Season of Mists (Young Adult Paranormal Romance) (Cupid's First Strike - Teen Love In The 80's)

by Doreen Owens Malek

  I planned to visit to the Elm Pharmacy the very next day.

  Chapter 7

  School seemed endless because I was so anxious to get on the trail of Maggie Sanborn. I was hotfooting it out at the end of the day when Linda cornered me at the west wing door.

  “Where are you going in such a hurry?”

  “I’ve got some errands to run,” I said evasively.

  “I’ll bet you don’t even have a costume ready for Gina’s party,” Lin said accusingly. “It’s Saturday night, you know.”

  “I’ll come as a fool,” I replied. “I won’t need a costume.”

  “Don’t try to weasel out of it,” she said. “You promised you would come.”

  “I’ll be there, Linda,” I answered wearily. There was nothing that turned her into more of a nag than attempts to dodge social obligations. Ken called her Emily Post.

  “We’re all supposed to bring some kind of food,” she reminded me. She glanced at the ceiling. “My mother is making a bean sprout casserole.”

  “Linda, nobody is going to eat that.”

  She giggled. “I know. Ken said we could order a tray of lasagna from Marchetti’s and pick it up on the way.” She made a helpless gesture. “I hate to say no to Mom; she tries so hard.”

  “Maybe we could feed the bean sprouts to Stella.”

  “Not even Stella would eat this. Wait till you see what it looks like.”

  I could imagine. I had seen enough of Linda’s mother’s concoctions in the past to have a vivid memory of their revolting appearance.

  “Lin, I have to go,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Okay. Get working on that costume.”

  “I will.” I fled to the street.

  Elm Pharmacy was only a few blocks from the school, but when I got there it was obvious that no one was living above it. The windows were boarded up and the door leading to the second floor was padlocked.

  I went into the drugstore and approached the stranger standing behind the prescription counter. “Is Mr. Parks around?”

  “Nope. It’s his day off.”

  “Is there any way I can reach him? I have something important to ask him.”

  The man looked doubtful. “I could call him at home. Is it about a prescription?”

  I was tempted to lie, but if I did get hold of Mr. Parks the deception would be revealed anyway. “No, but I really have to talk to him. Could you just give me his number? He knows me.”

  The pharmacist still hesitated. “Forget it,” I said disgustedly. “I’ll get it out of the book.”

  “It’s unlisted.”

  The expression on my face must have convinced him. “All right, all right. Are you sure he knows you?”

  “He went to high school with my mother. Annie Lindstrom.”

  He motioned for me to come behind the counter and dialed the phone. He listened for a moment, and then handed me the receiver.

  Mrs. Parks answered the phone. I asked for her husband and he came on the line.

  “Mr. Parks, this is Cory Simpson, Annie Lindstrom’s daughter. Remember me?”

  There was a pause. Then, “Oh, sure, the little blonde with bronchitis. How are you?”

  Doctors and druggists remember people by their illnesses. “I’m fine.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Parks, you own the whole pharmacy building, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the apartment above it?”

  “Yes. It burned out quite some time ago. The people living there were nearly killed. It was a close call, I can tell you.” He would have gone on to describe the close call in lurid detail, but I interrupted him. Mr. Parks liked to talk.

  “Do you remember the teacher who used to live there, she worked at the grammar school? Her name was Sanborn.”

  “Yes, I do. My father rented to her for many years, and she stayed on after he died. She’s been gone about five years.”

  “Gone?” I repeated, my heart sinking. Maybe Tom was wrong.

  “Certainly, my dear. She moved to some retirement home, in Philadelphia, I think.

  Great. Now I would have to track her down there. In the last few days I’d done more detective work than Sherlock Holmes. I closed my eyes and crossed my fingers.

  “Mr. Parks,” I said, “I really would like to get in touch with her. Would you happen to have her new address, by any chance?”

  “I just might. My wife keeps a Christmas card list. Hang on a second.” There was a muffled conversation in the background, and a long pause. Then his voice came back on the line.

