Summer Of Fear (19 page)

I went to the den and stood in the doorway. Julia was sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table on which there was spread a road map of New Mexico. Dad and Peter were sitting across from her on the sofa, and Dad was explaining, “You take the freeway here and go north. It’s only sixty miles or so on a nice double-lane highway. About twenty miles north of Albuquerque there’s an Indian pueblo which your Aunt Leslie will probably want to take you through. Then up here, on the outskirts of Santa Fe, you’ll get into the area of the red clay cliffs. It’s pretty striking scenery.”

“The open air opera house is here in these mountains,” Peter said, touching the map. “They’ll probably be rehearsing while you’re up there. Do you like opera?”

“I’ve never heard any,” Julia said. “I don’t know much about singing.”

“We’ll have to go sometime. I’ll check and see what’s planned for the rest of the season. Knowing Mom, she’ll take you to eat at La Fonda, that’s her and Rae’s favorite place for Mexican food.”

“It all sounds lovely,” Julia said, tracing the route with her forefinger. “Did you say the cliffs are in this area?”

“Right here,” Pete said. “I wish I were going with you. Rae’s lucky not to have a summer job; she gets to loaf around and go along on everything.”

Julia moved her finger slowly up and down the black line that represented the road to Santa Fe.

“Is it all right if I take the map to my room?” she asked. “I’d like to study it a while tonight. I’m ashamed at how little I know about my adopted state.”

“Go right ahead,” Dad said warmly. “Keep it as long as you want to. I’m glad you’re interested.”

“Thanks, Tom.” Julia smiled at him. It was a nice smile, gentle and gay and loving. Despite the difference in their coloring and features, when Julia smiled at my father that way she reminded me startlingly of Mother.

That night we ate chicken and rice and peas for dinner. Mother did not speak to me at the table except to ask me to pass Bobby the peas because he hadn’t taken any first time around. I cleared the table and did the kitchen without being asked. Mike stopped over for a while; he had the next day off and wanted to know if Julia wanted to go on a picnic, but she told him she already had plans. After Mike left Bobby asked Julia if she wanted to play dominos, and the two of them had a game. Then Peter decided he wanted to play, so he joined them. Dad read the paper and then got some papers out of his briefcase and went over them with a red pen making little marks and corrections. Mother spotted the doll house prints and got them ready for mailing. She also remarked to Julia that she would develop the American Girl photos after her return from Santa Fe. I read a magazine.

It wasn’t an unusual evening in any way. The only reason I remember it in such detail is that it was to be the last evening we were all together. It was the evening before the end.

I did not get up the next morning until after Mother had gone. She had not mentioned to the family the fact that I was not going on the Santa Fe outing, and I knew it was because she hoped that I would change my mind. I was too tired of conflict to be able to face any more of it, so I remained in bed until I was certain that she and Julia had left, and then I got up and put on my shorts and a T-shirt and went out to the kitchen.

Bobby was there, eating a piece of chocolate cake.

“Is that your breakfast?” I asked him.

“It’s my breakfast dessert,” he said. “I had cereal already. How come you’re home? I thought you were going with Mother.”

“I was,” I said, “but I changed my mind.”

“That’s dumb,” Bobby said. “It means Mother doesn’t have any company.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “She has Julia, doesn’t she?”

“Julia’s sick.” Bobby took a huge forkful of cake and stuffed it into his mouth and continued to talk through a ring of chocolate icing. “Her stomach was upset and she had a headache. Mother said it sounded like she was coming down with flu.”

“You mean she didn’t go?” The twist in circumstances was more than I could bear. I would not have had to share the day with Julia after all! It could have been just Mother and me as I had originally anticipated!

“Mother said for her to take aspirin and stay in bed,” Bobby told me. “She couldn’t stay home herself because she had an appointment with an editor, but she said she’d come straight back when that was over and if Julia wasn’t feeling better she’d take her to Dr. Morgan.”

“It’s funny Julia can’t cure herself,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Oh, nothing.”

I went to the telephone and dialed the hospital and asked about Professor Jarvis. They transferred the call to the nurse on his floor who told me there was “no change.” Then I got a piece of cake about half the size of Bobby’s and sat at the kitchen table to eat it while leafing through the morning paper.

