Solstice Wood

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  I added the leeks to the pot, along with a sprinkle of this and that. Then I put a lid on it and left it to simmer. I stood in the middle of the floor, my head empty, trying to remember what I had been about to do. Liam stepped into the emptiness; it spread suddenly through the rest of me, through the entire house, all the places where he wasn’t, and never would be, ever. “Gram?” I heard Sylvia say. I came back to life, untied my apron.

  “All right,” I told her. “I’m ready.”

  Rummaging in a drawer, we found an old spiral-bound notebook to record our findings. On the first page Sylvia wrote:

  Kitchen: Replace pineapple wallpaper.

  Paint window frames and moldings to match new wallpaper.

  New linoleum?

  I looked down at it. You could see bare floorboards in a couple of spots, but those were half-hidden under the refrigerator and under the bookcase where I kept my cookbooks and herbals and binders full of whatever local tidbits of history or family lore I had collected for Jane, or she had passed along to me.

  “How old is it?” Sylvia asked.

  I thought back. “Older than you are, younger than I am.” It was covered with geometric shapes, half-circles, triangles, circles, in what had once been bright yellow, red, orange, green. “I think Liam and I laid it down ourselves in the fifties. It has that look.”

  She nodded. “It’s not in terrible shape, and it can wait, if you can still live with it.” She sounded doubtful.

  “I think we bought it to match the pineapples. Yellow and green—”

  She nodded again, pinching the bridge of her nose in a way that reminded me of her great-grandmother. “I can imagine.”

  “That’s who you look like!” I exclaimed. “Those eyes, that pointy jaw—”

  “Who?”

  “Liam’s mother, Meredith.”

  She slewed her eyes at me, just like Meredith used to. “Thanks, Gram. You never liked her.”

  “She was difficult,” I admitted. “Persnickety as a cat, and so tart vinegar must have run in her veins. But she aged well; she always was a pretty woman. And she did dote on Morgana, from the day she was born. I remember once—” I stopped myself. “Don’t let me get started on Meredith.”

  She smiled and turned to a new page. “What’s next? What’s bothering you the most?”

  I went out into the hallway. “All those closed doors. I cleared most of the furniture out of them, over the years since you left and we stopped even thinking about using them. But I shut them up last fall; I’ve no idea what might have been going on in them during winter.”

  There were over a half dozen rooms down the long hallway, on either side of the warped and swollen front door. A formal dining room, I remembered vaguely. A library. A gun room. A couple of sitting rooms that opened into one another to make a ballroom. Meredith was the last of the Lynns to keep up every single room in the house, including the tiny servants’ quarters in the attic and my laundry room, which in her day she referred to as the butler’s pantry.

  I looked at Sylvia, wondering if it was all too much; she looked so young and slight. But she didn’t seem at all daunted by the thought of gun rooms and musty ballrooms. Maybe that came from dealing with business affairs and strangers and shipments on your doorstep from places halfway around the world. She just jotted down a couple of notes on the state of the paint on the wainscoting in the hallway, the faded paper and missing bulbs in the chandeliers. Then she turned to another page in the notebook, marched up to the first closed door, and opened it.

  Something flew at us. We both ducked; Sylvia slammed the door. She stared at me wordlessly. I put my hand on my heart, panting. Then I said, trying to be firm, “We can’t just—We should have more gumption than to be frightened away before we’ve even started.”

  She swallowed, then tilted her chin slightly, reminding me of Meredith again. “Yes. This is your house. You have a right to know what’s going on in it. Gram. Do you think it was a ghost?”

  “Maybe it was Meredith,” I said shakily. “She loved this old wreck.”

  Sylvia opened the door a crack, peeked in with one eye. Then she gave a snort of laughter and opened the door wide. She bent and picked up a long gauzy sheer that had frayed off its curtain rod and blown across the room at us. Somehow I’d managed to leave a window cracked all winter. We crossed the room to have a look at it. The sill and floorboards were pretty much worse for being snowed on. But other than curtains, the room was empty. No feathers or bird droppings in the hearth; no sign of small animals. Whatever might have come in out of the cold must have found cozier winter quarters.

