“What did your mother say?”
He was getting wise to her. She liked to get a yes from him to take to her mother to make her come around. “I haven’t asked her yet,” she admitted. “I figured she’d just flip out.”
As he considered this she heard a tune being picked out on the piano. It didn’t mean he wasn’t listening; he actually found it an aid to thought. “Finishing in the fall would put you half a year late starting college,” he said at length.
“I know.” She tried to sound mature and responsible, but she hadn’t had much practice with either one. “I’ve just had a lot of personal stuff going on this semester, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to deal with all the fallout in the spring. It might make it really hard to keep my grades up and do a decent job on my senior project.” It would also be lonely being somewhere else when all her friends were here at Ash Grove; she thought with a pang of not spending her last semester at high school with friends like Clark, Blake, Tasha, and Becca. But she couldn’t bear to be around William if he was going to keep her at a distance like this.
“It’s not something I’m prepared to decide right this minute,” he said, and she added eagerly, “Oh, me either. It may work out fine. I just wanted to kind of start thinking about a backup plan is all.”
“My Maddie, planning ahead? No way. Who are you, and what have you done with my daughter?”
She faked a laugh. It was pretty convincing, she thought. Her acting training had one real-life advantage: it made it easier to keep her parents from worrying too much.
* * *
When Tanner pulled up in front of the Sumner house, he was frustrated to see that Steven’s ancient VW Rabbit was gone. He didn’t want to wait to confront the man with what he’d done, but apparently he’d have to.
The Honda was there, though. His heartbeat quickened. That could mean that Joy was home, by herself, and he’d have a chance to talk to her uninterrupted. To make her remember. Despite the failure of his earlier attempt, he was eager to try.
The sound of piano music was coming from inside the house, so Joy was definitely at home. But a second later he changed his mind; it sounded too technically complex to be Joy playing. A strange suspicion tightened his scalp. Silently he took the stairs to the porch, and standing to the side of the window where he couldn’t be seen, he peered through a gap in the window blinds that revealed a sliver of the living room.
A woman sat playing the piano. She had curly dark hair that fell down her back, and her slender hands moved deftly over the keys. Although he couldn’t see her face, he had a growing certainty that she had a pointed, determined chin and lively dark eyes. A hollow feeling came into his stomach. He rapped at the door, interrupting the music.
Immediately she stopped playing, but she was humming the tune as she opened the door. “Yes?” she said with a smile of inquiry.
It was as he had suspected. He knew her face from the pictures Joy had shown him. There were a few laugh lines now, and something more mature in the contours of her cheeks, but it was the same woman. She had died eleven years ago in a car wreck, but somehow she stood alive and well in the doorway.
“Anna?” he said through dry lips.
“That’s me. Are you a friend of Joy’s? Or one of my husband’s students?”
It was impossible, but there she was. Anna Merridew Sumner, Joy’s mother.
Chapter 5
So now he knew the reason everything had turned upside down. Steven had found a way to bring his wife back to life, but it had altered history so that he and Joy had never fallen in love, never conceived their baby. Steven must have been overjoyed to have had things work out so tidily. It was a win-win for him: recover his wife and his daughter both.
“Is there something I can help you with?” asked Anna. “Steven’s out at the moment, but if you want to leave a message for him, you’re welcome to come in and scavenge for paper.” Her voice was pleasant and low, and recognizable from the songs he’d downloaded. Her singing voice was a lush alto, and it was strange now to hear her speaking to him. And so casually.
But she almost certainly didn’t know that she’d been brought back from the dead. For her, this was a normal afternoon in the week after Christmas. He noticed now the Christmas tree in the room behind her, a real pine more than seven feet high, decorated with a hodgepodge of store-bought and homemade ornaments with a moth-eaten angel on top. He and the Sumners hadn’t bothered to put a tree up before Joy went into hiding; first they were too distracted by other worries; then they were arranging the last-minute wedding; and after that it was just him and Steven, trying to bear up in Joy’s absence, and Tan had never even thought of asking his increasingly eccentric and secretive father-in-law if he’d like to bond over something as humble as buying and decorating a Christmas tree.
