The Mirror (Northwest Passage Book 5)

by John A. Heldt

  "Oh, we spent time with them," Ginny said. "We just did it last night. Our parents insisted that we go on our own. They gave us fair tickets for our birthday, along with these bracelets."

  Ginny moved an arm across the table and brought her left wrist into alignment with Katie's right. A diamond tennis bracelet that cost a thousand dollars adorned each wrist.

  Ginny knew it probably wasn't wise to draw a stranger's attention to expensive jewelry, but for some reason she felt comfortable doing so. This stranger didn't seem so strange.

  "They're beautiful," Marta said. "Your parents must love you very much."

  "They do," Katie said as her face lit up.

  "Well, I won't take up any more of your time with talk. You girls came here to learn and not to visit. Would you like me to address you as a pair or as individuals?"

  Ginny stared at her sister and waited for the sign – the knowing smile or the telltale glint that was as clear as any verbal communication. When she got the glint, she shifted her eyes to Marta.

  "Can you do both?"

  Marta beamed.

  "I can do anything, dear. I'm Marta the Magnificent!"

  Ginny laughed. She didn't know whether this woman was a fake or the real deal, but she did know one thing: she liked her style.

  "Let me start by seeing what the future holds for both of you. Are you all right with that?"

  The twins nodded.

  "OK then. Let's begin."

  With that, Marta the Magnificent, or at least the soccer mom that played a seer at the Cedar River Country Fair, got on with the show. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and raised her arms above her head. She held them there for what seemed like an eternity.

  Ginny glanced at Katie and saw amusement in her eyes. She could see she was thinking the same thing.

  What is this? Yoga?

  When Marta joined the living a moment later, she directed her eyes and her hands to the object in the center of the table: a transparent, six-inch sphere that dimly reflected the soft lights above. She took another breath and went to work.

  For more than a minute, Marta placed her hands over the ball and studied it like a museum curator might study a priceless vase. She moved her head and occasionally moved her hands but offered no clue – verbal or nonverbal – as to what she was seeing or what she was doing.

  "Do you see anything?" Katie finally asked.

  Marta gave Katie a stern glance and then returned to the ball. It was clear, to Ginny, anyway, that the great prognosticator, or money taker, did not like to be interrupted.

  "I see a journey," Marta said, "a strange, mysterious journey. You ladies will soon go on an adventure like no other."

  Both girls shot up in their chairs.

  "Thailand?" Ginny asked. "We've always wanted to go to Thailand."

  Marta offered a sad smile and shook her head.

  "No. I believe this journey will be closer to home – much closer."

  Ginny frowned. For years, she and Katie had asked their parents to take them to the land of exotic wildlife, breathtaking architecture, and pristine beaches. The least Madame Marta could do was raise their hopes by saying that foreign travel was on the horizon.

  "Can you give us details?" Ginny asked. "Are there any cute guys on this strange, mysterious journey? I need a new boyfriend. My sister does too."

  Katie glared at her sibling.

  Marta looked at Ginny, too, but did not immediately respond to her inquiries. She instead went back to the ball and studied it intently for more than a minute. When she was done, she leaned back in her chair and returned to Ginny.

  "The answer to your last question is yes. I see handsome young men in your future. These men will be no ordinary acquaintances. They will change your lives."

  Ginny and Katie beamed and gave each other a high five across the table.

  Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!

  Ginny laughed to herself. She knew the fortune-teller was probably full of it, but she liked the idea of meeting "handsome young men" on a "strange, mysterious journey."

  At the very least, it beat moping about Cody for the next several weeks. For a moment, she drifted off to a happy place where boyfriends opened doors and gave backrubs and didn't run off with pigtailed bimbos who brought them fish and chips.

  When she turned to Marta, Ginny expected to see a woman with a smug smile. Marta, after all, had just delivered the goods to two very skeptical consumers. Instead, she saw a woman who looked like she had just seen a ghost.

  "Is something the matter?" Ginny asked. "We're OK if your prediction doesn't pan out. We know this is all phony."

