Time Windows (17 page)

Miranda and Dan explained how they found the room, leaving out the part the dollhouse and the Kramer family played in leading Miranda to the trapdoor. Philip offered the further information that the Brownes had been living in Garnet for the past four weeks, just moved there from New York.

"Who was she?" wondered Philip. "And how did she come to be in that room?"

"That's just what we aim to find out," said the police chief, a woman around Helen's age, with sharp green eyes and short black hair. "We'll contact the man who sold you the house. Name of Kramer, I believe. We'll keep in touch with you, of course. Let you know what we come up with. And I'll have someone stop by your wife's office and tell her the news. Your daughter looks like she could use both her parents just now."

"That's okay," muttered Miranda. "I'm all right."

The chief stood up and shook hands with Philip. "I'm sorry this had to happen in your new home," she said as she left with the other officers. "Not a very nice housewarming."

Mr. Hooton slung his arm around Dan's shoulders. "Do you two want to come over to our house?" he asked. "Though I suppose the reporters will be over there in a flash if they don't find you here."

"I think we'd better stay here until Helen comes home," Philip answered. "Why not stay with us for now? I'll get us something to drink."

Helen arrived to a front porch swamped with reporters clamoring to be allowed upstairs to photograph the hole.

She pushed past the throng of cameras and ran into the house, locking the door. "Phil? Mandy? What's going on? Is anybody hurt? The police stopped by my office. They said there was a dead body!"

Philip put his arms around her and explained. Miranda watched as her mother's face grew pale. Helen shook her head. "No, no! That's too horrible to be true."

Miranda and Dan and their fathers led her up to the attic and showed her the trapdoor. Helen absolutely refused to go down. But Ed Hooton slipped into the tunnel with the flashlight to see the tiny room and the chalk line the police had drawn around the body before removing it. Philip's weak attempt at a joke fell flat. "Last year I would have been too fat to get into that tunnel. Now I'll fit—but I find I don't want to."

Downstairs again, Helen was still pale but her voice was strong. "I knew it," she insisted. "What did I tell you about the attic? I knew there was something wrong! Something was waiting up there all the time."

Ed Hooton looked at her in surprise but said nothing. Philip put his arms around her shoulders in a brief hug. Miranda felt Dan's eyes on her, but she didn't look at him.

Hours later the reporters and photographers departed, finally satisfied that the Brownes and Hootons had nothing to tell. The lane grew quiet again. Miranda walked Dan and his father back to their house across the road. As Ed Hooton climbed the steps to their porch, Dan turned to Miranda. His eyes were dark with distress. "We didn't bargain on that, did we?"

She stepped nearer to him and tentatively touched his arm. "That hair—"

"I'm just glad I didn't see the face. Did you see it?"

"No. Thank God. But you could tell she was young."

Suddenly Dan had his arms around her in a fleeting hug. Then he stepped back. "See you tomorrow?"

She nodded. "Yes."

She watched him run up the steps, then she walked slowly back home. Helen was stirring soup in a pot on the stove; Philip sat at the table.

"Well," he said, rubbing a hand over his face, "you were right, Helen. I'll never say another word against women's intuition as long as I live."

"I
knew
something was up there," she affirmed. "Waiting and biding its time."

"Oh, Mither! You're giving me the creeps!" cried Miranda.

Her father reached up and stroked Miranda's hair as she stood beside him.

"You've had a bad shock today, Mandy. I think an early bedtime is in order."

"I'll never be able to sleep," she muttered.

"There's nothing to be gained by staying awake and thinking about it," he said. "Look at it this way. That child's body was here for a long time, and we never knew it till today. But now it's gone—there's no sense starting to feel uneasy about it
now.
"

Helen set a bowl of fragrant vegetable soup in front of him. "Oh, right, Phil!" she said sarcastically. "I know I, for one, won't be giving that long-dead mummified body a second thought." She put her hands on her hips. "Come on! How can we help thinking about it?"

The telephone rang then, and Philip went to answer it. "Hello?" He listened for a second. "Yes, Chief Patterson."

Miranda and Helen strained to overhear.

