The door creaked open, and Cass peeked inside. “But what about our studies?” Josie asked as her sister stood beside her.
“I shall find you a new tutor, and in the meantime I expect you to direct yourself as well as Cassandra. She has yet to learn her basic arithmetic, and her penmanship is atrocious. For the first time in your lives, I shall expect you to show some measure of discipline.” Mrs. Clifford pointed a finger. “And there will be no more secrets between us. Is that understood?”
The girls nodded.
“Now,” said Mrs. Clifford, settling herself in her chair, “if you would be so good as to take out the talking board and bring it here.”
Josie groaned aloud as her mother pointed to Cassie. “Go to your room.”
Cass stamped her foot. “I want to talk to Alec, too!” she cried, but with a nod from their mother Merritt clutched her around the middle with his cold, massive hands, lifted her four feet into the air, and conveyed her, squirming and whining, out of the room. Mrs. Clifford locked both doors and seated herself again.
josie? are you there?
“I’m sorry, Alec.” She began to cry, hiding her eyes so she would not have to see the look on her mother’s face. “I’m so sorry.”
“Now, then, Alec Frost,” Lavinia began. “If you would be so good as to resume just where we left off the last time we spoke.”
* * *
They tiptoed into Emily’s room hoping to find forgotten things to remember her by. The door to the little cupboard in the wall stood ajar, and inside they found a hat ribbon and one of the tortoiseshell combs she’d worn in her hair. On the nightstand was her crumbling copy of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pages foxed and lightly annotated in pencil.
“I hate this,” Josie said. “I hate feeling as if she’s died.” She hadn’t realized just how much she’d been hoping for a letter of farewell until they’d been through every nook and corner of the room. But then, Mrs. Clifford hadn’t given her time to write one.
The girls went back into the nursery and sat down at the school table. “We won’t ever get to talk to Alec alone again, will we?”
“I don’t know, Cass.”
“It’s so mean of Mother to take away our two best friends. I told that to Mrs. Gubbins and she said life isn’t meant to be easy or fair, because if it were always easy and fair then there wouldn’t be any point to it. Are you still going to write to him?” Josie nodded. “Well, I’m going to write him too, and you can put them in with the other ones in your hiding spot.” So they each took out a fresh sheet of stationery, and began to write.
Dear Alec,
I am miserable at the thought that she has parted us for-ever. Why do terrible things always happen in clumps? First Mother sent Emily away—how I am sick in my soul at the thought of never seeing her again!—and now she will not cease asking about all the things she has no earthly right to know.
But I must keep writing, even when I have no way of knowing if you will receive these letters. You do know, don’t you, that I used the board that night only because she compelled me? I can see what she wants—to make a prophet of you, and let the world believe she has come by your prophecies through her own “channels.” I despise her for it, but I see no alternative. She told me if I didn’t oblige her, I’d never use the board again. Now that threat looks as if it will come to pass, the same outcome as if I’d denied her, and so every day I wish I had.
Cassie misses you, too. I have enclosed a letter from her.
Your friend,
Josie
She tried not to smirk as she read over Cassie’s letter. How curious it was, feeling this impulse to laugh when the only good parts of life had soured in the span of a few days.
Now—where to hide these new letters? She’d already crammed the first set of envelopes into the narrow space beneath the base of the window seat, and those were the only letters Alec had discovered so far. And yet, if she were to leave this last letter alongside the others, perhaps there was a chance he would find it in time.
In time? In time for what? She’d give anything to undo the night she’d walked straight into the trap her mother had laid for her, but some things truly were impossible.
Still she must try it. Josie lifted the window seat and emptied the chest of its blankets before removing the bottom. Then, bending over the lip of the cupboard with the letter half concealed in the space beside the others, she lost her footing and hit her head against the lid of the chest, and the involuntary motion of her own fingers sent the letter into the dusty darkness.
