by Mary Bowers
Trixie turned me, staring at me hard. “That’s okay,” she said under her breath. “I don’t suppose you can help yourself. Ed warned me, and I should’ve listened.”
I half-turned my head at that, but I really didn’t care. It was important to get out of that room, but I couldn’t remember why. We needed to go upstairs now. It was time. Something was moving about, up in the house, and I was the only one who knew it. Willa took my arm and I smiled at her, and we three, we friends, went out of the room and somebody turned off the light behind me and closed the door.
“We’ll just get you upstairs,” Trixie said, so determined to be light-hearted that she sounded extremely worried. I heard her whisper to Willa, “I’m calling Eddie.”
“Yes, I think you should,” Willa said in return.
I didn’t mind. Ed could come. He was a nice guy. It would be nice to see Ed.
We went carefully up the stairs and when we turned into the living room, Bastet was standing stiffly on the sofa, staring at me.
They must have put me to bed, because the next thing I knew, I was having the strangest dream.
Chapter 21
The dark lady came to me again. She was cold and distant and beautiful, as always, and a faint glimmer in the dark barely defined her form. I tried to look at her but my eyes wouldn’t open. Still, I knew how she appeared, and that she was looking at me. Around her, a drift of music troubled the air, prickling and moving like bubbles in liquid. Spices burned. Long ago, to bring her to them so they could pray to her, they had burned spices. Musky, smoky, intoxicating.
She was moving her head from side to side slowly, resignedly.
“You have to help me,” I told her without speaking.
“No. Not this time. You are alone. There will be pain.”
“For who?”
“For you. And for one other.”
I wanted to know who. I couldn’t ask, but still, she answered: “The one who interferes. The one who goes where mortals should not go.”
“The fool,” I said. Suddenly, I knew.
“No. No fool. Hypnotized, bound against conscious will, full of hope, full of doubt. But no fool.”
I saw. I knew. There would be pain. Pain for both of us.
* * * * *
She left me then but I slept on. The night grew violet, then black, then gray. I came up from my sleep without effort, and I walked.
It was quiet. Trixie slept on the couch. I peered into her dreams and saw a confusion of things: a furious child’s voice: “Okay for you, Trixie,” before flouncing off in a huff; waiting on the corner and the bus never comes and she’s late for her new job and what would they say, and the bus never comes and the dream goes away and another one comes to her.
I looked and I saw a small black dog with short hair and light brown eyes. A long tail that wags suddenly, for no reason at all. Queenie. Queenie of long ago, the light of Trixie’s childhood. I sent Queenie to her, wiggling and waggling, and in her sleep, Trixie smiled.
I walked.
Willa had been right. They were there.
Willa slept on, forehead shining with sweat, raggedly breathing, troubled. And past the end of her bed, they walked. Sometimes they would turn and look, but always, they would go on, moving smoothly across the floor and out toward the sand and the water and the boats on the horizon where the little men with binoculars slept in their bunks.
Finally, one of those passing through the room looked at me and stopped. Hesitated. Stared.
“Kip,” I whispered, but Kip was asleep in his bed and he walked in his own dreams, looking for his own desires. I tried to clear my eyes by blinking, but they couldn’t lock onto him. Still, I realized in a moment that this was not Kip.
He came nearer, slowly at first, then a quick three steps and he stopped almost upon me, but I wasn’t afraid. A gentleman. A kind man. Tall and sad and worried.
He filled the space around me. Then, after a moment, his head lowered and he searched my face, turning to look this way and that, reaching beyond my skin and my bones, unable to feel the warmth of my blood.
I leaned forward, bringing my face into his, pressing past the outlines of his form, touching the man within.
“Don’t worry,” I thought to him. “I’m here.”
His head turned, rotating around mine, then he moved back and looked down at the sleeping woman.
“You can’t help,” he said sadly. “It’s already happening.”
He walked away from me and I tried to stop him.
“Frazier,” I said aloud.
The sound of my own voice pulled me out of myself, and I blinked my eyes and woke up.
