“I’ll be fine. Let me look at your arm.”
The arm was bruised and bloody, marred by three deep gashes where Cathleen’s fingernails had dug into the flesh. Fueled to a fury by white-hot indignation, Sophie whirled around to face Cathleen.
“How could you? She didn’t do anything.”
“You stay out of this!”
“I will not! Rachel is my friend, and even if you are her sister, you’ve no right to—”
But Cathleen wasn’t listening. She had risen to a sitting position, her eyes fixed on a point just beyond where the crumpled form of the handkerchief doll lay. Sophie followed her gaze.
The Treasure Box, her birthday gift from Papa, lay in the grass a few feet away.
“Leave it alone, Cathleen,” she warned.
Cathleen lurched toward the box, grabbed it up, and was on her feet in a flash. “You want it back, you’ll have to come and get it.” She took off running with the box under one arm.
After a split second of hesitation, Sophie went after her, with Rachel close on her heels. She could see Cathleen up ahead, sprinting through the woods that surrounded the cottage, lifting her skirts to jump over a fallen log. But she managed to keep her in sight and could hear Rachel’s labored breathing right behind her.
At last they slowed and came into a clearing on the bank of the river. A dead tree spanned out halfway over the water, and
Cathleen stood on the trunk, doubled over laughing at both of them. Then, as if in slow motion, Sophie saw her raise her hands and hold the box out in their direction. “Your precious little box that Papa made for your birthday,” she mocked in a singsong tone. She put the box up to her ear and shook it. “I hear something rattling inside. A locket? Something special? Some treasure you just couldn’t live without?”
“Give it back, Cathleen,” Rachel demanded.
“Or what? You’ll tell on me? You’ll go crying to Mam?”
Rachel took a step forward. “It’s not yours. It’s Sophie’s. And you know it’s important to her.”
“Rafe Dalton was important to me. But the two of you had to spoil that, didn’t you?”
“We didn’t tell. Now, give it back.”
“You didn’t tell? Oh, well, that explains everything. Mam just knew all on her own, right where to find me with Rafe, and when.
Maybe she’s got the second sight. Maybe she had a vision.”
“Put the box down, Cathleen. Please. I beg you.”
“You beg me? You beg me?” She laughed wildly, tossing the box from one hand to the other and moving in a bizarre dance up and down the tree trunk. “Beg some more.”
“Please,” Rachel repeated. “Please, put it down.”
“All right, since you asked so nicely.”
Cathleen held the box out toward Rachel, dangling it by one of its brass handles. Then, as Sophie watched in horror, she swung her arm out over the river and dropped it into the water.
“Nooo!” Rachel darted to the bank and plunged into the stream. For a moment or two she kept her footing, wading out into the shallows. Cathleen still stood on the fallen tree, laughing.
The bottom sloped down until the water rose as high as Rachel’s knees, then up to her hips. As the weight of it caught her skirts, she slipped and fell, and her head went under.
Spluttering and gasping, she came up with the blue tin box in one hand. “I found it!” she shouted.
Triumphant, she began struggling back toward the shore.
Sophie buried her face in her hands, but when she looked up again, Rachel was staggering, pitching on the mossy rocks. She lost her balance, and as she went down, her head struck the side of a massive boulder, just a few feet from where the river widened and deepened and rushed downstream in a cataract of white water.
Before Cathleen could scramble down from the fallen tree, Sophie was in up to her waist, frantically trying to reach her friend.
The day had been mild, but the water was like ice, and the current was a good deal stronger than she had expected. She could hear Cathleen behind her—no longer laughing, but screaming above the roar of the river: “Rachel! Rachel!”
At last Sophie got to her, and with some difficulty pulled her face up into the air. Rachel came to, coughing and choking and spitting out river water. When she finally found her feet and stood upright, she was still clutching the precious Treasure Box.
Cathleen waded out part way and stood knee-deep in the stream. “It’s all my fault,” she muttered. “I never should have . . .
