Time Windows (20 page)

Dorothy wandered over to the vanity table and perched at her mother's side. "Please, Mama. I want to go with you! I'll be ever so good, I promise!"

"Don't wheedle!" snapped Lucinda. "Go get dressed immediately."

Dorothy sulked, fingering some of the little bottles on her mother's table. "I can't do up the buttons on my dress."

"Then get Hannah to do it—oh, bother!" Lucinda frowned in vexation.

"Hannah quit, Mama."

"I know that, you tiresome child!" Her voice became icy. "Get your dress and bring it here. I will do up the buttons myself."

Dorothy did not budge, but inspected the crystal vial of perfume, unstopping it and holding it to her nose. "Mmm," she said. She spilled a small amount into her palm.

Lucinda leaped from the stool and grabbed Dorothy's shoulder. Dorothy cried out and tried to twist away, tipping the bottle and spilling the strong scent over herself and her mother. Lucinda knocked it out of her hand with a snarl. "
Now
look what you've done, you hateful brat! You ruin everything you touch!"

Dorothy backed away toward the door. Lucinda grasped her wrist and pulled her over to the vanity table. "You will learn to obey me if it's the last thing I ever teach you." And with those words, she turned the child over her knees and lifted the frothy white petticoat. She grabbed the long wooden hairbrush from the vanity and beat Dorothy until the little girl's screams filled the room. Then she threw down the brush and yanked Dorothy out the door. "Up to the attic with you, my girl. I can see you're not fit to go visiting today."

Her voice and Dorothy's cries of "Don't hurt me, Mama!" dwindled as they vanished down the hallway to the attic stairs.

Miranda waited at the bedroom window, biting her lip in anger. Lucinda and her hairbrush brought back other memories—of Aunt Belle and the porch swing slat, of Iris Kramer and the wooden spoon.
It's as if
Lucinda were somehow ... contagious,
thought Miranda.
Was it Lucinda who infected them all? Was it really possible that someone could reach from the past to cause unhappiness for those who lived in the present? Or was it the house itself that was evil—the house that infected Lucinda as well as Iris and Aunt Belle and—?
Here Miranda stopped. She couldn't bear to think about her own mother.

Lucinda stalked back into the bedroom and sat down, picking up her hairbrush. She began twisting and piling her rich hair onto her head, securing the thick mass with countless hairpins. "Where are you when I need you, Hannah?" she muttered, as half the elaborate coiffure tumbled down around her shoulders again.

After checking and rechecking her appearance in the double mirrors, Lucinda left the room. In the hallway Miranda heard her call up to the attic: "I want you quiet up there, young lady. An afternoon in the cold will teach you to mind your mother!"

As Lucinda's footsteps descended the stairs, Miranda pictured little Dorothy locked in the unheated attic in nothing but her petticoat. She shivered, tears gathering in her eyes.

Rinky-dink piano music, sounding tinny to Miranda's ears, drifted through the house. Miranda moved along from room to room, peering out the dollhouse windows until she located Lucinda in the living room, seated at the piano. The time sequence had never remained chronological for so long before, and Miranda hardly dared to blink, afraid of losing the continuity. Lucinda was still wearing the violet dress.

"Monster," muttered Miranda.

Lucinda left the piano and went into the kitchen. Miranda found her there when she moved to the dollhouse kitchen window. Lucinda checked the baking bread, then crossed to the wall telephone and lifted the receiver. She wound up the crank on the side of the wooden box and tapped a few times on the lever. "Operator? Operator, get me Garnet two-one, please. Yes, I'm waiting."

Lucinda's long fingers tapped on the tabletop. "Yes, yes. Hello, Mrs. Hooton. This is Lucinda Galworthy. I'm calling to say I won't be sending Dorothy over to you after all. But thank you so much for your kind offer of hospitality. It's very neighborly of you." Her voice was pleasantly cordial.

"I've decided to take Dorothy along with me," continued Lucinda. "She has always enjoyed train rides." There was a pause, then Lucinda answered gaily, "Oh, we're just traveling to Boston to visit my dear old auntie." After a few more pleasant remarks Lucinda replaced the receiver, smirking. "Dear old auntie indeed," she murmured, a smile tugging at the corners of her beautiful mouth. "Dear old auntie! Wait till I tell Donald." She left the room and the piano music jangled again. This time it was a dance tune.

