Paperquake (18 page)

 

June 20, 1906

Dear Diary,

This will be fast because we shall be leaving shortly, but I have to tell someone. My heart is so full. It has happened at last, at long last! Hal is mine at last, truly and forever. We were married this afternoon before a judge, with two kindly people brought in off the street as witnesses. They had no idea they were witnessing not only a wedding ceremony but the Guidon of all my hopes and plans. Everything is still in horrific disarray around us, but life goes on and we are making our plans to leave this ruined city. There are too many unhappy memories for me here, and for Hal, too, though I am positive with time I can change his sadness over poor Verity's death to gladness in the certainty that I am the right woman for him after all.

Her death is still very much on our minds—though in quite different ways, I imagine. He is remembering his dream girl, the beloved Sweet V he wanted to marry. I am remembering that same sweet V the day before the end.

I was helping her sit up in bed just a few days before she died when suddenly from outside in the street there came a loud clanging. She said softly, "Oh, listen, Laela—do you hear? Wedding bells! Wedding bells for me and Hal!" Her mind had seemed to be wandering in those last days, but I could hear the bells, too.

So I went to the window and looked out and saw the strangest sight. An old organ-grinder was walking by pushing a cart and banging with a stick on a pot dangling from a piece of rope. A very unusual sight on Chance Street. He had a little monkey riding high on his shoulder, wearing bells on his tiny fists. At least that's what I supposed they were, for as they passed, the little animal
raised his arms over his fuzzy head and shook them, and little jingles mixed in with the loud clanging.

"
Wedding bells," Verity said again from her nest of pillows.

"
It's just an organ-grinder," I told Verity. "With a little monkey. Come, let me help you to the window so you can see them before they're gone.
"

But she had faded into sleep again. I shivered a little, though the room was warm. What she thought were wedding bells might have been her own death toll.

 

Verity,
Violet thought, staring down at the page. V was Verity Stowe. And the diary writer's name was Laela. It looked like poor Verity had never married Hal after all. Instead Laela had—and very soon after the big earthquake ... after Verity died. After Laela had killed her? But the way Laela wrote of Verity's death in this entry didn't sound like murder to Violet anymore.

But then how
had
Verity died? Violet bit her lip. It was vitally important that she know. The pattern was still there.

Slowly Violet folded the page and slipped it into her pocket. She opened the bathroom door and walked carefully down the stairs, gripping the banister extra tightly.

"Where's Sam?" she asked as Jasmine walked past the stairs, carrying a trash bag full of wallpaper scraps.

"Outside. We're taking the bags out as we fill them."

Violet joined Beth by the big bay windows and started helping to pull old wallpaper off in thin strips. Beth and Jasmine started singing along to the radio, but Violet worked silently, lost in thought.

It would be a relief not to have to look out for murderers anymore. But what if she got hit by a car? What if she tripped and cracked her head on the curb? A sudden heart attack? There were so many ways to die. She looked out the window and watched a man across the street walk up toward the hardware store. What if he just pulled out a gun and turned and shot her—right through the window? Such things did happen sometimes. The newspapers were full of news like that.

If only she could find out exactly how Verity Stowe died, she'd know better what to look out for. She watched Sam and Rose walk around the house and up the front steps.

"What a job," complained Rose, entering the house. "Sam, how about if you hold the ladder for me, and I'll start on that corner?"

"Sam, how about if you help me rip the paper off here by the door?" asked Jasmine.

Sam just stood in the middle of the room and looked around. "It's weird thinking that this is where the witch lived. Was she a slob or what?"

"You should have seen it before we cleaned the first time," said Rose.

"Remember, the house was empty for years after she moved to the nursing home," said Beth. "That's a lot of time for the dust to pile up. Miss Stowe might have been neat as a pin."

Violet felt Sam's gaze on her and turned around. She liked his wide, happy grin. He would be a boy she'd like to get to know—but that probably wouldn't be possible now. She might not have much time left. Where had he found the diary entry? Why had he hidden it from the others? She would ask him—if she lived long enough to find time alone with him.

