by Ninie Hammon
“…have to eat all of it?”
The little girl scoops another spoonful of carrots out of the baby food jar and starts toward the baby’s mouth with it.
“Come on Jakey, be a good boy and eat. Mommy says we can’t go out until you eat your supper.”
Thunder rumbles in the distance, and at the sound, the little girl takes the baby’s hand and holds it so he can’t push the spoon away while she shoves the food at his face. He opens his mouth, takes the food, then spits it back out.
“Stop that!”
She can’t sound mad. If she sounds mad at him, he’ll tune up and cry and then he’ll never finish eating. And the longer the baby takes to eat, the longer she has to sit here before she can go out back to watch.
“Just two more bites and you’ll be all done,” she cajoles him sweetly,
From behind her, a voice says, “I’m finished, Mom. Can I go now?”
Another voice chimes in, “Me, too. See, my plate’s clean.”
“Okay, skat.”
The little girl hears the sound of chairs pushing back, running feet, and the stretching of the spring on a screen door.
“Don’t let the door sl—”
Bam, the door slams.
The little girl looks over her shoulder and sees a woman standing in front of the open door of a refrigerator, setting something inside. She’s blonde, hair in a ponytail, wearing a blue tank top and cutoff shorts. Her left arm is covered in a tattoo from her wrist to her shoulder — red and white flowers on a vine with green leaves. The little girl turns back and hurriedly eats the bite of baby food she was shoving at the baby. Scrapes the last bite out of the jar and eats it, too.
“Jakey’s finished, Mommy,” she says, and begins pulling the tray out and unfastening the strap around the baby.
There is a knock at the front door and her mother turns, closes the refrigerator door and starts out of the room to answer it. The little girl reaches to pick up the baby.
“You take him out to watch,” her mother says. “I’ll be along directly.”
It probably hasn’t even started yet. She hasn’t missed a single one.
The little girl pulls the child up into her arms and the scene fades.
The blackness returned to Bailey’s eyes and another reality formed around her, the sounds of the milling crowd behind the police line, the heat of the sun on her skin, the faint smell of fish that wafted up from the marina.
She opened her eyes and the parking lot scene downloaded into her brain.
Trembling violently, her legs felt so weak she had to sit down on the back bumper of the van or she might have collapsed.
She had connected to the little girl through that chair. But how? There was no little girl on that houseboat!
It took close to three hours for police to clear the scene and Bailey sat on the top step of the marina, staring out at the lake the whole time. Then she got into her car and drove. Just drove. The lake had six hundred miles of shoreline and she wandered around a considerable bit of it in the hours that followed.
She thought of the little rock-polishing machine she’d gotten for her tenth birthday. Put rocks and water in it and the tumbler would roll the rocks around until they were smooth. There wasn’t a thought in her head about the little girl with braids that had a rough edge on it anywhere. She’d rolled all of them around in her head until they were flat and glossy.
Her mind hauled out denial and shook the dust off it. Couldn’t be happening. Preposterous. She was a normal human being, after all, and ordinary people like Bailey Donahue didn’t — except she wasn’t Bailey Donahue. She was Jessie Cunningham, and ordinary people like Jessie Cunningham didn’t live a secret life with a fake identity, arms aching to hold a daughter who would die if Bailey so much as looked into her face. That didn’t happen to ordinary people, either. Normal people didn’t wind up in the Witness Protection Program.
And certainly normal, ordinary people didn’t paint portraits of events that hadn’t happened yet and see out other people’s eyes. But Bailey had — for real — and pretending it wasn’t happening changed nothing. There was a little girl out there somewhere, alive right now, who wouldn’t be alive much longer unless…
Bailey had only one card left to play. The issue was — could she play it?
She called T.J. He answered on the third ring.
“Can you come to my house right now? Meet me in a few minutes?”
“Done.”
