Time After Time

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  She sighed and glanced up at the three-foot-long calendar clock that hung on the kitchen wall, ticking as relentlessly as a time bomb.

  "Three o'clock!" Liz said, panicking all over again. "What was the point of dumping poor Susy on my parents?" She picked up the latest packet of unread letters and scowled at them in sheer frustration. "I'm ignoring my family, ignoring my work, ignoring everything except these godforsaken letters!" she cried, flinging the batch in a sliding heap across the kitchen table.

  Exactly at that moment they heard the old-fashioned br-rringg of her hand-cranked doorbell. Much later that night, Liz wondered about the significance of the visit; but for now, it merely represented an interruption she was in no mood to have.

  Which explains why she was downright surly when she flung the door open to greet a ponytailed young man with droopy eyes and wire-rimmed glasses who introduced himself as Grant Dade, fifth-year graduate student at nearby Brown University and author-in-progress of what he hoped would be a published doctoral dissertation titled "The Rise of Spiritualism in Two Ages of Excess."

  "Got a minute?" he asked with a John Lennon smile.

  "Mis-ter Dade," said Liz, exasperated, "I thought I told you on the phone this morning that I won't be making the letters available until sometime in the future."

  "If I could just ... if you could just hear me out. One minute. Please," he said, with the fierce resolve that only doctoral students almost through with their dissertations can muster.

  She sighed and gestured him in. "I've told the historical society and the — well, one other group — the exact same thing," she explained, folding her arms eloquently to back up her refusal. "So you needn't feel singled out or anything."

  She refused to sit down, hoping he'd get the message, but then Victoria wandered out and invited him to have a seat, so there they all were: ghostbuster, reincarnated con-woman, and crazed researcher. A nicely balanced group with a certain amount in common.

  Mr. Dade rolled back the cuffs of his denim shirt and gave his pitch. It was his theory — or would be, if he could just be first to get it published — that toward the end of every age of lavish spending, a backlash sets in of increased spiritualism. You could trace the pattern all through history, he said, but he himself was concentrating on comparing the Gilded Age of the 1890s to the decade of the high-flying 1980s.

  Victoria, dressed in her favorite New Age star-splashed sundress, said, "Really! So you don't think it's just typical end-of-the-century soul-searching? With an approaching millennium thrown in to boot?"

  "Not at all — God, no!" said the student, his eyes glittering with maniacal conviction. "I mean, think about it! In Gilded Age Newport —maybe the most concentrated example of excess since Rome — people thought nothing of budgeting three or four hundred thousand dollars for the summer's entertainment. For nothing! For fun!"

  He leaned forward in the wing chair; instinctively, Liz sat back in the sofa, easing away from him. He was too intense, too intent on converting her to his theory.

  He narrowed his eyes. "It was obscene," he said, hissing the word through clenched teeth. "Think what that money was worth a century ago. Consider the mansions: The Breakers; Rosecliff; The Elms; Marble House. They cost millions of dollars — millions of 1890s dollars — and were used a lousy six to eight weeks a year. And the people who built them made two stinking dollars a day!" he said, sneering in disgust.

  Liz was becoming more and more uncomfortable; he was making her feel like Nero's wife.

  She could see that he was struggling to calm himself so that he could go on. To some extent, he managed to succeed. His voice became dry and professorial as he suddenly sat up straight and said, "However, at the same time, spiritualism was making itself felt as a genuine force here. Mystics, esoterists, occultists — many of them the offspring of wealthy atheists — came forward to combat the Vanderbilts and Astors and Belmonts."

  His lecture ended abruptly. "That's why I need to see the letters," he said, eyeing the shoeboxes furtively. "Those are the letters, aren't they?"

  He forced himself to look away from them, to concentrate on Liz instead. "Please ... I'm so near the end of my dissertation ... I could read through them here, if you like," he begged in a suddenly pathetic voice. "I'll pay you rent; I'd be no bother."

  Mad as a hatter, Liz decided. Maybe all graduate students were. The pressure must be phenomenal. Not that she'd know: her only exposure to academe was a few evening courses at a community college before Susy was born.

