The Color of Forever

by Julianne MacLean

  Despite everything she had just said to me, as I witnessed the connection they shared, all I could feel was…envy.

  I turned to Bailey. “She made a lot of sense just now, about focusing on the future, not the past, but… Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “We need to check out that sundial,” she said.

  We both, simultaneously, waved the waitress over to take our credit cards.

  A few minutes later, as we were walking back to the SUV, Bailey said, “Katelyn, I have to ask… You don’t really believe it do you? That the sundial could be an actual portal through time? Surely there’s another explanation for all of this.”

  I handed the keys to her. “I have no idea, but that’s why I want to see it for myself.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  A heavy and humid summer breeze had picked up by the time we returned to the Fraser House Inn and parked the SUV on the gravel lot.

  Feeling as if there wasn’t a moment to lose, I grabbed my purse off the floor and hopped out, pausing only briefly to scan the length of green sloping lawn that led down to the sundial, just before the shoreline. Two freshly painted Adirondack chairs—one red and one blue—stood empty beside it.

  Everything seemed small in the distance, except for the ocean, of course. If a boat had been tossed up during a storm, I wondered if another rogue wave, sweeping in upon these rocks, might have swept the sea captain’s wife to her death. Despite the summer heat, I shivered at the thought.

  “Ready?” I said to Bailey as she got out of the vehicle and shut the car door.

  “Yes.”

  Together, with the sun warm upon our shoulders, we strolled onto the stone path that meandered down to the water, and passed beneath a charming, white painted rose arbor with a butterfly flitting about.

  We noticed Angela on the far side of the property wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and denim overalls. She was pruning a hedgerow with a giant pair of clippers. She waved at us and we waved back.

  As we drew nearer to the sundial, I lifted my sunglasses to rest on top of my head. “It looks ancient,” I said, stopping in front of it.

  Slowly, I circled the stone dial plate and ran my fingers over the Roman numerals carved into its surface.

  “The stand is pretty elaborate,” Bailey commented.

  I squatted down to inspect the column that stood upon a stone slab, and ran my open hand up and down the intricate designs. “I’ve never seen anything like it. This part looks Asian or Middle Eastern.”

  Rising to my feet, I turned to look out at the sparkling blue sea, and spotted a sailboat in the distance. Shading my eyes, I watched the boat for a moment, then walked forward to the edge of the lawn and looked over the rugged shoreline below. The tide was out and the rocks were covered in seaweed and barnacles. I breathed in the salty scent of the pebbly beach, then turned back to consider the sundial again.

  “Well,” I said, “we’re still here.”

  Bailey pulled out her phone and swiped the screen. “And it’s still August, 2016.”

  She pointed at a wooden deck on the far corner of the property with a few empty lounge chairs upon it. “Listen, do you hear that? I think those chairs are calling to us. Want to get into our bathing suits, grab a couple of drinks, and do some reading?”

  I glanced at the deck. “That sounds good, but you go ahead and get changed without me. I’d like to talk to Angela first, to see if she knows anything about the sundial. I’ll meet you on the deck. Save me a chair.”

  Bailey and I parted ways. She returned to the stone path while I started off in the opposite direction across the wide green lawn.

  o0o

  “A lot of guests ask me about that sundial because it’s so unique,” Angela said, as we began the short walk back to the house together. “My husband and I both wish we knew more. What we do know is that Captain Fraser was also an inventor late in life, and we found all sorts of fascinating Victorian contraptions in the attic when we bought the place. We donated everything to the local museum.”

  “That’s interesting. Is there a display there? I’d love to take a look.”

  “Yes, they have a cabinet dedicated solely to his inventions, and they also have a number of items stored in their archives.” Angela stopped, bent over and tugged a weed out of the grass, then we continued on.

  “I heard that the captain lost his wife when they were still quite young,” I mentioned, “and that he wanted to build a time machine so that he could go back and prevent her death. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Yes, of course. I was the one who discovered it in the letters his children wrote to each other, which we found in the attic. That’s her portrait hanging over the fireplace in your room. Sadly, the family destroyed most of his paperwork referencing his inventions and his travels during the last years of his life. They thought he was delusional in his old age.”

  “I suppose I can understand that,” I replied, “but it’s a shame those were lost.”

  “Indeed. When I think about how much we discard in our society today, not holding on to anything anymore, I wonder how much history we’re throwing away.”

  We reached the stairs that led up to the enormous veranda, but Angela paused at the bottom. “I have to put these clippers in the carriage house, so you go on without me. If you need anything, my husband is just inside. Ring the bell at the front desk.”

  “I will. Thank you.” I attempted to follow. “But wait…”

  I wasn’t ready to let her go just yet. There was still so much I wanted to know, because Sylvie had been more than upfront about the sundial being a doorway to another time and dimension. Surely, if that were true, the homeowner would know something about it.

  “Do you think it’s possible that the sundial has something to do with the time machine the captain was trying to build?” I asked, feeling ridiculous as soon as the words spilled across my lips. “It looks very ancient, as if it’s meant to be magical.”

