Time After Time

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  Exasperated, Jack said with a dark look, "Do you want me out of here or not, goddammit?"

  She was forced to divide her attention between Jack and the apparition. "No, no, it's not you, Jack, really," she said as her glance darted from man to ghost and back again. "You're just an innocent bystander—"

  "Thank you very much," he said, unflattered.

  "I mean, it's not your fault that you happened to be here right now—"

  "I'd like to think I had something to do with it," he said, offended now. "What're you, the spider woman?"

  "Stop miscontruing what I say!" she snapped. "All right. There is a connection: you're an Eastman, which — no, no," she said, after considering it. "That has nothing to do with it. I bought the house and found the box, and you had nothing to do with that. I was right the first time. You're irrelevant."

  "Jesus," he said, watching her mind play Ping-Pong with itself.

  "I'm sorry," she repeated, completely wrung out at this point. "The stove—?"

  "Right," said Jack, unable to keep wary hostility out of his voice. "I'll check on it."

  He pulled on his khakis and, with a puzzled glance at the shuttered windows, walked out of the bedroom. They both understood that Liz had totally lost it; that she needed time to put herself back together again.

  Not a chance, she thought. Not if I had all the king's horses and all the king's men.

  She jumped out of bed and yanked the white quilt off it, wrapping the spread around herself and muttering, "This is what happens when you go too long without sex. The hormones overflow and go straight to your brain."

  She turned, ready to do battle with the phantom interloper.

  But there was nothing in front of the shuttered windows. No artist, no easel, no nothing. No snotty smile, no fierce look of concentration. Liz had a radarlike ability to pick up arrogance in a room. There was none there now.

  Clutching the quilt to her breast with one hand, she sliced through the air with the other, feeling for — she didn't know what. Some kind of ghastly coldness, maybe. She listened for the chime-sound, but the room was silent. Definitely gone, she decided, relieved.

  She staggered weak-kneed to the bed and collapsed on the edge of it, then pulled her longish cotton top over her head, wearing it like a nightshirt. You've got to tell Jack what you've been seeing, she decided. If he walks, he walks. Heck, after this fiasco, he'd walk if she didn't tell him.

  What a bizarre form of misery. It was one thing to chat casually about haunted estates; but to have a haunting in the middle of sex, ending with the man you love backing away from you with a fearful look on his face — well, that had to stop.

  She buried her head in her hands at the mortifying recollection of what she must have looked like, flailing her arms and screaming at walls. She stayed that way a long time, with one thought uppermost: How did I ever get into this mess?

  She never heard Jack — barefoot, of course — walk up the steps. He simply appeared in the room as magically as his great-great-grandfather had done moments earlier. In his hands Jack cradled a cup of tea.

  "For you," he said, offering Liz a flower-bedecked china cup. It was her prettiest one, and for some reason it made the tears that had been hanging back come rolling out.

  "Hey," he said in gentle alarm as he sat on the bed beside her, "I didn't think the sex was that bad."

  She smiled, despite her pain and embarrassment, and said, "I don't suppose there's any way in hell — on earth, I mean — that you saw him."

  "'Him.' " Jack pressed his lips together thoughtfully, then made a tisking sound of regret. "No, I would have to say not."

  Liz nodded and sipped from her tea, searching for a discreet way to explain what had happened.

  Another sip.

  And another.

  "Okay, here's the problem," she blurted at last. "Christopher Eastman keeps appearing to me, and I don't know how to get rid of him. As you were able to tell," she added dryly, "yelling doesn't work."

  Jack opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

  She waited.

  "My great-great-grandfather? You, ah, saw him?"

  "Yep."

  He fluttered his hand toward the windows. "Over there?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "So you're saying, what, that you saw him. In this room. While we were — hmm. Let me ask you this," he said, weighing his words. "When — exactly? — did he appear?"

  She chewed on her lower lip. "I can't say exactly. Naturally I didn't open my eyes and look around until, well, we were done," she added, coloring. "Naturally."

  "Oh boy. Oh boy oh boy ... oh boy." Jack dropped his gaze and began rubbing his middle finger back and forth across his forehead. Without looking at Liz, he said, "You've seen him before, I take it?"