T.J. sat in the swing on Bailey’s porch with Sparky curled up beside him. She pulled into the driveway and as soon as she got out of the car, the dog leapt off the swing and dashed to her, jumped up on her begging to be petted. She stopped, got down on one knee and ruffled the animal’s soft fur. When she lifted her eyes to T.J.’s, he could see hurt, pain and confusion in them so stark, it was like looking into an Alaskan winter.
He got to his feet, but she waved him back into the swing, climbed the porch steps and sat down herself in the rocker across from it. Sparky proceeded to hop immediately into her lap and her hands caressed the little dog absentmindedly as she spoke.
“Where you been?”
She told him what happened, her voice almost devoid of emotion.
“Shot him? Shot Fletch?”
“You know him?”
“Everybody knows Fletch. He gone be alright?”
“Brice didn’t know.”
Brice, huh? Not Sheriff McGreggor. Okay.
“But that’s not all of it, not the whole story. I touched the chair, the blue chair, and I … saw out the little girl’s eyes.”
“What’d you see?”
“Nothing useful. She was feeding a baby in a highchair. It didn’t tell me anything about where she was or when it happened. At least when I saw her get her hand stamped at the carnival, it provided a place and time. But T.J., why? Why did that chair connect me to her when she wasn’t on that Osbourne guy’s houseboat? Was it just because it’s an Adirondack chair? Would I be connected to her by just any Adirondack chair? It doesn’t have to be one she touched? Is that it?”
T.J. shook his head. “They’s not much about any of this I understand. When I’s little, I used to see Mama acting strange. Like maybe she was hearing or seeing something I couldn’t. But she never told me what she seen and I never asked.” He stood. “I want to look at them two paintings again.”
He saw her flinch at the mere mention of them.
“And then I got something I want to tell you.”
She got slowly to her feet, swayed a little.
“You had anything to eat today?” he asked.
She looked puzzled. “Eat?”
“Yeah, eat. You know, food. Chewing. Swallowing, that kind of thing. You done that before, ain’t you?”
“I don’t know if … no … coffee this morning is all.”
T.J. shook his head.
“Never knowed a man in my life could just ‘forget’ to eat, but women…” He reached into his pocket and drew out his cellphone. “I’d offer to whip us up something but my cookin’s so bad the flies done took up a collection to get the hole in my screen door patched.”
No reaction at all. He punched a favorites number and Dobbs answered.
“I’m at Bailey’s house and we’s starving. Why don’t you swing by Delgados and bring us some supper, an extra-large pizza?” He stopped, looked at Bailey. “You like anchovies?”
She stared at him like he was speaking Mandarin Chinese.
“Hold the anchovies.”
To Bailey again, “How about—?” He stopped. Wouldn’t do no good to ask. “Put some extra cheese on it, and bacon. Everybody likes bacon.”
He paused and listened.
“Yeah, put olives on it if you want … whatever you want. And get a big one. No, make it two large.”
Best to get two large. If he was hungry enough, Dobbs could chew through a pizza like a woodchipper through a log.
He hung up and indicated the door. Bailey rose and walked in
to the house, downcast as somebody on the way to the gallows.
He went before her down the hallway to the studio, stepped inside and turned on the lights, not that he needed to. The two windows with north light funneled light into the room. Even at almost seven o’clock in the evening, there was still plenty of sun.
He went to stand in front of the two paintings, side by side on easels in the middle of the room, and Bailey reluctantly followed.
“Dobbs had his self a nice long talk yesterday with Miss Annabelle Lee. She lives in Arbor Dell Retirement Village. She’s ninety-three years old, sharp as a switchblade and mean as a serial killer with a sinus infection. She taught history here in Kavanaugh County for forty years. Dobbs asked her about the Watford House.”
When he was finished telling her Dobbs’s story, he took a deep breath and jumped off the bridge into darkness.
“That first night when I come here, I told you I knew this house, that my mama was a maid here when I was a little boy in the 1950s. She was helping the Whittakers get ready for a Fourth of July party and fell, hit her head, and that’s when it all started.”