  Sylvia wandered, busily writing. I felt around under the mantelpiece, found the pattern I’d scratched into the paint with Liam’s penknife.

  “Come and draw this,” I said.

  “What is it?” she asked, ducking down to peer at it. “It looks like a web.”

  “It’s a reminder of which pattern in my quilt guards which room. There’s one in every room, under the mantels if there’s a fireplace, or in a corner of molding behind the door if there’s not. That’s in case my threads fray; I’ll know which room my stitches are guarding when I mend them. If you draw and label them in your notebook, I can refresh my memory. Or at least I can when I remember where I put the quilt.”

  Crouched down under the mantel, she got her pencil busy again. I wandered, looking at memories in my head. This was one of the sitting rooms that turned into the ballroom; those wide double doors between the rooms would slide into the walls. There had been balls in her day, Meredith had told me when Liam brought me to meet her. The upper crust of three counties came to dance in Lynn Hall when she was young.

  Well, that had been some time, and time again, ago. Liam and I had gotten married in those rooms; so had Kathryn and her first husband, Edward. After that, with Kathryn moving away, and Morgana pregnant and never bothering to marry, and then dying, I lost interest in those old rooms. I thought I had emptied them before I shut them up. But I had missed a few lingering memories.

  “Replace windowsill,” Sylvia read from her notebook. “Sand floor?” She tugged gently at another sheer; it came down off the rod. “Replace curtains.” She walked back to the door, clicked the light switch. Only half the little bulbs in the chandelier and the wall sconces lit up. “Replace bulbs.”

  “Thank goodness I’ll be dead and in my grave soon.”

  “You’re not leaving me alone with all this,” Sylvia protested, sliding open the doors into the next room. Dust fuzzies scampered along the floor ahead of her. The air had an odd smell of smoke and wax, as though someone had been dancing there by candlelight. Maybe smells haunted a room like ghosts do. Or maybe, considering all the doorways in the house, it hadn’t been ghosts doing the dancing. I crossed the room to the fireplace, felt under the mantel for the pattern I’d left there.

  “I’d better check these threads. Now where was it I put that quilt?”

  Sylvia came over to copy the pattern. This time she tore a page out of the notebook, held it against the scratches in the paint, and ran her pencil lead back and forth over it. We studied the pattern it made.

  “It looks like a snowflake,” Sylvia said, and wrote on the top of the paper: Ballroom II. She turned, making more notes. Water stain under one window. Curtains. Wallpaper bubbling at seams. A curtain sighed, billowing outward over a closed window. For just a moment, music drifted through my head, like an echo from bygone years.

  And then I knew it wasn’t. It was no music I had ever heard played in those rooms. Sylvia had a quiet, distant look on her face; her pencil hovered, motionless above the paper. I remembered finally where I had put the quilt.

  “It’s in the cedar chest that Meredith gave Liam and me for a wedding present.”

  Sylvia came back to earth. “The quilt? Gram, where are you going?” she asked, as I headed out the door. “We haven’t finished in here.”

  “I have to find it.”

  “This minute?”

 
“I might forget in the next,” I said tersely. She followed me to the attic. We had to go down the second-story hallway, past the bedrooms to get to the attic stairway the servants had used to climb to and from their little chambers. That’s when I saw what Tyler had done to his room.

  I stopped so suddenly that Sylvia bumped me. We both hovered in the doorway, staring. The bed was made. All the clothes that had been draped over the furniture and puddled on the floor had disappeared into closets and drawers. The CDs were stacked neatly on the desk. The backpack hung on a hook in the closet. Tyler’s shoes, which evidently were for decorative purposes, stood toe to heel on the closet floor. His baseball cap, which I thought had taken up residence on the lampshade, sat on the shelf above his shoes.

  Sylvia’s face was so still it might have been a cameo.

  “Do boys in love clean up their bedrooms?” I asked.

  “Not in my experience. I mean, Madison—I mean some people are tidier than others. But—”

  “Who is Madison?”

