Darkscope
Page 12
One of these days, I’m going to have to talk to him about it. Otherwise, Chelsea knew, their friendship would suffer. She would have to confront him, and soon.
But how do you tell somebody you have a haunted camera? How do you tell him you just witnessed the death of your grandfather in 1941?
Ben emerged from the store with a bagful of groceries. “One more stop,” he said, as they got into the Silverado.
They drove up to Cole Street and turned west, passing Lucas McCord’s old house, her ancestral home. Chelsea had driven past the Victorian mansion a few times, but had never had the urge to explore it further. Toys were scattered in the yard—belonging, Chelsea was certain, to the children of the house’s newest owners. She had expected the sight of the house to elicit some emotion in her. After all, it was part of her heritage. But the hideous brown brick and wrought-iron monstrosity held no mystique for her. Chelsea felt nothing, except relief. She was glad that she didn’t have to live there.
At a hardware store on Bisbee Road, Ben bought a garden hose.
Bette Kronke was hanging out her wash when Ben and Chelsea arrived. She wore a broad-brimmed sun hat and flowered shift, her brown ankles growing out of blue Keds like saplings. Chelsea’s first thought: She must be in her eighties. As Ben and Chelsea approached, the old lady’s face lit up. “Oh, Ben! You got me the hose!”
Chelsea watched as Ben hugged the older lady. “How are you doing, Bette?” he said.
“Can’t complain.” They entered the house. Ben set the grocery bag on the kitchen table and Bette looked through its contents. “Oh, but you’re spoiling me,” she said, holding up a cooked ham.
Ben took the ham from her and held it up high in the air. “I wouldn’t want to do that. I’ll take it back.”
“You will not.” Bette reached up, plucked the ham from Ben’s fingers, and put it in the refrigerator.
After introducing the two women, Ben explained to Bette that Chelsea was interested in one of her old students.
“I’ll do what I can. I can’t promise I’ll remember, I’ve taught a lot of children in my day.” Bette opened the kitchen door. “Let’s go outside. I’ve got to finish hanging these things out. Might storm later.” As they walked outside, she added, “Ben, you can connect the hose around back. The faucet’s leaking again.” She pressed a finger into Chelsea’s shoulder. “Chelsea can help me with the wash.”
Stepping back and forth over a dozing calico cat, Chelsea hung up laundry while Mrs. Kronke sat on the porch and looked at the photographs. Occasionally the old woman would give Chelsea directions: “No, dear. Put that dress on the other side. It’s faded enough, and the shade will get to it faster over there.” Then she would go back to staring at the photographs, her lips pursed in thought. “Found these, you say? Funny. I don’t recall any colored snapshots in those days.”
“I found them in my uncle’s house,” Chelsea said, approaching the porch.
Bette tapped the photograph of the girl in front of the drugstore. “That looks like Kathleen.”
Kathleen. Chelsea missed what Bette said next. “Excuse me?”
“I said," the old lady reiterated peevishly, “I can’t remember her last name. She was in my third grade class. A nice girl, but a bit of a hellion, if you know what I mean. A real tomboy . . .” She stood up, leaned over, and fished out a clump of damp material from the wash basket. Shaking it out, she handed it to Chelsea. “Make sure you hang this by the bottom.”
She sat down again, her expression thoughtful. “Kathleen. Seems to me there was talk of a scandal, but I can’t remember what it was about.”
A scandal? Chelsea finished the laundry and returned to the porch.
Bette was looking at the picture of the young couple in front of the depot. “My stars! I thought he looked familiar. That’s John McCord.
“He must’ve died shortly after that. Gus and I were gone by then, over to Clifton. Company said move, so by golly, we did. We had no choice in the matter if Gus wanted to keep his job.” She sighed, her eyes sad. “I had to leave all those dear little ones, my children.”
Her blue-veined hands fumbled with the snapshots. “Where was I? John. He was a good boy. Always trying to please. I heard that Vice President Gamer himself came out for the funeral.” Her eyes glowed in reminiscence. “That was quite a day—the company let everyone off work in remembrance, all over the state.”
