by John Saul
As their parents disappeared behind the double doors to East Two, Kim and Jared looked at each other.
None of it was anything like what they'd expected.
Not the town.
Not the sanatorium.
Once again the same thought occurred to both of them at the same time, and as always, both of them knew it. As if by some kind of silent communion, it was agreed that Jared would voice the question.
"Our aunt Cora..." he began uncertainly. "We've never met her, but we've heard—" He hesitated, but the words his father had invariably used finally fell from his lips. "Is she really crazy?"
Bea LeBecque stopped her gentle bouncing of Molly, and the little girl cocked her head, peering up into Bea's face as if she, too, were waiting to hear the answer to her big brother's question.
"She's very old," the receptionist finally replied. "And she's been very alone. But is she crazy?" She fell silent for a long moment, then her head moved in a slow nod. "Now that I think about it," she said softly, "I hope she is." She was silent again, then: "For her sake, I hope she is."
Janet laid a hand on Ted's arm just as he was about to open the door to his aunt's room. When he turned to look at her, she could still see the hangover in his eyes, but today the toll of his drinking appeared even greater than usual: the sharp planes of his cheeks and chin were blurring, and a network of veins was appearing on his nose. But more than that, there was an underlying anger in the grim set of his features that Janet hadn't seen before.
Or, more than likely, she thought, hadn't let herself see. But of course, she knew in her heart that the anger had been there for a long time. It wasn't as if Ted had tried to hide it. He'd even used it as an excuse for his drinking, shifting responsibility from one problem to another, shoring up one excuse with another until so much of him had disappeared into his defensiveness that she'd sometimes wondered if there was anything left of the man she had married.
Nobody, to hear him tell it, had ever given him a decent break; not his parents, who had split up when he was a baby, or any of the people he'd worked for. And certainly not his aunt Cora, who had been in this room through most of his life, becoming nothing more to him than a burden of guilt he'd always resented. But now it was almost over.
"She's dying, Ted," Janet repeated softly, her eyes meeting his. "I know how you feel about her, but all she wants to do is say goodbye." For a moment she wondered if he'd heard her, but then he gently stroked her cheek with a single finger, in a gesture she hadn't felt in years.
"Hey, I know I'm not always the easiest guy in the world to get along with, but I'm not a monster, okay?"
"Last night you said—"
"Last night I had a lot top much to drink. And I'm not going to pretend I didn't pay for it this morning, and made you and the kids pay for it, too." He forced a smile that Janet sensed was masking pain he couldn't let her see. "I'm not going to try to even any scores," he promised. "It's way too late for that."
The door to Cora Conway's room opened and a priest emerged. He was ancient, his face deeply creased, his shoulders stooped as if with the weight of the decades of confessions he'd heard. From the waist of his cassock hung the beads of a rosary, and in his arms he cradled a Bible that looked even older than he, the finish of its leather cover long ago worn away by the hands of those who studied it, the binding of its spine weakened—but not quite broken—from constant use. As he pulled the door closed behind him, almost as if to shut out his penitent's final visitors, his eyes fixed on Ted. His mouth worked as if he were about to speak, but then his lips closed and he turned away. With a step so halting he seemed about to fall, the priest made his way down the hall and disappeared around the corner.
Only when he'd vanished did Ted grasp the handle of his aunt's door. A moment later he stepped into Cora Conway's room, Janet closely following him.
Both of them smelled death in the air. It seemed they were too late; surely no life could remain in the still and shrunken figure that lay in the bed.
Cora's wispy hair was matted against her scalp, and her eyes were shut. Her left hand lay in her lap, but her right was closed on an object suspended from a chain around her neck.
There was a stillness to the room, a heavy silence that made Janet slip her hand into Ted's.
Another gesture that hadn't occurred in recent years.
Then, out of the stillness, there was a rasping gurgle.
Cora Conway's chest rose as she sucked air into her weak lungs, and her rheumy eyes opened.
She blinked.
Finally her eyes moved, slowly scanning the room, as if she were searching for something.
