Shifting Shadows

by Sally Berneathy

  The older woman came back to the table shortly with fresh tea and listened without comment as Analise told of her strange tangle of memories and lack of memories, about Phillip’s theory that she was confusing the present with stories she’d heard about her house. But not even to Lottie did she confide about her dream and the fragment of crystal in her handbag. She needed to think about that further, try to figure out where the dream ended and reality began.

  “Phillip could be right,” her assistant concluded. “You were obsessed with that old house from the minute you saw it. Harriet—your realtor—told me you were dragging furniture down from the attic the first time she showed the place to you.”

  Analise nodded slowly, images settling into position like family members returning home. She’d known the minute she walked in the door exactly how the house should look.

  Lottie sipped her tea then set the cup back onto its saucer with a delicate clink. “Then you bought this shop and, oh, my, you had quite a time finding more furniture for your house. You’d get in your head exactly how a piece ought to look then turn the countryside upside down till you found what you wanted. Do you remember that?”

  Analise nodded slowly as a collage of images flashed through her mind. “Sort of.” She picked up her own cup...not so much to drink as to hold onto the solid feel of something she knew was real.

  “Then again,” Lottie continued, her gaze never flickering, “Phillip’s theory could be all wrong. You could be Elizabeth Dupard reincarnated. That would explain how you knew so much about furnishing the house.”

  An invisible force punched Analise in the stomach, jerked her upright to full attention. Reincarnation. The idea was absurd, of course. It ranked right up there with ghosts and séances.

  Analise studied the older woman intently. Lottie wasn’t joking. Nor did she even appear to think the idea was a little offbeat. Her tone and expression were matter-of-fact and placid.

  “Maybe that’s why you were so drawn to that house. Maybe being in the house where you used to live started tugging on the past, then you fell, and that bump on the head scrambled the memories of two lifetimes. We only use a tiny portion of our brain. Who knows what lies hidden in the rest of it? Maybe you just accessed some of those hidden memories. Maybe you need them for some reason.”

  Analise opened her mouth to protest, but somehow the words stuck in her throat. “What reason?” she asked instead, setting her cup carefully back onto the tray, no longer certain of the reality of even the smooth china.

  “Well, I don’t know. You’d be the one to answer that question. Elizabeth may have had some unfinished business since she died so young. Maybe you were headed in the wrong direction and wouldn’t have got things right this time either. We have to come back again and again until we finally get it right, you know.”

  Analise’s logical mind rebelled at the outrageous idea.

  Of course she wasn’t the reincarnation of Elizabeth Dupard. She’d doubtless heard bits and pieces of the life of the woman who’d lived in her house before her, and her imagination had filled in the details.

  But as surely as she knew on a rational level that she wasn’t Elizabeth Dupard, in her heart she still felt that she was Elizabeth.

  With a shiver, she remembered the first time she’d seen Phillip yesterday. As he’d walked across the yard toward her, for an instant he’d seemed to resemble Blake, one form superimposed over the other like a double image. If she was Elizabeth...

  She gave herself a mental shake. She was Analise, and Phillip was Phillip.

  “Are you all right?” Lottie asked, leaning toward her.

  “Yes. Yes, I’m fine.” Analise drew shaky fingers across her forehead, trying to wipe away the irrational thoughts. “Why did I divorce Phillip?” she asked.

  Lottie sat back, a look of concern on her usual cheerful face. “You said you’d both changed and grown in different directions. You no longer had anything in common.”

  She remembered Phillip’s insistence that she go home with him, his possessive attitude toward her. “Did he fight the divorce? Did he want me back?”

  “If he fought the divorce, you never mentioned it. He came in here a couple of times with papers for you to sign. You were always polite to each other. To tell you the truth, I wondered why you ever got married in the first place. I didn’t sense any passion between you two, good or bad.”

  Analise was reminded of the way she’d felt like a sawdust doll in his arms. “What did you think about him?”