"Yes, yes. I see." Philip's voice was soft. "Well, that certainly changes things, doesn't it? Yes, yes indeed. Please keep in touch. We'll want to know how things develop."

"Well?" asked Miranda as soon as her father had hung up. "What did she say? Did she talk to the Kramers? What did the Kramers say?"

"Whoa! Slow down." Philip took his seat at the table again. "Chief Patterson called Timothy Kramer, who lives in Boston with his wife and children. He and his brother are the ones who inherited this house last year when their father died, and they put it up for sale. Mr. Kramer lived here for a year when he was very little—four or five. He couldn't remember much about it, actually. He said they never knew anything about a trapdoor or a secret room. His parents moved the family back to Boston shortly after there was a fire in the attic."

Miranda's thoughts raced on ahead. Little Timmy Kramer was all grown up and living in Boston with a wife—and children! He would be older than her own father. And he said he knew nothing about the trapdoor—and yet he and his brother were the ones who'd led her to find it. Could it be he really didn't remember?

Philip ate his soup while he talked. "One thing the chief did say, which pretty well rules out any connection with the Kramers, anyway, is that the coroner has looked at the body and determined that the child was seven or eight years old when she died, and they think she died around the turn of the century!"

"Goodness!" exclaimed Helen. "That long ago! I wonder what could have happened, poor thing."

Miranda ate her soup in a daze. It couldn't be true—it
couldn't
be! And yet she'd felt the sick shock of recognition when her flashlight illuminated that golden hair. There was no mistaking it. Records showed that Dorothy and Lucinda Galworthy had been killed in the train wreck. But somehow, incredibly, little Dorothy had died in the secret hiding place under the attic floor.

 

Miranda feared she would lie awake all night reliving the horror of the day's discovery, but as soon as she got into bed, she was asleep. Toward morning she fell into a dream—a haunting dream of twisting corridors through which she wandered, searching for her mother. It seemed Helen was always just ahead out of sight, and Miranda ran faster to catch up to her.

"Mither!" she called again and again, but the figure ahead did not hear and did not stop. "Mither!" she called, but her voice came out a harsh whisper, hardly loud enough to be heard.

Finally the corridor ended and the figure in front of Miranda was forced to stop. At last, thought Miranda. She tried to run even faster, but her legs seemed to gel, and she moved in slow motion, as if under water. At the end of the hallway was a single bright spot, a small window through which the yellow sun shone. Helen stopped in front of it and turned to face Miranda. She held out her arms and Miranda ran to them, anxious to be within their comforting circle. The arms tightened around her and she felt momentarily secure. "Oh, Mither," she cried. "I tried so hard to get back to you!"

She raised her face to look at her mother. Helen smiled gently and tightened her grip. Slowly, as Miranda watched, Helen's smile widened until it no longer resembled a smile at all but was a grimace, teeth bared. The arms holding Miranda grew painfully tight, and she struggled to get away. She tried to scream, but no sound came from her throat. Laughter filled the air ... Helen was laughing, her strength squeezing the breath out of Miranda.

With a moan, Miranda jerked back and forth, trying to escape. She awoke, panting in the morning light. Her body was drenched in sweat.

The room seemed strangely still. After a moment she could hear her alarm clock ticking, and from downstairs came the morning sounds of her parents making breakfast. A blender whirred, a cupboard door slammed. Miranda hugged her pillow.

A short time later the front screen door banged. Miranda forced herself to get out of bed. She looked out the window. Helen was walking down the porch steps on her way to work. Just as she reached her car in the driveway, she turned and looked up at the house, catching sight of Miranda's face in the window. She raised her hand in a wave, which Miranda automatically returned. Then Helen slid into the driver's seat and swept her car smoothly out into the road. Miranda slumped onto the window seat.

What an awful dream! As if in a trance, she walked into the bathroom and shed her nightgown. She stepped into the shower to wash off the traces of sweat and fear. Afterward, feeling considerably more normal, she dressed and went down to the kitchen.

Philip sat sipping his diet milk shake and reading the newspaper at the kitchen table.

"Morning, Mandy." He smiled. "Did you sleep all right?"

