In the Blink of an Eye

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  How many times did she hear this sound last night, when she was finally alone in the house after she finished her final appointment?

  How many times—before she finally sank into bed at midnight—did she stand in this very spot, frozen, until the dial tone gave way to the operator’s recorded voice: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and dial your operator”?

  Every time that happened, she put the phone down and walked away.

  She never got far.

  Yet nor did she ever go through with the call when she invariably found her way back to the phone.

  Now, after a restless night, haunted by Nan’s words—Katherine is coming—she knows what she must do. It’s now or never. She’ll be tied up with appointments and message services for the rest of the day.

  Clutching the receiver in one hand and the scrap of paper from Rupert’s desk in the other, Pilar begins to dial.

  What if the phone has been disconnected?

  What if that number in Rupert’s address book belongs to a different Katherine in the metropolitan New York area?

  She holds her breath as the phone rings on the other end.

  And exhales it slowly as it rings . . .

  And rings . . .

  And rings.

  No answer.

  No machine.

  I’ll try again, Pilar decides, carefully putting the scrap of paper back under the heavy crystal heart-shaped paperweight Raul once gave her for their anniversary.

  She glances at the open window nearby, where a slight draft flutters the curtains. Then she tucks the paper more securely beneath the weight. I’ll keep trying until I reach Katherine and tell her what she needs to know about her mom.

  The sweet smell of flowers drifts into the room on the breeze. Pilar inhales deeply. It’s coming from the window box directly outside, the one she filled with aromatic annuals and herbs: purple stock, lavender, and nicotiana.

  As she breathes in the delicious fragrance, she is reminded of yesterday, in Nan’s bedroom. She forgot to ask Rupert about it when he returned. By then, the scent was gone anyway.

  Now, all at once, Pilar recalls which flowers bear that particular fragrance.

  The scent couldn’t have been coming from something blossoming outside, Pilar realizes.

  After all . . . lilacs are only in bloom at the beginning of May.

  THE TELEPHONE RINGS just as Rupert is turning off the flame beneath the whistling teakettle. He hurries to answer it, wondering whether it might be his investment broker calling back. Rupert left a message earlier. He’s going to have to cash out several funds and take a big loss. But it will be worth it to buy back his house.

  Paine said he would speak with the attorney about the sale. He’s agreed to allow Rupert and Nan to take immediate occupancy, but it will take some time to sort through the legal paperwork and make the transaction official.

  When Rupert lifts the receiver with an eager “Biddle residence,” the answering voice doesn’t belong to his broker. The accent—a perfect blend of Texas twang and East Coast aristocrat—is unmistakable.

  “Hello, Rupert, this is Virginia Wainwright.”

  His heart sinks. “Virginia. How are you?”

  “Back from Palm Beach and simply exhausted now that I’ve spent a full week getting the cottage into order again.”

  The cottage, Rupert knows, is a four-tiered lakefront house on the grounds of Chautauqua Institution, where Virginia’s late husband, Harrison, was once on the board of trustees. Rupert also knows that Virginia didn’t lift a finger getting the place into order again. She employs a full household staff, complete with a part-time nanny for occasions when her three small great-grandchildren visit.

  “Rupert, I would like to see you as soon as possible,” Virginia says. “It’s been such a long winter and I’ve missed Harrison. I’m sure he’s wondering where I’ve been.”

  “Virginia, we’ve talked about that. Harrison himself has let you know that he’s always with you, wherever you are.”

  “Yes, but I’ve missed our weekly chats. One-sided conversations with him are so frustrating. When can you see me, Rupert?”

  He hesitates. He wasn’t planning on giving readings this season. At least, not now. Not with Nan so ill.

  But one session with Virginia Wainwright, heiress to a Houston oil fortune, will be well worth his while. The woman, a regular summer client for years, always presents an exorbitant “donation” in exchange for Rupert’s channeling the late Harrison. It would mean Rupert might not have to touch his retirement investments for a down payment after all.