  Her eyes flicked away from me; she didn’t answer that. “It’s usually consistent, this tidy business. I’m tidy, so I know. Maybe he wants to invite her up.”

  “The Coyle girl?”

  “If that’s who he’s in love with today.”

  “He used my bubble bath.”

  “So that’s what I smelled.”

  “I haven’t used it for years. I thought it would be flat by now.” I glanced up at the ceiling, trying to see through the floorboards. “I wonder if he’s up there with Hurley. You could ask him.”

  “Me?”

  “Well, you’re his age, nearly.”

  “Gram, I’ve lived twice his lifetime.” She was silent a moment, thinking, then added slowly, “I’ll find a way to talk to him. Until then, we should just pretend he’s normal. That way he won’t think we’ve noticed anything.”

  “He won’t feel self-conscious, you mean.”

  She gave a little nod, frowning for some reason, and still avoiding my eyes. Love, I guessed. This untidy Madison, whoever he was, might or might not be someone I would have to figure into my plans for Sylvia. But I did as she suggested, pretended not to notice. We went upstairs to the attic and found Hurley at the top, one eye glued to his telescope. His toys were scattered around him: hammer and nails, saw, sawhorses, wood glue, and metal measuring tape. Little piles of sawdust lay like anthills on the floor.

  Hurley straightened, waved cheerfully. “I’ve been working on a moving platform for my telescope,” he told us, and gave it a push with one foot. It turned ponderously. “I’m going to paint it sky-blue, before I mount the telescope on it. Then I can turn and watch Sylvia drive in, and then turn back and watch whatever is going on in the wood.”

  “What is going on in the wood?” I asked him. Wherever Tyler was, he wasn’t in the attic; Hurley might have caught a glimpse of him among the trees.

  “Crows, mostly,” Hurley answered. “A couple of wild turkeys. Mourning doves.” He applied his eye to the lens again, and added, “Tarrant Coyle.”

  “What?” Sylvia and I said at once. Sylvia glanced out the window overlooking the driveway.

  “I don’t see his truck.”

  “What’s he doing in my wood?” I demanded. “Give me that.”

  I put my eye to the lens, saw what surely looked like the back of Tarrant Coyle, with his saggy jeans and his T-shirt that had the Titus Quest Company logo on the back. That man probably wore the company logo on his shorts.

  “What’s he doing?” Sylvia asked.

  Not much, from what I could tell. Walking a little, looking here and there… I could feel my lips go thin, pushed tight against what I didn’t want to say in front of Hurley. “Skulking,” I said finally. “That’s what it looks like.”

  Sylvia watched him, though he was barely visible to the naked eye, just a flick of blue and black among the shadows.

  “Maybe,” she murmured, “he’s looking for his daughter.”

  “Maybe.” But I doubted that. “I think I’ll go down and ask.”

  “Wait, Gram,” Sylvia pleaded. “Let’s at least get what we came for. Is that the cedar chest?”

  It was nearly hidden in a jumble of oddments in a corner, behind paintings and lamps; boxes were piled knee deep on the lid.

  “Yes,” I said, and Sylvia waded over, started to unbury it.

  “Pretty,” she commented, and it was: a simple varnished chest with a rounded lid that opened easily to give you a sweet breath of cedar. I helped her clear the boxes off, then opened the lid. As always, the smell made time turn for me, took me back through all the moments I had raised that lid to get a blanket on a cold winter night for a guest, for a child, for Liam.

  The quilt lay on top. It was bulky, winter white. Onto each broad, pieced square of heavy cotton I had fastened a white, crocheted web of thread; each web guarded a different room, every window, doorway, chimney, every opening in it.

  We were both quiet as we looked down at it. I heard Sylvia swallow. I closed my eyes, wanting to bang my head against a beam. Something had gotten into the trunk, nibbled away at the threads, fraying the crochet-work into tattered threads. I wondered if there was a complete pattern left anywhere on it.

  Far away, I heard an engine start.

  Sylvia rose to glance out. “He must have been parked on the road so that you wouldn’t see him.”