She drew herself up again, rubbing the tender spot on her forehead. So that was why he hadn’t found it.
One Last Letter
22.
He tried the talking board again and again, and each time Josie’s mother came through and either grilled him for information about the future or taunted him as she had on Christmas night. “I’m not telling you anything else,” he said before giving up on the board for good. “You never kept your word.”
He and Danny went over every inch of the two adjoining rooms, feeling along the baseboards and checking the same loose flooring. There had to be more letters. There had to be. Both of them were afraid, though neither said so, that what they were looking for was locked in the cupboard in the wall.
Headlamp cinched to his forehead, Alec pulled out the bottom of the window cupboard and climbed inside, covering his nose as the dust swirled up around him. Here—he ran his fingers along the narrow space—was the place she’d hidden the first set. Now he angled his head so the lamp shone beyond it, into the darkest space inside the wall—and he saw it, a new letter, pale and waiting under a layer of dust. He couldn’t aim the light and reach at the same time, and he groped and grasped at the darkness. If he were taller, with longer arms, that letter would be in his hands by now. Danny ran down to grab a yardstick from the garage.
A few minutes later Alec sat on his shins inside the window seat, filthy and triumphant. He didn’t even wait to climb out before reading the letter. It was dated March 31, 1916, and began with I am miserable at the thought that she has parted us for-ever. The second page was a letter from Cassie.
Deer Alec,
We ar so sad sins Mother took the spirit bord away. Missis Gubbins says in some familys the appels fall very far from the tree indeede and in this we are forchunit. I uppose Josie told you Emily wint away to. We are so loanly now! I wantd to ask you so many kwestyons about the futyur but I uppose now I shall never get anuther chans. I hope I live to be a very old wumman so you can come and visit me wen I am very old. I hope you will stil recogneyes me then.
Your fiend,
CASS CLIFFORD
There was a postscript from Josie: I know I really ought to have her work on her spelling, but it’s so amusing I just can’t bring myself to correct her. Danny read the letter and laughed out loud.
If only he’d found this envelope along with the others! But then, was there any use wishing? He sighed as he put everything back in the chest. If they could’ve changed it, there wouldn’t have been any letter to find.
Children of the Infinite
23.
Dr. Jennings returned to Edwardstown, but the girls were ushered back to the nursery right after breakfast every morning for three days, and Mrs. Pike turned the key in the lock. Josie paced the floor, devoured alternately by curiosity and resentment. She knew full well she might never have the chance to speak with the doctor again, but if only she could meet his eye, to communicate without words the truth of their distress!
In the meantime, she slipped her feet into Emily’s shoes, and found them too big to fill. Cass laughed at her when she brought out the elementary readers, or designed an exercise by which the little girl might practice her letters. For hours her sister hunched over their study table, drawing pictures of dragons and pirate ships and men with suits of quills like a porc
upine, as Josie sat on the window-seat reading the books Emily had left on the nursery shelves: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Little Women, Jane Eyre, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Emily had loved these stories, and turning the pages gave Josie a certain amount of comfort. Now and again she looked up from her reading to watch a motorcar pass or a bird alight on a branch in the leafless maple tree. Where are you, Emily? New York, I suppose, but what are you doing? Are you thinking of us?
At night they climbed into Emily’s old bed, and Josie would reread their favorite stories.
Cass nodded off with her arm wrapped tightly around Mrs. Gubbins, and, a short time later, when Josie gave herself up to sleep, she’d tuck the book of fairy tales in the folds of the pinwheel quilt as if it were a good-luck charm. Sometimes she woke in the blackest hour of the night and the old panic would revisit itself upon her, lonelier and more horrible than ever. Emily was gone, and it was all her fault.
Gathering small items for Alec’s time capsule gave her something to pass the hours—after all, there was no hurry—and he might receive it even if she would never know. So Josie found an old candy tin, emptied it of bric-a-brac, and began to look for things Alec might like. Cass watched her from the school desk, a green crayon poised in her little fist. “Can I help you fill the treasure box?”