  Marta stared blankly into space and tapped on the table with fingers from both hands. She appeared hesitant to continue the conversation.

  "Are you all right?" Katie asked.

  Marta sighed and lowered her eyes. When she lifted them a minute later, she turned to face Ginny and then Katie. She wore the face of an undertaker.

  "There's something else you should know about this journey," Marta said in a measured voice. "You'll be gone a long time – possibly a very long time – and you'll have only one chance to return. If you're not careful, you may never see home again."

  "OK, lady," Ginny said. "You're officially creeping me out. Are you trying to scare more money out of us?"

  The words appeared to shake Marta out of a daze.

  "No. I'm not," the seer said in a lifeless voice. "In fact, I'm going to do just the opposite."

  Marta leaned toward the small table, opened the cash box, and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. She then stood up, straightened the banknote, and held it out.

  "Take it," she said to Ginny. "I can't in good conscience accept this."

  "Why?" Ginny asked. "You've been accepting other people's cash all week."

  "Please," Marta said. "Just take the money and go. Leave the fairgrounds now and go home. I'm advising you as a mother and a person who cares about your safety. Leave immediately. Don't do anything else tonight. Just go straight home and stay there. I beg you."

  Ginny grabbed the twenty, stuffed the bill and the troll doll in her purse, and got up from her chair. She glared at Marta and then turned to her sister.

  "Come on, Katie. I guess our money's no good here."

  Ginny watched Katie stand up, admonish Marta with a stare, and step away from the table. When she followed her twin through the door and into the cool September night, she shook her head and tried to make sense of what had just happened.

  She couldn't remember the last time a fair vendor of any kind had refunded a fee. They were supposed to take your money. Maybe this was what she got for being born on September 11, 2001. The world, apparently, would never make sense.

  CHAPTER 3: GINNY

  When the twins reached the dirt road that provided access to the booths and exhibits in the fair's eastside addition, all Ginny could do was vent. Instead of celebrating the unexpected return of twenty dollars, she complained about a perceived insult.

  "Do you think she was trying to mess with our heads? Because if she was, she succeeded," Ginny said. "No one refunds money at a fair. No one."

  "Maybe she feels guilty about charging so much," Katie said. "I don't know. I just know she scared the heck out of me. I thought fortune-tellers were like fortune cookies and predicted only good things. What she said in there was just weird. Her prediction reminds me of the TV show that was on when we were little, where the plane passengers got stuck on the island."

  "You mean Lost?" Ginny asked.

  "That's the one."

  "Well, unless Mom and Dad are planning to ship us off to Australia, I don't think we have to worry about that. We'll be lucky if we go camping next summer. Yet she made it sound like we were going on our 'mysterious' journey next week. She did say 'soon,' didn't she?"

  "She did," Katie said. "She was very clear about that."

  "Ugh. It figures. I'll probably be obsessing about this for days. I hate it when people get in my head. Cody
did it all the time."

  "Don't worry about it, Gin. She's just a crazy lady. She probably works on Halloween too. Can you imagine her with a booth inside of a haunted house? I can. Forget about her."

  Ginny looked at her best friend and unofficial therapist and smiled. She envied how Katie could set aside slights and quickly move on to something else.

  Perhaps she was right. Maybe she should just forget about the crazy lady and think about the rest of the evening and the rest of the month. In two weeks, she would be on a university campus full of books, boys, and a hundred other delightful distractions. Why should she give even a second thought to a fortune-teller at a Podunk fair?

  "You're right, as usual. Screw Marta the Magnificent," Ginny said. "What do you want to do now? We have twenty dollars and twenty minutes before the fair closes."

  Katie took a long look at the attractions along the dirt road and sighed.

  "Maybe we should go home. I don't see anything else that looks even mildly interesting. Plus my back's starting to hurt."

  "Now your back hurts?" Ginny asked. She laughed. "You sound like Grandma."

  Katie glared at her sister.

  "Don't even go there."