Beside me, Willa stirred, and from behind, a hand touched my arm.
To move within a ghost and take his sadness into myself, to reach into death and hold it in my hands, had been natural and easy. But the touch of a living thing terrified me, and when I felt that hand on my arm, I screamed.
* * * * *
Lights came on and music I hadn’t realized I’d been hearing stopped and suddenly people were all around me and Frazier was gone.
“Where did he go?” I asked frantically.
“You mean Frazier?” Ed asked.
I became still and stared straight ahead, getting my bearings. Willa was standing next to me in pajamas, and Ed, fully dressed and holding some kind of camera in one of his hands, was holding my arm with the other.
“Why do you say Frazier?” I asked him suspiciously.
“You said his name yourself,” Ed told me. “You were talking. Don’t you remember?”
By that time Trixie had come into the room and she looked around and said, “What’s she doing now?” Then, shaking her head, she told me, “You may still be in denial, but I’m not. Something’s going on with you, girl, and whatever it is, it ain’t normal.”
I stepped back, shaking my arm out of Ed’s grasp. “I’m fine,” I told them all. “I was just walking in my sleep.”
“What did Frazier want?” Willa asked desperately. “I try to talk to him, but he never answers. Was Aunt Frieda there? Who else did you see?”
Caught, I looked around at all of them. Then I assumed whatever dignity I could gather and asked Trixie and Ed to leave the room. It took a little arguing, especially with Ed, but they finally left and closed the door behind them.
For the first time I noticed Bastet on the bed. When Willa and I sat down on the edge of the bed, Bastet went to Willa and sat next to her. Willa gazed down at her for a moment, tentatively touched her back, then rested her hand on the cat’s head and stroked her gently. Bastet closed her eyes.
I told Willa everything I had seen in her bedroom.
As soon as I was finished, she began to bombard me with questions, but I stopped her and asked, “What do you know about Sherman Frey?”
She stared at me, confused. “Sherman? Why do you want to know about Sherman, of all people?”
“Something to do with Harriet. He wanted to marry her at one time, didn’t he?”
“Oh, that. Well, there was something. Wait, let me remember. It was a long time ago. Aunt Frieda told me. She thought it was funny. She laughed about it.”
“He proposed to her, didn’t he? And now he’s here, and Harriet is dead. Willa, has Sherman been more friendly with you these past few days?”
She stared at me in surprise and started to laugh. She laughed so hard and so long that it began to seem like hysteria, and Ed came charging back into the room.
“What did you say to her?” he asked me furiously. He edged me aside and sat down next to her, putting his arms around her while he tried to quiet her, but by then she had subsided into sobs.
From the doorway, Trixie was shaking her head at me. “Lady,” she said, “you really know how to stir things up.”
Chapter 22
The next morning I woke abruptly, like I was bursting out of a bubble.
I inhaled sharply and sat up, got dizzy, lay back down and thought things over for a while. Fr
om the kitchen, I could hear cheerful voices and the busy clatter of breakfast being prepared.
I smelled food, mostly bacon. I smelled coffee.
I looked down at myself and I was in my nicest black pajamas, the ones I always packed for the rare occasions I went out of town, and I was back in Willa’s guest bedroom. I felt as if I’d just landed, somehow. And boy was I hungry.
In my pajamas, face creased from wrinkles in the pillows and hair sticking up like a homeboy’s, I walked out past the stairway and went into the kitchen. Trixie was at the range-top scrambling eggs, and Willa was pouring coffee for Ed at the breakfast table. They all paused and looked at me.
I gazed back stupidly and said, “Well, I was a big help, wasn’t I?”
Trixie came over and burbled something sweet at me, guiding me to the table, pajamas and all. I noticed that Trixie had showered, put on fresh clothing and made up her face. I have never seen her without make-up. I suspected she’d look prettier. All that eyeshadow.
Next to her, I knew I looked like something that had washed up on the beach in the night, in spite of the fact that I was wearing my nice black pajamas which doubled as loungewear.