I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
Sophie gripped the boulder and watched as Cathleen put an arm around her sister and helped her toward the bank. Exhausted and shivering in the waist-deep water, she wanted nothing more than to go home to Papa, to be warm and dry and wrapped in a blanket by the fire.
“Come on!” Cathleen shouted from the bank, motioning for her to hurry.
But Sophie couldn’t move. The hem of her dress, heavy with water and silt, seemed to be snagged on some outcropping under the surface. “I’m caught on something—a branch or a rock, I think,” she called back.
“Well, pull it free.” Cathleen’s repentance apparently hadn’t lasted very long; her annoyance was clear in her tone. “We need to go home. It’ll be dark soon.”
“I’m trying.” Sophie tugged vainly at her skirt. “I don’t want to rip my dress.”
“Tear it, you little fool,” Cathleen shot back. “Unless you intend to stay out here all night.”
“I’ll come help you,” Rachel offered, her voice barely audible.
“You’ll do nothing of the sort.” Cathleen grabbed Rachel’s arm to hold her back. “You’re already soaked and freezing; we both are.” She turned back to Sophie. “Pull harder.”
A shudder ran through Sophie, whether from the cold or from fear she couldn’t tell. The sun was beginning to set, and a chill was closing in. The push of the river against her legs seemed to be growing stronger. Long dark shadows stretched over the surface, making it difficult to see. She took a deep breath, braced one hand against the boulder, and yanked with all her might.
She felt a rip, and the dress gave way. The momentum threw her backward into the current, and before she could regain her footing, the force of the water swept her downstream toward the rapids.
The monitor went black. Vita sat staring at it for a full minute after the image had vanished.
She shouldn’t be surprised. Both logic and life experience had taught Vita that Murphy’s Law was not merely some cynical philosophical construct, but an inescapable reality. If anything could go wrong, it would. Expect the worst, and you’ll never be disappointed.
But she hadn’t expected this. Somewhere, deep down in Vita’s soul, in a place beyond the reach of experience and logic, a voice kept saying, It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.
Rachel had saved the Treasure Box, and Sophie had saved Rachel. Weren’t people supposed to be rewarded for their courage and their love, not punished by a capricious God or a heartless Fate? Where was justice? Where was simple fairness?
Vita pounded her fist against the keyboard, but nothing happened. The scene didn’t resume. No fortuitous rescue. No happy ending.
Nothing.
Just the vacant computer screen, a black hole, a lifeless eye staring back at her from the depths of a senseless universe.
6
UNDER THE WILLOW TREE
The first rays of a salmon-hued dawn filtered in through the high hedges around Vita’s office windows. After roaming around the house for hours, unable to concentrate, Vita had gone to bed in a black funk, determined to keep her distance from this computer and its virus and the compelling, disturbing images it pressed upon her mind. Yet after a sleepless and grueling night, here she sat, coffee cup in hand, as the sky lightened into morning and the clock chimed seven.
The computer was up and running, but so far nothing had happened. For thirty minutes she had waited, staring, while the monitor stared back, dark and unchan
ging. Maybe it was over.
Maybe the virus had consumed her hard drive and there was nothing left.
Then she heard it—faintly. Muted sounds emanating from the dual speakers on the shelf above her head. Muffled footsteps.
A rooster crowing. The bark of a dog.
The sounds drew closer, louder. She could hear voices now, although she couldn’t make out the words. Shouting. Running.
And above and behind the voices, a whooshing like static, like the white noise of a waterfall.
Or a river.
The screen brightened, and an image came into view. A riverbank, flanked by a stand of willow trees. In the middle of the stream, the water tumbled wildly over huge boulders and fallen tree trunks, but where the willows grew, their roots created a sheltered, placid pool. Long strands from the graceful branches cascaded into the shallow water, and light from the rising sun turned the pool to molten gold.
Vita looked closer. Something lay motionless in the water, half propped against the bank. A bedraggled doll, filthy and waterlogged, its dress torn to ribbons.
No. Not a doll. A child.
The footsteps accelerated, and she caught an echo: “Sophie!
Sophie!” It was Jacob Stillwater.
