The Mirror (49 page)

"Take it easy, Jerry," Rachael's brother said, a warning note in his voice. "Where to now, Puss?"

"Columbia Cemetery."

"Cemetery," Remy repeated, as if struggling to understand and humor his sister at the same time.

Cemetery,
Jerry said to himself and the hope that had flared since his wife's phone call was snuffed out. "Rachael, tell me what--"

"Trust me," Rachael cut him off and turned her face to the windshield as an enormous slab of what looked to be plywood flew across the car's hood and crashed into somebody's porch.

"We get out in this wind and we could get hit by something," Jerry warned when they'd parked at the cemetery entrance.

"It'll only take a minute." Rachael got out and wind slammed the door.

"Remy, Shay couldn't be buried here without our knowing it, could she?"

"I don't know. Let's just go along with Rachael and keep her calm until we get to the bottom of this. Frankly, Jerry, I'm worried."

"About Shay?"

"About my sister."

They stepped over the chain across the vehicle entrance, wind flopping Rachael's hair into her face, grinding stinging grit into Jerry's eyes.

"You're not going to believe this," Rachael yelled, and ran on ahead.

Tree limbs flayed at the sky. Threatening cracking sounds snapped all over town.

"She keeps saying that. Believe what?"

"Hasn't told me any more than she's told you." Remy pulled up his coat collar, turned sideways and shouldered into the wind.

Rachael stopped at the grave of her mother, a distant streetlight cutting through the dark enough for Jerry to see her half-shadowed face. It looked as if she was smiling.

"There she is." She pointed at Brandy Maddon's grave. "There's . . . Shay."

A nasty gust hurled a dirt cloud toward them and Jerry pulled out one side of his overcoat to shelter her, drawing her against his chest as he drew it around her.

Rachael's body shuddered with spasms. She was either laughing silently or sobbing.

Brandy still had the hiccups. They'd begun to hurt.

Wind roared at the truck, trying to force its way in, pinging sand and snow against the windows.

"Are you taking me back to the Gingerbread House?"

"Nope." He leaned over the steering device, squinting to see the road.

She should have known better than to trust such an erratic person as Ansel St. John.

"All these years and I never will get used to the winds. Seems they're getting worse. They have 'em in your day?"

Just last winter Mr. Arnett's hen house blew away, scattering his chickens ...

"There's more town and debris for them to stir up now," Brandy said stiffly, sure that he lied and was taking her back.

Where streets met and crossed each other, electric lanterns with red, yellow or green lights bounced on wires overhead. They looked to be heavy and Brandy wondered if they ever broke from their wires and fell on vehicles below.

Ansel parked in the shadow of an unlighted building. "Now, you wait here. I got to check on something. Be back in a minute." His beard flying in the wind, he hurried across a street and disappeared, to return minutes later and insist she follow him.

The wind caught her hair and tugged most of it loose as he took her wrist and pulled her along.

Pulling aside a board in a high fence, he shoved her through the gap and said something that blew away, as did the board.

Ansel led her to a gate in a roofless enclosure, across a rough sandstone area and through a sliding glass door.

Brandy waited until he'd switched on a light and pulled heavy curtains across the door.

A deep red rug, stone fireplace, enormous sofa . . . "What is this place?"

"You'll see." He whirled and raised his arms, obviously delighted with himself. "Your Christmas SURPRISE."

"Am I to live here?"

"Up to you, Shay Garrett. Nice place like this, this day and age, and that patio door's never locked. Makes you wonder, don't it?" He studied a hand-drawn map of some kind on the wall above the sofa. "Looks like somebody's sure been busy."

"Mr. St. John, I fail to see what--"

"Come along and I'll show ya."

In the next room, a giant bed without bedposts, the coverlet tucked inside the wooden framing. Ansel pushed down on it, creating a billow under the bedclothes that moved like a wave to the other side. "Now, what do you think of that?"

"I'm not sure I think well of any of this business and I demand to know exactly what--"

"Bet your granddaughter liked it just fine." He caused another ripple and then stared at her in his lidless fashion. "Got to do something about you, though."

Taking a brush from the bureau he brushed out Shay's hair. "You shouldn't braid it at night. Makes it all rumply." He pulled off her coat and inspected her. "Sure could use some color. Don't you have any lipstick?"

"I do not paint my face like a . . . Mr. St. John, what am I doing here?"

"One thing you got to remember, Shay Garrett. I'll be in the closet there. Don't keep looking at it and don't slip and mention my name or we're done for."

Marek Weir swerved the Porsche to miss a wire down in the street. Sparks snapped from its broken end, showering onto the pavement like a Roman candle.

He'd had to detour two blocks because a giant tree limb blocked the way, and just when he thought he'd be clear of the confusion a man in front of a Public Service cherry picker flagged him down.

"You want to wait just a few minutes and we'll have this cleaned up? Probably safer than trying another street right now," the man roared in his ear when Marek lowered his window. "Police and state patrol are asking everybody to stay home tonight till the wind calms down," he added in a rather bored tone, maybe because he knew it would do little good.

Boulderites tended to go about their business in these windstorms, much to the consternation of authorities.

Marek turned off the engine to wait for the Public Service Company to clear his way.

"Look for the good," Louise Weir had taught her sons. "The bad happens anyway."

Marek decided the only good thing about a windstorm was that it gathered up all the wastepaper wrappers and cups around McDonald's and blew them to Nebraska.