  Looking warily at the stressed-out, teary-eyed graduate student now confronting her, Liz decided to cut the interview off once and for all. "I understand your enthusiasm, Mr. Dade, but if I gave you access, it wouldn't be fair to the others. I've already stated my plans," she said firmly. "I'm sorry I can't help you."

  She began walking to the door, assuming that he'd take the hint. When he stood there, apparently in disbelief, she repeated, "I'm sorry."

  Something in her tone got through to him. He flushed deeply — whether in anger or embarrassment, she couldn't say — and muttered, "I hope you reconsider."

  He got up and walked past her, but when he reached the door, he suddenly turned to her with a chilling look and whispered, "I really do."

  She took a step back, then watched through the front screen door as he climbed into a beat-up red Volvo and made a four-point U-turn on the narrow, lane-size street and tore out of there.

  "He's pissed," said Victoria evenly. "Did you get his license?"

  "I never thought of it," Liz said with a sinking sensation. "All I know about him are two syllables: Grant and Dade."

  "He goes to Brown," Victoria added. "He must be all right."

  Liz gave her friend a sideways look. She hated it whenever money talked instead of common sense. But there was no point in getting into that discussion again. For one thing, Liz was well aware that she had a blue-collar chip on her shoulder the size of Rhode Island. For another, she just didn't have the time.

  ****

  By eleven o'clock that night, Liz felt reasonably confident that Jack Eastman wouldn't kick her out of his boatyard office the following morning. The proposal wasn't to die for; but at least the food would be good, thanks to a last-minute cancelation that had freed up a favorite caterer of hers. If only she knew what to do with the kids! Boat rides were the obvious choice; but even she, a landlubber, understood the liability complications that boat rides would create for the shipyard.

  She stretched at the little Shaker desk that she'd set up for temporary office duty in the kitchen, and yawned, tired beyond measure after the last few nights. There would be no letter-reading tonight. She was sick of Victoria St. Onge's outrageous handwriting, sick of the hassle that the letters had brought into her life. In any case, she hadn't found a single new allusion to the rakish younger-brother artist. If he was so dashing, where the hell had he dashed off to? Liz slumped in the near-dark of her desk-lit kitchen, too tired to move, too weary to care.

  Normally she loved a night like this: thick, thick fog, with only the shrill, distant wail of the warning siren on the Newport Bridge and the low, flat moan of the foghorns in the harbor drifting through the window screens. But tonight she wasn't altogether comfortable with the soupy silence; it was more eerie-scary than eerie-neat. She wished she had Susy with her, or Victoria staying over.

  Dammit, she thought. I've let that graduate twerp get to me. She resented it thoroughly. What right had he to force himself into her life? And for what? So that he could add a few more footnotes to a piece of writing that no one would ever read? She had a good mind to call Brown the next day and complain to his department head.

  She stood up, yawned again, and surveyed the rubble from a day of last-ditch planning: papers on the desk and floor, dirty dishes on the desk and floor, and cookbooks and brochures everywhere. Liz was a tidy person by nature (she had to be, to live in a house that small), but tidy was the last thing on her mind right now.

  Sleep, blessed
sleep was her only thought as she turned her back on the mess and dragged herself up the stairs. She brushed her teeth, changed into a man's extra-large T-shirt, and went to bed. In less than two minutes, with visions of picnic tables dancing through her head, Liz fell fast asleep.

  ****

  The sharp crack of one dish against another was like the crack of lightning before a squall. Liz jerked up on one elbow, eyes wide open, mind still off in dreamland. Her first, irrational thought was that her mother was fixing a snack for Susy. Her second, less irrational thought was that it was awfully late for snacks.

  Someone is in the house. It didn't seem possible. Intruders were things that happened to other houses in other towns. Not here! Please, she prayed, not here.

  Then a second, sickening sound, of someone bumping into furniture. And her without an upstairs phone. A business phone in the basement, a home phone in the kitchen, and zip-nada upstairs. How dumb, dumb, dumb can you get?