At last they came to rest on Ted Conway. "Stay away," she gasped, her voice barely audible. "Stay away from here."
Instantly, Janet stepped around Ted and lay her hand on the old woman's shoulder. "It's all right, Aunt Cora. Everything is going to be all right."
The old woman's collapsed lips worked as she struggled to formulate words. "The children," she finally managed to whisper. "I want to see the children." Janet hesitated, gazing down into the ruined face of the dying woman, but Cora's eyes locked onto her own, and the old woman's left hand closed on her wrist. "Bring them," Cora whispered. The words, though barely audible, were not a plea. Rather, they were a command. "Bring them to me!"
Still Janet hesitated. In all the years she and Ted had been married, they'd visited Cora Conway only half a dozen times. The visits had been brief, for Ted's aunt had invariably commanded him to leave—just as she had today. The last two times Janet had come, she hadn't even tried to convince Ted to join her.
She had never brought the children, afraid that they would be terrified of the strange old woman, and that Cora would only become more agitated than she already was. Nor had Cora ever asked for them before; indeed, Janet couldn't tell if the old woman had even understood her when she talked about them. Now, though, it was clear.
Cora Conway wanted to see the children.
And certainly Jared and Kim were old enough not only to understand their great-aunt's condition, but the mental illness that had blighted so much of her life.
Making up her mind, she covered Cora's clutching hand with her own reassuring one, and bent low so she was speaking directly into Cora's ear. "I'll get them," she said. "I'll be right back."
"I'll stay with Molly," Ted said, following her back out to the reception area.
Janet nodded her agreement, relieved that at least this one time Ted's motives—which she suspected were primarily rooted in a desire to escape his aunt—coincided with her own needs. "It won't be long," she assured him. "It seems like she's barely hanging on."
On the way back to Cora's room, Janet tried to prepare Jared and Kim for the dying old woman who was their closest living relative, but the moment the twins stepped into the room, she knew she needn't have worried.
Showing no sign that they noticed the odor of disinfectant and death, the twins went directly to the bed. "Aunt Cora?" Kim said. "I'm Kim. It's so nice to finally meet you."
Cora Conway's eyes fixed on Kim for a fraction of a second, then shifted to Jared, fastening onto him with a burning intensity. For a long time she said nothing.
Finally, the boy extended his hand, as if to touch her. "I'm Jared—" he began, but Cora cut him off, shrinking from his touch.
"A Conway," she said. "I can see it. Stay away! Stay away from here!"
Jared, recoiling from his aunt's words, glanced nervously at his mother, then tried again. "It's all right, Aunt Cora," he said, this time reaching out and placing his hand gently on her shoulder.
Cora twitched away, as if she had been pricked by a needle. "Go!" she rasped. "Go now!"
Jared glanced at his mother, who tilted her head almost imperceptibly toward the door. "I'm sorry," he said softly. "I didn't mean to ..." His voice trailed off as he realized his aunt Cora had already shifted her attention back to his sister. "I'm sorry," he repeated once more, then quickly backed away from the bed, tur
ned, and hurried from the room.
As soon as Jared was gone, Cora pulled herself up in the bed. Her hands fumbled with the chain around her neck. "Wear this," she said, her voice croaking as she struggled with the chain's tiny clasp.
"Let me help you," Janet offered, moving closer to the bed.
Cora shook her head. "Kimberley. Kimberley must do it!" Exhausted by her efforts, Cora dropped back against the pillows and lay still as her great-niece carefully unfastened the clasp and lifted the chain from the old woman's neck. As the tiny golden cross hung before her, Cora reached out for it, almost as if to take it back, but then dropped her hand onto the coverlet. "Put it on," she told Kim. She fell silent again, but her eyes missed nothing as Kim carefully put the chain around her own neck, fastened it, then touched the small gold cross. "There is another one," Cora said when she was satisfied that the cross was in place. "In the drawer." She waited as Kim opened the drawer, searched for a moment, then found a second cross, identical to the one that now hung around her neck. "For the little one," Cora whispered. Her eyes flicked away from Kim, fastening on the place where Jared had stood a few moments ago. She smiled, as if recognizing some person unseen by either Janet or Kim, and both mother and daughter could see the tension draining from the old woman's body. "It will protect you," she whispered. "Just as it protected me. Don't ever take it off."