  Ginny smiled. She dearly loved Cindy Smith, her paternal grandmother, but hated that she talked about her ailments, particularly her bad back, more often than the weather, politics, and food. Even at the relatively youthful age of seventy, she had accumulated roughly half of the world's known physical conditions.

  "OK. I get it. You're tired and sore. So am I," Ginny said. "Let's just do one more thing. We probably won't come back next year, so we might as well go out with a bang."

  "Do you still have that fair program?"

  "It's in my purse."

  "Can I see it?" Katie asked.

  "Sure."

  Ginny retrieved the program from her purse and handed it to her sister, who proceeded to study it like a menu at a fancy restaurant.

  "What about this?" Katie asked. She pointed to a listing on back. "The House of Mirrors sounds interesting. It's one of those funhouses you were talking about. Take a look."

  Ginny took the program from Katie and read the paragraph about the House of Mirrors. The exhibit was one of several that had been brought back specifically for the fair's sixtieth anniversary. One of the event's earliest attractions, it had been discontinued in the mid-sixties. The new House of Mirrors was apparently an exact replica of the original.

  "I can do that," Ginny said.

  "How much does it cost?"

  "It's free, according to this. We can walk right in."

  "Then let's do it and go," Katie said.

  "OK. It's just down the road. We can catch the sword-swallowers on the way."

  Katie gave Ginny a pointed glance.

  "Or maybe not," Ginny said. She laughed. "Let's go."

  CHAPTER 4: GINNY

  The first thing Ginny Smith noticed about the Cedar River Country Fair's celebrated House of Mirrors is that the inside looked nothing like the outside.

  The exterior was bland. With stained cedar siding, a shingle roof, and a modest entrance, the windowless structure was as nondescript as a portable classroom at a crowded high school or an activity building at a summer camp. Only a small sign out front indicated that it was anything more than a maintenance facility.

  The interior, however, was something else. Filled with scores of mirrors of every shape and size, it sparkled, shined, and amazed. Irregular lighting lent mystery and charm to the place, as did a teal checkerboard floor and early 1960s music that streamed from ceiling speakers.

  The only thing that looked even remotely pedestrian or out of place was a huge, oval mirror that hung on a pinstriped wall. With an ornate hardwood frame, it looked like something one would find in a Gilded Age mansion and not a fair exhibit.

  Wearing a white blouse and a denim skirt, Ginny stood in front of the mirror and surveyed her reflection. She saw what she had seen for years: a petite blonde with crystal blue eyes and a pleasing face who resembled not only her two sisters but also her mother, maternal grandmother, and great-aunt – or what her father affectionately called "the Swedish royal line."

  She also saw a young woman entering the prime of her life, a normally confident soul suddenly plagued by doubt, guilt, and insecurity. Ginny knew she'd had a good life and probably had a better life coming up, but she wondered whether she deserved that life and would be able to cope with the many demands of adulthood. She liked being a kid and, unlike many of her peers, wasn't all that eager to jump into the world of routine, responsibility, and stress.

  "What are you doing, Gin?" Katie asked as she emerged from an elaborate maze of mirrors. "Looking for a fat cell?"

  Ginny shot a hot glare.

  "Watch your mouth. If I have one, you do too."

  Katie laughed.

  "Touché," she said. "Seriously, what are you doing? That's just a plain old mirror. The ones in the maze are much cooler. There are a few about halfway through that actually make you look thinner."

  "I'll get to them," Ginny said, "right after I ask this one who's the fairest maiden in King County."

  Katie smiled and shook her head.

  "Whatever."

  "Mirrors are not all about flattering angles, sister dear," Ginny said. "Elegance counts too. This looks like something I'd find in a Scottish castle or a haunted mansion or someplace I'll never see. Unless I go on Madame Marta's magical mystery tour, of course."

  "Will you just drop it?"

  "All right. All right."

  "It's almost ten, Ginny. Go walk through the maze while I call Mom. She wanted me to let her know when we left."