There was talk of a scandal. Chelsea thought of her grandfather and this Kathleen walking toward the camera, so obviously in love. “But you were gone by the time John died?”
The old lady nodded. “I heard it broke old Lucas McCord’s heart—if he had one, which I doubt. But they say he never was the same. Of course, he had that other boy. Robert, his name was.”
“Were you his teacher, too?”
Bette waved her hand in dismissal. “He was in another class. Heard he was a bit of a cut-up. You donating these pictures to the Historical Society?”
“I’d like to find out something about them first,” Chelsea explained.
“Curiosity killed the cat,” Bette said. “Sorry, Clarissa,” she said to the thin bundle of fur in the yard. “Well, that’s John McCord. There’s no mistaking him. And that's Kathleen. I wish I could remember her last name. Seems to me it was an Irish name . . .”
“Thank you very much, Mrs. Kronke. You’ve been very helpful.” Chelsea took back the pictures.
“Don’t mention it.” Bette scrutinized Chelsea. “You known Ben long?”
Ben came around the side of the house. “The faucet’s fixed. Do you know who the girl in the pictures is?” he asked Bette.
“Yes. I told your girl—” She stopped, her eyes sharp. “Wait a minute. You said your name was McCord?”
Chelsea nodded.
“Of the Bisbee McCords?”
Here we go again. “Yes.”
“Well, I’m sorry I said the things I did. But they’re true.” Her expression dared Chelsea to argue.
“I’m sure they are.” Chelsea smiled reassuringly.
The old lady rose stiffly to her feet. “You two come in and have some coffee. I’ve got coffee cake that’ll go begging if you don’t eat it.”
As they were leaving, Bette called out, “Go see Peter Trelawney. He worked in the mines for years. Now he’s over to Lowell School, works for the school district, yard maintenance. He was around about that time. And Ben, you come by more often. There’s plenty to do around here. You know my legs aren’t good! And bring your girl. She’s a darn sight better than the others, I’ll tell you that, even if she is a McCord.”
“How long have you known Mrs. Kronke?” Chelsea asked as Ben drove toward Lowell.
“A long time. She and I worked together on the city planning committee about six years ago.”
“You’re very nice to her.”
“Bette was a big help to me when I needed someone to talk to. Helped me through a bad time. Don’t let that old-lady-in-tennis-shoes act fool you. She’s a very bright woman.”
What kind of bad time could Ben possibly have had? Chelsea couldn’t imagine him ever taking anything too seriously.
Ben turned before the traffic circle onto a narrow road fronting the cemetery.
They found Peter Trelawney mowing the lawn at Lowell School across from the cemetery. Yes, he knew the girl. She was a regular at the swimming pool above the Waterworks. “A real water baby. Up at that pool every day, like clockwork. I sure do remember her.” He pulled out a bandana from his unbuttoned trousers pocket and mopped his brow. “I think all the boys carried a torch for her.”
“Mrs. Kronke said her name was Kathleen,” Ben said.
“Kathy. Her family was second generation Bisbee on her mother’s side. Can’t remember her mother’s name offhand. Her father was deported in 1917.”
“Do you remember her last name?”
“Barrie. Kathy Barrie.”
Barrie. The name on the photo album.
“Is she still in town?” Ben asked.
Chelsea remembered the baby picture. Wasn’t the infant’s name Kathleen? Born July something, 1917. Sean Barrie’s daughter? Sister?
Ben showed Trelawney the pictures of John McCord and Kathleen Barrie together.
“There was a lot of talk about those two. He was married, you know”
The baby had grown up to fall in love with Chelsea’s own grandfather. She spoke her thoughts aloud. “So they were lovers.”
Pete Trelawney’s face closed up. “I wouldn’t know. There was a lot of talk, that’s all. But it ain’t right to talk ill of the dead. And as I said, John had a wife. I’ve got work to do,” he added. “Gotta mow back and front.”
As they drove through town, Chelsea went over what she’d learned. Kathy was the baby in the old photograph album. She’d grown up to become the lover of John McCord, Chelsea’s grandfather, who had been married at the time.
