Past Suspicion (Christian Romantic Suspense)

by Therese Heckenkamp

  My gaze drifted past the bed, the dresser, and lingered fondly on a collection of framed cat and horse pictures. I saw a desk. One side was lined with drawers. Above this desk were rows of shelves packed tightly with books. But for some reason, what my eyes finally focused on was the closet.

  I crossed the room, ignoring my suitcases, which still leaned against the foot of the bed waiting to be unpacked, and opened the door. On a metal bar, bare wire hangers hung in a forlorn row. My gaze moved to the back of the closet, where shapes protruded from the dark. This was where I needed to start.

  My fingers trembled as I reached into the shadowy depths. The back of the closet was cold, and the smell reminded me of locker room showers, musty and dank. Holding my breath, I dragged out three boxes. Behind them, in the farthest corner, sat a wooden chest—my fingers told me this before my eyes did. Not being able to bring myself to pull the chest out into the light just yet, I decided to save it till last.

  I blew dust off the three boxes, realizing too late what a mistake that was. After my day in the bookstore, I did not need more dust. Coughing, I went to the window and swept aside the lacy curtains. I opened the window and leaned my head out, taking a deep breath of the cool evening air. The scent of lilacs drifted up from the blooming bush below.

  That was enough fresh air for me.

  I pulled my head inside and returned to the boxes, ready to unpack my mother’s past.

  I was disappointed to find the first box full of old clothes. They were pieces that had once been out of style but, in the circular way of fashion, were now coming back in: embroidered frilly blouses, bell-bottom pants, long flowery skirts—things sold in unique little California beach-side shops . . . things I could not imagine my mother wearing. Of course, she had not been my mother when she’d worn these. She’d been Tiffany Hutch. There was, I was coming to realize, quite a difference.

  The next two boxes contained odds and ends such as games, stuffed animals, and a mood ring. The cardboard sides of the games were broken off, and the pieces came sliding out. I found a pet rock still sitting in its original box; a Rubik’s cube, stickers peeling; and two Chicago records protected in cloudy plastic slipcovers. Having no use for these things, I packed them away. The mood ring, however, I kept. Its deep midnight-blue color intrigued me, and I slipped the ring on my finger. A perfect fit.

  Now to unpack the chest. Getting down on my hands and knees, I dragged it out, my heart thumping heavily. I’d saved the chest for last because, somehow, I sensed it contained something important. It had to. I wanted it to. I ran my fingers over the tarnished hinges and smooth grooves of wood, speculating. For a moment I felt like Pandora, about to open a forbidden box of secrets. Once I lifted this lid, there could be no turning back.

  Why do I always think such strange things? I wondered. Maybe it came from reading too much. I smiled, but my stomach fluttered as I lifted the lid.

  Creak . . .

  A light, flowery scent floated up to meet me. I caught my breath, completely unprepared for the ugly thing I saw lying on top of a spread out handkerchief. I didn’t dare touch it. Until, upon closer scrutiny, I realized it was only a shriveled branch of withered flowers. They were brown and crinkly, breaking into coarse fragments at my touch. Not knowing what to make of it, I carefully rolled the branch up in the yellowed handkerchief and set it aside.

  By removing the handkerchief, which had probably been white when my mother first placed it there, I uncovered a blue book. I picked it up and read the gold lettering: Lorens High School Yearbook, 1978-79. I paged through it slowly, seeing the usual rows of teacher photos, sports teams, and award recipients, as well as collages of black and white photographs showing mismatched bodies and heads.

  Several pages were devoted to poems and artwork. Skimming the names of the contributors, Tiffany Hutch, senior, caught my eye. Her drawing was of a river with a wooden bridge arching over it. A weeping willow stood on the riverbank, its leafy tendrils trailing serenely in the water. I studied the drawing for a long time, admiring the way my mother had used just the right quality of line and shading to capture the scene in subtle beauty. But more than the skill of the artist, I was taken by the fact that the artist was my mother. I’d never known she could draw like this.

