The Summerhouse

by Jude Deveraux

  Futures, Inc.

  “Have you ever wanted to rewrite your past?”

  Madame Zoya can help

  333 Everlasting Street

  Leslie read the card, frowned, then handed it to Madison. “I have no idea what it is. I didn’t notice it when I was reading the book.”

  Madison looked at the card for a moment, then put it down on the table. Opening her handbag, she withdrew another card and placed it beside Leslie’s. They were identical.

  “That’s odd that we both have the same card,” Leslie said, “but then I guess the lady is just trying to drum up business. It must be difficult to earn a living in a small town like this. Maybe—”

  She broke off because Ellie had rummaged inside her shopping bags and had placed a third identical card on the table by the other two.

  Seventeen

  “Palm reader,” Madison said as she ate another piece of fried food.

  “Tarot,” Ellie said. “Or, actually, she could be regressionist.”

  “Past lives?” Madison asked, eyebrows raised. “Gee, I’d sure love to find out that I’ve done stupid things for centuries.”

  “You were probably a great beauty then too. Maybe you were some king’s favorite courtesan,” Ellie said.

  “So why do I get courtesan and not queen?” Madison asked. “Why do I have to be illegal as well as immoral?”

  “In real life queens are never actually beautiful. They’re chosen for their lineage, not their looks.”

  “Does this include Princess Diana?” Madison shot back.

  “She didn’t make it to queen, did she?” Ellie said, one eyebrow raised.

  “But that doesn’t mean—”

  “Let’s go,” Leslie said, and, without waiting for a reply, she began to gather her things.

  “Back to the house?” Ellie asked, puzzled by Leslie’s abruptness.

  Madison leaned over. “I think she means for us to go to Madame Zoya.”

  “You’re kidding,” Ellie said as the waitress came up to their table.

  “Is there anything else I can get for you ladies?” she said, but she looked directly at Ellie.

  Before Ellie could make a reply to the skinny waitress’s look, Leslie said, “Do you know where Everlasting Street is?”

  The girl began to clear the containers from the table. “I don’t get out of here very often, but they sell maps at the bookstore.”

  For a moment all three women looked at the girl in puzzlement.

  “How long have you lived here?” Leslie asked quietly.

  “All my life,” the girl answered. “You sure you don’t want dessert?” She looked at Ellie. “We have chocolate cake.”

  Madison put out her arm to prevent Ellie from physically attacking the girl, but the waitress just smiled and turned away, leaving the check on the table.

  “Anyone leaves her a tip over five cents and she’s dead meat,” Ellie muttered, but the girl had brought her back to reality. Being with Leslie and Madison for these last two days had made her forget why she’d been hiding for the last three years.

  Leslie was standing on the opposite side of the table, her cardigan and her handbag over her arm, the book in one hand and the card in the other. She was looking at it in concentration.

  Reaching across the table, Ellie took the card from her. “Rewrite the past,” she said. “I’d like to go back to the time before I was fat,” she said with vehemence; then she handed the card back to Leslie. “Let’s find this place.”

  The two women looked at Madison.

  “You two don’t believe this thing, do you? This has to be a hoax. If anyone could send anyone back to the past, she would have been on 60 Minutes, and since I rarely miss an episode . . .” She trailed off, hoping to elicit a smile from Leslie and Ellie. She didn’t like fortune-tellers. When she was a teenager, one of them had read her palm and told her of the wonderful future in store for her, complete with four children. Since her divorce, she’d thought of that charlatan several times.

  “Why don’t you two go, and I’ll . . .” Madison began, but the looks on the faces of Leslie and Ellie made her retreat. “All right. What do I have to lose? My future couldn’t be much worse than my past.”

  “Sure it could,” Ellie said. “You could become rich and famous and have every person you’ve ever known drop you because they’ve decided that you’re now a snob.”

  “Or you could be elected chairman of your town’s Winter Carnival and be expected to raise the money as well as spend it,” Leslie said.