  Hurley was still looking for him, shifting his telescope hither and yon as though he were following a flock of birds that couldn’t make up their minds which way was south. Sylvia went over to him while I pulled the quilt out of the trunk to see if anything in our lives was still safe.

  “What do you see?” she asked Hurley. Her voice sounded tight. “Is it Judith Coyle? If it is, I want to talk to her.”

  “Looks more like a Rowan,” Hurley said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “Recognize that hair anywhere.”

  “Let me see,” Sylvia said, and I raised my head at that tone: a Rowan was either the first or the last thing she wanted to see in Hurley’s telescope. She put her eye to it, drew back as quickly, as though she had found herself being looked at.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Leith Rowan,” she said, and passed the telescope back to Hurley. She added on her way out, without meeting my eyes, “I’ll be back in a moment, Gram.”

  But she wasn’t.

  12

  Sylvia

  Leith led me a long way before he let me catch up with him. I walked fast, confused and desperate for answers, frightened for Gram and Hurley, whom I’d left alone with that unpredictable wood-creature, with its bright, false smile and its mysterious, inhuman motives. And frightened for myself, the changeling I’d made of myself that I couldn’t protect anymore, and that seemed every bit as dangerous as the fay lurking in Lynn Hall.

  But as quickly as I moved, Leith moved faster, somehow without disappearing entirely. I caught glimpses of his flaming hair ahead of me in the wood, and then halfway across a field, and then along the road between Gram’s property and Owen Avery’s hillside. I reached that road just in time to see Leith turn down an ancient, rutted dirt road that ran along a brook to where a mill had been built, a couple of centuries before. That road ended, or at least the overgrown memory of it did, on a steep bank beside the only remaining wall of the mill. There, civilization ended; the woods ran wild. Rowans lived far back along the water. The land had been posted for decades against trespassing by a Rod and Gun Club that appeared to be mythical; I’d never known anyone who knew anyone who belonged to it.

  I was slowed there by the ancient ruts of wagon wheels, by weathered stones and the roots of trees drawn up above the earth by pounding rains and shifting frosts. Maple, oak, and yew grew close to the water on both banks. The scene looked placid enough: the rocky, babbling country brook, pooling here and there just deep enough for a trout to linger in its shadows, buttercups and forget-me-not reflected in the water, flowering raspberries and hone
ysuckle tangled with wild phlox farther up the banks. But Gram had told me the shallow stream had flooded four times in her life, pulling up slabs of slate out of its own bed and carrying them away along with a cottage or two caught in its raging. Still waters ran deep; limpid shallows could be even more treacherous.

  Leith was waiting for me at the mill. He was sitting on the stone wall, eight feet above the water, balanced in a broken hollow where the mill wheel must have turned on its axle. If I hadn’t been looking for him, I wouldn’t have noticed him; he could melt into stones and shadows until even his red hair seemed part of the placid landscape. Even if I hadn’t been looking for him, I wouldn’t have gone much farther. The road reached its abrupt end just beyond the mill; the massive, crumbling trunk of a fallen oak stretched across it like a boundary marker. Rowans had their ways of discouraging visitors; the rumor that any season was hunting season in that stretch of woods was one of them.

  Leith shifted when I came up, turning his head to look at me instead of the water. He didn’t speak. Neither did I. For a moment, I thought I didn’t have words for what I needed to say; I had never said it before. His eyes were wide, wary; probably neither had he.

  I said abruptly, “I wore glasses for the first time in the second grade. I remember how surprised I was when I could see the individual leaves on trees. Everything looked the same, but slightly changed. Clearer. I remember wandering around the schoolyard at recess, looking at the different world. I could see the way drops of water falling out of an old pipe caught fire in the light and turned to jewels. I could see expressions instead of blurs on faces across a distance. I could see bug-life going on around me, movement in the roots of things I’d never noticed before. I looked at you, and you looked back at me, and that’s when I knew I must be wearing a pair of magic spectacles, because I recognized what you are. And in that moment, I saw you recognize me. It took me longer to realize that the magic wasn’t in my glasses.”