I made myself coffee and poured it into a thick mug to take up to my office. I gazed out the French doors at the sun, listened to the birdsong. The heat hadn’t stopped the transformation of the foliage. We were poised at the turn of the season. The winds and sleet and cold could come any time, but that day the glow of the trees was still like palpable light. Scarlet and salmon, and fleshy gold-veined green they shone, although soon enough the leaves would fall and dry and blow away, leaving only skeletal branches reaching like bones into the sky.
But that day was golden, like the David Bowie song we danced to at our wedding, the one Jeremy used to sing to me. Our first time away together had been to London, to visit his parents. We’d seen Bowie’s Sound + Vision concert at the Docklands. “Golden Years” was Jeremy’s favorite song. He’d often pop up and startle me, croon it tunelessly in my ear. One of his little jokes I told myself I’d never miss. And now I was crying in my coffee, wishing I could hear him sing it one more time.
I had a flash of memory. It was a Monday, our very last Monday together. The one day of the week completely devoted to smoothing out kinks in our current show and developing new tricks for the next we were planning. The theater was dark Monday nights, and Jeremy and I often stayed late at the workshop, got takeout. It was also one of the only times we could be completely alone.
I was in my office, puzzling over an awkward transition in the Mascherari script when I heard Dan call, “See you tomorrow,” and the big overhead door slam and lock. I pushed back my chair and began working the knots out of my neck. Then I felt Jeremy’s hands grip my shoulders, gently coaxing my muscles. “That feels good.”
“How about this?” He breathed the question into my ear as he slid his hands down the length of me, to rest at my waist. He kissed me then, just at the base of my collarbone. I could smell the oniony scent of flash powder on him. It was like an aphrodisiac to me, that smell. I took his face in my hands, kissed him deep. I loved the view of his known face when I kissed him, its planes and arcs. I never closed my eyes, but always looked into his, elementally blue as sky or water. He pulled me to him, carried me to the couch I kept there for those late nights. Jeremy wasn’t tall, but he had the kind of strength that came from using his whole body for his work, the strength acrobats or jockeys have.
His hands, clever from card and coin tricks, unbuttoned me as he went. “It’s a minor miracle to me that you are still a featherweight after three children, Mrs. Maskelyne.” I laughed. When his mouth settled on my breast, his hand slipped into the wetness between my legs. My laugh turned to a hum of pleasure at the magic our bodies always seemed to find together.
My hands reached for him and hit glass. The old window didn’t shatter, in spite of its bubbles and fissures, but there I was, back in Hawley. A glaze of tears shone on my face reflected in the window, and I felt the sting of freshened pain, the wound Jeremy’s death made opening again.
But then I heard Caleigh’s heavy feet pounding the stairs. I steeled myself to go and make breakfast. By the time I’d wiped my eyes and got down to the kitchen, Caleigh was slamming cabinet doors, complaining in the whiny little girl voice I was trying to break her of.
“Why can’t we get some fun cereal?”
“Because it’s full of sugar, and you’re ready to jump out of your skin now. How about scrambled eggs?”
“With cheese?”
“You know it.” I felt another stab of grief as I remembered the last meal Jeremy ever made for her, Caleigh’s green eggs and ham. She never asked for it now. Maybe someday she’d make it for her own children, tell them how her father had invented it for her. I hoped so. There were so many lasts, and I couldn’t help but replay them all, my mind stuck on rewind. I knew it was the same for the girls. We all carried him with us in different ways, the loss still so fresh we hadn’t found any ease in bearing it.
I started assembling pans and ingredients, pushing aside my brooding thoughts while Caleigh formed and re-formed patterns with her string.
“I wish we could have breakfast at the fair. I bet they have good doughnuts.”
“I bet they do. But we’re not meeting Grand and Gramps there until eleven.”
“We could go early.”
“We could, but then we’d be there for hours and hours.”
“That would be great. Hey, will Gramps take us for a ride in the cool car?” My father’s not-quite retirement from the Williams College faculty had freed up enough time for him to restore an ancient Packard convertible. All the girls loved it. I could see the wheels of the car Caleigh was shaping in string.