“Of course you can.”
Her sister offered a blue kazoo and a spinning top she’d once found in a Cracker Jack box, along with a fistful of peppermints saved from Mr. Berringsley’s last few visits. Everything went into the tin with the smiling pigtailed girl and her dachshund labeled BARNABY’S BEST LEMON CANDIES. “Where are you going to put it?” Cass asked.
Josie tapped her finger on her nose, thinking. “Do you have an idea?”
Cass pointed through the open doorway at the little cupboard that had been Emily’s. “Mrs. Gubbins says Alec will receive everything we put in there.”
The following afternoon they were expecting Dr. Jennings, but as Mr. Berringsley was also visiting that evening, Mrs. Pike was needed in the kitchen and did not follow the girls to their room. Leaving Cass to her drawings and her whispered one-way conversations with Mrs. Gubbins, Josie crept down the back stairs while the women were out mopping the back porch and crouched in the darkened corridor outside the reading room door.
The doorbell chimed and two women entered the room, neither of whom wore black, followed by the doctor and his secretary. The sitters were slim and dark haired, relatively young women. Whoever they had lost, it must have happened some time ago.
Mrs. Clifford kept them waiting ten minutes before she took her seat at the table. Soon her chin fell to her chest and her head rolled to one side. When the medium spoke, it was in a voice Josie hadn’t heard for some time. “I greet thee, O Women of the New World!”
One of the ladies bent to the ear of Dr. Jennings. “Which one is this, Doctor?”
Josie heard, rather than saw, the twist in his mouth as he replied. “The one without a name, I suspect.” Then he addressed the spirit control. “Good afternoon. Today I have something different in mind. We are finished with our metaphysical discourses for the time being.”
“That is a pity,” answered the medium, “for we have only begun.”
“There will be other opportunities.”
The nameless spirit clucked its tongue. “Tempus fugit, Doctor. My compatriot has already warned you of your hourglass. The sand is ebbing.”
“Am I to die today? Tomorrow?” the doctor asked, with a cheerfulness that must have astonished the sitters. There was a brief silence. “Ah yes, so there is some time left. We shall achieve all things in due course.” The doctor opened his portfolio, drew out an envelope and laid it on the table. “Your objective, Sir, is a simple one: to tell us the message contained in this envelope, using words as near verbatim as possible.”
From Mrs. Clifford’s reply and the murmured conversation that followed, it seemed that Dr. Jennings had devised a new sort of test for her mother’s spirit controls. If they were as powerful as they claimed, they ought to be able to read the letter aloud without anyone having to remove it from the envelope.
“Sometimes,” Lavinia said dreamily, “when a soul senses its ties to the earth are to be loosened before those of its comrades, it flies in sleep to dwell in the halls of the future. There the spirits of her ancestors may confide in her, and impart to her knowledge which will ease her passage.”
It was obvious to Josie that her mother was dallying as if, for the first time ever, she had no idea how to fool them. Dr. Jennings reached forward and tapped his finger on the envelope. “We wish you to tell us the contents of the letter.”
There came a long pause, and the word that ended it sent a dart of panic through the girl’s heart: “Josie?”
The voice came from the medium’s chair, but it was not her mother’s voice at all. Josie froze in her crouch on the floor, unable to flee in her terror. “Josie, are you there?”
Trembling, she pressed her eye to the keyhole once more, but everyone in their room remained in their chairs. No one knew she was here.
“Josie, where are you?”
She’d never heard it before, and yet she knew beyond all doubt that it was Alec’s voice in her mother’s mouth. He sounded so forlorn, like he’d been left to wander through some cold gray wasteland beyond the bounds of time. Josie was more frightened for him than she was for herself.
“Josie? . . . Josie!”
Dr. Jennings cleared his throat. “Mrs. Clifford? The contents of the letter, if you will?”
