Shifting Shadows

by Sally Berneathy

  She’d never known Elizabeth’s father and couldn’t mourn him.

  “Analise, look.” Again Dylan’s voice startled her, and she whirled to find him pointing off to the side, to a large monument. She could read the names easily. The Holbert family plot. Logically, she realized, that would be where Elizabeth lay. With her husband, not with her parents.

  She walked slowly toward it, anger and fear overpowering her sadness—anger at Blake for what he’d done to Elizabeth and irrational fear as though he might come up from the grave to attack her again. She passed the tombstone that marked the resting places of Blake’s mother and father. Beside it stood a newer but similar one for Blake and Susan Holbert, husband and wife.

  That wasn’t possible! She stared at the carving, trying to make sense out of it. “I married him,” she whispered. “The journal proved it.”

  “Maybe he remarried,” Dylan suggested. “He lived a long time, until 1985.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed, grateful for his words even though she could hear the doubt in them. A deceased wife would be buried in her husband’s plot, even if she did later prove to be only the first wife.

  The evidence should have made her doubt herself, but she didn’t. She knew Elizabeth had been Blake’s first wife. Maybe she’d died young, and Mama had insisted she not be near him in death after the way he’d treated her in life. But Mama’s wishes would likely not have been honored.

  Glad to be leaving this place that held Blake’s remains, she continued on her familiar route. And there it was, the remembered gray stone. Gaston Dupard, Beloved Husband and Father. Born July 26, 1866. Died January 19, 1911. The carving was weathered, blurred, no longer as new and vivid as she remembered. But the pain of losing her father felt new and vivid.

  She forced herself to beat back the grief for someone she couldn’t possibly have known, to hang onto the real world, the present world.

  Tearing her gaze from the stone, she looked at the one beside it. Eileen Wagoner Dupard. Born June 25,1872. Died March 8, 1915.

  Mama! She sank to her knees, grief overwhelming her, grief as real as if it had happened yesterday, as if it belonged to her and not to someone long dead. Her fingers traced the dates on the stone. Mama had died in 1915, only three years after Elizabeth’s marriage to Blake. Mama hadn’t had much time to enjoy her financial security.

  The terseness of the carved facts suddenly hit her, the failure to award her status as a beloved mother. Elizabeth hadn’t buried her mother. She couldn’t remember Mama’s death, hadn’t been prepared to see her tombstone here.

  She hadn’t been there when Mama died.

  Involuntarily, inexorably, she felt her gaze being drawn to the other side of Papa’s grave.

  Elizabeth Catherine Dupard Holbert. Beloved Daughter and Wife. Born February 10, 1893. Died April 12, 1914.

  Chapter Nine

  The world began to swirl, to lose precision and definition. She stood slowly, stepped over to her own grave and sank again to her knees. Reality slipped away, earth and sky whirling into chaos.

  She reached out, laid her hand on the ground, tried to hang onto the solidity of the earth. But the soil dissolved. Her hand sank into a cold, clinging wetness that drew her downward, sucking the breath from her lungs. She pushed upward, but she was too heavy. Leaden skirts trapped her legs. She flailed her arms in vain....

  “Analise!” The word reached her as if from far away.

  Strong arms pinned hers, pulled her upward, free of the grip of the suffocating cold. She felt firm solidity—a denim jacket, a cotton shirt, a wide chest. She hung on for dear life, for sanity.

  Gradually the world stabilized, and she realized she was crying. Dylan held her, stroked her hair. It felt distressingly good. Just as he’d had the strength to overpower her the night before, that strength now reassured her, gave her something to hold on to.

  It reminded her of...something, someone. The elusive memory flitted around the periphery of her mind then darted away.

  Reluctantly she pushed back from Dylan, left the secure shelter of his arms. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I don’t usually cry. At least, I don’t think I do.” She forced a half smile at her own weak attempt at humor.

  He returned the smile, handed her a tissue, and she dabbed at her eyes.

  “I’m acting crazy, aren’t I?” she asked.