  “Or—” Ellie began.

  Madison put up her hand. “I give up. You win. So how do we find Everlasting Street?”

  “I think I saw a newspaper office somewhere,” Leslie said.

  “It’s over the drugstore. I wonder what their subscriber rate is.”

  “At least twenty-five,” Madison said, smiling. “Which is about two more than the Erskine paper has.”

  “Shall we go?” Leslie asked, and there was impatience in her voice.

  “Let me take care of the check,” Ellie said with a malicious little smile on her face. Five minutes later the three of them were walking down the main street of the tiny town on their way to the newspaper office. But they hadn’t gone four blocks when they saw a street sign that said, “Everlasting Street.” It was true that the sign was smaller than the others, and it was almost hidden behind the leaves of a magnificent copper beech tree, but, still, it was there.

  “Lived here all her life and she’s never heard of the street,” Ellie muttered, looking up at the sign.

  “Well, ladies,” Leslie said, “shall we?”

  Leslie didn’t wait for an answer as she trudged ahead, Ellie behind her, a reluctant Madison trailing in the rear.

  “This really is absurd,” Madison said. “I don’t know what you two hope to find out. Fortune-tellers are out to get what they can. I saw a special once on TLC that showed how they see clues about your life from your clothes, your jewelry, even the way you carry yourself. Then, no matter how little you tell them, they pick up these clues. It was all just an act. The commentator took a couple of lessons, and at the end he told someone’s fortune. He did quite well at guessing, but—”

  All the time Madison had been talking they had been walking. As far as they could see, the narrow road was deserted. There were no houses on either side, just what looked to be virgin forest right up to the edges of the road. But then the road turned to the right, and they were suddenly staring at a big Victorian house, and the sight of it made Madison halt her speech.

  The house wasn’t huge, but it was exquisite. It had been painted in an intricate manner that one usually saw only on brochures put out by paint companies. This one was done in a sort of taupe green, with accents of dark brown and dark green. There were spindles on a little balcony, and they had been meticulously painted in all three shades.

  “I wish Alan could see this,” Leslie said under her breath. “He loves Victorian houses.”

  “Probably fake,” Madison muttered.

  “No,” Leslie said. “I know something about building, and this one is old. See the way the windows are uneven? It takes years for a house to settle that way.”

  “Look at her lilacs,” Ellie said, nodding toward a ten-foot-tall hedge along the right side of the house.

  Leslie turned to Ellie. “Don’t lilacs bloom in the spring? This is October.”

  For a moment, the two women looked at each other with wide eyes.

  “Are you two going to go into some sort of supernatural trance? They’re plants. Plants bloom at different times. So what? She has October-blooming purple flowers, and you two have May-blooming purple flowers. Snap out of it!”

  When neither Leslie nor Ellie moved, Madison grabbed their arms and pulled them toward the perfect little white picket fence that surrounded the house. “Really, you two! You dragged me here, now you’re the ones chickening out.”

  There was no answer from either Ellie or Leslie as Madiso
n pulled them onto the front porch. And when she dropped their arms, they just stood there looking about the place. Leslie was inspecting the ceiling of the porch, while Ellie was studying the swing. There wasn’t so much as a dead leaf on the porch. It was as neat and as perfectly tidy as the garden was.

  “I don’t think her trees drop their leaves,” Ellie whispered.

  “I have the feeling that it would be in bloom just like this even if this were January,” Leslie whispered back to her.

  Madison threw up her hands in exasperation. “Right. Madame Zoya is Merlin’s first cousin, and she—Oh, no, wait, she’s his reincarnation, and—” When she saw that the other two weren’t listening to her, she stopped talking and put her finger on the doorbell.

  The woman who answered the door could have been someone’s plump, pleasant grandmother, except that her hair had been dyed a flamboyant shade of orange. But then, Ellie thought, grandmothers today had introduced the world to LSD and other such questionable “enlightenments,” so maybe a grandmother would have orange hair.