  “Here it is. Marguerite Sanborn, Shady Rest Village, 1235 Merritt Parkway, Philadelphia.”

  Marguerite. Maggie. Bingo. I let my breath out in a long exhalation.

  “Would you repeat that, sir?” I asked, scrambling in my purse for a pencil. I copied the address on a corner of my notebook.

  “Have you got that?” he said.

  “Yes, yes, thank you very much.”

  “Say hello for me. She’s a lovely person, you know.”

  “I’m sure she is.” Tom’s Maggie would have to be a lovely person.

  “Why did you want to get in touch with her?” he asked.

  The dreaded question. “She’s a former teacher of my mother’s. They’re having a reunion. A . . . surprise reunion.

  “I graduated with your mother. I didn’t hear anything about a reunion.”

  What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. When I got home I would write that one hundred times.

  “Miss Sanborn taught my mother in grammar school.” I knew Mr. Parks had gone to the parochial school then.

  “Oh. Well, I’m glad I was able to help.”

  “You’ve been a big help. Thanks again. Bye.”

  “Goodbye.”

  I hung up and turned to the counterman. “May I have some change for this, please?” I handed him three one dollar bills. “I want to use the pay phone for a long distance call.”

  He gave me the change, and I went to the booth at the back of the store. I didn’t want any calls to the Shady Rest appearing on my mother’s phone bill.

  I got the number from the directory and dialed. The machine responded with a recorded voice telling me how much to deposit. I fed the coins into the slot, praying that this effort would not be in vain.

  The call went through. “Shady Rest Village.”

  My heart began to pound. This was it.

  “Hi. Could you tell me if a Miss Margeurite Sanborn is a resident there? I’m a former student of hers and I would like to visit her.” On balance, I had told more lies today than I had told for the whole rest of my life.

  “Yes, Miss Sanborn is here. Who is calling?”

  I sagged with relief. “Oh, don’t tell her. I want to surprise her. Do you have visiting hours?”

  “Every evening, seven to nine, and afternoons Saturday and Sunday.”

  “Wonderful. I’ll be by tonight.” Easier said than done.

  “I’m glad. Miss Sanborn gets so few visitors, I’m sure she’ll be delighted to see you. I won’t tell her you’re coming.”

  A horrible thought occurred to me. “She’s not sick or anything, is she?”

  “No, she’s not sick. She does get a little . . . vague sometimes. She’s seventy-four, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.” This was Tom’s Maggie, for sure.

  “We’ll see you this evening, then. Your name is?”

  “Cordelia Simpson.”

  “I’m Mrs. Lansing, the day shift head nurse. I won’t be here when you arrive, but I’m very glad you called. It’s so difficult to outlive all your contemporaries, and that’s what has happened to our Miss Sanborn. All her friends are gone.”

  Perhaps she would make a new friend tonight. “Thanks for your help,” I said. “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye.” I hung up and leaned back against the door of the booth.

  How on earth was I going to wangle my mother’
s car in order to get to Philadelphia?

  * * *

  Getting the car proved to be easier than I had thought. Mom was correcting tests after dinner and was very absorbed. It was clear that she wasn’t planning to go anywhere.

  I pretended to read for a while, and then said casually, “Mom, would you mind if I borrowed the car for a couple of hours? I’ll be back early.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked, without looking up.

  I had my answer ready. “The library in Trenton didn’t really have what I was looking for, and I thought I’d drive up to Bucks County College and check that out.” If I told her I was going to Philly I would have had what the astronauts call an aborted mission.

  “By nine, Cory,” she said warningly as I skipped before she could change her mind. “Tomorrow is a school day.”

  I stopped off at a stationery store to buy a box of candy and dial the Philly police. I told the desk sergeant it wasn’t an emergency and asked for someone to help me with directions. I left with the route to Shady Rest mapped out in my purse.