“How are you feeling this morning?” Ed asked intensely. He had no recording devices of any kind going that I could see, but I knew he was on the job anyway. The man was working. On me.
“Hung over. What kind of wine was that, Trixie?”
“Want some more?” she asked. “Hair of the dog that bit you, I always say. There’s orange juice if you don’t want to take it straight.”
“Coffee,” I said in a gravelly voice.
Instantly everybody was trying to give me coffee, even Ed.
“She doesn’t eat bacon,” Willa said quietly to Trixie.
“Well, then she’s just going to have to be satisfied with eggs and toast.”
Staring groggily down, I said, “I could eat this table.”
“Oh, good,” Ed said, and I could just see him memorizing my reactions and exact words. “She’s hungry.” He was itching to write it down, but knew he’d better not until I was out of the room.
Once I had some coffee and eggs inside me, I looked around and said, “Okay, tell me. What happened last night?”
“Confirmation,” Ed said. “You saw what Willa had been seeing. Like news reporters, we paranormal investigators like to get confirmation from more than one source, and now we have it.”
“Yay.”
“Now, Taylor, let’s not be testy,” he said.
“Let her be testy if she wants to,” Trixie said. “I don’t know what was happening to you, but it looked exhausting. You doin’ all right now, honey?”
“You believe her now, don’t you?” Ed asked Trixie smugly. “You know, disbelieving as you do is not really skepticism. Skepticism is keeping an open mind. You’ve got your mind made up. You think it’s all nonsense.”
“I’m not saying anything about it,” Trixie said. “I was only saying the woman walks in her sleep, and when you’re dreaming, nonsensical things happen. We’ve all had a lot on our minds lately, and we’ve been thinking about those darn Strawbridges until we’re just about cross-eyed. No wonder some of us are dreaming about them.”
I looked at her and felt very tired. “What did you dream about last night, Trixie? Happy dreams? Nightmares? Trying to get somewhere and not being able to?”
She slipped a glance at me, but wasn’t perturbed. “I don’t really remember.”
“The dreams I love the most are the ones where my pets from long ago come back to me. I feel like I’ve really had a visit from them, and for all I know, I have. Maybe they’re just beyond my waking state, waiting for me. When that happens, I remember how much I miss them.”
She became very still, then slowly lifted her coffee cup and sipped from it.
“And it’s never just a generic dog,” I said. “It’s always Mitzi, or Homer, or Pinkie. Who is it for you? Queenie?”
She stopped breathing. Nobody spoke for a full minute. Then, whispering to herself, Trixie said, “I hadn’t thought about Queenie in years.”
“And you dreamed about her last night?” Ed asked eagerly, looking from Trixie to me. This time he did dive into his briefcase and get his notebook. He began to write madly.
Finally, Trixie looked at me. I looked down at the tabletop, ashamed, and quickly apologized. I’d just had to do it, hadn’t I? It was cheap of me.
“Well, now that it’s out, what else do you know,” Trixie asked in a flat voice.
There was breathless waiting, and I felt like a fool.
But again, I just had to do it.
“Willa,” I said, then I stopped.
I looked up at her expecting to see fear in her eyes, or at least surprise. Instead, she looked back calmly, her washed-out blue eyes unreadable.
Then she said, “You don’t have to tell me. I already know. I’m next.”
We just stared at one another, and when we didn’t speak again, Ed said, “What? What does she mean, she’s next? Willa, if you know something, you have to tell us. We can’t help you if you don’t.”
But Willa was still looking at me, unafraid, not really seeming to feel anything at all. “It’s all right,” she told me. “I can face it now. I’m ready.”
“Willa, no,” I said. “Let us help you.”
With a gravity that would have been comical at any other time, Ed took Willa’s hand and said, “You agreed to be my steady girl. Were you just leading me on?”
“Oh, Ed,” she said miserably. “Of course not.”
“Then tell me. I’m your steady. I’m your man. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
She closed her eyes and her lips began to tremble.