“I bet he will.”
She tucked into her eggs, and after she finished, she threw herself into my lap. She was dressed in her favorite bright green Hello Kitty T-shirt and a plaid skirt. At least we’d be able to find her in a crowd.
“Mom, I’ve been having some weird dreams. Well, not really dreams. More like, I don’t know … like something that happened a long time ago, and I can see it.”
A thin shiver ran through me. The strange dreams I’d been having over the past week shuffled around in my mind like a pack of cards. “Well, do they upset you?”
“Not really. They just seem so real.”
“What happens in the dreams?”
“A girl is there, in long dresses. Her mom, too, sometimes. Or her grandmother. They do stuff. Cook things, or clean. And there’s a book—a book the girl has but she doesn’t really want it.”
The book with red leather covers pursued me in my dreams, too. Sometimes I’d be trying to perform the trick called Book of Life, sometimes I dreamed of a woman who was supposed to keep the book safe. The woman would shift and change; sometimes she would be the woman in the painting, but often others would take her place. An old woman, or a woman with red hair like my own. Many of the dreams would begin with the ever-changing woman writing in the book with a quill pen. Then she’d startle at a noise, close the book up, run to hide it. Some nights she buried it in the earth. Some nights she hid it behind a loose brick in a wall. But the next night, it would appear again.
Caleigh looked up at me, searched my face, as if she knew about my dreams that echoed hers. “And Mom? The girl has your name.”
I held her tighter, kissed her cheek. Wondered what it meant, that the Revelations were in our dreams. I felt them close, surrounding us in this house. The woman in the painting might have been a Revelation, for all I knew. Was some kind of relation, probably. It still troubled me that I hadn’t remembered seeing it the first time I went through the house, with Carl Streeter. I’d thought about calling him to ask if the painting had always been there. But he’d think I was a nut-cake.
“Well, sweetheart, your dreams may be flashes of what happened here, many years ago. You know your string games are a kind of magic you can do, and divining things that happened in the past could be another part of your gift.”
“Yeah, sometimes it starts when I’m making a pattern. Or when I’m reading.”
“I don’t think it’s anything to worry about at all.”
“So it’s not weird?”
“No, I don’t think it’s weird. But you know, sometimes it’s good to write down your dreams. Then they don’t bother you as much. Can you do that?”
“I guess I can.” She paused, then said, “Daddy helps, too. I see him, Mom, when I make the ‘Missing Dad’ pattern.” I hugged her close, breathing in her fresh, milky smell. She pinched the skin of my knuckle. It amused her that it stayed in a ridge, didn’t snap right back like hers. Her face had lost its troubled look. “Now can I go wake up Grace and Fai?” One of Caleigh’s favorite pastimes was leaping onto her sisters’ beds and bouncing them until they got up.
“Sweetheart, we don’t have to leave for a while yet. Let them sleep. If you don’t they’ll be cranky. Then none of us will be pleased with you, you know.”
“Oh, all right,” Caleigh sighed. “But what will I do?”
“Last I knew Nathan was outside. You could go and bot
her him.”
“I think I’ll just read.” She slid off my lap, plucked an oatmeal cookie from the jar, then darted out, the door banging behind her.
I crumbled uneaten toast between my fingers, wondered what our twinned Revelation dreams meant. Although I felt better behind my high fence, I didn’t want to risk the lives of my children on it alone, or on my own unconfirmed feelings of safety, or old family legends. We sure hadn’t been safe in Las Vegas. But would we be any safer in Hawley? I had fled in desperation, but I’d had a lot of time to think in the past week while washing old panes of mottled glass and hacking at weeds. I realized that there were just too many unanswered questions. Why had Nan been so adamant we come here to Five Corners? And how had she known about the Fetch? Before I even had much of a clue myself, she had known.
I’d taken the girls to visit her just after we’d arrived, but she’d kept us busy, made sure we were all swirled up with her hawks and helping the girls fly them. Tiny and implacable, she’d commanded and coaxed the girls all morning, her long silver braid swinging as she gestured at them. When she’d gone in the house to supervise snacks, I followed her, caught her in the hall, asked her what she meant when she sent the note.
