Time Windows (19 page)

"We've got to do something!" she cried. "Something's really wrong with my mother!"

They stepped back inside the house. Miranda listened. Only silence. "What's happened?" asked Dan.

"Sshh!" she said. "Let's go up to the attic."

They climbed the stairs quickly. Dan hesitated at the top but then followed Miranda over to the dollhouse. He kept his eyes averted from the hidden room.

Once they were seated on the cushions behind the house, Miranda covered her face with her hands. "Dan, I'm getting scared."

"Tell me what's going on! You said you wanted to tell me something about the graveyard?"

"That's why I called you to come over in the first place—but it doesn't seem important now. What's important is my mother—she's not acting like herself."

"How do you mean?"

Miranda shivered. She drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. "Dan, this is getting way too weird. I mean, it's strange enough that I can see things through the dollhouse, but when the same things I see start happening in my own family—! What am I supposed to do?"

"Is your mom acting like someone in the dollhouse?"

"Mither just about repeated word for word what I heard Iris Kramer saying tonight! And Iris was going on about the same thing Lucinda Galworthy did, years and years before that!"

Dan knelt to peer into the dollhouse. "You sat here and watched, and then you went downstairs and heard your mom say the same thing Iris said."

"Right. Iris was yelling at Andrew about how she wanted a job—anything to get out of the house. And that's what I heard Mither going on to my dad about."

Dan opened one of the little bedroom windows, then slid it carefully shut again. "Did it ever occur to you that maybe it's just a coincidence? Maybe Iris wanted a job. And maybe your mom wants a job. That's not so unusual."

"Dan!" She grabbed his arm. "Will you listen to me? She
has
a job. She's an obstetrician! She has her own practice—that's why we moved to Garnet in the first place. Sometimes I think her job is her whole life. She works all sorts of weird hours and is always rushing off to deliver babies in the middle of the night. I could understand her yelling about
not
wanting to work anymore. But she was yelling at my dad that she wants to get a job!"

He studied her. "You're right," he said finally. "That's totally bizarre. Do you think she has forgotten somehow? I mean, like does she have amnesia?"

"I don't think so. I think something is making her say these things.
Compelling
her to."

"And do you have any idea what?"

Miranda shrugged, but the tingling had started in her stomach, and she thought she could smell Lucinda's magnolia perfume. She stood up. "I do have an idea. Let's try to contact Dorothy again—and this time we'll ask her what's happening with Mither."

"You mean go back to the graveyard?"

"No. Dorothy's not there, anyway. We should do it right here." She pointed to the trapdoor. "Over there, actually."

"How? There's no way I'm going down that hole, Mandy!"

"Please, Dan?" She heard the strain in her voice. "We won't go inside. We'll just sit near the entrance. Please?"

"The things I do for you."

They sat against the wall by the windows, about six feet from the hole. It wasn't hard to keep their eyes shut; neither one wanted to see the gaping black space. Nor was it hard to keep a grip on each other's hands; neither of them wanted to pull away and sit alone.

Miranda tried to picture Dorothy—to conjure up those blonde curls without summoning the nightmare image of the body they'd found. Dorothy had been a little girl. She had lived in this house, had played up here. Her father loved her, and she loved him. Her mother seemed too angry about all the injustices she perceived in her own life to pay any attention to what was happening in her daughter's. And somehow Dorothy had died in that little room. Had she been playing? Or hiding? Why had no one found her? Only a little girl. And she had died too soon.

"Dorothy?" Miranda whispered.

They waited. Miranda was holding her breath. She let it out slowly and tightened her fingers on Dan's. "Dorothy, are you here? Can you help us? Do you know what is happening to Mither?"

Dan stirred. When he spoke, his voice squeaked. "Dorothy?" He cleared his throat. "We'd like to know how we can help you, too. We don't understand what happened to you—and we don't understand what's happening to Mandy's mom. If you know, please tell us!"

Miranda half expected the attic to come alive with the sounds of insects and birds, the way the graveyard had that morning. But the room was still. No breeze wafted through the open windows. No cars drove by on the street. There was no sound at all.

