Summer Of Fear (17 page)

“No,” Mary said. “Not at school. We weren’t permitted to keep pets in the dormitory.” She sounded bewildered. “Why did you ask that?”

The conversation was taking me nowhere. Worse than that, Mary was beginning to become suspicious. I had put through my phone call impulsively without having properly planned it, and as a result I was floundering. My precious opportunity was being wasted and it would not come again.

“Who did you say this was?” Mary Carncross asked. “Are you really a cousin of Julie’s? Are you sure this is a long distance call? You’re not just somebody playing a joke?”

There was no help for it. I must plunge ahead or the chance would be lost forever.

“Do you know,” I asked, “if Julia ever made a study of witchcraft?”

There was a long pause. When Mary finally spoke again, her voice was clipped and cold.

“I don’t know what kind of kook you are,” she said shortly, “or why you decided to call me, but you’d better not make any accusations about Julie Grant. I’ve been her roommate for two years and I know her backwards and forwards. She’s as clean and straight and open as sunshine. You’re either a troublemaker out to hurt her, or you’re just plain crazy.”

“Just plain crazy”? Was I? My suspicions would seem so to many people. Mary Carncross thought Julia one of the finest people in the world. It was not as though she didn’t know her either, for as her roommate of two years she should know her better than I. Was it possible that anyone as evil as the Julia I knew—or thought I knew—could keep up a pretext that long? Would Mary Carncross lie to protect her? If so, why?

Am I crazy? I asked myself. I could not believe that I was. I was on the edge of something crazy, perhaps, but I myself was sane. I knew the things that Julia had done. I had not invented them. The professor understood, I could tell that by his eyes. The fear there last night had not been imagined. Something terrible was happening one step at a time, and the fact that I had no proof to offer did not make it any the less real.

What should I do now?

An immediate answer occurred to me, one thing that must be done before any other, and I did it. Still by the telephone, I looked up the number of the Presbyterian Hospital and dialed it.

“Hello,” I said. “I am calling to tell you that the life of your patient Professor Jarvis has been threatened. If you have any regard for his safety you will restrict all visitors to members of his immediate family.”

Not waiting for a response, I replaced the receiver on the hook. I could imagine the reaction at the front desk of the hospital office. Would the plump woman I had seen there the night before still be on duty? If so, she had probably fainted on top of the visitors’ register. Or perhaps a replacement had taken over her position by this time, someone who had never heard of Professor Jarvis. She would now be flipping frantically through the book of patients, trying to place him. Now she would have found him. She would be lifting the receiver—dialing someone with authority.

“I’ve had the most disturbing call,” she might be saying. “A murder threat to one of our patients!”

So much for that, I thought with a feeling of satisfaction. Julia would not have a chance to walk three times clockwise around that particular bed.

But in making the call I had cut off my own contact with the professor as well as Julia’s. That contact might have been extremely helpful. The night before, in my final moment at the hospital, I had come to realize that it was possible to communicate with Professor Jarvis. His eyes had been intelligent and alive, receptive to such communication. I might have presented him with questions and worked up some sort of code between us—a blink of the eyes once for yes, twice for no. “Spell out your answer, Professor,” I might have told him. “One blink for A, two for B, three for C.” It might have taken us hours to have gotten across one short message, but it could have been well worth the effort. The knowledge that lay buried in that snow white head was invaluable. If we had been able to have spoken to each other for even one moment, I was sure he could have steered me to an answer. He could have given me enough information about the workings of witchcraft so that I could have exposed Julia for what she was.

But this was not to be. Given the choice, his safety was more important than the help he might give me. Somehow I must work out a solution by myself. I had a number of pieces to the puzzle, but they would not fit together. The Julia I knew and the Julie known by Mary Carncross appeared on the surface to be two entirely different people. Her Julie went to church and sang lead soprano with the choir. This seemed impossible. Could anyone practice black magic and still be a participating member of a Christian church? As far as I could recall we had not attended church since Julia had come to live with us. My own family was lax about going, ever since Pete and I had become teenagers and our lives had filled with too many conflicting activities. And Julia herself had never suggested going to church. As far as the singing went, I had never heard Julia sing. She had not brought a guitar home with her, unless it was crammed somehow into one of those boxes stored in the attic.