  He nodded, but his expression was nonjudgmental, sympathetic, giving her permission to be crazy right now.

  Gathering her courage, her sanity, and resolving to keep them, she turned back toward the graves.

  April 12. The date of Elizabeth’s death.

  “She died on the same day you fell down the stairs.” Dylan spoke quietly from behind her, echoing her thoughts.

  The day she herself could have died—had died and come back, if her dream was more than a fantasy.

  An eerie coincidence.

  With this new information, she searched her mind for memories that seemed to come when she heard about or discovered details of Analise’s and Elizabeth’s lives.

  Nothing came.

  She reminded herself that the carved stones marked the resting places of people long dead, people she knew only by dint of living in the house where they’d once lived, reading about their lives in a journal.

  But Elizabeth’s stone drew her gaze back for a last chilling look. Beloved Daughter and Wife. So why was she buried with her family and not with her husband? Because Mama had known how he’d treated her? But Blake could have easily overruled Mama’s wishes unless Elizabeth had done something so unforgivable that he hadn’t wanted to lie beside her, not even in death.

  The graves guarded their secrets, and Analise reluctantly turned to go.

  Dylan waited behind her, his shirtfront wrinkled from her tears. He stared at Elizabeth’s stone as if in a trance, and in his dark eyes, she fancied she could see storms raging, storms that should have spent their fury a century ago.

  “Dylan?” she queried softly, almost afraid to disturb his thoughts.

  He turned to her, his dark eyes in his unshaven face alive with fury and anguish. She stepped backward involuntarily. The pale sunlight became even paler, almost disappeared.

  He blinked, ran a hand over his jaw, and the strange expression vanished. He looked around as if to orient himself. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Let’s get out of this place. It’s giving me the creeps.”

  She nodded and fell into step beside him. He’d seemed to become completely involved in her fantasy last night when he’d grabbed the journal, when he’d kissed her. Had that just happened again as he looked at her grave? Something had happened. He’d been immersed in another world when she’d interrupted.

  “I’m sorry about your shirt,” she apologized. “I’m sorry I fell apart like that. Everything just...”

  “Seemed real to you?” he offered, and his voice was soft and deep, held no suspicion or sarcasm.

  “Yes,” she admitted. “It feels like this all happened recently. Mama—Elizabeth’s mother—was alive a few days ago, and now she’s dead. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like I really am Elizabeth, and I miss my family.” She shivered, as much from her thoughts as from the chill in the morning air. At the same time, she thought of Analise’s mother and father and resolved to visit them more often.

  Without a word, Dylan slid his faded denim jacket from his shoulders and settled it about hers. She started to protest that she really wasn’t cold, but the jacket surrounded her with the faint scents of earth and trees, of his male strength. The feel of the garment, still warm with his body heat, seduced her through the thin fabric of her own jacket, reminded her of how his lips had felt on hers.

  “Thank you,” she said. He’d seemed so understanding ever since they’d found the graves of her family—Elizabeth’s family—as though he knew how she felt. “Are your parents still living?” she asked.

  She felt the anger and pain before she looked up to see them on his face. “Only my mother,” he
answered. “My brother and father died recently.”

  “I’m sorry,” she murmured, afraid to question him any further, afraid of worsening the agony she’d obviously revived.

  He slipped his arm about her waist as they walked, and she sensed he was taking comfort as well as giving it.

  When they reached the car, he stopped. Leaning against the hood, he faced her, his eyes again opaque, bottomless oceans, the soul she’d so recently touched once again hidden from her.

  “So you’re having problems getting rid of the notion that you really are this other woman?” he asked.

  She nodded, tried to answer him honestly. “I know I’m not Elizabeth. That’s impossible, of course. I know I’m me, Analise.”

  “You have your memory back.” There it was again, that desperate need to know if she remembered...what?