  She had no Mace. Mace was for those other houses in other towns. And she certainly had no gun, not with a child in the house. If she were a witch, she could maybe cast a spell, but her psychic skills seemed to have come and gone.

  The fakeout. It was all she had. If you could repel an attacker with screams and shouts, you ought to be able to do the same with a burglar on another floor. Without taking the time to second-guess herself, Liz bolted from the bed with a loud commotion, deliberately knocking things over and screaming, "Jim, Jim — call the police! Get the gun! Do something!" and then began stomping down the stairs the way she imagined a two-hundred-pound Jim would do.

  It worked. Halfway down the stairs, she heard the back door slam.

  She paused, her heart knocking wildly in her chest. Then, still working on instinct, she ran to the back-door yard switch and threw it on, infusing the thick wet fog outside with bleary white light. She was in time to see a man — he certainly was no ghost — drop down on the other side of the barbed-wire fence and flee, stumbling, into the murky shadows on the grounds of East Gate.

  She ran to the phone and punched in the number of East Gate to rouse the house there. Jack Eastman picked up on the first ring. His voice sounded annoyed, which was understandable; it was one in the morning.

  "Jack! Quick!" she said without introducing herself. "Look out your windows for a burglar. I just chased one out of my house!"

  "Jesus! Call the police. I'll be right over."

  He slammed the receiver down before Liz could argue with him. She was baffled by his response; why rush to the barn after the horse had escaped? He should be guarding his own homestead. She ran to the front windows to wait for his car, and then, like a fool, ran barefoot out into the street to look for red Volvos. The street was quiet, the houses were dark; she lived on the kind of block where people had to get up early and go to work, party town or no party town.

  No Volvos. By now, Liz was shivering violently, and not just because the fog was cold and clammy: it was her first-ever bout with crime, except for the time her watch got stolen from under her beach blanket. The charmed life she'd been leading was officially over. She scurried back into her still-dark house, another disillusioned, frightened statistic.

  When she saw the shadowy figure looming in her kitchen again, she let out a scream that could be heard all the way to her parents' house.

  "Elizabeth, for God's sake — it's me!" cried Jack, fumbling in the dark. "Where the hell is a light switch around here?"

  "Oh — Jack," she said, dizzy with relief. She pulled the chain of an old glazed lamp that stood on the foyer table.

  Apparently he'd just got home; he was still dressed in gray trousers and a long-sleeved white shirt. The shirt was spattered with blood.

  She threw up her hands involuntarily. "Oh my god, you've killed him!" she cried, by now beyond the reach of simple logic.

  "Are you all right?" he said, reaching her in three long strides. He grabbed hold of her arms with his bloody hands. "Did he hurt you?"

  He was wearing a tie, even. She'd never been rescued by a knight in shining business clothes.

  "No ... I was upstairs ... he was an oaf ... he tripped ...." Her voice trailed off in confusion as she stared at the dark stains on his crisp white shirt.

  She took hold of one of his hands and turned it palm up. "Is this paint?" she asked in a daze. She drew her fingers across the red sheen that covered the palm. "Is this some kind of joke?" It was blood, of course; but she thought she smelled turpentine, which confused her still more. Nothing made sense. How had he gotten into the kitchen?

  "I scratched myself climbing over the barbed wire," he explained tersely. "C'mon. Sit down. You're shaking like a paint mixer yourself." He wrapped one arm around her and walked her to the wing chair, then sat her gently down in it. "Don't lean back until I wipe that blood off your arm," he said.

  "Oh, thank you," she answered with bizarre politeness, impressed by his thoughtfulness.

  He was on his way into the kitchen, but he turned and gave her an appraising look. "I guess the scare is sinking in. You look pretty pale for a dark-eyed girl."

  "No, no," she said. "You're the one who scared me. When I saw you standing by the clock."

  The clock, the paint, the blood ... wait—he's the wrong one.

  "Sorry about that," he answered from the kitchen. "I banged on the back door, but no one answered. I didn't know what ... anything could've happened to you."

  "I thought you were coming by car," she called back over the running water. "I went out to wait for you."

  He came back into the living room with a wet dish towel in his hands. "Dressed like that?" he asked with a bland half-smile.