  She smiled at me and laid a hand on the top of her straw hat to keep it from flying off in a sudden gust off the water. “I’ve always thought so myself, but I’ve never heard any tales about it. We can always imagine.”

  With that she walked around the side of the house toward the carriage house, swinging her hedge clippers at her side and humming a cheerful tune.

  I watched her for a moment, then climbed the steps alone, pausing on the veranda to shade my eyes and look out at the sea. It sparkled like diamonds under the sun.

  The sailboat was no longer visible. I wondered where it had gone. Perhaps the owner had sailed farther out to bask in the freedom of the open water and the sound of the ocean rushing past the hull. Or possibly back to one of the yacht clubs to finish out the day with a glass of wine and a bowl of seafood chowder.

  How wonderful that sounded. Turning to go inside, I promised myself that one of these days, I would learn how to sail.

  Chapter Eighteen

  After spending the afternoon stretched out on the lounge chairs on the seafront deck—each of us immersed in a bestselling novel while listening to the waves on the rocky beach below—Bailey and I returned to our rooms to shower and dress for dinner. I was ready before she was, so I lay down on the bed to watch the Portland Evening News. When Bailey finally knocked on my door, she told me that Angela had recommended a few places to eat.

  A short time later, we found ourselves seated at a cozy local restaurant called The Good Table.

  Bailey ordered the lobster fettuccine and I devoured the rib-eye steak—delicious with horseradish crème fraiche, frizzled onions and a baked potato.

  Afterward, we returned to the inn to take part in a card game in the library with Angela, her husband, and a few of the other guests, where we all drank Rusty Nails—equal parts cheap whiskey and Drambuie—and gambled with quarters.

  There had been much animated talk about the weather forecast for the following day, which promised record-hot temperatures and high humidity. Bailey and I dec
ided to head to Crescent Beach to lie on the sand all day, read our books, and frolic in the waves.

  When we said goodnight to the other guests and retired to our rooms, I felt relaxed and slightly tipsy from the strong drinks, and laughed at myself as I tumbled, in my pajamas, onto the massive antique bed.

  “You’re drunk,” I said to myself while gazing, blurry-eyed, at the portrait of Captain Fraser’s young bride above the fireplace. I imagined how passionately and deeply in love they must have been for him to spend his life trying to invent a time machine to bring her back. It only served to remind me, yet again, that I had never known that kind of love. All I’d ever experienced was heartbreak and betrayal—a sense of not being everything my husband truly wanted me to be, because Mark had desired another.

  Even Chris, in that parallel life I remembered, hadn’t loved me the way I needed to be loved, and that’s why I had been unfaithful to him. I was always searching, longing for something more. It was as if I had known we weren’t meant for each other. That we were each meant for someone else.

  Not that that was any excuse for my actions. Infidelity was a four letter word as far as I was concerned, and I despised myself for having given up on our marriage—even though my actions were completely fictitious. At least in this life.

  In the next few moments, the bed began to spin. Typical.

  “Good luck getting up tomorrow,” I said to myself as I rolled onto my side. “You’ll be hungover and you’ll probably get sunstroke.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep, but couldn’t stop thinking about the sundial. I suspected Sylvie had kept something from me, because she didn’t want me to go flying in and out of other dimensions and start messing around with her current reality.

  Why would she want to chance it, when she was already married to the man of her dreams?

  The last thing I wanted to do was destroy her life, or take anything away from her. But I couldn’t help but believe that I had been drawn to this place for a specific reason, and I had my own destiny to seek and fulfill.

  I decided to rise early and drag Bailey to the local museum before we headed to the beach, because there was still so much I wanted to know about this house and its mysterious sundial.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It took tremendous discipline, but I rose extra early to get my CNN application sent off to New York before heading down to breakfast. I then dragged Bailey to the Cape Elizabeth Museum, where we spent the entire morning in the back room, seated at a large round table, wearing white cloth gloves as we handled precious documents. I was surprised when the museum curator trusted us with the entire Fraser Collection—which consisted of one box of letters and a number of interesting contraptions from the inn’s attic—but she remained seated nearby, working at her desk the entire time. She was also kind enough to answer any questions we had about the social history of Cape Elizabeth during the late-Victorian period.

  We discovered that Captain Sebastian Fraser had inherited the house from his father, a sea captain himself, who had built it in 1840. Sebastian married his beloved, Evangeline, in 1878 when he was thirty-five years old and she was twenty-one. They had two children in the first two years of their marriage—a boy and a girl, who were unfortunately too young to remember anything about their mother after she died.

  One interesting item I discovered was that she had been swept off the rocks at the Portland Head Light. This came as a surprise to me, for I had assumed she’d died on the property itself, in the place where the captain had erected the sundial.

  Later in life, the children’s letters to each other revealed how they lamented their father’s perpetual grief over the loss of his young wife, and how they wished he would marry again.

