Time Windows (21 page)

"I was just thinking I'm lucky no one knows me around here," said Miranda. "They'll recognize your name and stop you on the street, but not me."

"I promise I'll introduce you," said Dan. "Maybe I'll make you a sign and pin it on your shirt: Ask Me About the Mummy's Curse. Something like that."

"Don't you dare!" Miranda sank onto a low cane-bottomed chair under the window, heedless of the Do Not Touch sign at the chair's foot. "Oh, Dan." Her voice was no longer teasing. "When your mom said how some of those secret spaces were airtight, it made me wonder whether Dorothy was only playing in the hiding place. Your mom said children liked to play in the secret rooms. Maybe she just got trapped down there. You saw how heavy that trapdoor is—maybe she couldn't get out again."

"You mean maybe Lucinda didn't kill her?" Dan shrugged. "Maybe. But wouldn't someone have come looking for Dorothy, in that case?" He scowled. "They'd call her for dinner or something. They'd come up and find her."

"But we know they didn't find her." Miranda stared out the window at her house across the street. The scene she had so recently witnessed through the dollhouse windows nudged at the back of her mind. What was it about the Galworthys that day that struck her?

Suddenly it hit her. "Dan!" She jumped up from the chair and grabbed his arm. "Lucinda locked Dorothy in the attic and then left with that man—Donald—to catch a train. I heard him say they had to hurry so they wouldn't miss it. What if
that
were the train that crashed? Dorothy would have been locked in the attic, and no one would have come to let her out!"

"Her father would have come and let her out, though," argued Dan.

"No!" Miranda paced the room with excitement "No, he never did. See, Lucinda and Donald ran off together—and Lucinda was going to leave Dorothy with Mrs. Hooton until Sigmund came home from work. I heard her say that. But then after she went into her rage about that horrible perfume Dorothy spilled, and she beat her and locked her up in the attic, Lucinda called Mrs. Hooton and made up a lie that she was taking Dorothy with her. But really, she just didn't want to tell her neighbor how she was punishing Dorothy."

"I get it," broke in Dan. "Then Lucinda was killed in the crash. If she hadn't died, then Sigmund would have gone home and searched for Dorothy. He would have heard her calling when he went into the house. Even if she'd fallen into the hole, he'd have heard her and searched till he found her."

"But he didn't search at all, because Mrs. Hooton told him Dorothy went to Boston with Lucinda."

"And when he learned of the crash, he thought they'd both been killed..."

Their voices rose as they added to the story. But then Miranda shook her head. "There are so many things we don't know," she mourned. "Did Sigmund know Lucinda was going to leave him? Or did she tell him she was going to visit an aunt? If he didn't know anything, he would have been so shocked when the police came to his office to tell him of the train crash. He wouldn't have believed, at first, that her body could be in the wreck. But after he went to identify Lucinda's body, he would have rushed back to Garnet to get Dorothy. He'd assume Lucinda left her here with your great-grandmother. But when he got here, your great-grandmother had to tell him Dorothy went with Lucinda. It's so awful! Sigmund would have had to go back to try to find Dorothy's body, too."

"It's a tragedy," said Dan, "no matter how you look at it."

"The poor man," echoed Miranda, and fell silent. But then she stared at Dan. "But there are two bodies buried in the graveyard. We saw the stone! That means Sigmund somehow identified Lucinda
and
Dorothy! How did he do that—if Dorothy wasn't even on the train?"

"Oh, probably there was some other child who had been very badly burned—maybe she even had blonde hair. Since Sigmund expected to find Dorothy, he did. I mean, he identified the burned child as Dorothy and had her buried with Lucinda."

Miranda nodded slowly, feeling swift compassion for the child interred under a name that was not her own. "I guess that's another of the things we'll never know," she said. "Mrs. Wainwright told me that since Sigmund couldn't bear to go home after he identified the bodies, he stayed here—with your great-grandparents, I mean—for a few weeks."

"Weeks! And Dorothy was up in the attic the whole time—dying. No food. No water. She wouldn't have lasted long." He paled. "Makes you sick."