“An old woman’s fancy, maybe … no need to dissect it, Reve. You’re here now and that’s what matters.”
“But why were you so insistent? And how did you know about the Fetch? Our Fetch? I never told anyone.” I took hold of her bird-wing arm, thin as a stick. Nan tisked at me, just as one of her birds might, and shook me off. She was shrunken with age now, but still strong with ropy muscle from handling hawks and cleaning mews every day of her long life.
“Don’t look for more trouble, Revelation,” she told me. “You have enough.” And she strode into the kitchen, commanding her housekeeper to hurry with lunch.
The connection of the distant past with what was happening now had been tugging at the periphery of my consciousness, and my dreams kept stirring it all up again. And now Caleigh’s. I sighed, yanked my hair back until my scalp hurt, determined to pull all the weirdness out of my brain.
Miss May, our goat, bleated desultorily just outside the kitchen door and brought me back to the present. She was missing the horses. As soon as I knew where we were bound for, I’d had them shipped to a farm in Vermont. Even before I had any idea how I would get my family away. The horses had been bred and raised in the West, with its dearth of trees, and I knew they’d need time to get used to the heavy foliage of New England, the shadows it cast, the drifts of leaves. Even a well-trained horse will spook at things it’s unaccustomed to. It would have been stupid to uproot us all to ensure the safety of my children, then let the twins crack their heads open in a needless fall. It was a risk to even bring the horses, since the Fetch could track their route as well as ours, but I reasoned that I couldn’t take everything from Grace and Fai. Or myself. So I’d written up false bills of sale, trying to cover their tracks, too.
I’d shipped Miss May with the horses, but as soon as the owner of the farm learned we were on the East Coast, she insisted on sending the goat down to us before the horses were due back. She informed me that Miss May had wreaked more havoc than any horse she’d ever trained. I chalked up her complaints to goat ignorance. If Miss May didn’t get what she expected, when she expected it, she’d let you know. For instance, she was usually quiet for most of the morning as long as she had a treat after breakfast. So when I opened the door armed with an oatmeal cookie, Miss May trotted up, her dark coat shining like a Hollywood starlet’s mink. She took the cookie I offered gently, then ran off, her white tail twinkling at me.
I nudged a cookie out of the jar for myself, picked up my mug, and headed back upstairs. Caleigh’s noise had brought me down to the kitchen before I could check my e-mail.
When I got to the office, I turned on the computer, and the usual morning spam greeted me. Offers to update my wardrobe, my body, my car. Nothing crucial, so I logged off, went out to the widow’s walk. Something shone metallic in the white steeple of the church across the common. A breeze came up, and I heard a faint sound, a resonance, almost like singing. I whirled, thinking the sound came from the portrait behind me. But the woman’s smiling face was as serene as ever. Then I heard it again, that singing, from the other direction, soft on the autumn air. A scream snagged in my throat. But the scream became a laugh. What I’d heard was only the church bell, glinting in the sun, sounding in the wind. I laughed at myself until I felt better. We wouldn’t start living in fear again that day. It was only slightly haunted Hawley, stuck a few hundred years in the past, that lurked here.
I went down to wake my sleepy twins. We’d go to the fair and pretend, at least, to be a normal family. I thought again of Jeremy’s favorite song, and hoped for a golden day.
2
Main Street teemed with cars and people. The town hall was a hive of Girl Scouts and farmers. The Ladies Benevolent Society hawked warm apple pie, spicy chili, fried dough with maple cream. The common overflowed, a bluegrass band played, and children clambered over hay bales or threw balls into buckets for lime green yo-yos or purple bears.
I drove down the street, looking for a place to park. I was still slightly panicked being out in a sea of strangers. But I’d promised the girls. And there hadn’t been any trace of the Fetch in our wake.
“There it is!” Fai shouted in my ear. Dad’s Packard, parked in the church lot, was hard to miss—spring green, long and low-slung. I parked next to the Suds & Stuff Laundromat, and the girls leapt from the car.