Miranda was just turning away from the kitchen window to check on Dorothy in the attic, when a face appeared at the back door and the chimes sounded, clear and melodic. Lucinda entered the room again and hurried to the door. Miranda's head reeled when a man dressed in a gray overcoat came in brushing off snow, crying, "Lucinda, beloved!" as he pulled her into an embrace.

She held him at arm's length. "You're wet, Donald. And cold."

This scene! This was the first time the dollhouse had shown a repeat. As before, Lucinda left the room, returning a moment later wrapped in fur. Then the smell of burning filled the kitchen, and she snatched up a towel. "Oh, the bread! I forgot—!" She cursed sharply. "Damnation!"

Smoke whirled out of the stove as Lucinda shrugged to remove her coat, dropping it onto a chair. Then, there it was, the tiny
pinging
noise Miranda remembered from the first time she had watched this kitchen scene. Lucinda drew out the charred loaves and dumped them into the sink by the pump. "Ruined," she complained crossly to the stove, as if it, rather than she, were at fault. "You black monster!"

Donald was at her side, checking his watch. "My dear, calm yourself. It doesn't matter."

"Of all the rotten luck. I'll
never
learn to cook! Stupid Hannah! Why did she have to quit today of all days?"

Miranda raised her brows. "You awful woman," she shouted. "I'd leave, too, if I had to be around you for five minutes! You're wicked to the core."

But Donald was chuckling. "Darling Lucinda. A housewife you aren't! But where we're going, you won't need to be—" He embraced her, their cheeks touching.

Lucinda's voice sounded gay again. "Let's leave, then. We don't want to miss the train."

Donald helped her button up the fur coat. "But what about the kid? Where's Dorothy?" he asked. "She doesn't suspect anything?"

Lucinda's laughing features froze for an instant. "Oh—oh, she's over at the Hootons' and doesn't suspect a thing. Sigmund will bring her home. They'll be fine together. He dotes on her. They'll never miss me, I assure you."

Lucinda opened the back door, and a gale of wind blew snow onto the floor. "Just leave it!" she cried. "I'm never going to worry about keeping house again!"

"It'll be just you and me, my darling," Donald promised, ushering her outside. "We'll be in business together before you know it."

As they bustled out the door, Miranda heard the tinkle of Lucinda's laugh. "Oh, Donald, you'll love this! I told Mrs. Hooton I was going to visit my dear old auntie!"

Their peals of laughter were cut off abruptly as the door clicked shut.

Miranda sat back on her heels and rubbed her forehead. Then without a backward look, she ran downstairs, out the door, and across the street to the Hootons'.

Dan was in his room, stretched out on his bed, listening to his tapes. "Well, hello!" he greeted her, pulling off the headset. "Have a seat."

Miranda sat on the edge of his bed. "Oh, Dan. I've been watching again. It's all so awful—Lucinda makes me feel sick. Really, truly sick." She rubbed her forehead. "I tried to pay attention to the stuff in the rooms so we can check it out in the museum, but I couldn't concentrate. It's so terrible watching and not being able to do anything!"

Dan stared out the window at the gables of Miranda's house poking above the trees. "Listen, I'm really not up for any more séances—or whatever you call them. So I hope you're not here to suggest we try to contact Dorothy again. And, you know? I don't need to do my experiment to check in the museum. I believe you. How else would you have known where to look for that trapdoor, if you hadn't seen those Kramer kids point it out?" He paused, then confided in a low voice: "I had a nightmare last night."

"I haven't been sleeping very well, either," she admitted.

He touched the back of her hand. "So what did you see this time?"

She started speaking all in a rush, relating the scenes she had just witnessed in the Galworthy house—the way Lucinda had beaten Dorothy for spilling the perfume, how she'd locked the child up in the cold attic, how she'd waited for Donald down in the kitchen. "And then they left to catch their train—with poor Dorothy locked in that cold attic. I couldn't believe it! She just left her there!"

"That Lucinda sounds like
she
should have been locked up—for child abuse," Dan said grimly.

"I wonder if anybody knew how she treated Dorothy? She sounded like the sweetest thing on earth when she phoned Mrs. Hooton—your great-grandmother, right? In public she was totally friendly and polite. Nobody would ever suspect she was so horrible at home."