  “Won’t you come in,” she said graciously, opening the door wide. Inside, the house was furnished in a sort of country French style, with pretty, bright-patterned fabrics and big, overstuffed chairs and sofas.

  The woman laughed at the look on Leslie’s face. “My late husband was the Victorian lover,” she said. She had a nice voice, soft and warm; it made you trust her. How could anyone with such a sweet-sounding voice be harmful? “But I never cared much about Victorian, so we compromised. The outside is Victorian, the inside is comfortable. No horsehair sofas for me!”

  She smiled at the three of them, as though expecting them to laugh with her, but Leslie and Ellie were looking around at every corner of the house. Only Madison was looking at the woman.

  “Are you Madame Zoya?” Madison asked, and a sneer was in her voice.

  But the woman didn’t take offense. “My professional name. My real name is Bertie, short for Brutilda. It’s a family name. Now, what can I do for you young ladies?”

  The “young” appellation made Ellie and Leslie smile, and for a moment, none of them spoke. To say why they had come would be to admit that there was a possibility that they believed that she could . . . Well, what exactly was she saying that she could do?

  “We, uh, found your card,” Ellie said, then had to clear her throat. “You, uh, tell fortunes?”

  “Oh, my, no,” Madame Zoya/ Bertie/Brutilda said. “I send people back in time to change their lives. I have no idea what a person’s future is. Or past, for that matter. I can only do the one thing.”

  The four of them were still standing in the foyer of the lovely house. To the left, through an archway, was the living room, to the right the dining room. In front of them was the main staircase leading up to a hallway where a couple of pretty little tables flanked an open doorway. Inside they could see the corner of what looked to be a four-poster bed.

  “Just the one thing?” Ellie asked, eyebrows raised.

  “That’s it,” Madame Zoya said happily. “Now, if one or all of you are interested, we can step into the sunroom and, after we get the financial details out of the way, we can begin.”

  “Ahhhhhh,” Madison said. “The financial details.”

  Madame Zoya whipped her head around and froze Madison with a look that would have terrified any schoolchild. “Yes, dear,” she said firmly. “I have expenses just as you do, and so I charge for my services.”

  With a weak smile, Madison took a step backward.

  “I’d like to know more about what you do before I make a commitment,” Leslie said with a smile. “After all, I’ve never so much as heard of anyone who can do what you do.”

  Madame Zoya’s pleasant smile returned as she looked at Leslie. She did not invite the women to sit down or even to go into her living room. “I do just what my card says I do, I help people rewrite their pasts.”

  It was Ellie’s turn to step forward. “Okay, so shoot us for not understanding, but we have no idea what that means. Maybe you could start from the very beginning.”

  For a moment Madame Zoya looked hard at Ellie, as though searching inside her for signs that she was actually telling the truth. Did she really and truly not know what it meant to rewrite the past?

  The woman’s look made Ellie feel as though she’d asked her to explain what a car or a television was. Ellie felt as though she should know what “rewriting the past” meant. She had an impulse to grab a yellow pages and show the woman that she was the only person in there under “Past, Rewriting of.”

  But Ellie wasn’t about to miss out on hearing a story, so she bit down on the side of her tongue to keep her remarks to herself and gave the woman a look of regret, No, sorry, but she didn’t know what it meant to rewrite the past.

  When Madame Zoya seemed satisfied that not one of the three knew what she could do, she spilled out words so quickly that they could hardly keep up with them. “I can send you back for three weeks, that’s all. You, of course, will choose when and where you want to go. At the end of the time you will return here and not one second will have passed. You will then be given some choices. You may keep your lives as they are now, or you can go with the new future you’ve created. However, I must warn you that going with the new future carries risks of the unknown. In this life you could have escaped accidents and deaths of loved ones, but who knows what will happen in the new one? I had one man who chose the new future, then his arm fell off. Well, not really fell. It was more that it disappeared. One minute his arm was there; then the next it wasn’t. In his old life he hadn’t been at the place where the accident occurred in his new life, so he hadn’t had the accident that removed his arm. But that’s the risk you take. So, now, any more questions?”