T.J. watched Bailey’s reaction as he continued.
“I knew about that Watford woman, just wasn’t sure when. The details is what I needed from Annabelle. Now, think about this … in the summer of 1895, Sophia Watford fell and hit her head…”
He turned and pointed out the door of the studio.
“And she died in that kitchen. Sixty years later, in the summer of 1955, mama fell and hit her head in that kitchen … but she didn’t die. She was unconscious and when she woke up, she was different, compelled to paint portraits she didn’t want to paint — the last one of you with a bullet hole in your right temple. Exactly sixty years after that – this summer, 2015 — you shot yourself in the head in that kitchen and when you woke up, you were different, too. Different the same way my mama was.”
He paused, could see Bailey’s wheels turning around in her head, dots connecting of their own accord.
“Maybe the same person did paint both those paintings.” He paused. “And maybe the artist was Sophia Watford.”
Bailey’s face was totally blank, like she had walked away from her body and had gone somewhere else entirely. When he saw her countenance return, there was a kind of recognition in her eyes.
“You’re saying you think Sophia Watford’s … what? Ghost? … painted both these pictures?”
“As God is my witness I ain’t sure what it is I’m saying. Ghost? Spirit? Presence? Essence? Life force? I don’t know what. And maybe none of this means anything at all. Maybe it’s all a coincidence. Maybe Sophia Watford don’t have nothing to do with nothing. But…”
Bailey stepped over to one of the two wingback chairs and sat down heavily.
She smiled a little half smile.
“Do you hear it?” she asked.
“Hear what?”
“Na-na, Na-na; Na-na, Na-na.” She hummed the theme from The Twilight Zone.
Then she burped out a bleat of laughter that sounded semi-hysterical and he watched her swallow back the emotion that’d produced it. She sat still, getting herself under control before she spoke.
“I don’t know if it’s the ghost of Sophia Watford or the ghosts of Jimmy Hoffa, Elvis Presley and Elias Howe and his sewing machine. I don’t have any idea what force paints these pictures.” She paused for a beat. “But does it really matter, T.J.? Does it matter how it’s happening? It’s a reality we can see and feel and hold in our hands.”
She rose and went to stand beside the picture of herself his mother had painted. He could see she judiciously avoided the painting of the little girl. “The only thing that matters is that you and I know, we know that this little girl” — she pointed, but didn’t touch — “is going to drown unless we can figure out who she is and do something to prevent it.”
He nodded but said nothing.
When she spoke again, her voice was quiet.
“It took me all day to drag myself around to the obvious, inescapable conclusion. To screw myself up to it.”
“And that is?”
The haunted look in her eyes broke his heart.
“I have to finish it, the painting. I have to paint her face.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Bailey didn’t wait for T.J. to agree with her, didn’t put the matter up for discussion so perhaps the two of them could come to a joint, reasoned decision. She had to paint the little girl’s face. Period.
Some part of her had known that from the beginning. As she stood on the marina, looking at the hundreds of houseboats there, it was clear then. There was only one way they could be certain they had found the right boat, the right child. The child had to have a face.
It was just that she knew what would happen as soon as she touched a brush to the canvas. The little girl would drown all over again. And Bailey would drown with her.
T.J. knew that, too.
“Hold up a minute, missy. You—”
“Know what’s going to happen? Yes. We both do.”
She walked to the other side of the room, selected a clean pallet and began to squeeze out gobs of black and white paint onto it.
“And you’re up for that?”
She could hear the concern in his voice and it touched her more deeply than she wanted him to see. So she said nothing, just continued to prepare the paint.
“That bullet in your head and all, are you sure?”
She laughed, not a big laugh but genuine.
“Oscar, you mean?” He looked blank. “Brice named it, the bullet. Have you ever ridden a jet ski?” She could see T.J. had no idea where she was going with such a non sequitur.