"Well, fortunately she had a maid to take care of Dorothy, so she wasn't actually with her that much alone, right? Sounds like old Lucinda wasn't the maternal type."

"She sure wanted a career." Miranda stopped. "I don't know—oh, Dan, it just makes me want to cry to think about Dorothy."

Dan shrugged. "But there's nothing we can do except to have her buried properly."

"How
did
she end up in that hole?" Miranda's eyes grew wide. "Do you think Lucinda murdered her?"

"Probably," Dan said darkly. "And if she did, I'd say the father and the maid and even my great-grandmother were to blame, too. They all should have noticed something was wrong in that house. They should have called the police—or the child welfare agency, or something!"

"Maybe they didn't have agencies like that back then."

"Maybe not—but they did have police! Anybody could have noticed that Lucinda wasn't exactly the perfect mother."

"But probably there's no such thing as the perfect mother."

"Are you defending Lucinda?" asked Dan. "I thought you hated her!"

"I'm not defending her! I was just thinking that maybe everybody saw she wasn't the greatest, but didn't think she was, you know, a
criminal.
That's all."

"Well, I don't buy it. People have a responsibility to watch out for kids and report something that looks suspicious. I bet Lucinda was abusive in lots of other ways, too—ways the dollhouse hasn't shown you."

"We don't really know for sure that Lucinda
did
kill Dorothy, remember." Miranda wasn't sure why she was protecting Lucinda. But the thought of a mother losing control—becoming a criminal—frightened her. Better to believe there had been some unimaginable accident. No one's fault.

She got up and paced around Dan's room. There were two shelves of books above his desk. One held several dozen science fiction paperbacks; the other held library books on the restoration and refinishing of antique furniture. She looked out the window and saw cars pulling up in the Hootons' driveway.

"You have company," she said.

"Patrons, you mean," he corrected, coming to stand beside her. "Want to join the tour?"

"Sure." Anything to get her mind off Dorothy.

Dan led the way downstairs, along a narrow hallway running the length of the house. "This connects the rest of the house to the museum wing. It was added in the 1890s."

Miranda glanced around at the closed doors and hallways leading off the one they walked down. "This house is huge!"

"Yeah, tell me about it. We have to keep a lot of it closed off in the winter because it's too expensive to heat." He stopped in front of a large oak door at the end of the corridor. "Here we are." He pushed the door open and they stepped into a bright foyer.

Mrs. Hooton stood next to a grandfather clock along one wall, speaking to a small group of people. Dan drew Miranda into the room, and Mrs. Hooton smiled a welcome at them before continuing. Miranda listened as Mrs. Hooton gave a concise history of the house, which was the prelude to the museum tour.

"After the Civil War ended and the Underground Railroad was no longer used to hide escaping slaves, the secret hiding places became favorite playrooms for children." Mrs. Hooton smiled at the visitors. "Generations of Hooton children have played in the secret room in our basement. My own boys used it until the museum opened and we turned it into an exhibit. We will go down in a moment." Her smile faded. "Of course, not all the hiding places in Garnet homes are as large as the one I'll show you today. Some were mere cubbyholes—airtight crevices where a slave could hide only a few hours."

Miranda's hand crept to her face. "Dan!" she breathed. "Let's go. I just thought of something."

He glanced at her curiously. "Okay." He flapped his hand at his mother and started around the group toward the stairway.

"Dan? Don't you two want to stay for the tour?"

"It's okay. I'll tell Mandy all the facts. I know the speech by heart!"

The visitors chuckled, and Mrs. Hooton joined in. One of the men detached himself from his wife and pointed at Dan. "Daniel Hooton? Didn't I just read your name in the newspaper? Aren't you the boy who found a mummy the other day?"

Interested faces turned to them. Dan nodded and took Miranda's hand. They left the foyer quickly, feeling the eyes of the crowd on their backs. Miranda was glad no one knew her.

Mrs. Hooton cleared her throat. "Yes," she said. "An old Underground Railroad stop had some new excitement recently."

 

Miranda and Dan entered a low-ceilinged room hung with hand-stitched samplers and patchwork quilts. Along the walls, glass-sided cases displayed memorabilia of Garnet's past. Dan closed the wooden door behind them, cutting off the murmur of voices that floated up the stairs. He faced Miranda. "I always thought I wanted to be famous," he said. "But not like this. I don't want to talk to anyone about the ... mummy."