  Relieved to be knocking down at least one barrier of secrecy between them, Liz ticked off the occasions: "I saw him by the longcase clock in your hall the first time I was at East Gate. I saw him on the afterdeck of the Déjà Vu, the day I came to the shipyard to discuss the picnic. I saw him last night, right here — I think. And of course, just now."

  She smiled and added wanly, "But that's really all."

  "Oh, good," Jack said. "Just so long as he's not a nuisance."

  Unable to sit still any longer, Jack got up and began to pace. There was nowhere to pace, of course, so he stopped and leaned against the wall; something about him reminded her of the artist, lounging by the clock.

  "And what makes you think this apparition is Christopher Eastman?"

  She shrugged. "Well, the way you're holding up that wall, for one thing. He does it just like you."

  Taking that for flippancy, Jack gave her a sharp look. She added quickly, "But besides that, there are the letters written by Victoria St. Onge. Some of them refer directly to him."

  "You never told me that."

  "You never asked."

  "How the hell—!"

  He brought himself back under control and said with a lawyer's precision, "I'm asking you now. What exactly did you learn about Christopher Eastman ... in the cache of letters ... you found in the trunk ... in your attic ... shortly after you purchased this house?"

  Liz put aside her teacup and folded her hands in her lap, like someone in a courtroom witness box. Alas, she was partly naked; but she felt sure that Jack wasn't aware of it. He was completely focused on hearing her answer.

  As clearly as she could, Liz recounted the bits and pieces about Christopher Eastman that she and Victoria had gleaned from Victoria St. Onge's lifetime of ramblings.

  Beginning with the artist's dashing appearance at the Black and White Ball (where Mercy St. Onge had fallen so hard for him), Liz went on to recount the story of his confrontation with Victoria St. Onge in the studio that used to exist where Liz's house now stood. Liz told Jack why his great-great-grandfather had thrown Victoria St. Onge out of his workplace: because the psychic had been snooping at some paintings he'd made of a beautiful auburn-haired nude who turned out to be a servant named Ophelia.

  Jack said nothing, but a dark flush passed over his cheeks. Liz interpreted the look to mean, "Like great-great-grandfather, like great-great-grandson."

  She went on to explain how at another date Victoria St. Onge, peeping through a folding screen in the dining hall at East Gate, had watched as Christopher Eastman replaced a place card at his mother's grandly set dinner table with one that had Ophelia's name on it, and then stuck a small heart- shaped pin in Ophelia's sand bucket instead of a gemstone favor like everyone else got.

  Jack, arms folded across his bare chest, had been staring at the little rag rug as Liz went through her paces. At the mention of the pin, he jerked his head up.

  "That's all she said? A heart-shaped pin?"

  Damn. He must've remembered the pin from the painting of Christopher's mother Lavinia in his entry hall.

  Liz had no desire to ruin Victoria's cosmic scheme to return the pin and redeem herself with the powers that be, so she an
swered Jack's question as narrowly as she could. After all, Jack didn't know that she'd found the pin in the red lacquered box.

  "Victoria St. Onge only wrote that the pin had a small garnet in it and that it wasn't worth very much."

  Jack frowned and went back to studying the rag rug. "I see. Go on."

  Liz said, "After Christopher left the dining room, Victoria St. Onge switched the small gemstone party favor in her own sand bucket with the heart-shaped pin in Ophelia's bucket."

  "What? Why? If she said herself it wasn't worth much."

  Liz shrugged vaguely and said, "She had a history of doing stuff like that — taking things out of spite. She admitted that she wanted to get back at Christopher for embarrassing her in front of her friends. I think she was also a bit of a kleptomaniac. Often she had no idea why she stole something."

  "This woman sounds damned unpleasant. Why the hell did your friend Tori assume her identity? Surely there were other ones available," Jack said, not bothering to hide his disbelief.

  "It's a long story," Liz said wearily. "Let me tell it to you some other time." The night was catching up with her. She wanted desperately to sleep, to be done with this waking dream turned nightmare.