  “I’m busy today and tomorrow,” Rupert informs Virginia. “How about later in the week? Thursday or Friday?”

  “Wait until Thursday? That’s out of the question, Rupert.”

  “Virginia, I’m afraid I can’t see you sooner. I’m in the midst of packing up the house and taking care of some real estate business. Nan and I are moving in a few days.”

  She gasps. “Please tell me you’re not leaving Lily Dale?”

  “Of course not. We’re just moving back to our old place on Summer Street.”

  “Don’t frighten me like that, Rupert I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’re the only person who has ever been able to put me in touch with Harrison.”

  “And I’ll be happy to do so . . . on Thursday, Virginia.”

  After a few more attempts to change his mind, Virginia grudgingly agrees to the appointment later in the week.

  Rupert hangs up the phone, satisfied. Cash is on the way. Everything has fallen into place.

  He returns to the kitchen, where he quickly finishes making a cup of herbal tea for Nan. He places it on a tray, and, as an afterthought, adds a container of yogurt with a spoon. It’s plain vanilla. Maybe it will appeal to her more than the fruited flavors do. She hasn’t eaten much of anything in days. She isn’t thirsty, either, though Rupert has gently insisted on spooning cool water and warm tea to moisten her parched lips and mouth.

  Carrying the tray into the bedroom, he finds her asleep, just as she was when he left the room fifteen minutes earlier. He notices a fragrant floral aroma that seems to come and go in this room and absently wonders where it’s coming from.

  The puzzling thought vanishes as he realizes that Nan’s breathing is irregular again. That keeps happening. Sometimes, her respiration speeds up, so that her breaths are almost coming in pants. Other times, it’s so slow and faint that Rupert can barely hear it, and he has to keep checking her in dread.

  Now Nan stirs, as though the movement in the room has disturbed her slumber.

  “Nan, I’ve brought you some tea and a light snack, sweetheart,” Rupert says gently as he sets the tray on the bedside table beside numerous orange plastic prescription bottles and the stacked paperback novels Pilar placed there yesterday.

  There is no response from his wife, yet she turns her head away from him, her eyes still closed.

  “Nan, sweetheart, wake up.” Rupert bends toward her, stroking her head.

  She mutters something incoherent.

  Her arms, elbows bent, are on top of the quilt in the warm room. Suddenly, her hands come together, thumb on her right hand to pinky on her left, palms upward, fingers curled as though they’ve closed around something.

  The handle of a shovel.

  Her arms begin to move in familiar rhythm.

  She’s digging again.

  “You’re in your garden again, sweetheart,” he says softly. “Aren’t you? You’re in your garden.”

  He swallows hard, watching her.

  THE AIR IN the basement beneath Iris’s house must be twenty degrees cooler than the sunny yard, Julia thinks as she descends the creaky stairs. Something brushes across her face. She lets out a little cry.

  Ick.

  Cobwebs everywhere.

  At the foot of the steps, she eyes the old bureau, wondering if she can possibly move it up to the yard herself. Paine has go
ne back to Chautauqua to sit in on another acting class. Dulcie—happily settled with her beads on a blanket on the grass just outside the basement door—certainly can’t help Julia carry this ancient thing.

  For the moment, she has no choice but to work on it down here.

  She opens the bag containing the furniture-stripping solution Paine bought for her, taking it out and reading the label carefully.

  “Julia?” Dulcie’s voice carries down through the open doorway.

  “Yes, Dulcie?”

  “Are you sure I can’t come down there with you?”

  “It’s really dirty down here, Dulcie, and the stairway is too steep. I won’t stay here long. I just want to get started on the dresser . . .”

  Before your dad tells Rupert he can have it along with the rest of Iris’s stuff he’s selling with the house.

  Paine said that was part of the agreement he made with Rupert. If the Biddles can’t wait to move in, they’ll have to dispose of Iris’s belongings themselves. He said Rupert readily agreed.

  Julia sighs, opening the plastic lid covering the nozzle on the rectangular metal can.