He realized she was waiting for an answer; her dark eyes were looking curiously at him. “A message,” he repeated. “Yeah, that’d be great. Will he be long?”
“There’s no telling with that man,” she said, a dimple appearing in one cheek. “Sometimes he’s the stereotypical absentminded professor.”
Doubt crept into his mind. Why would Steven part from his wife even for an hour when she had just been restored to him? Maybe Steven wasn’t aware any more than she was that she had been lost for more than a decade. Which meant that maybe he wasn’t behind this… thing.
“Maybe I should just try another time,” he said, wavering.
She took pity on him. “He just ran down to the gas station to get me some cough drops. For some reason he didn’t feel comfortable with me driving there, although heaven knows I could do it in my sleep.”
He didn’t want her driving. Adrenaline blasted through Tanner’s veins. Steven knew. He knew his wife was supposed to have died in a car accident. He’d only been pretending not to know who Tanner was. Now it was just a matter of making him put things right.
“You know what, I’ll just run down and meet him. I need to pick up a pack of smokes anyway,” he said. If he didn’t head Steven off, he’d see the Ninja at the bottom of the drive. Better to ambush him. And, frustratingly, it was true that his system was starting to clamor for nicotine. “I appreciate your help—Anna.”
“No problem,” she said, and shut the door.
When he pulled up in front of the convenience store Steven was already at the checkout counter. The noise of the bike made him look up, and through the glass door Tan saw his posture tense into a defensive stance. He kept the bike idling in front of the entrance.
When his father-in-law stepped through the door, Tanner pushed up the visor on his helmet. “I’m through being kept in the dark,” he said. “It’s time you told me the truth. About Joy and Anna.”
Steven’s shoulders slumped. In his professorial uniform of khakis, oxford-cloth shirt, and blazer, he looked defenseless. “You win,” he said.
“I win, nothing. Thanks to you I’ve lost everything.” But this was no place for that conversation. “The park by the riverbank, near the Mission Dam turnoff,” he said. “Head back that way, and I’ll catch up.” He threw down the kickstand and cut the motor. First he had to buy cigarettes, dammit.
Seated across from each other at a picnic table, they regarded each other with hostility in the dim illumination of a streetlight. Tan took a long drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke not quite to the side of the older man’s face. It was a douchey thing to do, and he took a childish satisfaction in it. He had begun to realize he was kind of immature in this new existence, despite Bobby and Donna’s influence.
“I’m not going to ask how you did it,” he said. “All that matters is that you undo it. Now.”
Steven bristled. “Out of the question. You have no idea how difficult—”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass how difficult it was. You make it go away.”
“I don’t take orders from you, young man. You have no right to dictate to me.”
“You’ve taken away the one person who complete
ly believed in me. This is like before the wedding, when you were convinced she was making a mistake and trying to make her decisions for her—only worse, because you’ve changed her.”
Steven shot back, “You’re the one who changed her. Until you came into her life, Joy was doing great. As soon as you arrive on the scene, her grades drop, she starts keeping secrets from me, she gets pregnant—it’s like all her judgment vanishes where you’re concerned.”
It was Joy’s judgment that had saved Tanner’s life. “And what about our baby? Was Rose a mistake too?”
“Yes. Yes, I believe she was. Joy would never have been so irresponsible without your influence.”
Under the table Tan’s right hand was clenching and unclenching with the urge to punch him in the face, glasses or no glasses. “You’re talking about our daughter, Joy’s and mine,” he said tightly. “Your granddaughter. She was real, and wonderful. I held her and heard her and smelled her… I’d show you pictures, but they all vanished when you started changing things up. She was so perfect.” If he closed his eyes, he could still picture her. Her funny tuft of brown hair, and that perfect tiny chin that was a replica of Joy’s, and little triangular eyebrows that Joy swore were like his. He could remember how she felt in his arms, the way her mouth pursed up, the way she waved her tiny fists. The light in Joy’s face when she looked at her.
