by Alice Orr
When they did drive up in front of Stormley, it looked very different from anything she might have expected. The three-story Victorian with its tall, narrow windows would have fit more naturally into northern New York than here in this open, airy culture. Most surprising of all, it was built of brick. Taylor couldn’t remember seeing a single brick house in her last two days of jaunting around the Key.
“Does this place spark any memories for you?” Des asked after he had stopped the Jeep in front of the wrought-iron gate and fence that bordered the Stormley grounds. “Your aunt had it rebuilt according to the original plans. Only the exterior brick is different. It used to be white wood.”
Taylor strained her mind, forward across the deep lawn as well as backward in time. She had seen so many houses like this one back home. She was careful not to let those connections confuse her. Two parallel rows of trees hung with green fruit lined the walk that led from the street to the veranda, which was surrounded by a white wooden railing along the three sides of the house that she could see. A scent drifted over her, probably from those trees, and for an instant familiarity might have come wafting with it. The instant passed.
Taylor shook her head. “Nothing,” she said in a resigned tone. “I don’t remember anything.” She sighed.
“Don’t give up yet,” Des said. He opened his car door and jumped out. “We’ve just started this memory-lane thing. Something may come back to you yet.” They were walking up the path between the lime trees when he added, “Don’t try to force it. This may take some time. I’ll help you any way I can.”
Taylor looked up at him, but he wasn’t looking back. She had heard the tender concern in his voice, but he wasn’t letting much of that show on his face. He might have confided in her some during their drive from Violetta’s house, but he was hardly an open book still. Taylor sensed that there were many things kept private behind the practiced steadiness of his green-eyed gaze. The answers to her questions about him lay there. She wondered if he would ever be able to let his guard down enough to reveal those answers. Even more pointedly, she wondered why that guard was so high and so vigilant in the first place. What exactly did he have to hide? How would she feel about him if she ever found out?
Meanwhile, they were climbing the steps to the veranda. The scent of the lime trees was more powerful here. Taylor felt herself suddenly assailed by it, and all other sensations were lost in the effect. She was almost certain she had been in this place before. She halted on the top step and turned around. These thick-topped, thorny trees held a secret for her. She knew it. She couldn’t decipher it quite yet. For the first time, she experienced a real hope that she would decode the secret some day. She was so excited by the prospect that she didn’t think to be frightened by what that secret might be.
She could hardly wait for Des to unlock the front door. When the key resisted turning for a moment, she wanted to take it from him and force its compliance herself. When the door finally did open, she was assailed again by yet another aromatic memory, from the more recent rather than the distant past this time. This had been Aunt Netta’s house, but it smelled almost the same as Aunt Pearl’s. Once more, as had happened many times in Taylor’s life, she was struck by how similar these sisters had actually been, despite their outward differences.
Des stepped aside and Taylor walked in. She had forgotten for a moment her original intent in being here. She was in the presence of her aunts. She almost expected one or both of them to come bustling into this foyer and greet her with a hug to their wrinkled cheeks. Another scent, purely from memory, mixed with the familiar smell of the house. It was the soft, faintly floral fragrance of the powder they had both worn. Taylor was filled with a longing to be with them again. They had hovered over her and made her feel imprisoned sometimes, but they had loved her, too. And she had most certainly loved them in return.
“Are you all right?” Des asked.
Taylor had almost forgotten he was here. “It’s Netta,” she said. “I can almost see her here, and my Aunt Pearl too.”
“I know what you mean. All of these beautiful things make me think of her every time I see them.” Des gestured toward what Netta would have called her sitting room. It was filled, some might have said over-filled, with obviously precious antiques—tall Ming vases, tables inlaid in abalone shell and mother-of-pearl, Tiffany lamps, and much more. “Back in the mid-1800s, merchant ships would run aground out on the reef. Anybody on the island with a boat would take off like a shot to claim the salvage. Fine china, fancy furniture, gold plate. It was all there for the taking, and the laws favored the finder. Netta told me all about how so many of the best houses here on Key West were very elegantly furnished out of those wrecks. She spent years buying up as much of that old booty as she could find. There’s a lot of priceless stuff in these rooms.”
Taylor had been watching him with growing curiosity as he spoke. “Did you ever go with her on those buying sprees?”
“Many times. She was always picking out something she couldn’t possibly carry. She was such a tiny thing.”
Tiny and susceptible to influence, Taylor was thinking. Along with his substantial money bequest, Des had been left a considerable number of these antique pieces in Netta’s will. A detailed list had been attached. Taylor remembered marvelling at how much they were worth. She had just been thinking about how similar her aunts were at heart. Yet, Pearl had been a very frugal woman. Had Netta been that way too? Could she have been manipulated into the extravagance that filled these rooms? Manipulated by someone who planned to benefit from that extravagance after her death? Taylor turned away from the sitting-room archway where she had been standing, as if she might turn away from such distressing thoughts as well.
“I’d like to look upstairs first,” she said and walked toward the wide staircase that ascended from the center of the foyer.
