toward the white van and the youths who awaited him.

  The other man watched until the van pulled away before ambling off in the direction of Clay Street. I realized I could stay and face the Fullmers when they arrived, with or without the police in tow, or I could do a very stupid thing and follow this man and try to talk to him.

  In the end, I followed the strange man because I was curious about his surreptitious meeting with his brother. What had Dar given him?

  Or maybe I just didn’t want to look into Mrs. Fullmer’s sad eyes again.

  Chapter 3

  The thin man had already begun walking in the direction of Clay Street. Too late, I wondered if he had a car. I hadn’t brought the old clunker I’d finally bought before last winter had set in—my previous car having sunk to the bottom of the Willamette during the bridge collapse—and he’d easily outdistance me. Then again, given the tattered condition of his clothing and his general unkempt appearance, it wasn’t likely he owned anything more than a bicycle. But even a bicycle would leave me far behind.

  He moved like a beaten animal, head tilting forward as though hoping no one would notice him, looking neither to the right nor to the left. I followed. The sidewalks were almost empty this time of day, though cars whizzed by steadily on the streets. One block, two, three. Finally I lost count. He had a lot of endurance for such a small, thin man. As for me, my feet had been toughened by many years of going without shoes, and I was accustomed to walking long distances. The sun felt good on my face and warmed me so much I was glad I’d worn short sleeves that morning.

  At last we reached 12th Avenue. Residential houses sprang up along the tree-lined street, mixed in with a few squat apartment buildings and businesses. One sign read Dancing—Beer. On we went, past more buildings and a muffler shop. Older houses, some tiny bungalows, others still small but with two stories. There was no way to pretend now that I simply had business in the same direction, so I wasn’t surprised when he whirled to face me, his narrow face flushed.

  “Why are you following me?” He was still bent over slightly, his head tilted to one side. It took me a minute to realize that his right eye didn’t meet mine but looked off to the side. Useless. Or perhaps uncontrollable. I guessed him to be around my age, though he acted as if he were a shriveled old man awaiting death.

  I lifted one foot and with my finger flicked off a minuscule pebble that had been embedded in my sole for at least a block. He followed the movement but showed no expression at my bare feet.

  “I saw you with Director Dar,” I said. “I know you’re his brother. I just wanted to ask you something, that’s all. I don’t mean you any harm.”

  His left eye narrowed, or maybe he was squinting because of the overhead position of the sun. “Your eyes,” he said. “They’re different.”

  I stifled the urge to say, “That’s the least of my weirdness.” In truth, I was amazed he’d noticed that my left eye was blue and my right hazel, which in my case is a hereditary condition I share with my twin: heterochromia. Neither we nor our separate adoptive families knew exactly where the anomaly came from. We knew little about our birth mother’s family, but her eyes had been a normal blue.

  He didn’t speak again but stood waiting, so I plunged on. “A girl I know, Victoria Fullmer, was talking with your brother’s group. I think she went with them. I want to know if you know her and if she was okay when you last saw her. She left in December, after Christmas. You would have still been there then.”

  “How do you know that?” Suspicion dripped from his voice. “My brother didn’t tell you.” Now there was a tinge of insecurity, as if he really wasn’t sure about his brother’s fealty.

  “No. I touched his watch, and I saw that it was you who gave it to him. You left in January. She would have been there.” Every time I read a recent imprint I could tell when it had happened, almost to the week. If it was really fresh, like the girl’s bicycle, I knew even the day. Older impressions were hard to pinpoint to a decade, much less a year, and only with antiques did that ability come in handy.

  Oddly, his right eye rolled around in its socket, coming to rest on me as though it had been there all along. It was blue like the other, but there was knowing in it. “I can’t tell you what you want to know,” he said. “I am sworn to secrecy. My very soul depends upon keeping my word.”

  I hadn’t expected him to believe my brief explanation. No one ever did except those close to me or those desperate enough to need hope to cling to. “Why did you leave?”

  “Only my body left. It was weak. My spirit is there.”

  “But not your heart. That’s in the grave with Sarah.”

  His right eye wandered off again, but his left held a sheen of tears. “She died. I wasn’t there when it happened, but I felt it. The connection was gone.”

  He was the first person I’d ever met who talked about connections the way I’d felt them with my parents and my sister. “What happened?” I spoke softly and gently, fearing to startle him into silence.

  His eyes shut, and his head rotated back and forward. For a minute he didn’t speak, and then he said, “Don’t go there. You might never leave. Some of us are not meant for the truth. We cannot live the law.”

  “Are you talking about Harmony Farm?”

  “I wanted to be strong like Dar, but I’m not.”

  “What happened?” I begged. I was beginning to think I’d have to go to Rome myself to search for the answers.

  “It’s hidden. Hidden. Where you think it is, it really isn’t.”

  I clenched my fist in frustration. “I don’t understand.”

  He shook his head, rotating again as though it were the eye in the socket, going around and around. He’s crazy, I thought.