Chelsea thought about her grandmother, who had died last year. A short, slender lady with a no-nonsense voice and a sophistication she wore like a queen’s mantle. Equally at home working phones for the Muscular Dystrophy telethon, or buying art at Christie’s or thoroughbred colts at the Keeneland yearling sales. Certainly not a woman to back down, certainly not a woman to give in to despair when she discovered that her husband had a lover.
Despite herself, Chelsea felt pity for the beautiful girl in the photographs. She saw in her mind’s eye the joyful, loving face tilted up at John McCord. That girl was no competition for the aristocratic strength of Peggy McCord, she knew intuitively. John’s wife would surely be the winner in such an uneven battle.
But nobody won. John McCord died in 1941.
“Want to see the pool?” Ben asked.
“Why not?”
They parked at the Waterworks and climbed the steep flight of steps up the hill. At the top, they stopped to catch their breath and look at the view. Below snaked Tombstone Canyon, looping under the US 80 overpass and cutting between hills stippled with oak trees. The sky arched overhead, a pulsing, neon blue. Where they stood, the grass was high and brittle.
Rusted pipes and water mains lay scattered on the hill. Dark blue moths floated and wheeled over the grass like light planes practicing takeoffs and landings. The black water of the reservoir was scummy, brackish green in patches, and a rusted pipe fed into it. Chelsea followed the cracked sidewalk along the chain-link fence, brushing aside the crowding boughs of Arizona Cypress.
Ben curled his fingers around the wires in the fence and rested a foot on the bottom links. He surveyed the stuccoed cabanas and the pool, separated from the reservoir by a cement wall. “Did you hear what Trelawney said? The day they opened the pool there was a rip-roaring party down below. A band played, people danced . . .” He trailed off.
An unspeakable melancholy crept into Chelsea’s throat. It must have been so beautiful here once. In her mind’s eye she saw the long, low cars, the women with their bobbed hair and one-piece swimsuits. An era not so far in the past, now abandoned and dead as dust.
And suddenly, she really was seeing it. A kaleidoscope of color. People splashing, diving, sunning. Women wearing swimming caps. Dark motorcars lining the road nearby . . .
This time, it was only a momentary glimmer, a mirage. Chelsea felt the familiar panic rising from the pit of her stomach, grappling for her throat, trying to make her scream. The image shivered in the air, nostalgic and beautiful . . . and terrifying.
“Chelsea?” Ben’s voice cut across the laughter, the splashing, and then they were in the center of silence. Just the two of them on the mountain by a deserted swimming pool.
“Where were you?” Ben asked. “Just now.”
“I . . . saw what it looked like, when the pool was new.
“You mean you pictured it.”
Chelsea was tired of lying. To everyone else, to herself. By now it was clear that the dark-haired woman in the photographs wanted something from her. She had walked across Chelsea’s yard in 1986, looking just as she did in the pictures of forty years ago.
She glanced at Ben. She’d seen another side of him today through his relationship with Bette Kronke.
Keeping everything inside had been so hard. Already, her actions had threatened her relationship with Gary. The problem was getting too big to handle by herself. Talking might help, and she sensed that Ben wouldn’t laugh at her. Maybe he wouldn’t believe her, but he wouldn’t laugh. Chelsea said, “No. I didn’t picture how it was back then. I saw it.”
“You saw it. I don’t understand.”
Take a big breath and jump right in.
Chelsea told him. Everything. The girl in her yard, Mr. Chips’s unusual reaction to her. The things she’d seen in the viewfinder of the camera, the photographs taken this summer, and her grandfather, melting like a waxwork in the mine. When she had finished, she met Ben’s eyes. His expression was troubled, but he said nothing.
“Well?” she pressed. For once, you don’t have some smartass remark. “What do you think?”
“What do you want me to think?”
“Go ahead. Tell me I’m not right in the head. But I know what I saw.”
“You don’t have to get defensive.”
“Then I suppose you believe me. Tell me you believe that cameras take pictures of the past and that people dead for forty years suddenly appear in the middle of a mine tour!”