And the Julie of the “silly jokes”—to me she did not exist. There was no levity, no sense of fun in the Julia I knew. Could it exist beneath the surface, I asked myself. Could it have lain hidden for these past months, buried beneath the weight of parental loss?

No—no. I could not believe that to be the case.

Nothing fit—nothing fit. I had to have more information.

I need more to go on, I thought hopelessly. I need something that makes all the parts go together into some kind of workable whole. With Professor Jarvis no longer able to help me, where could I turn? Only to the books, both of which I had read through several times.

Perhaps I’m missing something, I thought. I’ll go back and read them again.

Leaving the kitchen I went softly down the hall and let myself back into Bobby’s bedroom. He was sleeping as deeply as he had been when I had left him. In the time since I had been gone the room had grown light enough so that reading was possible.

I opened the drawer in which I had stored the books and took them out and carried them over to the bed.

The history book looked solid and factual and unhelpful. There was nothing factual about the type of information for which I was searching. I was looking for a will-o’-the-wisp, a flickering light, a glimpse past the solid and the real into another kind of reality. It was like trying to grasp quicksilver.

I shoved that book aside and picked up the second, the one on superstitions. This was where I would start and somewhere, somewhere, in these pages, I would find something I could work on.

That “something” turned out to be on page seventy-three: “There is a superstition, widely held among believers in magic, that a witch cannot be photographed.” I read over the statement once, stopped, and read it again. It was followed by a series of stories supposedly gleaned from interviews with old-time residents of the backwoods area of the Ozarks. They all concerned attempts that had been made to photograph women who practiced the art of witchcraft.

One told about a tourist who was driving through the Ozarks and saw an old woman leading a cow down a country road. She was so picturesque that the tourist had stopped his car and despite the woman’s protests had snapped her picture with his Instamatic. Arriving home, he had taken his film to be developed at a drugstore. The prints he got back included one of a cow walking alone along a road. The lead rope stuck straight out in front and ended in midair. The woman was nowhere in the picture.

There was another story about a national magazine that had sent a writer-photographer team back into the hills to do an article on present-day witchcraft. The writer had interviewed a number of women who claimed to be witches and the photographer had taken their pictures. When the photographs were printed, several of them contained no people.

The author of the book called these “tales from the hills.” “These are the sorts of stories that run from generation to generation,” he wrote,

growing stranger with each telling. Over the years the names of the people involved become lost or are replaced by other names. No one can offer any proof of their credibility. At the same time, they are accepted by a large number of older people and a surprising number of younger ones who have learned them from their parents. As short a time as three years before this book is being written a coed at a southeastern college refused to have her picture taken for the school yearbook. Her reason, confessed finally to her counselor, was that “witchcraft runs in our family” and she did not want this revealed to her classmates by having the frame turn out empty.

It was not a large section of the book, only a couple of paragraphs, but it was enough to start my heart beating wildly. How was it that I had bypassed this before? In my rush to find more applicable material I had skipped over a section that was in reality the most important thing in the book. It explained so much that I had found unanswerable. It explained, for instance, why it was that Mike had no picture of Julia on his bureau. She had never given him one because she didn’t have one! It answered also the question of why Julia had no driver’s license. I had wondered about that because at seventeen she was certainly old enough to have one. I had chalked it up to the fact that away at school as much as she was without access to a car she had had no chance to learn to drive. Now I had a better answer. To receive a license you had to have your picture taken!