But then there was a smell. Miranda sniffed. She opened her eyes, her heart thumping madly as she recognized what it was.

Magnolia.

She pulled her hands away from Dan's and jumped up. The panicky feeling of being chased assailed her, and she bolted for the stairs. "Run!" she screamed, and they clattered down together.

Philip and Helen were standing in the hallway.

"Mandy!" Philip grabbed her as she flew past him. "What were you doing up there?"

She skidded to a stop and leaned against him. "Oh, Dad!"

"You weren't down in that awful hole, were you?" Helen's voice echoed the panic Miranda had felt in the attic.

"No, Mither! Of course not." She took a deep, calming breath. "We just wanted to—to see it."

Dan stepped forward. "It's just so hard to believe it really happened," he said, as if by way of explanation.

Did he mean hard to believe they'd found the body? Or hard to believe they smelled that magnolia? Miranda glanced at the attic door. Her heart hammered under her thin T-shirt, but the scent of magnolia was gone.

Helen closed the door firmly. "It's late," she said. "Time for you to be going home, Dan. And Mandy? I want you two to stay out of the attic from now on. It's no place to play."

"No problem!" said Dan. He said good night, and then Miranda accompanied him downstairs to the front door.

"No place to play," she murmured.

"You can say that again," he said.

"But it was Dorothy's playroom!"

"And look what happened to her! It's a creepy place." He went out onto the porch. "At least your Mither seems all right now, even though the experiment didn't work."

"But you did smell it, didn't you?" She had to be sure.

"Smell what?" He looked at her closely. "You smelled something? Is that why you ran?"

She looked out at the trees in front of the house and nodded.

What could he say? He had smelled nothing. He had run out of the attic only because her panic was contagious. He hugged her now, briefly, and turned to go. She imagined she could see relief like a ribbon of light streaming behind him as he raced away from the old Galworthy house, back to the haven of his own.

Miranda didn't sleep well that night. She felt hot and kicked off her sheet. Then the wind picked up and blew through the window, chilling her bare legs. She dragged the sheet back up and pulled the bedspread over her as well. After she was asleep the wind dropped again, and the air in the room grew close and stuffy. She woke up, kicked the covers off, and tried to find a cool spot on the bed. She tossed around miserably until morning, not exactly dreaming, but thinking about Dorothy each time she awoke and wondering whether she should tell the police she knew who the dead girl was. When morning came and she awoke again, she was all wound up in the sheet. She untangled her legs and sat up, rubbing her eyes. She felt bruised.

Miranda looked out the window and saw that the car was gone. That meant Helen had already left for her office. She peeked into her parents' room to see if Philip was still asleep, but the bedding was tossed around as if he and Helen, too, had had a sleepless night. The room was empty.

Good—no one to be disturbed by her music. She set her flute case on her desk, opened it, and lifted out the instrument. If anything could make her forget about Dorothy and Lucinda and all the weirdness, it was Vivaldi.

She pulled her music stand out of the corner and set it up in front of the window, then opened her sheet music to the piece she was to learn for the concert. She moistened her lips, held up the flute, and began. At first she was distracted by the sight of Dan's house through the trees across the street, but soon the piece began to work its magic. She no longer looked out at the world, but inward, to the music.

She didn't know whether what happened when she played was a strange thing or not—maybe, indeed, all people experienced the same sort of thing when they concentrated on something important to them. But when Miranda played her flute, she would find herself falling into the music, into the story it told. After the first few minutes of warming up, she no longer noticed her fingers on the keys or her mouth on the mouthpiece, controlling the flow of air. Instead, she was off in some other place, listening to the music as if she herself were not playing it, but as if it flowed through her from some other source. Hours of practicing could pass this way, and she would return from this other place only when something jarred her—a wrong note or an outside disturbance.

What stopped her this time was an outside disturbance: a light patter of applause behind her.

She stopped playing, blinked, and lowered the flute. "Dad! I didn't know you were there!"

Philip laughed. "I took care that you didn't. It isn't every morning that I'm treated to a concert."

"I'm practicing-to play in the autumn concert—a real concert, Dad. To benefit the library."

"Well, you're in fine form. That was just beautiful."