“Here!” Vita shouted aloud. “She’s over here!”
But of course, no one could hear her. This wasn’t real. Still she couldn’t seem to quiet the pounding of her heart or stem the surge of adrenaline that shot into her veins.
She could see Sophie’s face more clearly now, pale and gray and crisscrossed with lacerations—from tree branches in the water, perhaps, or sharp edges of the rocks. Like a reflection in a broken mirror. Like the spider-web pattern of a shattered windshield.
Like Hattie.
The memory unfolded and settled down on Vita, a thick woolen blanket thrown over her head, cutting off both light and air. How could she have forgotten, buried that image so deep?
The picture of Hattie Parker’s face, scarred beyond recognition.
Seventh grade. The year she lost her best friend without really knowing why.
Hattie had just turned thirteen, and puberty had not been kind to her. Awkward and homely and devastated by her parents’ divorce, she had begun acting out—letting her grades slide, drinking on the sly, hanging around with older kids, a wild and rebellious bunch from high school.
Vita had caught up with Hattie at Little Pigs’ Barbecue, a local teen hangout, the afternoon before their seventh grade history midterm. “Let’s go home and study,” she said. “You can have dinner at our house.”
Hattie had refused. “Some of us are going out,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at a gang of pimply-faced boys and longhaired girls who jostled one another on the hood of an old blue convertible. She didn’t say so, but the message was clear:
Vita was not invited.
“But it’s a school night,” Vita protested. “And the exam tomorrow—”
“You’re not my mother, OK? So quit hovering.” Hattie stormed away, and Vita went home to study alone.
The call came at 11:35 that night. A one-car accident, head-on into a telephone pole on a deserted road outside of town. The driver, a sixteen-year-old sophomore who had received his license five weeks before, had been killed instantly. Hattie had gone face-first through the windshield. Half a twelve-pack of beer lay on the floorboard, and six empty cans littered the backseat.
The doctor wouldn’t let her into the room, but Vita went to the hospital anyway, every afternoon for a week. Not a single one of Hattie’s new friends ever once set foot in the place. Finally the nurses let her go in—ten minutes, they said. No more.
The visit took less than five. Hattie sat propped up in the hospital bed, her face a patchwork of stitches and puckers and swollen bruises. It had taken the ER doctors nine and a half hours to remove the glass from her face and put her back together. Half an inch closer, and she would have lost her right eye.
“How’d you get in here?” she slurred, her mouth twisting in a direction it wasn’t meant to go.
“I’ve been here waiting to see you every day since the accident. The nurses finally let me in.” Vita set a small potted plant and a card on the bedside table. There were no other flowers in the room, no cards, no balloons. Just bare white walls and a hanging drip that went into a needle in Hattie’s left elbow. Her eyes flitted back and forth from Hattie’s ruined face to the window, to the muted television, to the foot of the bed. She didn’t know where to look.
“Go ahead and say it.” Hattie turned her head to one side and closed her eyes.
“Say what?”
“I told you so.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But you thought it.” She opened her eyes. “So high and mighty, Vita. Always right. Always in control.”
Vita frowned. “I didn’t come here to fight with you. I came because—”
“Because you wanted to see the freak? Well, go ahead. Take a look. Take a good hard look.”
“You’re not a freak, Hattie. The doctors can fix it. It’ll take some time, but it’ll be all right. At least you’re alive.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Guess I should count my blessings.”
“I’m so sorry, Hattie. I just want you to know that—”
“That you’ll always be my friend?” Hattie interrupted. “Don’t say it, Vita. Just don’t. I can’t stomach your pity. So just leave, all right?”
Vita left. For a while she held out hope that the accident might serve some good purpose, that she and Hattie could be friends again. But it never happened. Hattie recovered, got out of the hospital, and went on with her life—a life that no longer included Vita Kirk. Once, in high school, Vita saw her in the parking lot, getting onto a motorcycle with some guy twice her age.
She wore a black leather jacket with a skull and crossbones embroidered on the back. The banner above the skull read Scarface.
