The Mirror (50 page)

"Shay?"

Wind swirled red drapes into the room, howled derision.

A patch of white on the drapes. He stumbled over to find a piece of paper pinned to them.

Dear Mr. Weir,

I am truly sorry for the inconvenience I have caused you. I would have returned your engagement ring but my fingers have swollen and it cannot be removed. Please forgive me and please do not try to follow or search for me any longer. Nothing useful can come of it.

It was unsigned and neither in Shay's words nor her handwriting. But in the same flowery script as the message on his blackboard.

He found the blanket he kept on his closet shelf on the patio. It smelled of ether.

The gate was open.

Shay was gone. Again.

Marek crumpled the note and leaned his face against the brick wall, wind screeching a cover for the groans his voice made as he forced himself not to cry.

17

The wind stopped suddenly, as it had begun. A warm Chinook wind, it'd taken the snow with it, brought the nighttime temperature to an unseasonable sixty degrees.

It left nerves frazzled, piles of fine dirt on the insides of windowsills, tree branches hanging broken over roofs and sidewalks, Christmas decorations stripped from streetlights on the downtown mall, shingles lifted and torn, a few houses under construction flattened, and a fire raging in a mobile-home park where a trailer had been torn from its gas connection.

Now that it was gone, the city seemed inert and bizarrely silent. A line had gone down somewhere and the Gingerbread House was without power. The stove was a gas range, the hot dishes had kept warm and Rachael broiled the steaks.

Jerry sat between his wife and brother-in-law, a Christmas candle lighting their dinner. And yet this was not a festive meal. The silence outside seeped into the kitchen. The grating of a knife cutting through meat against the surface of a plate seemed to scrape on the nerves.

Rachael insisted they eat before she reveal her surprise, the reason for their visit to Columbia Cemetery.

Remy watched her with open concern.

She kept her eyes on her plate. Candlelight added to her pallor. She seemed too intent in her concentration on cutting her food, directing it to her mouth.

"Bran would have had a snit once about the cholesterol in this meal," Jerry said, trying to find a common and safe topic to lighten the mood.

Rachael lowered her fork to her plate, the broccoli still on it, her eyes wide with an expression suggesting hysteria. "Remember the fuss Mom made about all the bacon and eggs you used to eat for breakfast, Jerry?"

"Yeah. And that was years before I even heard the word 'cholesterol.'"

"And, Remy, remember on the ranch when she'd make us scrape up and down between our teeth with pieces of thread?"

"It kept breaking or fraying and getting stuck. Sure was glad when dental floss became available."

"Did you ever know anyone else whose mother insisted on that . . . then?"

"No, not that I'd remember anyway." Remy refilled their wineglasses. "But Mom was always ahead of her time. It was uncanny the way she--"

"I'll make some coffee." Rachael's silverware rattled as she took her half-eaten dinner to the sink.

When the table was cleared and the coffee poured, she handed Remy their mother's diary and lit more candles.

"I want you to read this aloud, Rem. I don't believe a word of it, you understand, but. . ."

"Do you think we should? This is a private thing."

"She meant for it to be read by . . . someone."

"Rachael, I know you're troubled. Can't we just talk it out?" Jerry asked. "I can't stay all night to hear your mother's diary."

"You'll change your mind when you've heard some of it," Rachael said too calmly.

" 'Dear Brandy.'" Remy began reading an odd account of Brandy telling herself what had happened to her as if she hadn't been there, using words no lady would have used in 1900--the date of the first entry. It dealt with her first marriage and the death of her father. "'He died in my arms, Brandy, thinking I was you.'" Remy looked up. "It doesn't make sense."

"Go on to the next entry." Rachael turned to Jerry. "It's dated 1946 and it's after our dad died."

Remy lifted his reading glasses to rub his eyes and then continued.

As you can see by the date, the mirror didn't reverse us and I think I should tell you of your life that I led. It looks like you will live out my life and I can't fill in all the gaps in your knowledge to deal with that but I can explain something of the family and times you missed. I can't imagine how you'll deal with being Shay Garrett but--

"Shay Garrett didn't exist in 1946," Jerry interrupted.

The diary related eventually how, when she was seven, Rachael brought home a little boy named Jerry Garrett and Brandy dropped a bowl of potatoes because she recognized the name if not the face of the man who would be her father for twenty years.

"Rachael, this is one of your stories written up like a diary or something. That mirror couldn't have switched Shay and Bran . . ." Jerry had a quick memory vision of Shay in the mirror, dressed as a gypsy, and the young Brandy watching the mirror being unloaded from a wagon. "No. I still don't believe it."

"Of course not. It's obviously impossible." Rachael laughed. "The funniest thing about it is how well it would explain the sudden change in Shay."

"And how my mother knew things she couldn't have known." Remy stared at the cupboards. "Like what professions we'd get into."

"And that I'd marry Jerry. And that I'd be a writer. She even told me the title of my first book before I wrote it."

"Rachael, this is some kind of hoax." Jerry's dinner wasn't sitting well.

"You read for a while." Remy handed him the diary. He was as pale as his sister.

Jerry tried to ignore the fact that the handwriting bore a close resemblance to Shay's. He'd been reading about ten minutes when the phone rang.

Rachael pulled the receiver into the hall by its overlong cord to talk and Jerry wondered if there was a man on the other end.

When she came back, she lit a cigarette off a candle and smiled without humor. "That was Marek. He's coming over."

Jerry groaned. 'Why do we have to have that--"

"Shay was at his apartment tonight. Or Brandy. Whoever. She's alive."