  Leslie and Madison stood there blinking at the woman, not fully comprehending what she’d just said. But Ellie was used to following stories, and when she talked to her editor about a new story idea, they talked in the shorthand style that this woman was now using. “So if they stay with what they have now, will they remember the new time, the way they didn’t go? And do they take back current knowledge with them to the past?” Ellie fired off at her.

  “Your decision,” Madame Zoya said. “Remember or forget, as you wish. And, yes, you return with everything you know now. You can be eighteen with a woman’s knowledge of the world. A lot of women choose that path.”

  Madison hadn’t fully understood all that had been said, but she knew the word “forget.” “I’d like to forget everything that’s happened to me since the day the three of us met,” she said under her breath.

  Madame Zoya heard her. “Your choice. So what do you want to do? Any of you? All of you? None?”

  “How much does this cost?” Ellie asked. She was her own agent, so she had no qualms about discussing money with anyone.

  “One hundred dollars.”

  The three women blinked, with Leslie recovering first. “You mean that you’ll send us back to the past for a mere one hundred dollars?”

  Madame Zoya’s eyes sparkled in merriment as she looked directly at Madison. “Didn’t hear that on The Learning Channel, did you, dear? That show was all about money, wasn’t it?”

  Madison gave the woman a weak smile, then looked away, embarrassed. Did she have an intercom on her porch so she could snoop into everyone’s private conversations?

  “What the heck?” Ellie said as she reached into her handbag for her wallet. “This is my treat. Even if it doesn’t work—” With her back to Madame Zoya, she wiggled her eyebrows at Leslie and Madison, letting them know that she was sure the whole thing was a joke. “—I can write off the expense as research.” Turning back, she handed three one-hundred-dollar bills to Madame Zoya.

  Smiling, the woman took the money, slipped it into the pocket of her lavender print dress, then motioned toward a hallway past the dining room. “My office is this way,” she said. “Follow me.”

  “Everyone’s arms on tight?” Ellie whispered to Le
slie and Madison, sounding as though they were about to get on a dangerous roller coaster.

  Madame Zoya led them to a small room at a back corner of the house. There were windows on two sides and a view into a deeply shaded part of the garden. Thick vines hung over a tall fence; trees drooped down above them. There wasn’t a flower in sight, not a bit of color to break the dark green.

  The only objects in the room were three identical chairs—Queen Anne, upholstered in dark green, facing the windows—and on the floor, a large, lush rug patterned with entwined leaves. The walls were painted a somber golden yellow, without a picture on them.

  All in all, it was a soothing room, and the three chairs made it seem almost as though the three woman had been expected.

  Ellie tried to lighten the mood by making a joke. “What if only two of us had accepted?” she asked, smiling. “Would you have run ahead and removed a chair?”

  Madame Zoya didn’t smile. “I choose my prospective clients well. I knew that all three of you needed me.”

  At that, Madison almost turned around and left the room, but Ellie and Leslie caught her arms and pulled her back to them; then they led her to the middle chair and half pushed her onto it.

  “Does this hurt?” Madison asked.

  “No, of course not,” Madame Zoya said. “The only pain is what you experience in life. I will cause you no pain at all. Now, each of you must tell me where you want to go.”

  “You mean in time?” Ellie said.

  Madame Zoya, standing in front of them, looked at her as though she weren’t too bright. “Of course I mean in time. I’m not a bus service, now am I?” At that Madame Zoya laughed as though she’d made a wonderful joke. She didn’t seem to notice, and certainly didn’t mind, that the three women didn’t share her laugh. “Oh! There’s one requirement that I forgot to tell you about.”

  At that, Madison gave Leslie and Ellie an I-told-you-so look.