  “No.” She shook her head. “Things keep returning a little at a time, and I have a sense of being me, Analise. But I still know more about Elizabeth than about Analise. It’s like Elizabeth and I are the same, like the secrets to Analise’s life are hidden in Elizabeth’s. I have to find out about her to know about myself.”

  His eyes narrowed intently. “Do you think you had a reason to choose her story beyond just living in the same house and having your accident on the day she died? Other parallels, maybe?”

  Analise reflected for a moment. Her feelings had been more instinctual, but what he said made sense. “Yes,” she replied.

  “That’s why you want to find the newspaper stories about her death?”

  Because Elizabeth’s death might somehow relate to Analise’s, or at least to attempts on Analise’s life? Was that the unspoken end of Dylan’s question? Was that why he had become so fascinated with Elizabeth?

  She shivered, wrapped the coat more closely about her, then remembered whose coat it was and tried to shrink away, pull inside herself. But the comforting warmth held her inexorably.

  Against her will, she looked up at him and found him looking at her, caught him unawares, his barriers down. In the midnight sky of his gaze she saw eternity, and she was one with him and with the universe. The sensation of merging and bonding was so strong she gasped and staggered backward a step.

  He lifted a hand to her cheek, stroked it gently. A blue jay shrieked raucously above them. Dylan dropped his hand, raised it to his eyes and stared at it curiously.

  The spell was broken for both of them. But something had been there. She’d felt it, and not for the first time. “What happened between you and me before my accident? What can’t I remember?”

  “Nothing happened. We were neighbors.” He sounded as baffled as she felt. Without another word, he went around to the driver’s door and opened it, motioning her in, his eyes fixed on a point just over her head.

  She slid in and fumbled for her seat belt.

  He climbed into the passenger seat beside her, his body and his presence seeming to fill the interior, expand into the empty spaces. And she was one of those empty spaces. She shivered with the same rush as the night before...fear or desire or both? What sort of power did this enigmatic man have over her?

  “Are we off to the library now?” he asked, as if nothing unusual had happened.

  We? She wasn’t sure she wanted him with her, that she felt safe letting him know whatever she might uncover. On the other hand, she couldn’t deny that she’d been grateful to have him today. And a part of her wanted him to be with her when she read about the details of Elizabeth’s death...that part of her he’d touched when he’d given her his coat.

  “I don’t think I’m up to any more discoveries today,” she said in compromise. “Anyway, I need to get to the shop. Lottie’s expecting me. I’ll have to make plans for her to open tomorrow so I can go to the library then.”

  “Okay,” he agreed. “We’ll go tomorrow.”

  She didn’t object. She could always manage to slip away in the morning before he noticed.

  Or maybe she couldn’t. Did he ever stop watching her?

  *~*~*

  She dropped Dylan at his house, assuring him she needed no assistance to get to her shop today. She fancied he would have liked to take her again, pick her up again. Because he wanted to be with her or because he wanted to be certain of her whereabouts all day?

  Don’t be paranoid, she warned herself. But she couldn’t dismiss the feeling.

  When she got to the shop, Lottie was already there, waiting in the little kitchen in back of the shop with a pot of hot tea and fresh croissants.

  “Do you come in this early every day?” Analise asked. “Don’t I ever open up and let you sleep late? And don’t I ever bring breakfast?” She picked up one of the croissants and took a bite, the buttery layers melting on her tongue.

  Lottie’s laughter tinkled like old crystal. “I like coming in early. It’s my choice. And you always insist on giving me a separate check every week to reimburse me for my little treats, though I always tell you I don’t want it. I enjoy cooking. My husband, God rest his soul, weighed over two hundred fifty pounds before he got sick. He always said I was a better cook than anybody, even his mother. Of course, he never said that in front of her.”

  Analise accepted a cup of tea and sank into a rickety chair at the scarred wooden table. Their best pieces of furniture didn’t make it to this room where nobody could see them.

  “So tell me what’s happened now,” Lottie invited, joining her. “Your aura’s positively vibrating this morning.”