On the ranch in Wyoming, when hail ruined the hay crop or heavy snow killed the spring calves, Louise shrugged it off as "just life."

One day before another Christmas, Bill Weir's heart stopped forever on the back porch while the rest of the family was in town.

When they arrived home hours too late, their arms filled with Christmas packages, to discover their father already stiffening, Marek's older brother cried. And he was almost fully grown. "He died alone."

"That's the way we all die, Arnold," Louise had said cruelly. "Alone. Trick's not to live that way."

When Louise Weir died, all three of her sons stood at her bedside. But she died alone, not even coming out of her coma long enough to know they were there. Had Shay died alone?

"World owes you nothing but pain," his mother'd told him. "If you want more, you have to go out and get it. And that's easier than you think. Look at the clouds, son. Ever seen anything so beautiful?"

Marek hadn't appreciated the clouds that day. He couldn't now. But he had in between, and he would again.

A car honked behind him and then passed. Marek was startled to see the cherry picker and crew gone. He headed the Porsche home.

His search for Shay was hopeless, busywork to keep from facing the fact he'd have to adjust to one of life's little alterations.

Marek pulled into his reserved parking area. Wind carried the sound of sirens to him as he shielded his face and ran for the door.

He had an open invitation to several parties tonight. Singles tended to band together on holidays to pretend together they didn't mind being alone. Maybe he should go to one. He fumbled for his key under the light in the hall and decided he'd go to all of them.

Marek noted instantly the drapes pulled on the patio doors, the lights on. A thudding noise from the direction of the bedroom.

He slipped out of his jacket, chiding himself for leaving the patio doors unlocked just in case she ...

He deserved to be burgled. He moved quietly on thick carpet toward the bedroom doorway, tense, thinking he was ready for anything.

But he wasn't.

Streaming platinum hair with odd ripples . . . longer than he remembered.

Marek choked in an effort to breathe. She turned at the sound, reaching for a corner of the dresser as if in astonishment.

He was unwilling to believe that as often as he'd rehearsed this moment his first reaction should be anger. "All this time, God damn, and you're alive. And you let me worry?"

Leaning against the doorframe, he felt it tremble with the windstorm blasting Boulder and the apartment building. Marek clasped one hand with the other because they wanted to shake her until her teeth fell out.

Her hands moved to reddening cheeks. The ring finger on the left one still wore his diamond and she wore a shapeless thing with long sleeves that hung from the shoulders like a nightgown and extended to the floor. Beneath it she was huge.

The baby. He'd forgotten the baby.

Shay drew herself up and pointed her nose at the ceiling with an expression like an insulted librarian. "Mr. Weir, I did not expect this--"

"What the hell did you expect?" Marek crossed the room in spite of himself. In spite of the baby.

His approach and probably the look on his face took the starch from her. She crumpled. "Oh, how could he? This is awful." She backed away.

"How could who? What? Where have you been?" He reached for her.

Shay dodged. "How could . . . you get your fiancee with child and leave me with the results? She must have been--"

"She? She's you. And she got that way--you got that way right there!" He gestured toward the bed behind her. She jerked away and fell onto it.

The water bed rolled and heaved beneath her and she grabbed for the board frame. "John McCabe would have killed you for this."

"Who?"

"I want you to leave me be. Do you understand?"

"Then why did you come here?"

"I don't know. I mean I do know." She struggled off the bed. "I came because . . . well . . ." Shay bit her lip, looking every bit as furious as he felt. "Because I want you to stop searching for me."

"I'd already decided to do just that."

"You did? That's . . . good to hear." But she looked disappointed.

"Shay, does someone want money for you? Is this a setup? Are you being held somewhere against your will?" Was someone hiding behind the bathroom door with a gun to be sure she said the right thing?

"No. I'm perfectly safe and ... I know I must seem a silly goose to you but-"

"Silly goose?" He hadn't heard that expression since his grandmother died.

"I'm happy and well cared for and wish to be left in peace."

"Cared for by another man?" Why would anyone take on the trouble of a pregnant woman half the country was searching for?

"Certainly not!" Shay drew in her breath and blinked. "Another man . . . yes. Yes, that's it. So you see you must forget all about me." She posed again with her nose in the air and started to walk past him.

He had her by the shoulders, fighting the urge to violence. "And the baby. I'm supposed to forget about him too?"

"It will probably be a girl and no great loss to you. I assure you I'll do everything in my power to care for her."

"And your parents? Their lives have been ruined by your stupidity." An odd smell had crept into the room. "What do I tell them?"

She gave a little scream as he tightened his grip and she looked over his shoulder.

Just as he realized the import of the direction of her glance and before he could turn to defend himself, something thick and dark came down over him, tightened quickly around his arms before he could move. That smell overwhelmed him now even as he recognized it and did exactly the wrong thing. . . .

Marek drew in a choking breath, instinctively planning to let it out in a roar of fury at this final insult in an evening filled with them.

The roar never came. He stared down and someone gently lowered him to the rug.

"You mustn't hurt him." Shay's worried voice, far away.

". . . just sleep awhile. Looked like he was going to get rough." A harsh whisper. "Thought you needed help."

When Marek came back to the light in the room nothing covered his face or bound his arms.

He had a staggering hangover.

Rolling, he pushed on carpet until he was on his knees. His head and stomach shuddered together, his vision slid in and out of focus.

"Shay?"

Marek pulled himself to his feet, holding onto the dresser, and made for the door across a tilting floor.