Hattie lived, but the friendship died. Vita never really understood why. What she did understand was that when you cared about people and trusted them, they betrayed you. Always. One way or another, they always left you, always let you down.
By some miracle, the searchers found Sophie Stillwater in time.
“She’s alive!” Jacob shouted as he gathered the limp, dripping body into his arms. “Thank God—she’s breathing!”
He fought his way out of the tangle of willow branches and up onto the bank, and somebody tucked a heavy coat around the shivering girl’s shoulders.
“Papa,” she murmured. “I knew you’d come. I prayed, Papa, and Mama kept me safe until you found me.”
Jacob pushed a sodden lock of hair away from her face. “She’s burning up with fever. Let’s get her home.”
For ten days little Sophie floated between this world and the next, and although for Vita the timespan was compressed, she knew that the longer Sophie’s fever continued, the less chance the child had of surviving. Rachel came every day and sat at her friend’s bedside with the blue Treasure Box on her lap. Bridget hovered, feeding Sophie sips of broth from a spoon and cooling her brow with a damp rag. Jacob hung in the doorway with a bleak, haggard look on his face.
Then, on the eleventh day, Sophie’s fever broke. The angry red blotches on her cheeks faded. She slept—not feverishly, shaking with chills and sweats, but a sweet, deep sleep, twelve hours of it. She woke up hungry, ate soup, talked a little. Jacob and Bridget smiled again. Everyone breathed easier.
Everyone except Sophie.
“It’s pneumonia,” the physician said, snapping his black bag shut. “She’s inherited her mother’s weak lungs, it seems. Keep her upright and quiet.”
“But she’ll be all right, won’t she?” Jacob persisted. “She’ll get well.”
“It’s possible her condition may resolve itself,” the doctor said.
“Only time will tell.”
Sophie was lying propped against the head of the bed when Rachel came to visit. “I kept this for you,” Rachel
said, holding out the Treasure Box. “I dried it out and cleaned up the locket, but I’m afraid your pretty green ribbon got ruined.”
“That’s all right.” It hurt to breathe, and Sophie was so tired she could barely talk, but she took the box and opened it. Inside lay the handkerchief doll, a bit the worse for wear, with the locket twined about its neck on a ribbon the color of mud. “I see you rescued Titania.”
Rachel nodded. “And you rescued me,” she choked out, fighting tears. “And now—oh, Sophie, I’m so sorry.”
Sophie waved a hand to brush the words away. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. It wasn’t your fault. I’m fine.
Honestly.”
She fingered the locket, then removed it from the doll and placed it around her own neck. “I’ll get a new ribbon. A pale green one, like—” She stopped suddenly. “Rachel, can you keep a secret?”
“You know I can. We’re friends, aren’t we? Best friends.”
Sophie smiled. Even smiling hurt, but it was a good kind of hurt. “I saw Mama.”
Rachel’s eyes widened. “When? Where?” she demanded. “Oh, Sophie, do you suppose that means you’ve got the sight?”
“No. It wasn’t like that. Not a vision, I mean. It seemed— well, like a dream, but very real.” She sighed and leaned her head back against the pillows.
“Can you tell me?”
Sophie tried to take a deep breath, but her chest felt as if a heavy iron ball had settled on it. The air only went down as far as her breastbone, and all she could manage was a shallow little gasp. Still, she went on.
“I was in the river—it was freezing cold, don’t you know, and I was terrified. I saw the rapids come up to get me, and then I was pulled down. Something was tearing at my face.” She reached up and touched gingerly at one of the cuts across her cheek. “A tree branch under the water, I think. My head hit on something hard. And then she was there—”
“Your mother? She died when you were six.”
“Yes, but I saw her.” Sophie’s eyes held Rachel’s. “You do believe me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. Go on.”
“She was standing on the bank, wearing a long, flowy kind of dress—the prettiest dress I had ever seen, a pale yellow green, so pale you could almost see through it. And her hair was loose— not tied up, like she usually wore it—so that it flowed too, around her shoulders and nearly down to her waist. She almost looked like—like a mermaid.”
The Treasure Box Page 5