  I decided that was all I’d get from him; already he was sidling away. But he stopped after about ten feet, and his next words shocked me. “You see from objects. I see from here.” He tapped the side of his head. “I left because I couldn’t stand the crying. The screams. The death.”

  Chills shuddered up my spine. If he was to be believed, whatever Victoria had gotten herself into was not the benign group of friends it appeared on the outside but rather a cult that exploited youth who were too young to know better and the elderly who were too sick with the world to care.

  Or maybe he was completely insane.

  “Please—” I searched my memory to come up with his name—“Inclar. Don’t you have any information you can give me?”

  He grunted. “Don’t use that name. He gave it to me, but I am not worthy.” He ducked his head. “I will always belong to them.”

  “Not to Sarah?”

  His head twisted around again, as though fighting an internal demon. “I failed her.” He started down the driveway of a small, red brick house.

  “What about Victoria!” I shouted after him. “Her parents are worried about her.”

  “She’s already lost,” he answered, his words barely reaching me. “Unless you can find her soon. She might be hidden. A few are always hidden.”

  He scuttled up a set of rickety-looking stairs to what I was sure must be a tiny attic apartment under the steeply sloped roof. Seconds later the door slammed shut, the sound echoing loudly in the quiet neighborhood.

  “What a strange little man,” I said aloud, thinking he could do with a few choice herbs from Jake’s shop. Calming ones, mainly, and something to help his eye a
nd improve his thought processes. Had I learned anything of value from him? I didn’t think so. His information was unreliable at best and at worst meant to mislead. Still, he seemed to both fear and worship Harmony Farm. Or someone living there.

  Whatever the truth, I was glad he was gone.

  I walked briskly back to the shopping district, realizing I’d been away much longer than I’d intended. Both Thera and Randa would be at work by now, helping in the Herb Shoppe and Autumn’s Antiques as needed, and I should have been doing books or maybe researching upcoming estate sales, where I always found the best pieces in my inventory. At least with Mrs. Fullmer’s purchase, I wouldn’t have to worry about the day’s profit. I was already ahead.

  My store had only one customer, who was with Thera, but Jake and Randa were busy with a rush of people in the Herb Shoppe. Randa was tall for her sixteen years and slightly on the too-thin side. Her skin was a shade or two darker brown than her brother’s because she came from her mother’s second marriage, though she shared some of the same facial features—the curve of her nose, the shape of her brown eyes. She wore her hair as she always did, in thick corn rows on the front and sides, ending in the back with a ponytail of black frizz. In all, she was a beautiful girl with a fun personality to go along with her looks. At the moment, she was steadily ringing up people at the register, unconcerned at the line of waiting people.

  I went through the double doors to the Herb Shoppe to see what I could do to help. Jake was over by the B vitamins, talking with a frail, old woman, who gestured vivaciously with her hands. He caught my gaze over her head, asking a silent question with a flick of an eyebrow. Are you okay?

  I nodded and he smiled, looking so beautiful that my breath caught in my throat. I glanced away quickly before any of my thoughts could reach my face.

  “Miss,” a large man said, “can you help me find flaxseed oil? My wife usually comes to get it, and I haven’t any idea where to look.”

  “Sure. It’ll be in the refrigerator over there.” I led him to the oil, leaving him to choose the size while I helped Randa ring up customers at the counter.

  Fifteen minutes later we had only two customers left, and they were with Jake at the front of the store discussing the healing properties of magnets. “I’m going to check on Thera,” I told Randa, heading for the antiques shop. I’d actually rung up a few antiques at the herb counter, so today was turning out better and better.

  “I’ll be there in a minute to dust the toys,” Randa called. “Thera hates doing that.”

  “Take your time,” I returned.

  Thera, her white hair swooped up elegantly on her head, was sweeping the floor, as she did every day, though it really didn’t need sweeping. She did it from some misguided idea of protecting my bare feet. Afterward, she’d wash the windows and soap down the counter. Her movements stopped when she saw me. As usual, the older woman wore all blue, a calming color that helped her forget the years she’d had to endure a difficult husband. Her favorite multistrand blue bead necklace lay against her large, soft-looking bosom. “I sold the Victorian dresser and one of the music boxes!” she exclaimed, a note of triumph in her voice.

  “Way to go.” The dresser had been an unusual piece and slightly damaged. At only a few hundred dollars, the customer could pay someone to fix it properly and still have a good deal. “Which music box?”

  “The one with the pony.”

  She meant the nineteenth-century Swiss cylinder music box with the inlaid horse.

  “Great! I should have guessed.” With a price tag of two hundred dollars, it had been the most expensive box in my shop and my favorite. If I hadn’t had five other boxes at home that I couldn’t stand to part with, I would have kept it.

  That was how it went in this business. A flurry of sales and then sometimes a week with almost nothing, and I’d have to either send Thera home or seize the opportunity to go searching for more appealing inventory. I didn’t mind living hand-to-mouth, especially now that the money Jake was paying me for Winter’s store, whose inventory had represented nearly all his life’s savings, went into an IRA account.

  Thera nodded. “Maybe then you can afford shoes, eh?”