“I have not and don’t never intend to. I’ve ridden contraptions a lot more dangerous than that, though.” He didn’t elaborate. “But I ain’t got nothing to prove no more.”
“I can’t speak to the danger part, but I am here to tell you that the pounding I took on that thing yesterday—”
“You rode a jet ski yesterday?
“Brice and I both did, went out looking in the coves, trying to find houseboats with Adirondack chairs.”
She smiled a real smile. Yeah, it had been jolting, bumpy. But it had also been fun.
“If that ride didn’t knock Oscar loose, I don’t think standing here with a paintbrush in my hand and…”
She stopped. Her breath suddenly stuck in her throat.
“Not just standin’ here … standin’ here and drowning,” he finished for her. “You never know what it might take to knock that thing cockeyed.”
She turned to him. “We’ve already had this discussion, remember? It is what it is.”
Then she stepped around him and stood in front of the incomplete portrait of the dead child. It was time to give that child a face. She laid the pallet in the tray on the front of the easel, resolutely dipped the brush into a gob of white paint, quickly lifted it to the canvas before the tattered fabric of her courage could unravel and touched the brush to the canvas.
She is filled with a terror that totally consumes her. The pain in her chest — it feels like it might explode, spew her heart out into the darkness.
She has to breathe.
Dark, so dark.
The water is cold. She opens her eyes, tries to see, but her eyes sting and she reflexively squeezes them shut again, pawing at the water, struggling upward.
Her face breaks the surface and she gasps in a lungful of air, gets water along with it. It tastes nasty, smells like—
She begins to cough, strangled, kicking her feet frantically to stay upright. She forces her eyes open, burning, and sees colored lights. Something bumps into her and she grabs at it, catches it, holds on. It’s big, a chair. She grasps with all her strength, tries to pull herself up out of the water and onto it. But it is slick and she can’t keep her grip.
The chair slides out of her grasp, turns in the water and comes down on top of her.
She goes under again, cold
, struggling, pushing at the chair, trying to push it out of the way, but the effort shoves her farther underwater. And her lungs are screaming, the strangling cough reflex grips her throat.
Can’t … can’t let the air out, can’t…
But the air explodes out of her burning lungs and she involuntarily gasps — not air. Water.
It hurts! It hurts so bad. Black water flows into her mouth, burning in her nose.
No!
Hel—
Nothing. All light is gone. She is gone. She is dead.
Bailey felt something, a hand on her shoulder.
A voice echoed down through time and space from another universe, too faint to hear.
Then louder, in her ear.
“Bailey. Bailey, come on back now, hear?”
Her eyes snapped open to see the black water and—
No black water. Sunlight. So bright she squinted, not like she did with the stinging water in her eyes. She gasped in a great lungful of air. Then another. Panting.
T.J. was beside her, his hand on her shoulder.
Why she didn’t fall to the floor was … how was she standing here when she drowned? Died!
Her not-stinging eyes focused on the canvas in front of her. Shock knocked the brushes out of both hands to the floor.
The little girl had a face. She was a beautiful child, her features small and perfect, a button nose and full lips. Her eyes were closed, so there was no way to tell the color, but if Bailey’d had to guess, she’d have said blue. Though her face was smeared with the black mud that covered the rest of her body, her forehead had a small clean spot from her hairline down about two inches, far enough to reveal the spray of red freckles on her forehead, and her hair color. The gooey black braids were actually red.
Bailey heard a knock at the front door, followed by Dobbs’s voice.
“I’ve got pizza. Who’s hungry?”
She heard the door open and close, heard his lumbering steps cross the living room and go into the kitchen. But she didn’t turn, stood transfixed, staring at the face of the little girl who would be dead soon unless…
“Take a picture,” T.J. said and pulled his cellphone from his pants pocket, lifted it and began snapping photos of the still-wet canvas, moving around a bit to get slightly different angles. “We’ll need these to show people.”