  Analise felt blood rising to her face. Could Lottie somehow discern her strange affinity to Dylan? Did she know about the way his kiss, his touch affected her? Was that what she meant by a vibrating aura?

  “I found Elizabeth’s journal,” she said, diverting herself as well as Lottie from any thoughts either of them might have in that inexplicable direction. She told Lottie about the contents of Elizabeth’s journal and of her morning visit to the Holbert and Dupard graves.

  “So tomorrow morning I’d like to go to the library and read through back issues of the newspaper, if you don’t mind holding down the shop alone,” Analise concluded.

  “Of course I don’t mind.” Lottie tapped a short fingernail against her cup, her expression thoughtful. “We’re going to have to give serious consideration to the possibility that you’re the reincarnation of Elizabeth Dupard. That would explain the increased intensity of your aura and how you know so much about her life, even where she hid her journal. Living in her house and then having the accident must have jarred loose your memories. Though nothing is ever an accident, you know. There’s a reason for everything. I’d guess that you need to know about Elizabeth’s life to get this one right. That’s usually the only reason we’re allowed to remember our past lives.”

  Analise was unwilling to believe Lottie’s words yet unable to disbelieve them. She poured more tea for both of them and took a sip to wet her suddenly dry mouth.

  “There’s a logical explanation for everything,” she assured Lottie, though she hadn’t found one that would take away her gut feeling of being Elizabeth. “We don’t have to look to the supernatural.”

  Lottie eyed her over the rim of her translucent cup, returned it to the saucer. “Reincarnation isn’t supernatural. It’s all perfectly natural. Most of the world has always accepted it. Even the laws of physics confirm it. Nothing ever disappears, it just changes form. So our soul goes from one body to another, learning from our past mistakes, until we get it right.”

  “You keep saying that.” Analise ran a hand through her hair in frustration. “Get what right?”

  Lottie waved her fingers vaguely. “It could be something as encompassing as transcending earthly desires, as the Tibetan lamas try to do, or something as specific as learning how to get along with your mother.”

  “Or my husband?” The question escaped from Analise’s mouth before she realized she was even thinking it.

  “Or your husband,” Lottie repeated. “Why did you ask that? Do you think Phillip might h
ave been Blake?”

  “No, of course not.” But she’d confused him with Blake the first time she’d seen him and again last night when she’d feared he would hit her.

  “What about Dylan, your neighbor? Surely you realize it’s no accident he’s living right next door to you, in your friend’s house, and he just happened to come over the morning you fell.”

  No, she didn’t think it was an accident. But she doubted the reason for his presence in her life had anything to do with reincarnation.

  “Maybe he was Blake,” Lottie mused. “Are you frightened of him?”

  “Yes,” Analise admitted, then grinned wryly. “But you’ve got to remember, I’m frightened of everything and everyone. How would you like to wake up a hundred years in the future?”

  Lottie studied her for a moment then rose decisively from the table. “We don’t have many customers this early. Let’s put a sign in the window that we’ve stepped out for half an hour, and I’ll read your tarot cards.”

  First reincarnation and now tarot cards? This was a little too much. Of course she’d do no such thing.

  “All right,” she heard herself agree. What could it hurt, after all? And it would make Lottie happy.

  Her assistant left the room, returning almost immediately to rummage through her voluminous bag. “Ah, here we are.” She withdrew an oversize deck of cards.

  “Choose the card that represents you,” she said, offering Analise a selection of four colorful drawings.

  Analise knew this was crazy, but that was nothing new. Everything had been crazy since she’d awakened at the foot of the stairs.

  She selected a card.

  Lottie raised an eyebrow. “The Queen of Pentacles. A dark woman like Elizabeth, not fair like you are now.” She placed the card in the middle of the table, awkwardly shuffled the remainder and asked Analise to cut the cards.

  Analise complied, and Lottie lifted the top card from the deck. “This first card covers you. It represents your general environment, your obstacles.” She flipped it over, laid it across the Queen of Pentacles. From eyes as dark as midnight, the devil stared up at Analise.