Trixie and I held our breath and stayed rock-still, afraid to break the emotional grip Ed now had on Willa.
We could both see it the moment it loosened and fell away. Ed still held her hand, but she was no longer his.
She opened her eyes, gave his hand an affectionate little shake and released it. She looked around with a phony brightness. “I’m sorry, everybody. Don’t worry. I’m not losing my mind.” Then she looked away, out the window. “It looks like it’s going to be a nice day. Would anybody like more eggs?”
* * * * *
“That was official, by the way,” Ed said as I walked down Santorini Drive with him. “I wasn’t making it up. She agreed to be my girl. My steady. And damn it, I’m going to help her.”
He had convinced me to come down to his house for a debriefing, and suddenly the thought of getting out of Willa’s house felt like walking away from the mouth of purgatory. I couldn’t wait to go, even if it was to be debriefed by Ed about things I didn’t want to talk about.
I had accused him of using Willa, latching onto a poor, weak woman who was obviously having problems and using her to advance his ideas. In response, he had finally told me what they had actually decided the day he proposed to her. He hadn’t just popped up with the stuff about going steady; Willa had proposed it herself. A sort-of watered-down counter-proposal, and Ed had accepted.
“We have dates,” he said. “You know, we go to restaurants, and . . . well, so far we’ve just gone out for dinner. And to the grocery store, of course. I suppose that counts. But we did go to an actual restaurant the other day. She’s the one who defined our relationship, and she calls it ‘going steady,’ so she’s my girl, and I’m going to help her.”
“Whether she wants you to or not. I get the strangest feeling that she doesn’t. That she was hopeful for a while, but now she’s resigned herself, which is ridiculous. Nobody else is going to die.”
“Correct,” he said firmly. Too firmly. “People react in various and surprising ways to the death of one close to them. Many times, the reaction involves some version of ‘I’m next.’”
“Right. Willa’s going to be fine, once she gets over the shock.”
“Exactly.”
By then we were at the door of his house and we went in, bot
h of us still trying to believe what we were saying.
“It’s bad enough,” he blurted as we went into his office, “to be outfoxed by the cleaning lady. I’m a professional! Yet Gretel, by some convoluted pathway you can’t even call logic, realized from the beginning that Willa was in peril.”
“She’s not,” I said. “I thought we just agreed on that.”
“I know, but . . . that, if nothing else, should convince you of the miasma of shared knowledge that surrounds us all, though we’ve become too modernized to be able to tap into it anymore. If only we could retrace our steps and become more primitive again.”
“Like Gretel?” I asked.
“Oh, you know what I mean. Sunday, May 28,” he declared, talking into his voice recorder. “Ten am. Debrief of Taylor Verone, Edson Darby-Deaver present as interviewer, and no one else.” He set the recorder down between us and told me, “All right, go,” then sat back and waited.
When my life is normal, I don’t think about Ed and his other world. It really doesn’t interest me; the real world is enough.
When my life isn’t normal – when Ed gets going, and his world comes down around me, I have to talk about things I’d rather not. This was one of those times. I didn’t know what had happened the night before, and as the morning ripened and the day felt more and more real, I didn’t want to think about the shadows that had lurked in my dreams. But I remembered them.
I decided not to be coy or try to spin things or figure out whether it had all been real or not. I started with Willa’s old playroom and told him just what had happened throughout the night, from my own perspective, without any window dressing or any excuses.
By the time he snapped the recorder off, he was happy, but he was too wise to say so.
Without further comment, I got up and left his house. I was going home. There were dogs to be walked and fed and work to do in the office, and most of all, there was Michael to love. By giving Ed his debriefing, I had cleansed my mind of the ghosts and the cobwebs, and I was going home to life and love and normalcy. As soon as I told Willa I was leaving, that is. And asked Bastet if she wanted to stay or go. I’d leave it up to her. And I’d decide whether or not it was a good idea to come back that night after I’d talked to Michael.