  Lottie actually looked uncomfortable for half a second. But she faced Analise squarely. “His aura isn’t clear. I can’t read him. He’s hiding himself. Just like Dylan. I think I like that young man, but he’s hiding something too. You be careful of the both of them.”

  Cold enveloped Analise at Lottie’s warning, the confirmation of her own nebulous fears.

  The bell over the door jingled, startling her. An elderly, dignified lady made her entrance. “My goodness, this weather is really nasty,” she exclaimed.

  “Mrs. Arnold,” Lottie said, rising from the table and going out to greet the woman. “Come have a cup of tea and some of my blackberry-jam cookies.”

  Analise spent the rest of the day assisting customers and soon discovered that she possessed an astonishing knowledge of the inventory of the shop. Because Analise had acquired the knowledge from others or because Elizabeth knew about the furniture from having lived with many pieces from that period?

  Her memories were beginning to run together, and she couldn’t determine which belonged to her fantasy of Elizabeth and which belonged to Analise. Logically, she knew that should be comforting. She was returning to herself, to Analise. She might very easily wake up in the morning and realize that she’d invented Elizabeth. That would solve a lot of problems, should be a relief.

  But she didn’t want to lose Elizabeth. She didn’t want Elizabeth to go away, to die.

  Lottie had left for the day and Analise was explaining the intricacies of a Victorian music box when the doorbell jingled. Every nerve in her body suddenly came alert, and she knew without looking up that Dylan had entered the shop. His force reached across the room and touched her as surely as it had the night before when she’d stood at her window.

  She concluded the sale, deliberately focusing her attention on the customer until the door closed behind the woman. Finally she turned and looked at Dylan.

  He stood with arms folded across his chest, watching her.

  During the day she’d begun to feel at ease, safe in this one area of her life. His presence took that away and put her off balance again, made every fiber of her being alert, awake and expectant.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  She nodded, closed up the shop and followed him outside. The sun had finally emerged about noon and now glowed brightly on the horizon. As they walked toward his car, Dylan touched the small of her back lightly, casually, and her breath caught in her throat. The contact didn’t feel casual. It was two opposite poles connecting, a linking that allowed energy to flow between them. She heard his sharp intake of breath and knew he felt it, too. For a moment he didn’t move, his hand attached to her body as if by magnetic force.

  Then he turned away—angrily, it seemed—and, without a word, opened the car door for her.

  He wanted to avoid the attraction between them, pretend it didn’t exist. Why? What did he know about her that she didn’t?

  Inside the automobile he finally spoke, his tone even, conversational. “You sounded very knowledgeable, talking to that lady about the music box.”

  She started to tell him it was almost identical to one Papa had given Mama so she had reason to be knowledgeable, but she swallowed the words. If she didn’t understand this world, she was at least learning to survive in it.

  “It’s a type I know about,” she replied ambiguously.

  He pulled away from the curb, merged into traffic. “I guess it really is pretty easy to get wrapped up in the past when you live in one
of these old houses. They do tend to kind of pull you back in time.”

  His statement came out of nowhere. He sounded friendly, almost apologetic. And for no sane reason, that lifted her spirits immeasurably.

  “Since I moved next door,” he continued when she didn’t respond, “I’ve noticed an influence on my painting. I guess our surroundings play a part in what we think and how we feel. I can see how it would be disconcerting to wake up in that atmosphere after a scary experience like falling downstairs.”

  The sunlight seemed to grow brighter, to seep inside her.

  “What kind of an influence?” she asked, grasping at the piece of himself he’d offered, admitting to herself that she yearned to talk to him, to reach out to him, to solidify that eerie bond between them.

  He was quiet for a moment as if considering whether he wanted to tell her. “My paintings have taken on a more ominous tone,” he finally said. “Even my subjects are different. I paint storms now where I used to paint sunny days. I’ve had the same nightmare all my life. I hate it, yet suddenly I’ve felt compelled to paint a gruesome picture of it.”