“I’m sure it’s hard,” Steven began, and Tanner slammed his fist down on the table with a force that shook it.
“Don’t give me that bullshit. Hard? Think about when Joy was born, when she was just hours old, and tell me how you’d feel if someone just came in and stole all that from you. Your wife and your daughter. Because that’s what I’ve lost, thanks to you.”
“I did lose my wife. I lived without her for eleven years, and you can’t know what that’s like.”
“Well, if you get your way, that’s exactly what I’ll have to live with. And it’ll be even worse because part of her is still here. She looked at me as if I was a stranger.” Without love, without even interest. There might as well be a wall of solid rock dividing them. “Do you have any idea what kind of torture it is?”
Steven’s eyes didn’t waver. “You’ll have to get used to it,” he said.
That stunned Tanner into silence, and Steven seized the opportunity.
“I know you think I’m a heartless bastard, but I’m sorry for you. I am. But I’ve been working toward this for so long. To lose Anna without any warning, when we should have had decades more together—it was more than I could bear. You understand that now.”
Tanner lit another cigarette with jerky movements. He could imagine it. He was living it, in a warped way. He inhaled deeply and felt the nicotine work its soothing magic on his jangled nerves, willing it to take away the urge to do violence to the man who had stolen his life.
And who was still justifying himself. “Her death served no purpose. None! It’s not as if she died saving someone’s life. It was a mistake, a cosmic glitch. All I was doing was setting things right.” His voice was persuasive now. Tanner remembered him in English class, reading aloud from Shakespeare and Conrad. The man had presence; he had to give him that. Maybe he was where Joy got her acting talent from. Except there was nothing deceptive in Joy.
“So where does that leave me?” he asked.
Steven seemed pleased at the mildness of this question. He must have thought he was winning his point. “The world, to coin a phrase, is your oyster,” he said.
“That saying has never made any sense to me.”
“It means that limitless opportunities lie before you.” He was in full lecture mode now, the pompous prick. “You feel that Joy is essential to your life? Very well. Woo her. See if she’ll take you on these terms.”
“You’ll warn her off me, try to come between us.”
“Not if you treat her well and don’t use any tricks. Like getting her pregnant.” He glared. “No hanky-panky.”
In other circumstances Tanner would have laughed at the quaint expression. But he needed information. “Fill me in on exactly what you did,” he said as he ground out his cigarette on the sole of his boot. “You brought Anna back, fine. But why did it change so many other things?”
Steven looked more than ever like he should be standing behind a lectern in front of a class. “I assume you’ve heard of the theory of alternate timelines—that every action we take creates different realities. You make the decision to go to a seminar, say, and that day you meet your future employer, and a whole series of events unfolds from the consequences of that choice. But if you had chosen instead to go to a political rally, that day you might have decided to run for office, thus creating an entirely different chain of events.”
It had been a while since Tan had read any sci-fi, but this bizarre conversation was waking memories of some long-ago concepts. “So you took Anna’s accident out of the chain of events, causing all these other things to happen or not happen, and that created this alternate reality that I’m stuck in now?”
Steven gave a short nod. “Essentially, yes. I didn’t know precisely what the fallout would be, but I knew there would be some changes. Not grave ones—not ones that would change our world too significantly. Not changes that outweighed the benefits, certainly.”
Tanner stared at him in disbelief. Was the man’s ego really that huge? “You really thought you could just start taking nips and tucks in reality without concern for anyone else? And that it would all fall into place the way you wanted?”
“It’s not that easy, of course,” Steven said tartly. “A balance must be maintained. In this case, a life for a life. To bring Anna back I had to eliminate someone from the timeline.” He actually smiled. “I can’t help but be rather proud of myself.”