  Ginny flipped her long hair over her shoulders, looked into the mirror one last time, and turned to face her sister.

  "You say the weight-loss mirrors are about halfway through?"

  "They're right next to the ones that make you look bloated," Katie said. "Now, go. I want to be home by eleven. Unlike you, I still have a job and have to work tomorrow."

  "Well, I don't. So there," Ginny said.

  She turned her nose up as she walked past Katie and entered a maze that apparently had just two openings – one by the front door and another by the big mirror, where Katie had exited. To her knowledge there were no other people in the building.

  Ginny laughed to herself as she maneuvered through a set of mirrors that made her look like four or five Picasso paintings. It was easy to dismiss things like sleep when you didn't have to work at a grocery store at six the next morning.

  She had left the same employer exactly one week earlier so she could spend extra time with Cody before he left for his freshman year at UCLA. She had hoped that a rock-climbing trip to Olympic National Park would solidify their seven-month relationship and help get them through the coming separation.

  It seemed like a good plan until Cody informed Ginny that he had slept with the waitress who had served them dinner at a Lake Union restaurant Saturday night. The waitress, a giggly piece of work named Wendy, was a sophomore at UCLA.

  Ginny had little difficulty navigating the maze, which, like the building itself, was a replica of the 1960s original. She guessed that the designers wanted to challenge customers but not so much that they became frustrated and pushed the mirrors over to get out.

  When she reached the mirrors that made you fat and then the ones that made you skinny, she paused to do another inventory of her life. Perhaps she should stop stressing about Cody Williamson and Marta the Magnificent and focus on the things that really mattered – like family, school, and personal fulfillment.

  As she left the thick-and-thin mirrors, she tilted her head to better hear the music. The song "Soldier Boy," by the Shirelles, took its turn on the House of Mirrors' soundtrack. There were a lot of things Ginny didn't like about the early sixties, but its music wasn't one of them. Like her father, she was a fan of Motown, classic rock, and the rhythm and blues Grandma Cindy had listened to as a kid. A poster of Elvis hung on a
wall in her bedroom.

  When she neared the end – or what she believed was the end – of the maze, Ginny picked up a second, fainter sound: her sister's voice as she talked on a cell phone. She wasn't at all surprised that their mother had asked Katie to make the call. She was the most likely to do so.

  From the start, Katie, the younger twin, had been the more responsible and the closer to Grace Vandenberg Smith. She was the better student and, generally speaking, the better kid – the one far less likely to keep her parents up at night or find herself in the vice principal's office.

  Ginny was closer to her father, Joel, both personally and temperamentally. She acted on impulse, challenged authority as often as she could, and lived life as completely and zestfully as a surfer who rode bulls, wrestled alligators, and jumped out of planes when the surf wasn't up.

  She retrieved her cell phone from her purse and saw that the time was 9:59 p.m. She didn't like the idea of going home so early but conceded that Katie was probably right. Maybe it was time to call it a night. A restful night of sleep sounded good.

  Ginny put the phone away as she rounded the last bend in the maze. "Can't Buy Me Love" by the Beatles began to stream through the speakers. When she reached the maze's opening, she glanced first at the front door and then at the end of the long corridor.

  She expected to see Katie talking on the phone or perhaps checking for fat cells in front of the oval mirror. Instead, she saw something that made her stomach drop to the floor. She saw her sister walk through the mirror and disappear.

  Ginny covered her eyes with her hands, shook her head, and reminded herself that human beings simply didn't vanish into thin air. She dropped her hands, opened her eyes, and looked again at the end of the hallway, which measured maybe fifteen feet by forty. She saw the mirror but no sister.

  "Katie?" she asked. "Are you in the maze?"

  Ginny walked briskly to the mirror.

  "Katie, please answer me," she said as she spun around. "This is not funny."

  Ginny entered the maze and passed through it quickly. When she exited near the front door, she again looked down the corridor and saw nothing but the mirror. She ran outside and circled the building, where she saw fairgoers and cleanup crews but no Katie Smith.