  But no. Jack wasn't finished with her yet. "What else do you know," he said quietly, "about this Ophelia?"

  This Ophelia. Fairly or not, Liz heard condescension in Jack's voice, and she resented it.

  "Two days after that dinner party, Christopher's older brother was killed in a riding accident," she said. "You undoubtedly know that, and that your wild artist-ancestor was forced to grow up overnight and take control of the family empire. In any case, his love affair with Ophelia was put aside, and eventually he married Brunhilde. Did Brunhilde bring a minor fiefdom to the union? I've wondered."

  Ignoring her sarcasm, he stayed focused on the story. "Where does Victoria St. Onge fit in?"

  Liz shrugged and took a swallow of her tea. "She felt that by interfering in Christopher's party plans, she'd manipulated his destiny. She was a spiritualist, don't forget. She dabbled."

  "Okay, fair enough," he allowed "But where do you fit in? Why is Christopher Eastman appearing to you and not, say, to me?"

  Was he being sarcastic? This time she couldn't tell.

  Liz wasn't ready to confess that she was Ophelia's great-great-granddaughter, and so she simply said, "I'm the one who found the letters."

  "Yes, you did find them, didn't you?" said Jack, obviously seizing on a new line of reasoning. "And they sound like damned lively reading."

  "Some of it."

  "With lots of detail. Sure. It makes sense. You're a creative, imaginative woman, Liz. How hard could it be for you to conjure up the ghost of Christopher Eastman on the basis of those letters?"

  She let out a caustic laugh. "There's a left-handed compliment if I ever heard one. Anyway, don't you think I've thought of that possibility? But I saw Christopher Eastman by your grandfather clock before I read a single letter. It's true that Tori had discovered them and was reading through them at the very moment I saw him — but unless she and I shared the information telepathically, I don't see how I could have conjured up an artist—"

  "How could you tell he was an artist, anyway?"

  Liz described the stained, loose-fitting shirt he wore: how at first she thought the stains were blood but later realized that the shirt was a smock and the smears were paint.

  Jack wasn't convinced. He went up to the windows, threw open the painted shutters, and stared out at the distant harbor, working through the problem. "You were in the grand entry hall of an old dark house with a Gothic interior," he mused, thinking aloud. "You were ready to see a ghost. The ghost of choice is of a murderer; everyone knows that. So you saw blood; you inferred evil."

  He turned around to Liz with a look of obvious relief on his face. "Later, when you found out about Christopher Eastman and that he was an artist, you tweaked your vision to fit the new information. Your so-called ghost wasn't a murderer at all; he was an artist. Simple!"

  "Simple! You're the one who's simple!" she said, exploding. "Do you think I like believing what I'm seeing, Jack? I'm telling you: Christopher Eastman exists! In some way, in some form, for some reason! There are two many facts, too many coincidences — dammit!"

  She slammed her teacup on the nightstand, spilling tea on the appliquéd linen, then stood up and stepped into her skirt, still lying like a nest on the rag rug. As far as she was concerned, this party was over.

  Jack let out an exasperated curse and said, "Don't you get it? Don't you see that I'm trying to come up with a plausible theory to prove that—"

  "I'm not crazy? Forget it, Jack," she said, her cheeks hot with anger. "That ship has sailed."

  She began to dress, fumbling with the hooks and eyes on the skirt with no success whatever, then was forced to go through the minor humiliation of stepping back out of the skirt, walking over to the bureau, opening a drawer, taking out a pair of shorts, and slipping into them instead. All of this was done in stony silence in a room too small to contain two people in love, much less two people at war.

  When she was finished, she picked up Jack's discarded clothes and handed them to him.

  "What're these?" he said, snorting. "My marching orders?"

  She didn't know. She honestly didn't know. All she knew was that Susy was in Disney World and that they were blowing the best damned opportunity she'd had in five years.

  "Is the fund-raiser still on?" she asked, ignoring his question for one of her own.

  He looked bewildered by her detour. "Of course it's on," he said, pulling the T-shirt over his head. "The fund-raiser is business. This is—"

  "Pleasure?" she said sorrowfully. "I don't think so."