"Thanks!" She gathered her sheets of music.

"Don't let me stop you, Mandy. I just came up to say it's lunchtime, and I'm leaving now with Ed Hooton for Lexington. We're going to try again to check out some stuff that's been donated to the museum. He thinks I'll be helpful as an advisor."

"I'm quitting now, anyway. My mouth is all dry." She licked her lips.

"We'll probably be back in time for dinner. Mither called and said she'd like you to put the roast in the oven around five o'clock so it will be ready when she gets home. I've left it thawing on the counter by the sink."

"No problem, Dad."

"Set the oven to three hundred and fifty." He kissed the top of her head. "See you later!"

She put her flute away and went down to the kitchen to make a sandwich. As she sat eating it, she felt the lure of the dollhouse upstairs pulling at her, stronger than ever.
Come up, come up,
it seemed to urge. And, carrying her sandwich, she obeyed.

 

Miranda settled herself on the cushions and peered into the kitchen. She was immediately enveloped in the aroma of freshly baked bread. Two fragrant loaves lay on top of the black cast-iron stove in the Galworthys' kitchen. The oven door was closed, but the warmth of the kitchen told Miranda that more bread was baking inside. The windows in the kitchen were steamed halfway up each pane; the scene outside was white. Snowflakes drifted across the glass. The calendar on the far wall read "January 1904" and had a picture of people in bright winter scarves riding in a sleigh pulled by a team of spirited horses.

Miranda looked into the living room, searching for the Galworthys. A bedraggled Christmas tree leaned in one corner, its ornaments drooping. Boxes half full of candles and other tree decorations lay strewn on the floor, and Miranda guessed that Hannah had left her clean-up job half done. She waited, looking through the living-room windows for a few minutes, but Hannah did not return. Miranda moved on.

In the master bedroom upstairs she caught her breath sharply. The scent of magnolia was overpowering. She braced herself to keep the panic at bay. "I will
not
run away, I will
not
run away," she chanted in a whisper.

Lucinda sat before double mirrors on a small lacquered stool, brushing out her waist-long auburn hair. She hummed softly to herself. After several more slow strokes of the brush, she shook her hair back and gazed appraisingly at her reflection in the long mirrors.

"Mirror, mirror, on the wall," whispered Miranda.

But Lucinda could not have looked less wicked. She smiled happily at her reflection, then dipped her tapered fingers into one of the array of glossy pots on the table and smoothed the curves of her delicately arched brows.

She fluffed back her hair and reached for a crystal vial. She removed the stopper. The magnolia scent intensified as Lucinda applied several drops of the perfume to her wrists, the hollow of her neck, and behind her ears.

Entranced, Miranda stared, almost forgetting her fear of this woman. "I wish I looked like that!" she murmured, regretting her own dark hair and suntanned face.

"Mama? Can I come with you?"

Dorothy stood in the doorway of her mother's room, wearing only a petticoat, her golden hair hanging in curls around her small face. Miranda stifled a gasp of horror. That golden hair...

"Your grammar, Dorothy," answered Lucinda, not turning away from the mirrors. "You'll never get ahead in life if you don't speak properly."

"
May
I come with you? Please?"

Lucinda's smile disappeared as she spun on the stool to face her daughter. "No, you may not, Dorothy. Why aren't you dressed? I want you ready to go on time, do you understand? I'm taking you over in half an hour."

"But I want to come with you!"

"I said no. I am going away on a little trip—and you are to stay with Mrs. Hooton."

"No!"

"Dorothy, don't be difficult. With Hannah gone there's nothing else I can do but leave you with Mrs. Hooton."

"But what kind of trip? Where are you going?"

Lucinda hesitated, then caught her reflection in the glass and smiled. "Just a little business trip, my dear. It's time to make something of myself."

"When will you come home, Mama?"

Lucinda hesitated, then glanced again at her reflection in the mirror. "Soon enough," she said. "But if I'm not back before your father gets home, I'm sure he'll think to look for you at the Hootons'. I'll leave him a note. Now, hurry!" Before turning back to the vanity, she removed her robe and dressed in a gown of deep violet with black lace at her throat and wrists.