  The remaining yearbook pages were devoted to class photos. Skipping to the seniors, my eyes were drawn to a hauntingly familiar face. Tiffany Hutch was printed beneath the square photo.

  Even in a black and white photograph, it was obvious this girl’s hair was blonde.

  I blinked. For as long as I could remember, my mother had been a brunette. So what did this mean—that she had dyed her hair all these years? Was she really a natural blonde, like myself? I shook my head. How could I have never realized the truth? Surely I would have been able to notice something like that. Holding the book, my hands trembled. But had I ever really looked at my mother’s hair? Close enough to discover brown was not her natural hair color? Apparently not. I wondered how I could have been so blind.

  It was another thing my mother had kept from me, and I wanted to be angry at her for this. I told myself I had every right to be angry. But instead I felt guilt; if I had been closer to my mother, maybe there would not have been any secrets; maybe she would have felt she could confide in me, whatever her reasons had been for these secrets.

  Then I felt fear. What other things had she kept from me?

  I stared at her photo even longer than I had at her drawing. I’d never seen such a lovely picture of my mother. She looked so young! I did have my parents’ wedding photo, taken in September of 1979, and since my mother was eighteen in that, she was not even a year older than in this photo. Yet she looked so different in the wedding photo. And not just because her hair was brown. There were subtle differences in her face, a tightness around her eyes and lips that made her look so much older than a mere several months should have.

  I frowned. In this school photo she wore her hair long, loose and wavy. I liked it that way. It suited her face and was much more becoming than the short, prim style I’d always seen her wearing. And her smile was unlike any smile I’d ever seen. Her eyes shone with a radiating joy. Her soft face, with its smooth skin and high cheekbones, could easily be called beautiful. If only I looked a little more like her, I thought ruefully.

  When at last I turned the page, I saw a final group photo. Class of ’79 was printed boldly at the top. I searched, but this time I could not find my mother. At the bottom of the page, after the long list of students’ names, I read: Not pictured, Tiffany Hutch.

  I closed the book softly. I knew why my mother had missed that picture. She had probably been in the hospital about that time. That young, beautiful girl . . . I couldn’t believe something so awful had really happened to her.

  I laid the book aside. Part of me did not want to go on with this unraveling of the past, yet I couldn’t bring myself to stop. My hand returned to the chest, and this time it drew out a small velvet box.

  As I’d expected, the box contained a piece of jewelry. It was a small, heart-shaped locket that glinted golden against the box’s black velvet surface. I used my fingernail to pry the locket open, but the heart pieces separated to reveal only empty space where a photo should have been. My disappointment was displaced by the mesmerizing sense of mystery that came from wondering whose photo had once occupied the locket, and why it no longer did.

  Putting the locket aside, I moved on to the next item and lifted out a kind of portfolio. My mother’s name was sprawled in black ink across the cover. Opening it, I discovered a thick sheaf of drawings. I paged through them, fascinated and impressed by my mother’s talent. I’d never known my passion for drawing ran in the family.

  Her collection was remarkable; the drawings captured a wide range of subjects, including nature scenes, houses, animals, and portraits. I wondered why my mother hadn’t continued with her art. Because, like my uncle said, it was part of her past? But what painful memories could be connected with these
beautiful pictures? Curiosity made me impatient, and I tucked the stack of drawings back into the portfolio, promising myself I’d look through it more closely later.

  Two items remained in the chest. One was a thick binder, stuffed to overflowing with loose paper. I tried to sort through the pages, tried my best to read the sprawled handwriting, but the papers were a jumble of notes. Only after some tedious deciphering did I begin to get an idea of what this was: my mother’s research work on the Ingerman Mansion. As I sat there holding that confusion of papers, I felt that this was the most significant find of all.

  The notes were difficult to follow, but I gradually pieced together some of the facts of the mansion’s history. The Ingerman Mansion had been built in the early eighteen forties, not long before Wisconsin became a state. About this same time, the town of Lorens began to form. I hadn’t realized Lorens was such an old town.