  The daughter, Amelie, wrote this to her brother about her efforts to find him a new bride:

  “Father is so stubborn and rude sometimes. He slams his book closed and walks out on me whenever I mention a pretty lady’s name. He knows what I am up to. Then he sails off again for months on end. I worry about him, Nathan. He is obsessed with his regret, and I often catch him standing at the edge of the lawn, staring out at the waves on a stormy morning, no doubt thinking about how he couldn’t save her…”

  I read the letter aloud to Bailey, who sat back in her chair and laid both her white gloved hands over her heart. “Oh, to be loved like that.”

  “Tell me about it,” I replied, carefully tucking the letter back into the envelope. “But it’s so sad, how he couldn’t ever be happy again. And the children, never having a chance to know their mother or see their father happy.”

  The curator glanced up from her work. “It is rather tragic,” she agreed.

  We discussed the rarity of such everlasting love, then Bailey and I continued poring over the rest of the collection. At last I came to a reference about the captain’s desire to build a time machine.

  In a letter dated September 1915, his son Nathan wrote this:

  “He’s not well, Amelie. Last night I found that H.G. Wells book on his bedside table again. I thought he was all through with that, but he nearly electrocuted himself last week, fooling around with another one of his mad gadgets. I also snuck a look at his journal when he was out. There were notes and equations about time doorways and the alignment of the stars and the universe. I think you should come home…”

  “I wonder what happened to the journal,” Bailey said when I folded the letter and returned it to its envelope.

  The curator glanced up again. “It was never found. We believe the children must have destroyed it, because at the end of his life, they were quite concerned about their father’s mental state, and his reputation.”

  As I read through the remaining letters, I thought their assessment was a reasonable conclusion, based on Amelie’s and Nathan’s correspondence.

  Sadly Captain Fraser died a few months later, from a severe fever, at the age of seventy. His descendants lived in the home until the 1950s when they couldn’t afford to maintain it any longer and sold it to a family from Portland. It changed hands a number of times before Angela and her husband purchased it in 2009.

  When Bailey and I walked out of the museum, it was almost noon, and scorching hot. “Are you hungry?” she asked. “I could go for a sub before we hit the beach.”

  “That sounds good,” I replied, not wanting to reveal the fact that I would have preferred to skip the beach altogether, return to the inn and spend the afternoon napping in my room, because I felt deeply, inexplicably morose.

  I decided to blame it on the aftereffects of the Rusty Nails.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Of course, it’s all very fascinating,” I said to Bailey as we shook out our towels, laid them on the sand, and sat down. “But I didn’t come all this way for a history lesson. I’m still just as frustrated.”

  “You mean you’re still thinking about the son you had with Chris.”

  I sighed heavily and gazed out at the blue water for a moment before I squirted sunscreen on my palm and rubbed it on my shoulder. “It’s not that I’m in love with Chris or anything. It’s just…” I paused. “It’s more that my memories of Logan are painful because he was sick most of the time and I was so afraid of losing him, and there was so little I could do to make him better. Now here I am, but he’s not with me. It’s like…my worst fear realized.”

  “But he’s not real in your life,” she reminded me, growing a little impatient. “Who knows what happened to Sylvie? Maybe the whole thing was just a dream for her, too, and you picked up on it somehow—maybe through some sort of psychic ability. I saw a documentary about that once, where scientists were studying how people’s brainwaves could actually intermingle, where they would suddenly think of the same thing at the same time, like a steak dinner or something, or have the same dream. Maybe that’s what happened to you.”

  I sat forward, hugged my knees to my chest, and stared at the horizon where the water met the sky. “You’re right. It probably was just a dream. It’
s crazy to think otherwise, right? And she did mention that it happened because she was experimenting with lucid dreaming.” I turned to Bailey, who was stretched out on her back with her mirrored sunglasses on. “What is that, anyway? Lucid dreaming…”

  Bailey raised a knee. “I think it’s where you’re half-awake, and consciously, you know that you’re dreaming, so you can control what happens in the dream.”

  This idea went off like an exploding lightbulb in my brain, raising all kinds of possibilities. I turned slightly on my towel and raised my sunglasses. “Have you ever done it?”

  “It’s not something that you do. It just happens. And yeah, I’ve had them. Haven’t you?”

  I faced the water again. “I’m not sure.” For a long while I watched families on the beach, wading into the water with their small children, and listened to the distant sound of a portable speaker playing rock music. I breathed in the scent of coconut sunscreen on the air, then noticed a colorful seashell in the sand. I picked it up and studied it closely. Completely fascinated, I stuffed it into my bag.

  Then I turned onto my stomach and rested my cheek on my arm. “Sylvie said she was experimenting with lucid dreaming, which suggests she had been trying to make it happen. I wonder if that’s how she did it. I wish I could remember everything she said, but it’s all running together in my mind.”

  “You could always call her and ask.”

  I considered that for a moment, knowing that Sylvie wouldn’t be thrilled to hear from me again. “You remember what she was like yesterday. She won’t want to discuss it with me.”