"No," she told him. "I had nightmares."

"I don't wonder," he comforted her. "I think none of us slept very well." He handed her the
Garnet Star.
"But look at this. We've made the front page!"

 

MUMMIFIED CHILD FOUND IN GARNET ATTIC Mystery surrounds the discovery of a mummified child that lay hidden in a secret attic room of a Garnet Township home for nearly a century.

Yesterday afternoon police removed the remains of a small girl from the old Galworthy House, now home of Mr. Philip and Dr. Helen Browne and their daughter, Miranda. Miranda, 13, and a neighbor, Daniel Hooton, 14, discovered the body in a secret room beneath the attic floor.

In a statement to Police Chief Margaret Patterson, Mr. Browne said he had "absolutely no idea who the child could have been." Police are still researching the history of the Brownes' house in hopes of finding a clue leading to the identification of the dead girl.

Anyone with any information is asked to contact Chief Patterson at the Garnet Police Department.

 

A second front-page article gave a brief history of their house and mentioned that the Brownes had only recently moved to Garnet from New York City. But Miranda only skimmed it. "Anyone with any information—" She lowered the newspaper and felt her father's eyes studying her.

"I'm going out for a ride, Dad," she said. "Maybe up to the old graveyard."

"I don't know, Mandy. Why not ride into town? You can go shopping for some school clothes—get your mind off yesterday." He reached for his wallet. "Here, let me give you money for a new skirt or something."

"Thanks, Dad. I'd love a new skirt, but not now." She kissed him and headed for the back door, not failing to note the worry clouding his eyes. She knew he wished yesterday had never happened—wished he had the power to make everything all right for her now as he had been able to do when she was little. "
Don't
worry, Dad! I promise I'll be back by lunchtime," she said.

 

She pumped her bike up the hill toward the open countryside. She sailed past miles of fields of young corn and finally wheeled onto a dirt road. The old Garnet cemetery lay to her right, nestled between the fields.

Miranda braked and laid her bike down on the grass. The cemetery was bordered by a crumbling wall, with leafy ferns like green waterfalls cascading over the rough stone. She gazed at the marble monuments inside, straight rows of white and gray stones and grassy mounds leading back from the graveled drive all the way to the fields of corn. Beyond them stretched the endless woods. The stones where she stood looked new, shiny, and straight. She wandered farther back among the graves. The older ones all seemed to be in a corner near the field. She assumed that the blackened sandstone and granite indicated age. The oldest markers were thinner than the others, and they leaned at various angles. She made her way among the crooked stones and thought that, far from being a scary place, the graveyard was quite peaceful. Under the bright summer sun it seemed possible that the spirits here could rest.

She meandered up and down rows, noticing the familiar names. A great number of Hootons and Wainwrights were buried here. She stopped once to look at the stone of a young Daniel Hooton who had died in the Civil War. She wondered whether he had helped his family hide the runaway slaves in their secret room under the stairs. By the time she had circled back to the more recent graves, she was thinking about the modern-day Daniel Hooton. She wished she'd asked him to come with her today.

Still, she hadn't found what she was looking for. She returned to the older corner beyond the modern stones for a more thorough search and finally came to what she knew must be here: a section of the cemetery full of Galworthy stones—some old, some more recent. She read each one as she passed: "Julian Galworthy, Our Blessed Babe. d. 1810, Aged 5 months." "Anne Elizabeth Galworthy, a Good Woman, d. 1870, Aged 67 yrs." "Myron Galworthy, Who Died With Rosy Cheeks in the Seventh Year of His Age, 1866."

"It's got to be here," she muttered to herself, examining each stone carefully. Then she shook her head. "But it
can't
be here. It doesn't make any sense."

She stopped suddenly at a sleek gray stone and drew a sharp breath.

 

In Memory of
SIGMUND GALWORTHY
born in Garnet 1869
died in Boston 1942

 

Poor Sigmund. He had never recovered from Dorothy's and Lucinda's deaths. Miranda moved on to the next stone—and gasped, sinking to her knees in front of it. Here it was. She traced each letter lightly with her finger.