  Paine and Dulcie really are leaving Lily Dale in just a few days, after the memorial service for Iris on Thursday. Howard Menkin will handle the details of the real estate sale. Paine said Julia can have Iris’s old VW Bug if she wants, to keep or sell.

  She’ll keep it, of course. For sentimental reasons.

  Part of her thinks that Paine has done the noble thing, turning over the house to Rupert for immediate occupancy so that he can bring Nan home before she dies.

  Part of her thinks it’s a cop-out.

  Didn’t Paine tell her that he was determined to find out what happened to Kristin here? Didn’t he say he wanted Julia to help Dulcie deal with her clairvoyance? Well, not in so many words. But they both know what Dulcie is dealing with. They both know Julia is in a position to help the little girl.

  Now he’s brushed that aside in favor of fleeing Lily Dale at the earliest opportunity—before the house is even officially sold to Rupert.

  When Paine returned from Chautauqua yesterday and told Julia about the move, there was no opportunity for discussion. For one thing, Pilar had stopped by with a treat for Dulcie, and was still on the porch chatting with Julia about poor Nan Biddle when Paine arrived.

  For another, he was late getting back. Julia had to rush right off to her Medium’s League Message Circle. As Julia left, glancing at Dulcie’s wistful expression, she found herself offering to come and spend time with the little girl again this afternoon since a small brigade of workmen have taken over her house with their noisy tools.

  Dulcie’s face lit up, of course, and Paine was only too eager to take Julia up on the offer. He apparently enjoys being back at Chautauqua, even if his first visit there on Sunday obviously triggered haunting memories of the summer he met Kristin.

  If he would just stick around longer this summer, he can get involved in Chautauqua’s musical theater program again, Julia thinks, pouring the vile-smelling stripper into a small plastic bucket and recapping the bottle tightly.

  She should point that out to Paine in case he hasn’t thought of it.

  Yes.

  And if he stays—at least through some or all of July—I won’t have to say good-bye to Dulcie so soon. She needs me.

  But where can Paine and Dulcie stay? He’s promised Rupert the house.

  And I guess I can’t blame him for that.

  It was the right thing to do.

  The only thing a decent human being would do.

  Besides, there’s nothing holding Paine and Dulcie in Lily Dale.

  Nothing but painful memories of Kristin and Iris.

  Nothing but Julia . . .

  Who has no business even entertaining the ridiculous notions that keep flitting into her mind.

  Notions about Paine . . .

  And herself.

  He’s off-limits, she reminds herself firmly, setting to work rubbing the stripper onto the old, dark-stained wood. I would never get along with a man who thinks that what I do for a living is bogus.

  Didn’t she say exactly that to Lorraine when she called Julia this morning? Her friend insists on insinuating that romance is brewing between Julia and Paine, refusing to believe that Julia is spending so much time here merely because of Dulcie.

  Julia grew impatient with Lorraine’s annoying tangent, about to hang up when Lorraine finally got around to the real reason for her call.

  “You forgot your raincoat at the auditorium last night after the Message Circle,” Lorraine told her. “I saw it on a seat as I was leaving and I knew it was yours.”

  “Ah, yes, the lovely shade of neon orange gave it away, right?”

  “Exactiy. I picked it up for you and tried to catch up with you and Andy, but you guys were obviously in a big hurry to get somewhere.”

  “Hardly. We were only going out for coffee.”

  “So, Jules, tell me . . . what does Andy think about your spending so much time with Paine Landry?”

  “Why would he care?” Julia asked, trying to forget Andy’s comment yesterday morning about Paine being jealous. “It’s not as if Andy and I are a committed couple. We’ve gone out on a few dates. And like I said, Paine and I are only friends—if that. Get it through your head, Lorraine.”

  But Lorraine only laughed.

  Why doesn’t she get it?

  Even if Julia were to foolishly allow herself to fall for Paine, his heart obviously still belongs to Kristin.

  And Julia would be wise to acknowledge that it always will.

  “EDWARD? IS THAT you?”