  Liz looked down at the extra-large T-shirt she was wearing — that was all she was wearing — and felt her own blood do a U-turn from her feet back up to her face. She slammed both hands down between her thighs, pinning the T-shirt to the cushion, and slapped both thighs together in a gesture that was more pointless than prim. "I forgot," she explained numbly. "I was excited."

  Again the half-smile. "Aren't we both," he agreed, extricating one of her hands from the viselike grip of her thighs. He sat down on the chair's tufted hassock, rolled the sleeve of Liz's T-shirt back, and began wiping her upper arm clean of blood drops.

  Liz stared, fascinated, at his ringless hand. It was callused and deeply tanned, in vivid contrast to the starched whiteness of the French cuff of his shirt. His nails were blunt and clean but were neither manicured nor buffed; obviously he did honest-to-god labor when he wasn't wearing pinstripes. He may have been rich, but he sure wasn't idle. It was all very confusing.

  "Other arm," he said, the way a father might to his child. Liz held out her left arm dutifully. Her heartbeat, which had finally slowed back to normal, began to pick up the pace. He was so near. His hair, thick and dark and with a few odd strands of gray, had that rumpled look she associated with him. Probably from trying to pull it out with worry over the shipyard, she decided.

  He was shockingly handsome. Liz wondered how he'd managed to stay unattached all these years. He had to be really selfish or really picky, she decided; there were no other possibilities. She stared intently at his profile, with its shadow of a beard so vaguely familiar to her, and wondered what he'd look like, say, wearing a ball mask.

  Jack glanced up and caught her gaping at him. She said awkwardly, "You really are scratched up. Aren't you worried about tetanus?"

  He shrugged and held his hands palms-up her for inspection: there were several scratches and punctures, but the bleeding had stopped. "You own a boatyard, you get regular booster shots," he said. "Puncture wounds and boatyards go hand in hand."

  She shuddered again, upset by the thought of him gripping the barbed wire. He said, "You'll want to put something on; the police should be here any second."

  "The police? I didn't call the police," she said blankly.

  "What?"

  "1 saw the guy running; he wasn't carrying anything. And you were on your way; it never occurred to
me."

  "Oh, for God's sake," he said in disgust. "Where's the phone?"

  Chastened, she pointed to her little Shaker desk and waited while he made the very brief call. After that he made a second call.

  "Dad?" she heard him say. "Anything?" He listened and then said, "All right. Put the alarm on. I'll be back in a while .... No, we haven't spoken to them yet; she didn't call them .... How do I know why not? Maybe she believes in guardian angels .... Yeah. Bye."

  He hung up and surveyed the mess around the desk. His cheeks were flushed; obviously he'd had time to work himself into a snit.

  "Look at this place," Jack said angrily. "The guy tossed it. How the hell are you so sure nothing's missing?"

  "He didn't toss it," said Liz, embarrassed. "I did. That's how I work. And it's a good thing, too. If he hadn't stepped into my dishes, who knows how far he'd have gotten?"

  She folded her arms across her chest, but that had the effect of hiking her T-shirt higher, a luxury she couldn't afford, so she settled for yanking the sides of the T-shirt down low, which flattened the fabric over her breasts — also not a good idea.

  "How'd he get in?" Jack asked, with a burning look that left her unsure who it was that was getting in where.

  "I ... don't know. I must've forgotten to lock up. I was very tired."

  "Ah. I see. Right through the old door. Well, that saves wear and tear on your window screens, I suppose." He muttered something she couldn't hear, then ran his hand distractedly through his unruly hair. "What'd the guy look like? Can you tell me that, at least?"

  The implication that she was an absolute dodo rankled. "I certainly can," she said crisply. "I only saw him from behind, of course, but he was a tall male in pants and a shirt."

  "Excellent," Jack said with a thin smile. "That means we can quickly eliminate all the short men in dresses we come across."

  "Why are you being this way?" Liz said angrily. "I didn't commit the crime!" She brushed past him and began picking up books and dishes at random, then turned around sharply with an armful of debris and found herself nose to chest with him.