  It went on to explain that the Ingermans, as one of the first families in the area, had always been important town citizens. They were very rich, and this set them not only slightly above but also apart from the other people. At one time, a Ingerman had been mayor of the town.

  At about this point I began to yawn. I was stacking away the disarray of papers when I came across a page that made me sit up straight.

  It is a fact that Connie Ingerman, in 1851, fell to her death from a balcony of the Ingerman Mansion, although there is much speculation over the circumstances surrounding her fall.

  It is known that Connie fell in love with a common townsman by the name of John Ingerman, whom her father refused to let her marry. As a result, John went off to California in the Gold Rush of 1849 in hopes of striking it rich and proving his worth. Apparently, luck was with him, because about a year later Connie received a letter from him informing her he had found a fortune. He buried the gold for safekeeping somewhere in California and, it was rumored, sent her a copy of his map as a kind of trust until he returned to fetch her.

  But his luck ran out. John was killed on the journey back. And shortly after Connie received the news, she was discovered dead on the ground beneath her bedroom balcony, her neck broken from the fall.

  Thus the story everyone tells of the mansion is a tragic one: a tale of love lost, resulting in suicide. Not surprisingly, the Ingerman Mansion is rumored to be haunted. Some say Connie’s sorrowful soul can’t rest, and she roams the mansion, guarding the treasure map and waiting for her love to return.

  And what of the map? No one knows. Some say Connie destroyed it; some say she hid it, and that it remains hidden to this day, a curse hanging over it. Still others say the map never even existed . . .

  I sat on the carpet, shivering. My uncle hadn’t told me any of this, but it struck me as uncanny that both Connie and my mother had fallen from the same mansion, perhaps even the same balcony. I read on, convinced my mother’s story would have been published if she had ever completed it. But she hadn’t. She had locked all her notes away to be forgotten.

  My head was soon spinning with such a clutter of thoughts that I didn’t think I could contain any more information. Reluctantly, I gathered the papers back into the binder and moved on to the last item in the chest, a brown book with a scrollwork pattern on the cover. I read the spine and discovered, with surprised delight, that it was a Victoria Holt novel.

  When I glanced up at the shelves above the desk, I discovered an entire collection of Victoria Holt novels. Other books were familiar, too, and I felt a thrill go through me. Novels by Phyllis A. Whitney, Betty Cavanna. Not contemporary novels, of course, but I recognized them anyway. In the libraries, I had read as many of these authors’ books as I could find. But I’d never known my mother had shared my interest.

  I looked at the novel in my hands. How odd, I thought, that my mother should single out this one book to hide in the chest. I turned it over. Only then did I realize the title was identical to the one I’d been reading today. I opened the book about a quarter through, trying to find the place where I’d left off reading. I smiled, remembering the interruption, and for a moment my eyes didn’t see the page. Instead, I saw Philip’s eyes gazing into mine. Had he really meant it when he’d said he’d see me again? Oh, I hoped so.

  With my spirits lifted back to life in the present, I didn’t feel like brooding any more on the past. Besides, my head hurt from thinking so much, and I was tired.

  I intended to go to bed so that I could get up easily for work; I didn’t mean to read more than one chapter of the novel, but it was so easy to lose myself in the fictional world, in someone else’s problems as I followed fascinating characters and experienced the heightening suspense. Only when my eyelids became too heavy to hold open and the words dissolved on the page did I realize, with a start, how late it was.

  My legs had fallen asleep beneath me. Awkwardly, I stood, returned my mother’s things to the chest, and closed the lid. Because my room was too small to keep it in the middle of the floor, I pushed the chest back into the closet. The novel I set on the nightstand beside the bed, just before I collapsed into sleep.

  * * *

  I lay alone in the peaceful darkness, sleeping, when suddenly the quiet was shattered by alarming noises, voices, screaming—something was terribly wrong. Someone grabbed me, crushed me against them so hard I could barely breathe.

  I didn’t know where I was, but I was suddenly alone, cold and afraid. I needed my mother, my father; I needed to feel safe. Everything rushed by so fast in the darkness…I didn’t know what was happening. All I knew was fear. Terror.

