But the best they could do was try to see the truth brought out. She had never dreaded any moment so much as the one just ahead, but she owed it to Hart to walk through that door and confront Sibyl Forrester with her deeds.
Alistair rang the bell, than knocked. “They don’t always hear the bell.”
Raymond answered the door, looking hot and bothered, his round pink face with its white goatee having the appearance of a troubled but cherubic angel. He seemed so mild and unthreatening that it was hard for Hart to imagine him as the motive for a woman’s death.
She heard loud voices coming from the living room behind him. “Don’t see why you think you can come here troubling us about a woman who died a lifetime ago. We’re nearly ninety, my husband and me, surely we deserve some peace at our age. We’ve earned that, at least.”
Serena’s voice answered Sibyl’s with equal firmness and no touch of the hysteria in the other woman’s. “We certainly didn’t think of it as harassing you, Mrs. Forrester, but felt that you would be willing to help us for the sake of your old friends and neighbors. We only want to put closure on something that has troubled our family for generations now.”
“Stacia Larkin was no friend of mine and as for the rest of your family, you don’t seem to realize that they were just trash, the kind of people I would have walked around if I met them in the street.”
Hart stepped past Alistair in time to see Serena’s blazing eyes as she retorted, “They were only poor, Mrs. Forrester. When did poverty become a crime?”
“If they weren’t lazy and no count, they wouldn’t be poor. If they tried to get ahead like the rest of us instead of expecting a handout and breeding like rabbits, then they could manage well enough.”
Her anger stirred to action, Hart forgot herself. “My Dad worked harder than anyone I know. So did my mother and we were all brought up that way. And as for the size of the family, that was their business and they looked after their kids and loved each as though it was the only one!”
The room went silent after her blast of words. Bobbi Lawrence eased from her chair and came over to touch Hart’s shoulder with reassurance. Serena looked troubled, but Sibyl just glared at her with a frightening rage.
It was Raymond Forrester who responded to her challenge. “Hart, Sibyl wasn’t talking about your family. Everybody knows that the Hartleys were the most prosperous family in the Medicine Stick area and your mother’s grandmother only had the one child.”
Alistair stepped in. “I’m here officially,” he said, “as the sheriff. This isn’t just a visit.”
His tone was different, he didn’t sound like the usual easy-going Alistair, not even to Hart. She wondered if this was how he was when he was at work, dealing with law-breakers.
They all looked at him, even Bobbi Lawrence sitting back down in her chair, her brown hair glistening and the brown eyes bright with interest. Serena made a move as though to get up and leave like she thought that would be the polite thing to do. Then, at a slight nod from the sheriff, sat back down, her hand reaching out for her granddaughter’s.
Hart stood off to the side, her pounding heart belying her look of calm. She felt more like an observer as she watched Alistair begin his confrontation.
He focused his gaze on Sibyl Forrester, who of them all seemed the least uncomfortable. She looked every inch the poised and self-assured matron, but her husband, still on his feet, swayed uneasily. For the first time Hart wondered how much he knew. Certainly he’d been there in Medicine Stick that night and when Sibyl finally let him out of the cellar, he must have guessed at strange happenings.
“The necklace with the big diamond in the center that was stolen,” Alistair began and Hart frowned, not having heard about this before, “and the old school picture. What really happened to them?”
Raymond shuffled anxiously. “I told you, sheriff, somebody slipped in while we were sleeping and took both items. That necklace had been handed down to my wife from her grandmother.”
Alistair shook his head. “My deputy is bringing a warrant right now. We’re going to search the house,” his voice was soft, but firm with intent. “Don’t you think one or the other might be found here? Either one will do.”
My necklace, Hart thought in bewilderment. But it sure wasn’t a real diamond. Mom bought it at the ten cent store ‘cause she thought it was so pretty. She gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday.
“You are talking pure nonsense, Alistair,” Sibyl said, giving a little laugh. “Why would I steal my own necklace or an old school picture?”
Raymond didn’t say anything.
“My guess is because that school photo of the year when both you and Stacia Larkin graduated would show her wearing that necklace. Selena here told me that her sister loved that necklace her mother had given her and wore it on all special occasions. Getting their picture taken senior year would have been a real special occasion.”
“What nonsense!” Sibyl scoffed. “Stacia Larkin’s parents could never have given her anything of real value.”
“It was fake,” Hart said, “not a real diamond.”
“You took it off her after you killed her. You knelt over her dead body and unclasped that necklace and put it on yourself. That was how much you hated her.”