The thought brought tears to her eyes.

"Do you have something in your eye?" asked Sam, peering at Violet with concern.

"No!" Violet wiped her stinging eyes vigorously. "Nothing. I'm fine." She glanced past him up the stairs, imagined herself climbing them right up to the back bedroom. She had the strangest feeling that if she was to go to that window and look down at the backyard, she would see not a concrete alley, but a courtyard full of flowers—the same flowers poor V had looked out upon. Had they been the last thing she saw as she lay dying in her bed? Or had she died another way—by tripping down the stairs or choking on a fish bone?

Sam was looking at her strangely. "Are you sure? You don't look fine."

"No, I'm not. I mean, my eye is fine. But I'm not." He looked surprised, but she left the window and started for the stairs. "Come with me, Sam." When she saw her sisters looking over at them with identical smirks on their faces, she grabbed a spray bottle off the sales counter. "We're going to, um, clean windows."

They faced each other in the bedroom that looked over the backyard. "So, what's with you?" asked Sam. "These windows shine like they've already been cleaned."

"Forget the windows. Tell me about the diary entry." Her voice was low and intense.

"Is that what it is? Could you read it?" Sam made an attempt to lower his foghorn voice to match hers. It came out a harsh whisper.

"Yes. Where did you get it?"

"It was at the bottom of the fabric box. I looked before I brought it down. It was right there, under everything in the bottom. I thought you should see it without having to share it with everybody else."

"Why did you think that?" asked Violet. "How could you know?"

"Well, it figures. If you're the one getting weird letters from the past, then you're the one who should at least see the thing first."

"You mean you didn't read it?"

"Well," he admitted, "I did sort of try. But it's hard to read all that curly writing. I couldn't make it out. Was it what you were looking for?"

"Sort of. But—" She looked helplessly out the window, down at the cement yard. There were no flowers there at all.

"What?"

"She died. She didn't marry Hal after all, and I don't know
how
she died!" Violet felt tears pricking behind her eyes again. She knew she wasn't making sense. Sam would think she was a total idiot.

There were sprinkles of dried wallpaper paste in Sam's dark hair. They blew loose as he shook his head. "I don't know who died or who Hal is. What is it you're afraid of?"

"Death." At his shocked expression, she sighed. "Sudden death, Sam.
My
death."

"I think you'd better spell everything out for me. I'm not getting this at all."

Would he believe any of it? She took a deep breath. "Okay, listen," she began slowly. "I know this is going to sound really weird, but there's a sort of
pattern.
From the past, I mean. The things that happened to a girl named Verity who lived here in this house almost a hundred years ago keep happening to me. Well, sort of." She gazed out the window as she spoke and told him all about it from the beginning, about the letters and the diary entries. Even about the stolen letter from the museum. Then she fingered the carefully folded letters and diary entries in her pocket. She drew them out and read them to him, pointing out the similarities between her life and Verity's.

"It's like we're connected somehow," she concluded. "And she died young, and so—well, you know."

"So you really think you'll die, too?" Sam's brown eyes were wide. "That's incredible."

She spritzed cleaning solution on the window and watched it dribble down the glass.

Sam squinted at the diary entry he had given her. "The name Verity is really nothing like your name—except for the first letter. And the other parallels—well, they're just coincidence. They've got to be. Lots of girls have two sisters. And sisters are always pains—I know that much myself, and I have only one of them."

"But Verity's sisters were twins—and their names were Jane and Rachel. My sisters look like twins—and their names start with /and
R,
too." Violet sighed. "Look, I know I can't convince you. It's just that—well, this is all so weird, I can't ignore what I'm finding."

"Hey, you're not the only one finding things, though.
I
found that last diary entry. Does that mean I'm going to die? Or my mom, since she bought the box from the old witch?"