Miranda shivered in the warm room. "Poor, poor little girl," she whispered, wandering over to the glass cases along one wall and staring unseeingly through the top. "1896 to 1904, the gravestone said. Only eight years old. As old as Buddy. She shouldn't have died when she did. It wasn't time."

"I wonder if it's ever really time for anybody," Dan murmured to himself.

Gradually she became aware of what she was staring at. "Dan," she said slowly. He came quickly from the window where he had been gazing pensively at the old Galworthy house. "Look at this."

"What is it?" He peered over her shoulder into the case. "Oh, that old calendar."

"Not just any calendar! It's the one from the Galworthys' kitchen—January 1904!" She recognized the picture of the sleigh ride, the spirited horses, the field of snow.

"It could have come from any house," said Dan, pointing out the black-inked sign on the case which read: Local Household Items, Early 20th Century. The display included several pairs of wire spectacles, a heavy rusted iron, buttons and ribbons, a marble-handled letter opener, a teakettle, silverware, and a child's slate.

"It
is
the same one, though. Look what's written on it!"

Dan squinted at the faded, spidery writing. "January nineteenth," he read. "Sigmund to New York." He turned to Miranda, his voice full of wonder. "Wow, Mandy! This proves it one hundred percent." He looked at her with awed, almost frightened eyes. "Sigmund to New York. Maybe a business trip? I wonder if he ever made it."

Miranda turned away. "You already believed me; you know you did." She wandered around the little room. "God, it's just so unfair! Dorothy shouldn't have died then. It was just a series of accidents that killed her—despite Lucinda."

"Yeah, like a tragedy of errors," said Dan. "
If
she hadn't spilled the perfume, she would have been over at our house when the train crashed. Or
if
Lucinda hadn't lied to my great-grandmother about taking Dorothy on the train, or
if
Sigmund had gone home earlier and heard her crying in the attic—or hadn't stayed here for so long..."

"Or
if
Dorothy could have escaped somehow," mused Miranda. "Her death was such a mistake!"

"If you ask me," said Dan, "death is always a mistake."

Miranda stared at the calendar, thinking of Lucinda Galworthy, and wasn't so sure.

The voices of another tour group sounded outside the door, and Miranda and Dan exited another way, running down the back stairs and along a corridor to the lived-in section of the house. They climbed yet another stairway back to Dan's room.

"I'll give you the whole tour another time," he promised. "But at least we've accomplished something today. We know that my experiment worked, and we figured out what happened to Dorothy."

"You and your experiment," Miranda panted after all the running. "Dorothy is still dead."

"Come on, Mandy. She was dead for years and years before you and I were even born!"

"Well, she shouldn't have been!" cried Miranda.

"Don't yell at me! I didn't kill her!"

"I know, I know! I just feel I'm supposed to
do
something. You know, change things."

Miranda was looking at him but seeing instead the trees blowing in the cemetery the day before, when the wind picked up. She heard again the rustling and buzzing of insects, the frenzied chattering of the squirrels. "We wanted to fix things for Dorothy by burying her properly," she said slowly, a whole new concept forming in her mind. "We tried to contact her to ask what we could do to make her rest in peace. But what if that's not what she wanted at all? We just said it—Dorothy died too soon. It was a mistake. It shouldn't have happened. Dan, that's it!" She grabbed his arm and looked up into his face, her own eyes glowing with certainty. "She doesn't
want
to rest in peace. She wants not to have died in the first place!"

He looked at her intently. "Any plans, professor?"

Her face fell. She pleated the bedspread between her fingers in silence.

A breeze stirred the curtains. Then Dan leaned back on his elbows. "How long have your parents been married?"

She bunched the fabric in her fist, then smoothed it out again. "Oh, I don't know. About fifteen years, I guess. But why?"

"Well, it seems to me that if I went back in time about fifteen or sixteen years, to the time and place where your parents first met, and if I waited until just when your father was about to introduce himself to your mother, and then at that second I interrupted him and dragged her off to dance with me or something—well, they wouldn't have met!"

"Sort of like in that movie,
Back to the Future?
" Miranda laughed. "But my parents met on a bus, can you believe it? Sat next to each other. They were both really young—Mither was on her way to medical school, and Dad had finished college but didn't have a regular job yet. They ended up in New York and in love."