At Alistair’s words Serena gasped. Bobbi put an arm around her grandmother, encircling her protectively.
The atmosphere in the room was tense enough to cause glass to shatter, Hart thought.
“She didn’t know what she was doing,” Ray said mournfully. “She was out of her mind and in a way it was all my fault.”
“It was a small hand gun,” Alistair continued unrelentingly. “And I suspect if we send divers down we’ll find it still somewhere in the bottom of the lake. The gun you aimed at Stacia Larkin and used to shoot a bullet through her head. And then you pulled her body into the old store where you thought nobody would ever find it after the water was released the next morning to pour into the lake.”
Total silence fell on the room and Hart watched through the window as a uniformed Wichita County deputy parked his car next to his boss’s and, papers in his hand, walked importantly toward the front door.
“What I don’t get is why you went after Hart? Why did you burn her loft?”
Sibyl Forrester laughed, a soft, very reasonable sound. She didn’t seem at all like a woman not in possession of her senses, but she got to her feet, walking slowly past the sheriff to confront Hart.
Her face was very close, her gaze staring straight into Hart’s eyes. “Do you think I don’t know you’re in there, Stacia? Don’t you realize I would recognize you wherever you were?”
Chills ran down Hart’s back, but she held her ground while Alistair opened the door for his deputy and instructed him to read her rights to Sibyl Forrester while Helen’s granddaughter Serena sobbed quietly in the background.
Sibyl had never known she’d gotten it wrong on both counts. It was Hart, not Sibyl her husband had loved. And it was, physically at least, Stacia she’d killed once and then tried to kill again.
Epilogue
The scent of stale smoke still hovered strongly in the air as Hart and her husband sifted through what was left of the contents of her loft. Against the advice of all her friends, Mrs. Harris had decided to plow the insurance money back into the old building, saying the business had been started by her mama and she didn’t intend to be the one to shut it down.
So before work started, this was Hart’s chance to make sure there wasn’t anything she treasured remaining intact. It seemed unlikely, even the furniture had burned, the rugs melted into what was left of the floor.
Alistair advised her to step carefully around the big hole in the middle of the living room where the boards had fallen through, leaving only the charred framework of what had once been the floor.
He was first into the bedroom and called back to her that it wasn’t so bad in here. She followed his voice and saw that though the window frames had burned and most
of the furnishings on the west side of the room were in ashes, somehow her bed and the vanity beyond still stood in place.
He was the one to see something sticking out from under her blackened pillow and reached under to retrieve a small, faded brown book that she first remembered reading when it was bright and new back in 1947. She took it from him and, holding in her hands, her own copy of Take Three Tenses, she began to cry soundlessly.
“I’m sorry, hon,” Alistair whispered, wrapping her into his arms, “You’ve lost more than any one person should lose in a lifetime.”
She looked past him into the crazed and cracked image in the mirror where she and the tall man in a cowboy hat that she loved were reflected. She was getting used to that new image of herself, the one she would have to live with for the rest of her life, and no longer felt such a fraud. Somehow she knew that in one instant, Hart had willingly chosen to hand her life over for the woman who had played such a strange part in her years from the time they were both children.
She pressed her face against Alistair’s shoulder. “It isn’t all loss,” she whispered. “After all, we have each other.”
They were in the midst of an embrace when they heard someone clattering up the rickety remains of the stairs, heard a loud, “Wow!” apparently at the missing part of the living room floor, and then Bobbi Lawrence came into the room.
“Granny and I are getting ready to leave,” she said, her smile only a little embarrassed at having caught them in a caress. “I just had to say goodbye to you, Stacia. We haven’t known each other long, but you feel sort of like family to me.”
With a wave, she was gone, only calling back from somewhere down the stairs, “Hart! I meant to say Hart.”
Hart and Alistair were left staring at each other with wide, startled eyes.
The End
Barbara Bartholomew became intrigued with the notion of time travel when she was a little girl and listened to her grandfather talk about the possibility that time was itself a separate dimension and discuss Einstein’s theories on the subject. Her first published short story was “Wheel of Fire” in Analog magazine, which saw a traveler venturing into Elizabethan times, and in the 1980s she wrote the time travel trilogy for young adults, The Time Keeper, Child of Tomorrow and When Dreamers Cease to Dream after an editor asked her what she would write if her choices were wide open. Now as an independent writer, she has made the same choice and likes to explore lasting relationships against a backdrop of a constantly changing fantasy world.
Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series) Page 16