  “You think that comes from living in Rachel’s house?” For an instant she saw a nightmare in his eyes, and she didn’t think this one came while he was sleeping. Instinctively she reached to touch his arm. Then, as abruptly as it had come, the tortured look was gone, the curtained expression back. She started to draw away, unsure if her gesture of comfort would be accepted, and she couldn’t stand for it to be rejected.

  He covered her hand with his for a fleeting moment. Warmth surged upward, and she knew her face was probably flushed.

  But then she felt him pulling away again, and the air around them grew cooler. She snatched her hand back.

  “Is Phillip coming over tonight?” he asked, his tone flat and cold.

  “He said he would,” she answered, fighting down the disappointment that rose so sharply with his sudden change.

  “For an ex-husband, he certainly has a proprietary attitude toward you.”

  She couldn’t deny that. She’d noticed it too. “Did you know him? Before the accident, I mean,” she asked, searching for some basis for the intense dislike Dylan so obviously felt for Phillip.

  “I’ve seen him at your house a couple of times.”

  It didn’t sound like a lie, but it didn’t have the ring of total truth either.

  “You’re a lucky lady,” he continued in an apparent change of subject. “That’s a big staircase. You could have suffered some real injuries. Did you fall all the way from the top or trip farther down?”

  “From the top.” The words came out of her mouth before she realized she was reporting the dream, not what she knew as fact.

  The way his eyes narrowed and his jaw hardened told her immediately she’d given the wrong answer.

  “So you remember now.”

  Had she just admitted to her would-be murderer, while trapped in a moving car with him, that she remembered his attempt on her life?

  “No,” she denied, answering both the question he’d asked and the one she feared he was asking. She looked away from him as she spoke, hating the breathless way the single word came from her lips. Her heart pounded wildly as her eyes darted about the car, vainly seeking an escape.

  “If you don’t remember, then why did you say you fell from the top?” His voice was quiet and logical...and terrifying in its normalcy.

  “I don’t know why I said that. It just came out. I don’t remember. Truly, I don’t.” She waited tensely for his next action. How could she have let her guard down so he could trap her like that?

  “Well, I see your ex-husband is waiting for you,” Dylan said, and she saw that her house was just ahead, that Phillip was leaning against her car.

  Very possibly, she thought as Dylan pulled up to the curb in front of Rachel’s house and stopped, this man she had divorced had just saved her life.

  She opened the door and scrambled out before Dylan could come around to open the door.

  Phillip’s pale eyes glittered like silvery mirrors in the fading sunlight, following her path as she moved toward him, and she suddenly felt trapped between the two men. She didn’t fear Phillip as she did Dylan, but his presence made her feel suffocated. She didn’t want to be with him.

  “I’ll be over to get you in the morning.” Dylan’s voice came from behind her. Quiet, resonant and definite, it burned through her.

  She hesitated, turning back. “Thank you,” she said, laboring futilely to keep her tone polite and calm. Even to her own ears she sounded breathless...and she wasn’t at all sure if it came from fear or the sudden surge of desire he always seemed to bring to the surface.

  “My pleasure,” he said, returning her politeness. But his was as strained as hers. His eyes, his voice, the way he stood, all exuded raging passion—passion to kill her or touch her? She couldn’t tell.

  Maybe both.

  At the moment Phillip seemed the safer of the two men. She turned and ran toward him.

  Her gratitude was short-lived. As soon as they were inside the house, he grabbed her arm, twisting it, forcing her to face him.

  Panic surged through her as memories crowded her mind, but not memories of Phillip. The hand clutching her arm seemed to belong to Blake.

  He shook her, and she realized he was talking.

  “Where did you go with him? Did you spend the day together? Where’s he taking you tomorrow? Every time I see you, he’s around. What does he want from you?”

  Through a haze of fear and confusion she heard the words, tried to make sense of them, tried to determine if Phillip or Blake was saying them.