  I laughed. “I don’t think so. Where’s my sister?”

  I knew Tawnia was here. The line of connection that existed between us had grown fat and beckoning as I approached the counter. She must have come in while I was busy at the herb counter. Tawnia felt the connection between us, too, though not in such a tangible way. She felt it more like a craving, and it’d been too long since we’d made time to be together.

  Thera didn’t show surprise at my comment. We’d grown close working together over the past nine months, and she was one of the few who knew about both my connection to my sister and my new talent. “She’s in the back. Making tea, I think.”

  “Thanks.” I hurried to my narrow back room than ran nearly the entire width of the antiques shop. There was a long worktable where I prepared and ticketed items, a corner that held a bookshelf crammed with texts about antiques, an old electric stove, a mini refrigerator, and a ratty easy chair that I sometimes napped in when business was slow.

  At the far end was a door that led into a bathroom. As if on cue, the door opened and Tawnia emerged. She had my freckled face and upturned nose, my oddly colored eyes, set slightly too far apart for real beauty, and my hair—albeit longer than mine and in our natural brown. Her body had been more or less like mine before her marriage, but now her stomach was distended with seven months of pregnancy. After her marriage last September, she hadn’t wasted time getting pregnant, saying her biological clock was already ticking. Besides, Tawnia, raised as an only child, as I had been, wanted to fill her house with at least three or four noisy kids.

  “How’s my niece?” I asked, coming toward her with my arms extended. We hugged tightly.

  “You can’t know it’s a girl. I don’t even know.”

  “I know,” I insisted, though I really didn’t. I just wanted a niece. My hands were on Tawnia’s stomach now, and I put my mouth close to the blue shirt stretching over her stomach. “Hey, you in there, are you almost finished cooking? We’re getting anxious out here. You know your mom and I were born before eight months. You might think about hurrying up.”

  “Autumn, that’s a terrible thing to say!”

  “Just kidding,” I said to the baby. “Take your time. Your momma still hasn’t decided how she’s going to take care of you. So stay put for a bit.”

  The decision whether or not to leave her job as a creative director at a prestigious ad firm to take care of her child consumed Tawnia’s every waking moment.

  Tawnia sighed. “That’s the truth. I haven’t been at my job a whole year yet, and our team’s the most talented I’ve ever worked with. I’d hate to lose them.”

  “So go part time.” I took the herbal tea she’d started on the stove and poured us each a cup. I plopped a bit of raw agave nectar for sweetener in her cup without asking, feeling strangely as though we were making up for all the childhood tea parties we’d missed having together while growing up.

  I still had difficulty forgiving the doctor who had separated us at birth after the death of our teenage mother, though he was dead and would never know of my resentment. It was in part our birth mother’s fault, because she’d agreed to give her baby to a couple in Texas and then changed her mind in favor of Winter and Summer, with whom she’d stayed during her pregnancy. I’d tried to make peace with the past because I wouldn’t trade my growing up years for anything, and Tawnia felt the same. At least Bret’s investigation into the bridge collapse had finally brought us together. We had each other now, and that was the important thing.

  “If I went part time, I’d probably have to go back to being an art director, or a freelancer.”

  “So? You miss actual drawing, and you’d still be a member of the team, even if you worked from home most of the time. I’ll watch the baby when you have to go in, or you could take her with you
.” It seemed a simple choice for me, because I’d gone to work with Winter and Summer at the Herb Shoppe for as long as I could remember.

  “It’s not fair.”

  I perched on the table so she could have the easy chair, as comfortable as it was ratty. “No, but you know Bret will do what he can to help out, and it isn’t as if you two need the money. Besides, she’ll be spending so much time with me here that you might as well get working on the next baby as soon as she’s born.”

  Tawnia laughed. I could always make her laugh. “I’m sure you’ll have her refusing microwave dinners and hiding her shoes by the time she’s two.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh, and we sat in companionable silence for a time. We heard the ringing of the electronic bell I’d installed at the shop door, deeper than the sound of Jake’s real jingle bells, but Thera would take care of it. For now, I was content to sip tea with my sister.

  “So what’s up?” I asked, when my cup was almost empty.

  She shook her head. “I kept thinking about you all day. Did something happen?”

  “I did a reading for someone.” I shrugged, trying to show it was no big deal. “A missing girl. I think she got taken in by a cult. Her parents will try to get her out. The mother’s devastated.”

  “How sad.” Tawnia studied my face, as though trying to ascertain if I’d told her everything. “Well, finally I gave up trying to work at the office and left early. I wanted to invite you to dinner, but we’ll have to stop by the store on the way home because I’m fresh out of anything organic. So, will you come? I’ll work back here until you can leave. I brought my laptop.”

  “Sure, I’d like that.” Tawnia wasn’t much of a cook, but Bret knew his way around the kitchen, and between the two of us, we’d come up with something both healthy and filling that would please even my junk food-loving sister.

  “We could invite Jake.” Tawnia’s brows rose suggestively.

  “He has class on Thursday nights.”

  “I thought he hated college.”