  I got lost three times anyway. When I finally pulled into the Shady Rest parking lot I felt as though I had been wandering for forty years in the desert. I was perspiring despite the cold, and trembling with the anxiety I always feel when I lose my way in a car. People blow their horns angrily when you don’t know which turn to take and switch lanes unexpectedly. All I needed was to wind up stranded someplace after I’d lied to my mother. I hoped this trip was going to be worth it.

  I looked out of the window and examined the Shady Rest complex. It consisted of three low-lying brick buildings and a central administration office, which was obviously a converted house. So this was where you wound up when you grew old and had no one to care for you. It didn’t look inviting.

  I got out and went into the house. It had a lobby with an admitting desk just like a hospital.

  “Hi,” I said to the lady who was there. “I’m here to see Miss Sanborn.”

  “Relative?”

  “No. A friend.”

  “Miss Sanborn has an apartment in Building C. Number 12. If you turn left just inside the door it’s the third one down on your right.”

  “Thank you.” Building C was the furthest from the street. I approached it with a knot in my stomach. It didn’t seem possible that I was about to meet an old lady whom Tom remembered as a young girl.

  I found apartment 12 and knocked on the door. A high, reedy voice called, “Come in.”

  I entered a large, modern living room stuffed to the rafters with furniture and knickknacks. A television set with the sound turned low flickered, murmuring, in a corner. Maggie sat in an easy chair reading a book.

  She peered at me. “Oh, hello. Who are you? I was expecting the night nurse. I’m due for my pill.”

  I cleared my throat. “I’ve come to see you, Miss Sanborn. My name is Cory Simpson. You taught my mother in the third grade.”

  She motioned me closer. “Sit over here, girl, where I can see you.”

  I sat on the footstool she indicated. She was dressed in a print robe with bunny fur slippers on her feet. Her gray hair was drawn up into the sort of Gibson Girl bun Tom had described. She wore glasses attached to a chain around her neck. She certainly was not any conception of a soberly dressed matron, but she did look frail and old. I could see the purple veins in her hands, and the skin on her face and neck fell in crepey folds.

  “Now who did you say you were?” she demanded.

  “Angharad Lindstrom’s daughter,” I answered, hoping that my mother’s full first name might ring a bell.

  She studied my features, trying to see my mother’s eight-year-old face in my seventeen-year-old one. I could see her mentally running through the roll of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of students she’d taught in forty autumns, forty springs.

  “I’m sorry, my dear, I don’t remember her,” she finally admitted.

  “She lived in the old house at the end of Chancellor Street. Her father was a fireman. He was killed in a fall from an extension ladder the year after she was in your class.”

  She blinked, and then pushed my chin with her forefinger so that she could see my profile. Then she smiled.

  “Of course. Smart girl, but very stubborn. I remember that she would never set up her papers the way I requested; she insisted on putting her name on the right and the date on the left. What did the other children call her?”

  “Annie.”

  “That’s right. Well, you favor her, my dear. She had that same fair hair and lovely skin. What is she doing now?”

  “She’s teaching fourth grade in the new elementary school.”

  This clearly delighted her. “Isn’t that a wonder? And she almost drove me mad when she was in my class.” She frowned. “She wouldn’t write with anything but a fountain pen, and her papers were always a mess. There were no ballpoints then, you know, and she regarded my requests for her to use a pencil as an insult.”

  This glimpse of my mother as a child was enlightening. I tried not to stare rudely, but it was difficult. This woman had loved Tom once, as I loved him now. Realizing it was a surreal experience.

  “Why have you come to see me?” she asked, smiling pleasantly.

  “Well, Miss Sanborn . . .” I began.

  She waved her hand. “Call me Marge. Everyone does now, and I must say, after all those years of hearing Miss Sanborn from infant mouths it is quite refreshing.”

  “Doesn’t anyone call you Maggie?”

  She was very still. Then she said softly, “Only one person ever called me Maggie. He died a very long time ago.”

  “Tom Casement.”