The doorbell rang announcing the arrival of a gang of Bobby’s friends. They came trooping in, yelling and jabbing at each other and romping around. The noise seemed to fill the house. If anybody had been sick but Julia I would have told them to be quiet. As it was I kept my mouth shut.

I knew though that I couldn’t remain in the house with all that racket. It was more than my nerves could stand. I decided that I would develop the film that Mother had left in the “hold” box so that when she got home it would be ready to be printed. It was a small way of saying “I’m sorry” for having made her unhappy.

I think back sometimes on that decision, how casually I made it. I might just as easily have decided to do something else. If that had been the case—but there is no reason to dwell upon that. As it happened, I did make the decision, and I went out to the darkroom, and there was Julia. The overhead light was on, and she was standing in front of the “hold” box with a roll of film in her hands.

“What are you doing here?” I said. “I thought you were sick!”

Her back was toward the door and evidently she had been too deeply involved in what she was doing to hear me open it, for she started and whirled to face me. The film spool dropped from her hands and rolled across the floor, leaving in its trail a long strip of undeveloped film.

I looked down at the film and up at Julia.

“You’ve ruined it!” I exclaimed. “You must know it can’t be exposed to light!”

Julia’s voice was very low and choked with fury.

“You were supposed to have gone to Santa Fe with your mother!”

“Well, I didn’t,” I said. “And it’s a good thing too or you would have wrecked all of Mother’s last batch of pictures. What are you doing, trying to develop them? Don’t you know that has to be done in the dark?”

“Really?” Julia said. And slowly, very deliberately, she took a second roll of film out of the box, tore off the label that held it together, and lifted it high above her head, letting the strip unwind to its full length so that the spool fell out onto the floor with a sharp, metallic clink.

I was so surprised that I did not move to stop her. I simply stood there, staring at her in amazement.

“What—” I stammered. “Why—”

“I think you know.”

“I don’t know at all!”

“Those books you got from the library must have told you something. If they didn’t, then the professor did. It was you who suggested to your mother that she use me for a model. You did it for a reason. You wanted to show your parents that my image would not appear on the negatives.”

“But it would have!” I said. “I was wrong!”

“You weren’t wrong.”

“But I had to have been! You’ve been photographed before! Mary Carncross showed your yearbook picture to her brother! You were photographed for that.”

I paused. The thing that was beginning to occur to me was so incredible that I could not believe it possible, and yet—and yet—

“Julia Grant was photographed for that,” I said slowly.

“Yes?”

“If a witch cannot be photographed, Julia Grant was not a witch. So you—”

“Yes?” Julia’s dark eyes were fastened to my face. She smiled slightly. “Go on, Rachel. ‘So you’—?”

“You are a witch,” I said. “So you—cannot be Julia Grant!”

And now that they were spoken the words were not so unbelievable after all. In fact, they explained everything. The reason Julia had sung in her church choir but had never sung for us—her lack of interest in Mary Carncross’s letter—the million and one little inconsistencies in personality and background that had come to light over the past months—suddenly I could understand them. It was as though the pieces of an unsolvable puzzle were coming together and suddenly, miraculously, they fit!

“But, if you’re not Julia,” I said softly, “then—who are you?”

“You haven’t guessed that?”

“No. I can’t imagine.”

“My name is Sarah Blane,” the girl I knew as Julia said quietly. “I worked for Ryan and Marge Grant in Pine Crest. They hired me as a cook and cleaning girl, but I realized pretty quickly that this was not the reason they wanted me to live with them. They had heard in the village that I had the gift of witchcraft handed down to me from my grandmother. They thought that if I lived with them I’d tell them things. Ryan Grant was using me to get information for his book.

“Well, that can go two ways. I used them too. While they were studying me, I studied them—the way they talked, their table manners, their outside ways. I’m smart and I can copy. By the time I’d been there a year I could do a study of Marge Grant that was so much like her that her husband himself wouldn’t have known the difference in the dark. I was like the daughter of the house. I wasn’t a maid, I was family.”