  She fell to her knees before him, her free hand going up to protect her face. Blake liked to hit her in the face, leave bruises so everyone would know he could control his wife.

  His fingers on her arm tightened as he tried to pull her to her feet, but she slumped into a dead weight, refusing to make it easy for him. She strained harder to reach the floor, to make herself into a ball. He was saying something to her, but she wouldn’t answer, wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. It didn’t matter anyway. Whatever she said, he’d hear only what he wanted to hear.

  Tears of pain, rage and fright started from her eyes, but she fought against them, refused to cry ever again. His power fed on her fear, her weakness.

  “Analise!” With both hands he yanked her head up to face him. She closed her eyes to keep him from seeing her terror, but the hateful tears oozed between her lids, betraying her.

  Suddenly his hands were no longer hurtful, but stroked her tentatively instead. “Analise?”

  The name reached inside her. Analise. She was Analise. Not Elizabeth. This was Phillip, not Blake. Blake had hurt her, beaten her, but Phillip hadn’t. Trying to orient herself to the present, she raised her face, confronted his puzzled gaze as he knelt on the floor in front of her.

  “I’m sorry.” He sounded confused and oddly uncertain as he offered her a silk handkerchief. “I don’t know what came over me. It was like I was somebody else. I didn’t mean to make you cry. You’ve always been so strong. You never cry. I’ve never seen you cry before.”

  “I’m not crying,” she protested, ignoring the handkerchief, restraining herself from wiping the tears away because that would be an admission that they existed.

  “I’m sorry,” he repeated, decisiveness returning to his voice. “I’ve been waiting for you for over an hour, wondering where you could be when your car was right here. I was worried about you. Maybe I was jealous when I saw you drive up with him. It seems like he’s always hanging around, more than just a neighbor.”

  From somewhere inside, an impulse stirred for her to rise to her feet, tell Phillip that what she’d been doing was none of his business. But she bit back the rush of defiance. It wouldn’t be right. He was...had been...her husband.

  “I couldn’t remember how to drive. Dylan took me to the shop then picked me up. That’s all.” That’s all. Except he frightened her
and excited her, and no matter what he said, she knew they’d been more than friends.

  Phillip rose slowly and drew her to her feet. “You couldn’t drive? You really are suffering some ill effects from your accident, aren’t you?” Again he sounded uncertain, a rarity for him, she suspected.

  “I’m doing much better,” she told him as he urged her toward the sofa in the parlor.

  But he shook his head as he sat beside her and took both her hands in his. “You haven’t been acting like yourself. You seem so defenseless.”

  Defenseless? Well, wasn’t she? What possible defense did a woman have against a man? She’d had no defense against Blake when he turned cruel after their marriage. She’d been his wife, and he’d had the right to hurt her if she displeased him. Men were bigger, stronger. Even the law was on their side.

  “Let me take care of you,” Phillip urged.

  “I’m all right,” she assured him.

  His lips thinned into a half smile. “But I’m not. I miss you. And when I saw you drive up with another man, I lost it. Darling, I’m so sorry. You know I’d never hurt you. I was insane with jealousy. Please come back home and let’s try again to make our marriage work. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  She studied him intently for a moment. After Lottie’s description of their divorce, this was the last thing she would have expected. Insane jealousy? Wanting her back no matter what it took?

  Still, the idea of being divorced had bothered her. Maybe Analise could divorce her husband, but Elizabeth had a hard time accepting the idea. Whatever had happened to cause Analise to divorce him, Phillip wanted to make it right. Whatever it was, he hadn’t beaten her the way Blake had. She felt certain of that.

  Lottie’s peculiar idea rose to the front of her mind. She had said people reincarnated, came back to earth again and again until they got it right. Was this what she needed to get right, what Phillip needed to get right? She hadn’t been happy with Blake, and now she’d divorced Phillip. Both Elizabeth’s marriage and Analise’s marriage had gone wrong.