“The rooms are laid out the same way they were in the old house,” Des was saying as he kept pace with her onto the stairs. “But there are a lot of differences beyond that. The brick exterior walls, for example. They weren’t here before. Netta thought they would be more fireproof. She was always a little afraid of the same thing happening again, a big blaze burning the place to the ground. She had the bricks shipped from the mainland. It cost her a fortune.”
There he was, talking about money again. “My aunt could afford it,” Taylor said. “She was a well-off woman from a well-off family. She could buy expensive things if she wanted them.”
“Don’t I know it. I saw her do that enough times.”
“Did you ever try to discourage her from spending so much?”
“Why would I? It was her money. She could do what she wanted with it. I was just along for the ride.”
And a lucrative trip it turned out to be, Taylor almost added. She was also itching to ask if he had ever encouraged her aunt to make any of her pricey purchases. That kind of question would be more antagonistic than Taylor wanted to appear right now. She intended to find out more about Des’s relationship with Netta Bissett, and with her money. The information would be harder to come by if he was set even more on his characteristic guard than usual. Taylor had to be careful not to do that.
They had reached the second-floor landing. A balustrade stretched in either direction with closed doors at regular intervals along the corridor wall. Taylor turned left without even thinking about it. In fact, she had been so lost in troubling thoughts about Des that she didn’t really take note of what she was doing. She had walked to the last door on that side of the corridor and had her hand on the knob before she realized how purposeful her choice of direction had actually been. She looked back toward the staircase. Des was still standing there with one hand resting on the balustrade. He was watching her with a curious expression on his face. Taylor turned back toward the closed door. She knew but at the same time didn’t know what this room was and who it, or its previous version, had once belonged to. She both longed and feared to see what was inside. Her longing
must have been stronger than her fear, because she turned the knob and pushed open the door.
It was a lovely room. Filmy window curtains framed the deepening colors of the late-afternoon sky as sunset approached. A canopied bed was the graceful centerpiece of the furnishings, along with a matching chaise longue. A vanity table with a three-sided mirror was faced by a small, cushioned chair. The colors were mauve and white with touches of gold trim. Double mirrored sliding doors probably led to a large closet. Soft carpets and a few pale-tinted paintings completed the decor of this tasteful, uncluttered room that was so much unlike the heavily furnished sitting room and foyer downstairs.
“Your aunt tried to make this as much like Desiree’s room had been as possible,” Des said. He had walked down the hall to Taylor’s side and was looking over her shoulder through the doorway. “Netta did a good job. This is almost exactly as it was before the fire.”
Taylor barely heard what he was saying. She was too overwhelmed by what she was feeling at the moment for there to be room in her heart or her mind for anything else. The feeling that so overwhelmed her now was disappointment.
“I don’t remember any of it,” she blurted out. “Not a single, blessed thing.”
Des must have been more alert than Taylor and heard the catch that was more than slight in her words. He laid his hand gently on her shoulder. “Take it easy,” he said softly. “Give yourself time.”
Taylor pulled abruptly away from his touch and lunged forward into the room. “Time?” she said with anguish in her voice. “This isn’t about time. This is about something else. Only I don’t know what that something is.”
She walked rapidly across the room to the bed. Then she turned and paced to the northern windows that looked out over the roof at the the back wall of the house. The rooms along the corridor to the right of the staircase would have windows opening onto this roof. That meant this would have to be the roof Winona talked about, where Taylor crawled across as a child to reach her mother’s room. Taylor knew about that, but only from being told by someone else. She could find no memory, or even the traces of a memory, of any of that within herself. She turned and bolted across the room toward the opposite windows. She was vaguely aware of how irrationally she was behaving. She knew how unlike her this behavior was. No matter what happened, she never made emotional scenes. She couldn’t recall ever having so much as a tantrum as a child, much less the petulant, agitated kind of behavior Winona and Detective Santos had talked about. But then, Taylor couldn’t really recall her childhood at all, could she? At least not the one everyone was telling her she had actually experienced.
The windows on the south side of the room faced the Atlantic. There were two of these windows, wide and free of panes to let in as much light and, when opened, as much sea breeze as possible. These windows must have been specially designed. They were very unlike the tall, narrow ones in the rest of the house. Taylor swept the gauzy curtain aside and looked out at the ocean. She yearned to find comfort in the vast vista of the sea, maybe as her mother had once done, but there was no such solace here for Taylor. A wave of what was almost despair washed over her, and she thought she might be in danger of fainting. She reached out and pressed her palms flat against the window glass to support herself till the moment passed.
That was when it happened.
The ocean disappeared, and in its place were flames on the other side of the window. Taylor could even smell the smoke, seeping through the seams of the closed sash. She was no longer looking out of the house. She was looking into it and from the other side of the room. She could make out the bedposts through the flames and the canopy on fire. She could also see something on the floor. A figure in white crawled with laborious slowness toward the window where Taylor was standing now, her palms riveted to the glass as she strained to see through eyes streaming from smoke and tears. She saw another figure as well, a man or maybe a tall boy. His back was toward her, as he raised something into the air over the figure in white, still dragging itself across the floor.