“All right now, let’s stay together until we find them,” I called, to no avail. Grace and Fai were already halfway up the block, their hair bright halos in the sun.
“It’s okay, they know we’re meeting in front of Elmer’s,” Caleigh reassured me. But I held tight to her hand as we made our way through the crowd. The sidewalk was overrun with kids and old people, farmers in feed caps and tourists sporting “Life is good” togs.
“Grand!” Caleigh whooped, racing to her, throwing herself between Grace and Fai to get at my mother. She was dressed in her gardening clothes, red clogs, faded and pilled green Fair Isle sweater, wide-legged chinos. She never cared what she wore, yet somehow managed to emit repose and a spontaneous elegance. She was Grand, as the girls called her. Maybe it was her height. Whatever it was, I hadn’t inherited it from her. I always felt like a pygmy beside my mother. At least I had inherited her greyhound thinness and a wilder version of her stunning hair. Although hers was now threaded with silver, it was as glorious as ever. It shone, a Pre-Raphaelite golden red. She was growing it again, as the twins were, for Locks of Love. She smacked Caleigh on the cheek, then reached for me. I felt her cheek soft as the petals of the roses she grew. But the worry lines on her brow were furrowed.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked, after she had embraced me.
“Oh, off looking at some old tractors. You know how he is about machines. He says he’ll meet us at the pie stall, oh …” She glanced at her watch. “Now, actually. He says he’s hungry, but he’s already had blueberry cobbler and doughnuts.”
“Just like Caleigh. She’ll eat her way through the fair. I hope he’s prepared to be dragged around to every food opportunity again.”
“And to all the crafts,” Fai reminded me.
“And the crafts. Don’t worry. He’s been briefed. Just stay with him, and stay together.”
My mother and I watched the girls sprint up to the town hall steps. I took her arm. “You look tired, Mom.”
She waved that idea away. “Not tired. Just … I don’t know, thinking too much.” She hesitated, and a strange look came into her eyes, one I’d been seeing more often, and that worried me. Then it passed like a summer cloud.
“But you! Look at you!” She shed her gracious smile on me. I felt like a committee meeting she was chairing. Ever since we’d moved to Hawley, she’d been distant. She always seemed to be deflecting me. And although she’d been helping me at the Hawley house nearly
every day, there had been something subdued about her. Somehow I felt she was holding back, holding out on me. Like Nan. The girls had been helping or hindering us every moment, though, so I hadn’t been able to grill her. Until today.
“You’ve been looking better since you moved back,” she told me. “More like yourself, Reve.”
That annoyed me. “How did you expect me to look after my husband was murdered, Mom?”
Her eyes flared with an unreadable emotion—not exactly pain, or shame. Maybe a little of both, mixed in with something elusive. “Oh, honey, I didn’t mean that.” She hugged me. “Let’s just try to enjoy the day. They have good weather for it this year. Poured buckets all last fall, I remember.”
I sighed, decided to let it go for the moment.
We found my dad sitting on the wall outside the town hall, snacking on apple pie topped with a thick slice of cheddar cheese. Grace and Fai were making gagging noises, but he was feeding Caleigh a bite from his fork. Unlike my mother, he always looked as if he had prepared to face the world with care, but something was just a bit off. He forgot to comb his hair, or his vest was buttoned wrong. But then he’d smile and his eyes would crinkle and you’d forget any little flaws, his look bathed you in such kindly warmth. For the fair, he wore a jacket and bow tie, but the tie was crooked and now dusted with powdered sugar, probably from his breakfast doughnut. He almost upset his pie on Caleigh’s head when he rose to greet me.
“Sweetheart!” He wrapped me in his arms. “Everything okay?”
I nodded into his tweedy shoulder. “Just … watch the girls.”
He looked in my eyes, saw enough to know I was still troubled. “Of course I will.”
For all his absentminded ways, my father was incredibly observant. So I left him to shepherd the girls around, and my mother and I went off in search of treasure. For Mom, it would be interesting old garden tools; for me, maybe an opportunity to get some answers.
The Hawley Book of the Dead Page 8