Suddenly, she extended both arms, as if to welcome an embrace. Her smile broadened, her eyes cleared, and the years seemed to fall away from her.
Before either Janet or Kim could move toward her, Cora's hands dropped back to her sides. With a long sigh she relaxed into her pillows, her eyes closing as if she'd fallen into a deep sleep.
Her breathing stopped.
Then, in a flash so brief Kim would never be certain it had actually happened, she sensed the light in the room had changed, muted into a golden glow that suffused the air.
Beautiful, she thought. So beautiful.
"I'll take Molly's cross," Janet said quietly as she led Kim toward the door a moment later. "When she's old enough, we'll give it to her together, and tell her where it came from."
Kim barely heard the words, and as she was leaving, she turned to look back.
The soft, serene light had vanished as utterly as if it had never been there at all.
The golden glow—like her aunt Cora—had gone and now the room seemed dark and cold.
So cold it made Kim shudder.
CHAPTER 5
I'm so sorry, Mr. Conway." The sympathetic expression in Beatrice LeBecque's eyes and the genuine sorrow in her voice told Ted what had happened far more clearly than the woman's words. He hadn't been too surprised when Jared came back into the reception area only a few minutes after he'd left with his mother and sister. Nor had his aunt's reaction to his son surprised him; indeed, it was her desire to see Jared at all that had caught him off guard. "Don't take it personally," he'd advised. "It doesn't have anything to do with you. It has to do with the fact that you're a male."
"If she's got a problem with men, how come she married your uncle?" Jared asked, relieving his father of Molly, who'd been squirming uncomfortably in Ted's lap.
"You got me on that one. Who knows? Maybe it was Uncle George killing himself that soured her in the first place. Anyway, she sure never got over it."
They'd fallen silent then, Ted leafing through a magazine as the last vestiges of his hangover finally lifted, while Jared played a game with Molly, the rules of which seemed far clearer to the toddler than to her big brother. When the phone on Bea LeBecque's desk rang, both of them looked up, sharply. Now even Molly was silent, sitting quietly on her brother's lap.
So, the old lady was finally gone. Ted tried to analyze what he felt:
Grief? How could you feel grief for someone you'd barely known, and from whom you'd never heard a friendly word, let alone a kind one?
Loss? Of what? Certainly not family, since he had no memory of ever having seen his aunt anywhere but here. The only family he knew—had ever known, really—was Janet. Janet, and their children.
Sympathy? A little. At least Cora Conway was finally released from whatever had tortured her for so long. And he felt relief. Relief that the ordeal was finally over. A twinge of guilt stabbed at him as he realized that most of the relief he felt was for himself rather than for his aunt. He tried to tell himself that he had no reason to feel guilty, that if she'd tried to be even halfway decent to him, he'd have come to see her more often, tried to do more to make her life a little easier. Except that now, with his hangover finally gone, he knew the truth: he could have ignored her treatment of him, could have risen above the invective she had poured over him. She'd been old, and ill in her mind as well as her body.
He'd ignored her very existence.
And now she was dead.
No loss, no sorrow, no sense that something valuable was gone out of his life.
Just guilt.
Well, at least I can take care of her now, he told himself. With his head finally clear—at least of alcohol—Ted's talent for organization, which had made him so good at his job before he'd started drinking, came to the fore, and he began making a mental checklist of things that would need to be dealt with.
As it turned out, though, all the arrangements had been made long ago. "She had some very good days, you know," Bea LeBecque explained as she gave him the letter in which all of his aunt's plans were laid out, and to which she'd attached the receipts indicating that Cora had paid her own funeral expenses in advance. "Really, all you need to do is contact Bruce Wilcox." The name meant nothing to Ted. "Your aunt's attorney," the receptionist explained. She picked up the phone on her desk and dialed the lawyer's number from memory, then handed the receiver to Ted.