By morning the four of them had exchanged stories, compared countless details on how the diary explained both Shay and Brandy and how the note left in Marek's apartment came to be in an unfamiliar handwriting. They all agreed at one time or another that the whole thing was preposterous.

"We're too tired to make sense of this nonsense," Jerry said.

"I don't think we should say anything to Dan. At least not yet," Remy said. "He's hotheaded and--"

"He won't believe it anyway," Rachael said. "That the mother who bore and raised him was born his niece."

"There's no scientific basis or ... or any basis to account for a mirror that could . . ." Marek gave up and shook his head.

"I think we should keep Gale and the police out of this."

"Yeah, or we'll all end up in padded cells."

The conversation dwindled to stares, nervous gestures fed on coffee nerves, fatigue and shock.

"Have you ever had the feeling of lifting up out of yourself and looking down on you and . . . everyone?" Rachael pulled her eyes from the green leather book. Her expression blank. "Does it ever happen to anyone else?"

"You're just exhausted, Puss. And you've been through so much."

"Rachael, you don't really believe this?" Jerry picked up the diary.

"Of course not. It's impossible. But . . . what do you do . . . how do you cope if the impossible happens anyway?" Her face looked serene. Her entire body trembled.

The men sat watching her until Jerry whispered, "I'll stay with her. You two go on home."

Thirty miles away, the wedding mirror reflected a black coffee grinder and part of the oak pedestal table on which it sat.

Wilson Antiques, Ltd., closed for the holiday, stood barred and darkened.

Tiny dust particles floated in the air, many coming to rest on antique chairs and cabinets. But when they drifted onto the wedding mirror, they slid off, fell to the carpet below, collected in faint ridges that ringed the mirror's base.

In January, a cold snap hit Colorado and temperatures fell below zero at night. The weather warmed enough to snow and then turned frigid again.

The combination made the search for Shay unpleasant and difficult. Remy Maddon divided the map of Boulder County with Marek and they started all over again in a race to find her before the baby was born.

Jerry didn't offer to help. He felt ambivalent about finding his daughter now. Not, of course, that he believed the diary. And then he was too busy with Rachael.

He moved back into the Gingerbread House, buying twin beds for the ransacked master bedroom and hiring a retired nurse to stay when he had to be at the office. He couldn't possibly leave his wife now, not in the state she was in.

Rachael sat all day and stared at the wall, lay awake at night after her sleeping pill wore off and stared at the ceiling. She answered when spoken to and took an interest in nothing. She was beginning to put on weight, a thing she'd never allowed herself to do before.

One day the nurse found Rachael in the bathroom holding a razor blade to her wrist.

Jerry gave up and took her in to Gale Sampson, worried she might spill the fantastic story of the diary but not knowing what else to do. If she told him about the wedding mirror, Gale didn't mention it. He put Rachael on antidepressants.

Now Rachael didn't feel bad anymore. Rachael didn't feel anything. The nurse, at least, was relieved.

In Denver, the wedding mirror stood, unsold, in Wilson Antiques, Ltd. The store was located one block and around a corner from the Brown Palace Hotel.

In early February, it warmed up. The snow melted. And one night the wind returned. . . .

Brandy heard the first gust rolling in off the mountain range to the west, felt it slam into the house as she reached over Shay's stomach to wring out the dishrag. The rim of the sink vibrated against the baby. The baby moved sluggishly.

Ansel looked up from his newspaper, listening.

Silence.

As if the wind sucked in its breath.

Then a far-off murmur that grew to a growl as it approached. It swept by with a roar. Roof joists creaked in agony. Brandy could taste the dust on the air.

Again stillness, muffling all.

Ansel cleared his throat. "Drought wind. Better see to the animals."

Brandy rubbed Shay's back when he'd gone. Standing was uncomfortable, sitting anguish, and lying down not much of a solution.

The quiet lasted. Perhaps this wasn't to be a storm after all, just a few stray gusts.

Happy let out a long wailing howl and Shay's teeth ground together.

Brandy slid open the glass door to see if he'd become entangled in his chain.

He bared his teeth and lunged at her, snapping.

"Happy, what--" She lost her awkward balance and fell into the room on Shay's backside.

A twinge of pain from Shay's private parts. An even stronger one from her posterior.

Happy barked, snarled, tugged on his chain until he stood halfway over the doorsill.

"Stop it, dog! I know we're not the best of friends but we've managed nicely. I've even put food out for you."

Stina Mark pushed through the cat entrance and spat at him, arching her back and dancing on her toes in angry fear.

A gust Brandy hadn't heard coming hit the house and Happy snapped at her worn canvas shoe, teeth clicking shut inches from the toe.

"You've gone mad, hound. Out with you." She pushed a chair at him, rolling to her knees to slide the door closed, almost catching the end of his nose as he retreated.

The room was filling with cats, not only Stina's brood but several from the bam. They prowled the kitchen, mewing, sniffing.

Brandy pushed and pulled herself to her feet, using a chair and the table. A small puddle glistened on the floor where she'd fallen, her skirt and legs were damp.

Surely she'd have known if she'd wet herself.

A sickening ache in Shay's lower back

A barn cat sniffed at the puddle.

Wind shrieked outside. Happy howled.

Pain cramped around her middle, forcing her to bend over the table. The bread toaster fell off the corner and onto the floor. "Ma!"

Brandy held her breath till the pain eased, then drew in so much air it made her dizzy. Shay's legs felt weak.

She half-sat and half-leaned on the sofa with the bed pillows she'd brought from Lottie's room against the small of her back.