  Screeching, crashing—cutting pain in my arm. I screamed. Gravity disappeared and I was flying up, up through the darkness. Up to the moon. Then, just as suddenly, the world flipped and I was falling—

  I woke up gasping for air, my forehead pouring hot sweat onto my pillow. I smelled the sour smell of fear.

  Just a dream, just a dream, I told myself. But this didn’t convince me. I kept my eyes closed, too scared to move, yet not knowing what I was afraid of. I was frozen with the ultimate fear: fear of the unknown.

  It seemed to take forever for my heartbeat to slow—seemed hours, in which time my mind roared with the dream I didn’t want to remember.

  I hadn’t had the dream for at least four years. I’d thought I’d conquered it. I’d thought it would never return.

  But it had, with a terror more intense than ever.

  And now there was no one here to comfort me, no one to rely on but myself. With a burst of courage, I lunged for the bedside lamp, nearly knocking it over in my desperate attempt to turn it on.

  Then I sat trembling on the bed in a tangle of sheets, blinking in the sudden light, trying in vain to calm myself. I was being foolish, I told myself. It was only a nightmare.

  Or was it?

  Instinctively, I reached out to feel along the inside of my left arm, running my fingertips gently over the familiar scar.

  I took a deep breath. What was it my mother had told me? When I was a baby I had knocked over a vase and cut my arm badly on the glass. It was that simple. But after all I had discovered today, how could I believe anything my mother had told me? Why was it that when I had this nightmare, I always clutched my arm?

  I wanted my mother to explain and, in her convincing way, reassure me. Back when she was alive and I awoke with this nightmare, I would call for her and she would come swiftly as an angel. I ached for her now, yearned so strongly for her comforting presence that I could almost hear her words. “It’s all right,” she would say, holding me close. “You’re safe now. I’ll protect you, nothing’s going to hurt you . . .”

  My fear would begin to subdue, and I’d stop sniffling; but I never understood why then, when my mother hugged me again, so tightly, she would begin to cry. She would stay in my bed with me for the rest of the night, and I would feel safe in the smothering thickness of the warm quilt, aware of her protecting presence beside me.

  Now, I sat alone on my bed—my mother’s bed, actually—but I wasn’t comforted. With
out my mother to reassure me—even if it was only false reassurance—the nightmare was still too horribly vivid to forget.

  So I sat up all night with the light burning as intensely as my fear and didn’t attempt to go back to sleep. For I was afraid that if I did, I would re-encounter the nightmare. And that was a risk I could not take.

  Chapter Six

  All night long I fought my heavy eyelids. But when dawn finally came, with its gray light seeping through the edge of my window shade, I gave in to exhaustion and slept. It was a dreamless sleep, in which I abandoned all my tensions. I slept so soundly that when I awoke, I instantly knew I had overslept. Sure enough, the clock radio on the nightstand glowed ten-thirty.

  I tossed back the sheets and scrambled to get dressed, reproaching myself for wasting the chance to put in a full day’s work. Silence told me my uncle had already left for the bookstore. Why didn’t he wake me? I wondered, irritated, as I galloped down the carpeted stairs.

  I ran the sidewalk like a racetrack into town, until the heavy warmth of the sun forced me to slow to a walk. Above, a polished blue sky promised a day too beautiful to spend cooped up in a dusty bookstore. My spirits sagged. The closer I got to the store, the more my feet dragged. I wiped the damp hair off my forehead, wishing I could escape to the beach. Except there is no beach in Lorens, I reminded myself.

  My thoughts shifted to the terror of last night’s dream, but it seemed ridiculous now in the context of this bright morning. Yesterday had been a long, strange day. I had been stressed-out by my encounter with Justin, excited by meeting Philip, intrigued by the discovery of my mother’s past, and wrapped in the suspense of a Victoria Holt novel. Surely it wasn’t surprising that these things should mingle together in my unconsciousness and trigger the dream.