“But Sarah Blane was killed,” I said stupidly. “She was riding in the car with Aunt Marge and Uncle Ryan when it went off the cliff. They were taking her back to the village.”

“How do you know that?”

“Why, because—” Once again I paused uncertainly. “Because—”

“Because I told you so?”

“But there was a third body in the wreckage,” I said. “As badly burned as they were, they were able to tell that. The third person—” And then I understood.

“It was Julia,” I whispered. “The real Julia. She was the one in the car riding to the village with her parents. After the accident you took her identity. But why?”

“Me take her identity?” Sarah shook her head. “You’re wrong there. Julia’s the one who came back and took mine. I was the daughter in that house for a whole year, and I liked it. I wasn’t about to give that place back to Julia. I wasn’t going to go back to being somebody’s cleaning girl, to live my whole Me through in a place like Pine Crest, and marry some jakey durgen with cordwood on his breath and breed brats and slop hogs till the sky fell in. Not with a real world out there someplace waiting!”

“My aunt and uncle liked Pine Crest,” I said. “They thought it was a lovely place.”

“Then why did they ship their precious Julie off to Boston? They liked it, sure, for a squattin’ place, for a spot for writin’ a book in, but they wasn’t about to stay there, you can count on that. They was goin’ to leave this summer, to ‘come back to civilization’ as your aunt called it, and where would that of left me? Bight back where I’d started, except now I knew the difference. Now I knew what it was that I was missin’.”

“You didn’t have to stay there,” I said. “Nobody has to stay anywhere if she doesn’t want to. There, was nothing to stop you from taking your wages and buying a bus ticket and just—going.”

“Just going? Where?”

“Anywhere. Any big city.”

“Without schoolin’? Without trainin’? What would I do when I got there—scrub floors? What does a girl like me do, took out of school at the age of ten to help raise the little ones, whose only talent’s one that nobody will pay for? Sure, I know the art of witchcraft, I learned it from my gram and her from hers, but a lot of good it would do me shut off in the hills. And in the city alone, what good there either? I’d of ended up as a waitress in some dingy little diner or being somebody’s motel maid.”

“Well—” I could think of no answer. There was a point to what she was saying. What could she have done? There must have been something.

“You could have gone to night school and learned a trade,” I said. “Plenty of people start from nothing and make something of themselves. It takes time—”

“I got no time,” Sarah said. “I spent enough time. Pine Crest was where my time went. I’m not no child no longer—”

“You’re seventeen!”

“Your cousin Julie was seventeen.”

“Oh!” I stared at her. “Then, you—” And another part of the puzzle fell into place. The strange, high-boned face, the womanly body, the deep knowing eyes which had seemed from the beginning so unusual for a teenage girl, were not those of a girl at all. Sarah Blane was a grown woman.

“And so,” I said softly, “you decided after Julia was killed that you would take her place and come here to us. But how did you know that you could do it? What if we had known what Julia looked like, if we had guessed?”

“I was with the Grants a long time,” Sarah said. “I heard a lot of things. I knew how long it was since they had seen you last and that they didn’t send pictures. Like I said, I’m smart. I pick up things fast. Once I got here I learned how to act from you and your friends. It didn’t take me long.”

“No, it didn’t,” I admitted. “The clothes you wore—the dress—” I knew now where it was that I had seen the yellow dress that Sarah had worn down to dinner the first night she was with us. It was the same dress that was worn by the angel singing on the mountain top on the Grants’ Christmas card. The angel had been Julia, the real Julia! No wonder the clothes had not fit correctly, had been wrong in style and color. They had been bought for an entirely different person.

“So you bought new clothes,” I said, “and you got your hair cut like Carolyn’s and you learned how to act like a teenager. But you must have known that you wouldn’t get away with it indefinitely. When school started in the fall you would have gone in as a senior. You couldn’t have done the work. There’s no way you could have faked that! You’d have been found out then!”

“I am not going to be free to go to school in the fall,” Sarah said calmly. “I will be needed somewhere else. There will be a home to take care of, a little boy to raise, a lonely man to be comforted. I will have my own place then, the sort of place that should rightfully be mine. And before long the man will begin to love me and soon I will be his wife.”