“Mama! Mama!” Taylor cried out in a strangled voice. Her throat was beginning to burn from the smoke that she was imagining so vividly it was virtually real.
“Taylor!” Des had her by the shoulders and was trying to pull her away from the window. “What’s happening to you?” he shouted as she resisted his efforts.
Des let go of her shoulders and reached forward to grasp her wrists. He yanked hard to free her palms from the glass, where they had cleaved so tightly they felt to Taylor as if they might be fusing to the pane.
Taylor screamed, and not just from the shock of being so abruptly and forcefully moved. She stared down at the palms of her hands and could hardly believe what she saw. They appeared to be normal, maybe a bit red from their pressure against the glass, but nothing more out of the ordinary than that—which was very much in contrast with the way they felt. From inside herself, the flesh of her palms was seared as if deeply burned by its contact with glass heated by a roaring fire.
Taylor’s eyes were still streaming, and her throat was raw, though she could no longer smell the smoke. She didn’t want to look back at the window, but she had no choice. When she did, the fiery scene was gone. The ocean stretched before her, shading from deep blue into purple into dark red all the way to the horizon and the southern aspect of Key West’s renowned sunset. That was the view Taylor had been looking at only moments before. She screamed again, more a cry of agony this time. The pain in her hands was subsiding, but the pain in her heart was almost unbearable.
“Take your hands off her!”
The voice that shouted from the bedroom doorway was as familiar to Taylor as her own, but almost as disorienting as the vision beyond the window had been. Des’s hold on her arms loosened enough for her to turn toward the sound and then break away entirely.
“Early!” she cried. “I’m so glad to see you.”
She ran into her old friend’s arms. She was so reassured by the sight of his familiar face that she almost forgot Des was there until she glanced up and saw him standing by the window. He was watching her through eyes that were, at the moment, as unreadable as they might have been behind the darkest glass.
* * *
I REMEMBER THIS GUY, Des thought. How could I forget him?
Early Rhinelander was tall and spare, especially in the face, where his boniness made him look like a skeleton. That was how Des as a boy had thought of him, anyway. He’d been prematurely smooth-scalped on the top of his head even back then and was still, maybe a bit more so. Otherwise, he didn’t look to have aged much. He’d been what they call a conch, a native-born Key Wester. They tend to be like that, aging to a certain point and not much more after that, as if the bright sun or maybe the salt air had preserved them.
“What is going on here?” Early growled. “What have you done to Taylor?”
“I don’t really know the answer to that. You’ll have to ask her.”
“You had your hands on her.”
“Just like you do now.”
Early set Taylor gently away from him. She still looked shaken. Des would have liked to go to her and take her in his arms, but it didn’t take a genius to see she didn’t want that.
“She was screaming,” Early said. He had taken a menacing step toward Des, who could remember Early being menacing quite often in the old days. “Why was she screaming?”
“I told you to ask her. I don’t know any more about what was going on than you do.” That was true. Des had watched helplessly while Taylor went suddenly hysterical at the window. He hadn’t a clue to why she did that.
“You’re lying, Maxwell,” Early said in the low, mean tone he’d always used with Des. “You were a liar back then, and you’re a liar still.”
Des had held his temper about as long as he could. “I was a kid back then. I’m not a kid anymore. I would advise you against treating me like one.”
Des meant that as a challenge. Early took the bait immediately. “I can run yo
u off this place just like I used to,” he said. “Have no doubt about that.”
“You only thought you ran me off. I let you push me around because it upset Desiree when I fought with you.”
“Don’t you mention her name, you no-good bum.” Early took another menacing step. “You may have cleaned yourself up some. But, as far as I’m concerned, you’re still a tramp kid from the lowlife side of town who’s got no business hanging around where you don’t belong.”
Des took a menacing step of his own, closing the gap between them as they glared at each other. Des’s fists were clenched at his sides, and he was ready to do damage.
“Stop it, both of you,” Taylor cried out. She still had anguish in her voice. “Something happened to me. Des didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“What happened to you?” Des and Early asked in unison, setting aside their mutual animosity, if only for the moment.
“I’m not sure what it was exactly. I was looking out of the window. Then, all of a sudden, everything changed. There was a fire.”
She looked down at her hands, turning them over to stare hard, first at the palms, then at the backs, then the palms again. She appeared to be searching for something. Des couldn’t tell what it might be. All he could see was her torment, and his heart ached for her.
“There isn’t any fire. That was all over a long time ago,” he began, trying to be comforting.
“No! It isn’t over!” she said. “It’s still happening. The glass felt so hot to me it burned my hands. That’s how real it was.”
“What is this all about?” Early asked, stepping into the path where Taylor had moved toward Des.
“I think she saw something when she looked out the window.” Des gestured toward the ocean side of the room. “Something like a hallucination, I think.”