Lavinia drew a ragged breath. “Fatigue. The vessel is weak. I cannot continue. Children of the Infinite, I bid thee Good Day.”
Josie gaped. The “spirit,” admit failure? This had never happened before!
“The child,” Lavinia muttered in her own voice. “The child . . .”
The ladies shifted in their seats, and the first woman leaned over to whisper in the doctor’s ear. “What’s happening, Dr. Jennings?”
“The child will betray me,” Josie’s mother said in a cold, calm voice. “The child will betray me.”
Mrs. Clifford went to bed, taking broth for supper, but when Mr. Berringsley arrived at seven o’clock Merritt carried her down to the reading room sofa. As Josie crept down the stairs in the darkness she heard the key turn in the lock. She pressed her ear to the door.
“Why do you insist upon fretting like an old woman?” her mother said in her ordinary voice. The spirits had worn her out for one day. “I promise you your investments are secure for the time being.”
“But how long is ‘for the time being’?” Berringsley asked.
“You did not amass such a fortune by second guessing yourself, William, so why must you second guess me now?”
“You did not predict the war.” There was a note of petulance in his voice that made Josie smirk. She pressed her hand to her mouth.
Lavinia laughed. “Come now, William! This war is the best thing that ever happened to you. If I’d told you ahead of time you would never have made such appalling sums of money.”
The grin melted from Josie’s lips. What was it her mother had said at the rally last fall? The machines of war make men wealthy beyond the grandest imaginings of we ordinary folk. If Berringsley was one of those men, then that meant her mother had benefited, too—from the very evil she had railed against. “One’s choices cannot be made from a place of fear, if one is to succeed,” Mrs. Clifford said.
“You are quite right, Lavinia, but you cannot blame me for wanting to secure my legacy. You did say you knew beyond all doubt when the market would crash?”
Her mother sighed. “Not for another twelve years.”
“And how did you obtain this information? Was it Baldassare who gave it to you?”
With a curious feeling of serenity Josie waited for the answer. Alec was out of her mother’s reach now, and no amount
of Mr. Berringsley’s money could change that. “I received this particular intelligence through my own hand,” said Mrs. Clifford.
How very clever of you, Mother, she thought, her fingers curling into fists. You have not told a falsehood.
“May I see the pages?” He thought she meant automatic writing.
“You may not.” Mrs. Clifford’s reply was brusque. “You are second guessing me again, William. When have I ever given you reason not to trust me?”
Josie rose and went noiselessly up the stairs. Hearing her mother speak of trust made her go cold and shivery, as if she were coming down with the flu.
The Key to the Cupboard
24.
“You got a piece of mail today.” Alec’s mother held up a small Jiffy envelope. “Who lives on West 87th Street?”
“No idea.”
She was skeptical, maybe even a bit worried. “Well, this is for you.”
Alec didn’t drop his backpack and kick off his shoes as he usually did. He went to his mother, she handed him the package, and he felt around the edges of the object inside (something small and not too heavy, with an irregular shape) before tearing the envelope open. He saw the return address at the top left—69 West 87th Street, Apt. 29D, New York, NY 10024—but it meant nothing to him.
Inside the padded envelope was a key, as old and ornate as he thought it would be, and wrapped around the key was a note.
Dear Alec,
Here is the key you’ve been looking for. I hope someday you can share with me what you find inside.
Very best wishes,
A friend
Mrs. Frost had been reading over his shoulder. The look on her face had gone from worried to frightened. But when Alec ran up the kitchen stairs she was only two steps behind, and she watched from the spare-room doorway as he turned the key in the lock and the tiny door creaked open.
There were two shelves, both of them decked in cobwebs, and from behind these cobwebs shone a pair of bright beady eyes. Mrs. Frost shrieked at first, then began to laugh. “It’s a doll,” she gasped. “Good God, I thought it was a rat.”
The Boy from Tomorrow Page 12