  “Yeah, Ma.” Edward bends to pick up the Jamestown Post Journal from the worn mat in front of the door to the trailer before stepping inside. He blinks, his eyes adjusting to the dim interior.

  His mother, wrapped in a faded terry cloth robe that was once blue, is smoking a cigarette and watching one of those televised court shows she’s so fond of. As usual, neither she nor Edward bothered to fold up the pullout couch where he sleeps. Jocelyn Shuttleworth spends most of her days on it, doing exactly what she’s doing now.

  “How are you, baby?” she asks in her low-pitched smoker’s voice as Edward plods over to the short strip of counter space and deposits his metal lunch bucket amid a clutter of dirty dishes, open food containers, and overflowing ashtrays.

  “I’m too damned hot,” he tells her, wiping a trickle of sweat from his brow. “That’s how I am. What’s up with this weather? Either rainy or humid as hell.”

  “It’s going to rain again later,” his mother says, her gaze fixed on the TV. “That should cool things off.”

  “It should, but it won’t.”

  “You’re in a good mood,” she observes dryly, glancing at him. She pushes a strand of dyed red hair back from her once pretty face, prematurely wrinkled thanks to years of cigarettes and exposure to the elements. As Edward does now, Jocelyn worked on a road construction crew after the divorce from Anson Shuttleworth, for more than a decade until a back injury sidelined her on disability. There was a time when Edward was embarrassed, having a mother who wore a hard hat and tool belt. His friends teased him mercilessly about it when he was in elementary school.

  They didn’t pull that once he was in junior high though. He grew quite a few inches and pounds over one memorable summer, and nobody pushed him around after that. Those who tried found out the hard way that you didn’t mess with Edward Shuttleworth.

  You still don’t, he thinks with self-satisfied pride.

  “What’s to eat, Ma?”

  She shrugs, taking a drink from the plastic tumbler on the newspaper-littered table beside the couch. Edward knows his mother well enough to be aware that the amber liquid ain’t lemonade.

  “You know I can’t go to the supermarket till after the first of the month, when my check comes, Edward.”

  “That sure as hell hasn’t stopped you from shopping at the liquor store,” he mutters under his breath
.

  Either she doesn’t hear, or she chooses to ignore him.

  He forages in the cupboard and finds an almost empty box of saltines. Biting into one, he finds that it’s limp and soggy. With a grunt, he tosses the stale cracker, and the rest of the box, into the heaping trash bag in a plastic can under the sink. It topples off the pile and lands beside a can of Ajax that hasn’t been used in a good month.

  “You going back out later?” his mother calls after him as he heads into the bathroom.

  “Yeah. Not till after dark. Why?”

  “I need more cigarettes.”

  He closes the door after him and lifts the toilet seat, muttering, “Get ’em yourself.”

  Smoking.

  That’s one bad habit he never expected to pick up from his mother. As a child he never could stand the stale smell cigarettes leave on your clothes, your hair, your skin, your breath.

  His father couldn’t stand it, either. He doesn’t recall much about the first few years of his life, when he and his mother lived with Anson Shuttleworth over in Lily Dale. But he does remember the big fights his parents had. Many of those arguments were about her smoking. She would try to quit, and then she’d sneak cigarettes, and Anson would find out.

  “You can’t hide anything from that man,” his mother always said. “That’s what I get for marrying a medium.”

  Yeah.

  That’s what she got. A man who quickly caught on to all her secrets—especially when she had an affair with an auto mechanic who lived down in Jamestown. Not that Anson hadn’t had affairs of his own, his mother bitterly told Edward later.

  But when Anson found out about his wife’s indiscretion, he threw her out of the house. Edward was just a preschooler then, but he clearly remembers his mother telling him that his father hadn’t even fought to keep custody of him.

  He’s always wondered if it’s true.

  Not everything Jocelyn told him is.

  Edward found out later—much, much later—that his father really did pay her alimony. Child support, too.

  What his mother didn’t give to the mechanic—who lived with them on and off for a few years—she spent on booze, or gambled it away at OTB.

  Just another of her damaging little habits.