  Something in her tone of voice made his anger melt visibly. "Okay, what we're doing now isn't much fun," he said, taking her in his arms. "But we can deal with this, Elizabeth. Truly. You're not the first impressionable person who's seen something she can't explain," he said softly into her ear. "The good news is, there's no logical reason for Christopher Eastman to be appearing to you."

  He pulled his head back and looked down at her, anticipating her next crack. "Or is that the bad news?"

  Liz sighed and said, "Neither. It's just not true. There is a logical reason for him to be appearing to me."

  She hadn't wanted to tell him about Ophelia, but now she saw she had no choice. Her credibility — such as it was — was on the line. She led him silently downstairs where the oil portrait of Ophelia Ryan Pinhel stood leaning against the side of the sofa.

  "I haven't figured out where to hang it yet," Liz said, handing him the ornately framed painting.

  Jack accepted it with a puzzled look that disappeared at once when he saw the portrait. "This was painted by Christopher Eastman," he said quietly. "Ophelia?"

  "Yes. She was my great-great-grandmother."

  "My God."

  Obviously stunned, he seemed to take refuge in the portrait, studying it closely as he gathered his thoughts. "You're nothing alike," he said at last.

  He was the expert, she thought, blushing at the memory of their lovemaking; he ought to know. "Ophelia was pure Irish. I have more Portuguese blood than I do Irish."

  "Where did you get the painting?"

  "It came down through my family and ended up in my parents' attic. I remember it from when I was a child. It was the first racy picture I'd ever seen."

  Jack smiled at that, then returned to an examination of the reclining nude swathed in a paisley shawl. Liz could see that he was practically willing it to speak to him. He seemed to be racking his memory for mentions of Ophelia in the family history, but it was clear that he was coming up dry.

  "So tell me about this Ophelia."

  This Ophelia. Again!

  "Her affair with Christopher Eastman caused a great scandal in my family. After he abandoned her," Liz said, choosing the brutal verb deliberately, "a Portuguese shoemaker named Pinhel took pity on her and made an hon
est woman of her. We think."

  "God in heaven," Jack muttered. He let out a short, bleak laugh of disgust. "History repeats itself."

  Liz was thinking of her ex-husband: of the note he left on the kitchen table; of his flight from commitment. "I'm perfectly aware that history repeats itself," she said coldly. "You don't have to remind me of it."

  Jack looked up, puzzled. Then it dawned on him that they were on different wavelengths. Coloring, he said, "I was talking about myself, Liz. And my father. And his father. And now Christopher Eastman. About our amazing inability to stick with one woman. The Eastman curse," he said, more to himself than to her.

  "Curse? What curse? You sound like a vampire," Liz said impatiently as she took the painting back. "I've got news for you, Jack: That particular men's club has a very large membership."

  She laid the painting up against the side of the sofa, sorry that she'd let her bitterness show. He was who he was. They all were.

  When she turned around, more composed now, Jack said gently, "This is a painful subject — for each of us. Why don't we put it aside for now?"

  "True," she said, her voice catching in her throat. "We have so many other painful things we can talk about."

  "Stop, Liz. Painful or not, they need to be talked about. What we need now is—"

  "Some space. Please, Jack. I need to be by myself. For now, anyway." She looked at him with tense, pleading eyes.

  "I understand."

  Liz wondered if he was thinking, Hell, I don't have a condom anyway. She was appalled by her own cynicism; it was getting worse, not better.

  Jack touched his fingertips to her lips, still puffy from their lovemaking, and smiled an almost unbearably kind smile. "You'll be all right here alone?"

  "For sure," she said in a carefree lie. It was an impossible situation: She couldn't sleep with him, she wouldn't sleep without him. But she looked at the clock and feigned a yawn, trying to make it easy for him to leave. "Ten-thirty. Where does the time go?"

  They walked to the door together, carefully avoiding the subject of his people and hers, and discussed the fund-raiser instead. They decided that it would be Liz who would approach the executive director of Anne's Place; Jack would be available by phone if needed. It was all very businesslike, all very free of emotion. It set the tone for his farewell at the threshold.