What better proof could there be of Julia’s status as a witch than a photograph taken of her in which she did not appear! And with my own mother a photographer, how simple it would be to have one taken! There was no way Julia could explain it. It could not be blamed on the processing, for Mother did her own. Nor could it be blamed on the camera which was a piece of expensive, professional equipment. If the situation were not so serious I might almost have laughed at the vision of Mother standing in the darkroom, surveying her roll of negatives, her brows raised, her forehead wrinkled in. bewilderment.

“What in the world could have happened!” she would exclaim. “It’s impossible! I know that Julia was sitting right there in that lawn chair!”

Quite suddenly, at the peak of my exuberance, I felt limp with exhaustion. Just the realization that I was finally headed somewhere definite was enough to release the tension I had been under for so long. No longer was I floundering blindly about. I had a plan—something to go on. I laid the book aside and let myself sink back upon my pillow and then, surprisingly, I fell asleep. It was a sleep of such utter weariness, so deep and so intense, that I did not wake for hours and then only because Mother came in and shook me.

“Rae?” she said worriedly. “Are you all right, dear? It’s past noon!”

“Okay,” I mumbled. “Okay.” Mother’s voice and my own seemed to come from far away. Dream voices.

“Rachel,” Mother said, “open your eyes. I want to see that you’re alive in there. I’ve never known you to sleep this long unless you’re sick.”

With an effort I forced my eyes open and focussed them upon her face.

“I’m okay,” I said, my voice still blurred with sleep. “I just was awake a lot during the night.”

“Worrying over the professor, I imagine.” Mother nodded sympathetically. “I know how you feel. The first thing I did when I got up this morning was call the hospital. I think his condition must have worsened, because they’ve stopped allowing visitors. I had been planning to go down there at lunch time and sit with him a while so the Chavezes could go out to eat.”

“Did they say he was worse?” I asked, alarmed.

“No. They just said the ruling about visitors was changed. But I can’t think of any other reason. It’s such a sad thing. I was wondering—” She let the sentence fade off.

“What?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t even suggest it, I’ve got so much work to do. I’ve got to print up a batch of classroom shots for Teacher to illustrate that piece they’re running on the first graders who built a doll house, and there’s a dating article for American Girl I haven’t even started on. They want a boy and girl smiling into each other’s eyes and I haven’t even located models. It’s just that we’re all so depressed a break might do us good.”

“What sort of break?” I asked.

“I was thinking about a trip to Santa Fe. I could call it a business trip because I do need to stop at the Department of Development and discuss some illustrations I’m doing for an article for New Mexico Magazine. But that wouldn’t take long, and we could go to lunch at the La Fonda and do some shopping on the plaza. On the way back there’s a place I’d like to stop. There’s something there I might buy for you, if you decide you like the look of it.”

“It sounds nice,” I said. “We haven’t done anything like that for a long time. We used to do so many things together.” Before Julia came, I almost added. But I didn’t.

“Would you like to plan it for tomorrow?” Mother asked me. “I could phone the editor at New Mexico Magazine and set up an appointment, I could take the American Girl pictures this afternoon if you and Mike would pose for them, and you could help me with the printing tonight.”

“I don’t want to pose with Mike,” I said, sitting up in bed. My body felt numb from having lain so long in one position. “You know we aren’t going together anymore.”

“What difference does that make?” Mother asked. “You’re still friends, aren’t you? And I can’t use you with Peter. You look too much like brother and sister.”

“Use Julia,” I said. How easy it was! I couldn’t have planned the situation better if I had invented it from scratch. “Let Julia pose with Mike. You’ve talked about wanting to photograph her.”

Mother frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know. She looks—”

“Looks what?”

“I don’t know exactly—just not quite right for the picture. She’s lovely looking, of course, but too old.

“How can she be too old?” I asked, surprised, “She’s seventeen, the same age as Mike.”

“That’s true. It’s just that there’s something about her face that seems older than her years. Her eyes, maybe, or her mouth.” Mother seemed as confused as I was over the statement. “I never thought about it until now, picturing the way she would look in a photograph. I just have this feeling she might come across too old for American Girl.”