  She sat up straight, and her book slid off her lap to the floor.

  “What do you know about Tom?” she asked.

  “I work at the grist mill. There’s a real estate agency in the basement of the building now. I’ve heard the story of how he died.”

  “I’ve never been able to go back there,” she said, as if to herself. “I couldn’t even look at it from the outside. I used to go out of my way in town to avoid it.” She said in a stronger voice, “Is that why you’ve come here, to talk about Tom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “His story . . . interests me.”

  She eyed me with keen perception. She was far from vague at that moment.

  “Why should you be interested in the story of a boy who died fifty years ago? Morbid curiosity?” I could hear the old pain in her voice. The memory still had the power to hurt.

  “Oh, no,” I said, clasping her hands in mine. They felt as thin and small as a child’s. “Please believe me, I don’t mean to hurt you. I can’t explain, but it’s very important to me to hear about him, and know what you thought of him.”

  “You’re not writing a newspaper story for your school, or anything like that?” she asked, her lips trembling. “I don’t want everyone reading it. People have a sick fascination with those who die violently, and young.”

  “No, nothing, I swear. It’s just for me. Please tell me about him.”

  “He was nineteen when he died,” she murmured. “I was seventeen, which may not seem like much of a gap to you, but two years is a great deal at that age.”

  “Yes, I know.” I was seventeen, and I did know.

  “I had been watching him for years, as long as I can remember,” she went on. “He didn’t know I was alive, of course. He had his own friends, and when he left school our paths separated. He went to work in the mill, and I was still attending classes. But I didn’t forget him. I couldn’t. I used to watch for him to walk home at the end of the day. He would pass my house. He was so graceful.” Her gaze focused on the distance, and I knew she was seeing Tom walking home from work a half century before.

  “Then, that summer, I stopped off at the mill one day to bring my brother Ben his lunch. While I was waiting Tom came out onto the dock and looked at me. It was like he was seeing me for the first time, and I knew that I
was invisible no longer.”

  I waited breathlessly, enthralled by the story. I could see it playing out in my mind as she talked.

  “I was very pretty then,” she said self consciously. “Who could know it now?”

  “I’ve heard that you were very pretty, from someone who should know,” I said.

  She smiled distantly. “Well, I caught Tom’s eye that summer, you might say. He asked Ben if he could call on me. We were very old fashioned then. Tom asked me to a barn dance. I remember the smell of the hay, the heat in that big old stall and the way Tom’s shirt scratched my face as if it were yesterday.”

  I could feel the tightness in my throat that presaged tears. I should not have come to hear this. Her description of her loss was too close to what I knew I would have to deal with in the future. I knew him too, and I could imagine her suffering.

  “He kissed me that night,” she whispered, “for the first and only time. Three days later he was dead.” She looked back at me. “Do you know what’s been running through my mind all these years, like a refrain? Some lines of verse I picked up along the way. ‘Of all the sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: It might have been.’”

  I swiped quickly at my eyes to prevent the tears from falling. But she saw me.

  “My dear, don’t cry. I’m sorry that I’ve made you sad. My memories have comforted me, and helped me to endure.”

  “But you never married.”

  “Oh, no, I never found anyone who could quite measure up. It’s almost impossible to compete with a memory, you know. Mind you, I had offers. Quite a few, if I do say so myself. But I preferred to remain single.” She smiled. “I even convinced myself that I was a romantic figure for a while. But as the years passed I just became a rather peculiar old maid.”

  “I can’t believe you remember it so well after all this time,” I marveled.

  “Tom is not difficult to remember,” she replied. “He was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me, and the recollection has enlivened what proved to be a dull existence. The best was first, after all. He was a tough act to follow.”

  “And yet not much actually happened. One date, one kiss.”

  She nodded. “It doesn’t sound like much, does it? But it was. To my adolescent mind it was, anyway. It’s possible I have exaggerated the experience, but I don’t think so. I would have caught him if he’d lived. I don’t think he knew it, but I did.”