“For obliterating my daughter,” shouted Tanner, unable to keep up the pretense of being calm any longer.
Steven flinched back. “Not at all! The baby was… an unanticipated loss.” For the first time Tan glimpsed sadness in the older man’s eyes. “I didn’t expect her to be erased like that. Delayed, perhaps…”
“Because she has to be in our future. In Joy’s and mine.”
“What do you mean, has to be?”
Tanner stared him in the eye. “Joy met her,” he said distinctly, emphasizing each word. “Joy stepped into the future and met our daughter as a teenager, a student at Ash Grove. So you tell me, Doc Brown. What happens now?”
This rattled Steven. His adam’s apple jerked in his throat, and his mouth opened and closed. He took off his glasses and put them on again. Then he reached for Tanner’s pack of cigarettes and extracted one with fingers that weren’t quite steady. Tanner nudged the lighter toward him.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” Steven asked finally, after he had lit up. “Why keep it a secret from me?”
Tanner leveled a look at him that made Steven put a hand up to fend off the reply. “I know. I was scarcely a sympathetic audience.”
“Or a reliable ally.”
“That too.” He sat in silence as his cigarette, forgotten, turned to ash in his hand. “Perhaps Rose is a fixed point in history. Something that will happen—that must happen—no matter how chaotic other events become.”
That sounded promising. Maybe that meant the sequence of events would have to go back to the way they were before. “So you agree that it’s significant that Joy met her.”
“Very much so.” He gazed into space, his eyes troubled, and Tanner pressed his advantage.
“You and I had a deal, remember? You said you’d help me make a success of my marriage to Joy, and this isn’t exactly holding up your end of the bargain.”
The cigarette in Steven’s hand had burned down to his fingers, and now he started, shaking the column of ash to the ground, and tapped the end on the table to put it out. “You’re right,” he said quietly. “I’d forgotten. I suppose there’s only one thing to do now.”
“Reverse the spell,” said Tanner. “Can you do that?”
> “I don’t know. I can try.”
He hadn’t expected Steven to give in so readily. “What will happen to Anna?” he couldn’t help asking.
Steven darted a look of surprise at him. “Oh, Anna’s not going anywhere. There is absolutely no way I am giving her up to the powers of chaos again.”
That brought an uneasy prickle to the back of his neck. “You said a balance had to be struck,” he recalled. “To bring your wife back you had to zap someone else out of existence. If it wasn’t Rose you meant to eliminate, who was it?”
Steven’s brow furrowed. “Haven’t you already seen for yourself?” he asked, and Tanner shook his head, impatient, before the penny dropped.
“Melisande?” he asked, and Steven’s face confirmed it.
So it was true. That was why Bobby and Donna didn’t recognize the name. It was why the internet didn’t register her presence. She had never come to be.
Which was why he’d stayed in North Carolina, cutting up rough, getting expelled from Ash Grove, and then finishing out high school at Murphy. Why he hadn’t been moping in the graveyard that night when Joy came there, hadn’t kissed her on impulse or felt that initial tug of interest that made him spend time with her at… at an open house that hadn’t taken place, because Melisande didn’t exist to host it.
“Everything ripples outward,” said Steven, perhaps guessing the path his thoughts were taking. “It may take a little time for everything to catch up. For the threads to reweave, for the old memories to be replaced.”
“Is that why you and I can still remember the way things really happened?”
“I believe my memory is intact because I’m the one who brought about the new timeline. In your case, it may be that because you were at a greater physical remove, your timeline and your memory are taking longer to reset.”
That could explain why the nurse at the Georgia clinic had recognized him as Tristan but no one local had. “Why can’t Donna remember, then? She was in Atlanta too.”
“Hmm.” Steven looked thoughtful. “I’ve found that the new reality doesn’t fall into place all at once for everyone who’s been affected. For some, the ripples take longer to completely work outward.”
Among the Shadows (The Ash Grove Chronicles) Page 6