She saw it then. The same look Gary had given her the day of the mine tour. Should she have expected anything different? “I can tell you don’t believe me.”
“Do you have claustrophobia?” Ben asked abruptly.
“No, I don’t have claustrophobia!” Chelsea folded her arms and turned away, tears stinging her eyes. Why did she care? Why did she want Ben Fletcher to believe her?
“Settle down. I’m trying to find a logical explanation for what you think you saw.”
“I saw it! I didn’t think I saw it. I saw it!” Chelsea hit the chain-link fence with her fist for emphasis.
“Okay. You saw it.” Ben riffled through the photographs. “You took these a few weeks ago?”
“That’s what I told you.” Chelsea kicked at a pebble. “Wait a minute. I can prove it to you. These pictures are in color, and you told me yourself that they didn’t use color until after World War II.”
“Sorry. I checked. Kodachrome came out in 1935.”
“But what about these?’ Chelsea held up the pictures of the little girl in front of the pharmacy, the boy and girl at Phil Yard’s Texaco, the flood on the Gulch. “They were taken in the twenties.”
Ben shrugged. “It’s easier for me to believe that someone was using colored film in the twenties than that your dead grandfather is wandering around the Copper Queen Mine like a human torch. Sorry, but color me skeptical.”
“So you think I’m nuts.”
“I didn’t say that. It’s just hard to believe, that’s all. Would you believe me if the situation were reversed?”
“I’d be open-minded at least.”
Ben sighed. “I’m trying to be, but you’re not giving me much to go on. What’s to keep me from thinking you didn’t tint those pictures yourself?”
“Why would I do that, Ben? Tell me that! Why would I tell you this crazy story and make myself look like an idiot if it didn’t really happen?” She folded her arms to keep them from shaking. “Thank for your vote of confidence. I can walk home.”
She spun around and darted down the steps toward the canyon.
She was almost to the canyon floor when she realized that Ben hadn’t followed her.
Angered, she marched down the sidewalk along Tombstone Canyon. The street was empty, the houses lining the road closed in as if they were shunning her. Usually people were watering their yards, or children played on the sidewalk. But today
nothing stirred under the hot, blue sky. Chelsea became aware of her footsteps echoing against the pavement. She was alone. Completely alone.
Up ahead, a lawn sprinkler shot jets of water into the street.
Chelsea stopped, turned around. The feeling that someone had been rushing up behind her was almost palpable. But no one was there.
The sprinkler jet slapped the pavement in front her, scattering diamonds on the lawn and the rosebushes lining the yard.
I could have sworn . . . Chelsea shrugged and started walking again, briskly.
Behind her, an ash tree stood near the curb. Under the summer leaves, the shadows writhed and shifted. Sunlight and darkness wove together to form a face, a body, the draping folds of a skirt. The woman’s shape trembled briefly before the patterns changed again.
Twenty-one
“Chelsea. This is Ben. I talked to a couple of people who are pretty sure that the Barrie family once lived in your house. Call me.”
A dial tone, followed by a series of beeps.
Chelsea set down her groceries on the hall table and listened to the message again.
Kathleen had lived here, in this house?
She tried to remember what Uncle Bob had said. That the house had probably been owned by someone doing reasonably well financially—a shift boss or a low-level administrator. But the exodus to Warren at the turn of the century could have left the neighborhood to the less affluent people in the community.
Of course. She should have guessed before. If the house had originally belonged to the Barries, it would explain the steamer trunk in the studio. It would also explain why Kathy walked through the yard periodically.
Chelsea picked up the phone. Even if Ben Fletcher didn’t believe her story, he was still interested in finding out about the woman. And that was enough for her.
“That’s all?” Chelsea asked, disappointed. Ben held the door of the Mining Museum for her. “I was lucky to get that. Hardly anyone remembers back that far.”
“But my house is known as the Barrie house?”
That’s what at least two people called it. Apparently the father, Frank Barrie, was a shift boss. Did pretty well for himself, but he was seen talking to the wrong people a couple of days before the strike in 1917, and he was rounded up and deported with the rest of them.”