Ten minutes later, with Janet and Kim back in the reception area, Ted repeated what the lawyer had told him.
"There's some kind of trust," he explained. "I'm not sure I understand it, but this guy Wilcox says Aunt Cora ' tried to break it a long time ago, and couldn't."
Janet's eyes clouded. "Why did she want to break it?"
"Wilcox said she wanted to get rid of the house. But apparently that was the whole point of the trust—to keep the house in the family."
"So we've inherited a house?" Janet asked.
Ted shook his head. "What we've got, the way Wilcox explained it, is the right to live in a house."
They gazed at it in silence. Their eyes moved over the massive structure that stood amidst an acre of land so overgrown with weeds that it was hard to tell where—or indeed if—gardens might ever have existed.
Besides the enormous gabled building that was the house, there was also a large carriage house—big enough for half a dozen cars, apparently with some kind of apartment above it.
Though most of the windows of both buildings were intact, the paint had peeled away from the clapboard siding, and the smashed roofing slates that lay around the perimeter of the house testified to the water damage they might expect inside.
Vines, unchecked by any hand, had threaded their way through the great willows, oaks, and magnolias that dotted the property and were banked against the house itself. Tendrils were creeping toward the eaves, and had established a hold on one of the half-dozen gables that pierced the steeply pitched Victorian roof three stories above them.
But more than the broken windows, the fallen slates, the peeling paint, and the kudzu, there was an atmosphere hanging over the house—a dark melancholy—that all of them felt.
It was Molly who finally spoke. "Wanna go home," she said plaintively, her tiny hand clutching her mother's.
Janet lifted her youngest child into her arms. "In a little while," she promised. "We just need to look around first. All right?"
Molly said nothing, but stuck a reassuring thumb into her mouth and began sucking. For once, Janet made no effort to stop her.
"I wonder what the inside looks like," Ted mused, starting to pick his way through the tangle of weeds toward the broad front
porch. The broken remnants of the ornate gingerbread trim that had once graced the eaves and posts of the porch now looked like the jagged remains of broken teeth surrounding the gaping maw of some dying beast.
"Is it even safe to go up there?" Janet fretted, tentatively following him. "What if the porch collapses?"
"It's not going to," Ted assured her. "They built these old places to last. The frame's probably oak." He stopped and considered the looming mass of the house, a few yards away now. "When you think about it, it's not in such bad shape, considering it's a hundred and twenty-five years old and no one's lived in it for the last forty years."
"It doesn't look like anyone's even been inside it," Janet replied.
Ted winked at Jared. "What do you think?" he asked his son. "You game?"
Jared's reply was to start ripping his way through the tangle, tearing vines from the railing and steps before gingerly testing the strength of the old wood. "Dad's right," he called back to his mother and sisters. "It's fine!"
Ted tried the keys Bruce Wilcox had given him, and found a fit on the third one. The lock stuck, and he had to jiggle the key several times, until he felt it twist and the bolt slide back. Then the latch clicked, and the door itself—a huge slab of ornately paneled and molded oak hung from four tarnished brass hinges—swung slowly open.
Inside the front door was a large entry hall, with arched double doors leading into two enormous rooms—one of which had apparently been the living room. The other looked to Ted as if it must have been a reception room for the Porte cochere that lay on the side of the house closest to the garage. At the far end of the entry hall was a graceful staircase that swept up to a small landing. The stairs split at the landing, leading in opposite directions to the symmetrical wings of a mahogany-railed mezzanine that provided access to the rooms on the second floor, as well as a clear view of the broad entry hall below. Suspended from the vaulted roof of the entry hall was an ornate chandelier, the sparkle of its crystal pendants dimmed by a thick layer of grime. Flanking the base of the staircase were two more corridors, leading to more doors.