"The point is, if I'd sat next to your mom first, they wouldn't have met just then. And who knows? If they didn't meet each other then, maybe they'd never have met at all. Maybe they'd each have met someone else and married different people, instead of each other. Think of it! Then you would never have been born!"

"Thanks a lot," said Miranda glumly. "That would have been great."

"All I mean, Mandy, is that if you changed the past you'd be changing the present, too."

Catching sight of Dan's bedside clock, Miranda gasped at how late it had grown. "I'd better get home," she said, jumping up from her cross-legged position on Dan's bed. "I should have put the roast in the oven a half hour ago. Oh well, we can order out for pizza."

"Come over again tomorrow, okay? We can bike somewhere—but nowhere near the cemetery, okay?"

"Okay. I'll come over right after breakfast. I have to practice my flute in the afternoon, though, for the autumn concert."

"Famous Mandy." He reached for her. She squeezed his hand and headed for the stairs.

At the front door she turned to him, her forehead creased. "Listen. I've been wondering," she said. "Do you think we should tell the police that the body we found is Dorothy's, and that someone else is buried in the cemetery?"

Dan considered this for a moment, then shook his head. "We don't have any real proof. Nothing you saw through the windows would hold up in any kind of court—I can barely believe it myself. It just sounds like—"

"Total weirdness," finished Miranda. "I know."

"But it does seem wrong, somehow," Dan conceded. "Since we can't change what happened to her, the least we could do would be to bury her under her own name."

"But that isn't what Dorothy really wants," insisted Miranda. "I know it isn't. She isn't a ghost needing to be laid to rest or anything—she's a ghost who needs not to have died in the first place!"

"Well, you work on it," Dan teased. "Nothing you do would surprise me anymore!"

 

She ran across the lane, thinking about that. Could it be that she—and no one else—had the power to see into the past, for some reason? And what other reason could there be, except to rectify a wrong done decades ago? Yet what could she do to change the past? And—as Dan had mentioned—how might that affect the future?

Miranda was still deep in thought as she entered the kitchen. A wave of magnolia perfume immediately assaulted her, and a hard grip on her arm wrenched her out of her musings.

"There you are!" shouted Helen in a voice Miranda had never heard her use before. Helen's eyes glittered bright and wild, and her usually soft mouth was tightly drawn. The magnolia scent—Lucinda's scent—was overpowering. She shook Miranda roughly. "Where have you been?"

Miranda tried to twist out of her mother's grasp. "I was over at the Hootons'!"

"At the Hootons'. I see. So considerate of you to leave me a note." Her voice crackled with sarcasm. "I had no idea where you were, young lady. You didn't even see fit to come home in time to put dinner in the oven."

"I'm sorry, Mither—"

"Sorry! I'll bet you're sorry! Off running around with some boy, leaving without permission, shirking your duties at home—that's sorry?"

"Stop it!" shouted Miranda. "I didn't do anything!"

"Didn't
do
anything!" mocked Helen, her eyes gleaming. "Didn't
do
anything! So, we add lying to the list, do we?"

"What are you talking about? I haven't done a thing! Honest!"

Helen fairly spat out the words. "Then I am to suppose it was a
ghost
who spilled my new bottle of perfume? And a
ghost
who neglected to put dinner in the oven? And a
ghost
who went running off without permission?"

Miranda's heart thumped. Perfume?

"Answer me, young lady."

Miranda could only shake her head. Helen grabbed Miranda's arm and propelled her out of the room. Then she half pushed, half dragged her up the stairs. The magnolia scent was even more intense on the second floor. They stopped at the foot of the attic stairs. "Get up there!" Helen shoved Miranda at the steps so viciously that Miranda fell to her knees. "I said, get up there!" Miranda moved slowly up the stairs, her shins aching from the fall.

"It's a pity the latch is broken." Helen tried to force the lock back into place. "But you will remain up here just the same. You are not to come down until your father gets home and I discuss with him what is to be done with you."

Miranda jerked herself free and glared at her mother, trying hard to hold back the tears that coursed down her cheeks. "You're crazy!" she screamed. "And Dad will think so, too, when he hears!"