She turned away from him. She put her hand on her heart and waited, trying to feel its beat. Was it erratic? She leaned her head against the window glass, feeling dizzy and helpless. "The letters are a warning to me. I just know it—even if it does make me sound crazy and paranoid to say so."

Beth's voice from the stairs made them both turn. "Hey, you two! Want something from the café?"

"Come on, let's go," said Sam, taking the spray bottle from Violet's hand and dropping it on the floor. "I'll hold your hand while we cross the street and keep you safe."

Violet let him take her hand and lead her downstairs.
I'm
holding hands with a boy,
she thought, detached. She saw Rose, Jasmine, and Beth glance at each other in surprise when she and Sam came downstairs together.

Rose put her hands on her hips. "Well!" she said. "What have you two been up to?"

"We'll tell you about it at the café," murmured Sam.

"Really!" Beth wiggled her eyebrows. "Shouldn't some details be kept private?"

Jasmine and Rose giggled. "I hope," Jasmine said to Sam with mock severity, "that you haven't been putting the moves on our baby sister!"

Violet felt tears slipping down her cheeks. She felt stupid, but she couldn't help it, and she pulled her hand out of Sam's, pushed past them all, and walked toward the door. They could tease and joke all they wanted because they weren't the ones getting messages from the past. They could laugh! They didn't have to be watchful, as she did, searching out the dangers ahead. She just couldn't cope with every possible danger. She wouldn't know how to look out for them all. If it wasn't a murderer that killed her in the end, it would be a mugger, or a rabid dog, or her heart giving out, or a completely unpredictable slip in the bathtub sending her crashing down onto the hard tiles—

Or an earthquake.

"Hey, wait up," said Beth.

"Vi, we didn't mean anything!" Jasmine put her hand on Violet's arm.

"Don't be so sensitive," complained Rose. "You're no fun."

Violet shook the thought of earthquakes out of her head again. Sam led her out of the house. His booming voice was gentle. "I think you'd better show them the latest installment."

So over ice-cream sundaes served by the bubbly waitress, who flirted wildly with Sam when she brought their food, Violet showed her sisters and Beth the diary entry from Miss Stowe's box. She read it all aloud—about the organ-grinder and the bells, about Verity Stowe's death and Laela's marriage to Hal. The other girls stopped eating while they listened, sitting wide-eyed as if it were a delightful mystery tale they were watching on TV. Violet wished she could share their excitement as she had before. But today she couldn't shake the feeling that something awful was going to happen.

"At least," said Rose, "we know V's name now."

"Verity means 'truth,'" said Beth, who often knew odd things like that.

"It's a pretty name," said Jasmine. "How can we find out more about her? I mean, if you're not famous, then there aren't books written about you or anything."

"Try the newspapers," said Sam.

"The papers?" asked Jasmine in surprise. "Why would she be in the newspapers?"

"If she had been murdered, then, of course, it would be in the papers," said Rose. "But in this last entry it doesn't sound like Laela murdered her after all. So there wouldn't be an article in the paper."

"I know," said Beth. "Sam means her death announcement." Violet wondered if it was because Beth's father had died in a car crash when she was little that she knew things like where to look for people's obituaries. Violet herself hadn't known that newspapers carried such information.

"Right," Sam was saying. "I can ask my dad to help us. He works at the
Chronicle.
"

"We know the approximate date from the diary entry," said Jasmine. "Maybe the announcement will even tell us how she died."

"It would be good to know," Rose agreed. "So Vi can stop worrying."

"There's no news that will be good news," said Beth with a sigh. "Unless we learn that Verity Stowe died of old age."

"Which we know didn't happen," said Jasmine, "since the letters always mention how young she is."

"Maybe we'd know more about Verity if we knew more about Laela," suggested Sam.

"But we don't know her last name," Beth pointed out. "So how could we look her up in the newspaper?"

"We know she married Hal," Jasmine pointed out. "If we could find out his last name, we could find out hers—at least her name once she married him. Women always took their husband's last name back in those days."