The Treasure Box (18 page)

“Grace, about the box—”

“You're right taken with that little box, aren't you, deary? I have to admit I was, too, when I first laid eyes on it. Don't reckon she'd care to sell it, but you never know. You'd have to ask her about that.”

Rachel set the Treasure Box on the table next to her chair and leaned forward. “Grace,” she said with a determined effort to keep her voice calm, “who are you talking about?”

“Why,
her,
of course
.
” Again she pointed toward the back wall.

“Come on, honey,” she called, raising her voice. “It's time to get up. I'll have dinner ready pretty soon.”

Rachel strained her eyes in that direction again but saw nothing.

“I found her in the building after the cops had gone—hiding in a pantry. Hurt pretty bad, and scared out of her mind. I take care of her.”

Rachel closed her eyes and made an effort to compose herself.

“Here she comes. Be gentle with her. She's—well, not quite right, if you get my meaning.”

Rachel heard a noise behind her and turned. The lumpy pile in the corner, the one covered by a blanket, began to move.

The lump rose upright and assembled itself into a more or less human form—a woman, with straggly, filthy hair and multiple layers of castoff clothing. As she limped across the room, dragging her left leg, Rachel noted that her entire left side seemed to be crippled or paralyzed—the left shoulder drooped, and the left arm swung uselessly at her side.

“Come sit by the fire, deary,” Grace was saying. “We've got ourselves a visitor.”

The woman eased herself into the chair opposite Rachel and shrugged the dirty blanket from her shoulders. She kept her head down, and hanks of unwashed hair hid most of her face from view.

But Rachel wasn't looking at her face. Her attention was fastened on the woman's midsection, which swelled outward like an overinflated beachball and threatened to burst the buttons of a ragged sweater already stretched to its limit.

The only phrase that came to Rachel's mind was “great with child.” This woman, this indigent, looked as if she might deliver at any moment. But what then? What would happen to the baby? How could she possibly care for a child in these surroundings? Where would she find—

“Rachel?”

The voice interrupted her thoughts, and Rachel looked up, her eyes going immediately to Grace, who stood next to the fire stirring the kettle of soup. But Grace's back was turned, and she gave no indication of having spoken.

“Rachel?” repeated the voice, raspy and uncertain, rusted from disuse. Something in the sound of it snagged at a rough place in Rachel's mind. She turned—slowly, unwillingly—and forced herself to look at the beggar woman's face for the first time.

The long stringy hair, dangling in matted strands, might have once been blonde, but now bore the greenish brown color of tarnished brass. The eyes, what Rachel could see of them through the half-open lids, were blue, and the pallid skin was smudged with dirt and soot. But the most prominent feature of the face by far was the puckered scar that ran in a ragged line from the outer edge of the left eyebrow to the corner of the woman's mouth. As Rachel watched, the woman's lips moved, and that side of her face drew up in a grimace. “Rachel?” she said a third time.

Something in Rachel's stomach jerked with a sickening lurch, an unsought and unwelcome recognition. “Yes,” she responded hesitantly. “My name is Rachel.”

Grace rose from the fire and came to stand next to the woman.

She reached out a hand and stroked the filthy hair with all the gentleness of a mother comforting a very young child. “Lord help us, deary! She spoke to you! She's never said a blessed word in all these months. I don't even know her name.”

“Cathleen,” Rachel said, her voice cracking. She tried to drag her eyes away from the filthy, haunted countenance, but she could not. “Her name is Cathleen and she—” She paused, summoning the courage to finish. “She is my sister.”

The scarred face twisted in a pitiful contortion, the grotesque imitation of a smile. Then, with great effort, she slid the Treasure Box from the table, balancing it precariously between her good right hand and her crippled left. She struggled halfway to her feet, deposited the box into Rachel's lap, and sank into the chair again.

“It's yours,” she said, the words slurring together. “I kep' it for you.” She pointed. “See? The lil' dragon with the smiling face?”

Rachel looked down at the box, then up at the once-familiar countenance, now so ravaged and filled with despair that it was barely recognizable. A single tear leaked from her sister's left eye, following the jagged path of the scar until it dropped onto her bulging abdomen.

Yes,
Rachel thought as she gazed at the ruined image of what was once her sister,
there be dragons here.
Here, in this place of peril, you could have your beautiful face mutilated by fire from the dragon's breath, your dreams charred to ashes. Here, where the world ends, you could slip off the edge without warning and be lost forever.

18
A CRY IN THE NIGHT

V
ita never had trouble sleeping, and she had little patience for those who complained of insomnia. The minute her head hit the pillow, she was gone, into a deep and usually dreamless slumber. It was, she always said, the gift of an unburdened conscience.

In the past week or so, however, she had begun to appreciate the problems brought on by sleeplessness. Her normal routine— in bed by ten-thirty, awake with the dawn—didn't seem to be working any longer. She couldn't manage to get her brain to shut down so that her body could rest, and when she did sleep, her overactive imagination conjured up strange and disquieting dreams. She would awaken in the middle of the night or the middle of the morning, dazed and disoriented, haunted by troubling images that came to her in the darkness.

Tonight she couldn't get her mind off Rachel and Cathleen. She dozed a bit, but her subconscious reeled. Rats scrabbling in the alley. Something red, moving inexorably toward her like the molten flow from a volcanic eruption. Grace's bright beady eyes peering out from a nest in the hedge outside her office window.

The dream shifted. She was in a dark, cold place, fettered hand and foot. She couldn't move, couldn't escape. And above her, staring down at her, a woman with a scarred face and a swollen belly and dirty blonde hair. Cathleen, at first, but subtly transforming into someone else. Someone familiar. Mary Kate, with Cathleen's scar.

Suddenly she heard it: a sound in the night, like the reedy cry of an infant. Vita bolted upright in bed, but her arms and legs were caught in a tangle of sheets and blankets, and for a minute she couldn't move. She kicked and thrashed violently until the blankets pulled free, and then sat panting on the side of the bed, clutching the clock and staring at it stupidly until its numbers registered in her brain: three-fifteen.

Vita willed her heart to slow its painful throbbing. She was awake now. Back in the real world. It was only a dream. Everything would be all right.

The sound came again, a feeble wailing noise. A cat, probably, prowling around the back of the house. She shoved her feet into her slippers, threw on her robe, and went to the open window, but the only noises outside were the chirping of crickets and the distant echo of a dog's bark.

Then she heard it a third time—not out in the yard, but inside the house. She started downstairs, belting her robe around her as she went. The sound came from her office—faint, but very clear. Vita reached the doorway of the sunroom and stopped. There it was again, emanating from the computer speakers on the shelf above her desk. Not the cry of an animal, but of a human. A person.

A person in pain.

Rachel lurched up from the sofa as the cry startled her to wakefulness. For a moment she sat there, squinting into the darkness, trying to identify what she had heard. Where was she? And what
was that noise?

Her eyes focused on the hearth, where a fire had burned down to glowing embers, and she remembered. Grace's place. The back room of Benedetti's restaurant.

A gust of wind moaned around the corner of the building.

Rachel shivered. It must have been the wind; that was all. Just the howling of the storm that raged outside. She drew the ragged blanket closer around her shoulders, limped over to the fireplace, and added more wood.

With a little coaxing, the fire blazed up, and she stood there for a moment or two, letting the warmth soak into her. Then the cry came again, from behind her—a muted wail. Not the wind outside, but something inside, a sound almost human, like an animal caught in a trap.

She turned, and in the flickering firelight she could see movement— on the floor a few feet to the right of Grace's pallet, a jerking under the blanket. Cathleen.

Wincing as the pain from her sprained ankle shot up into her calf, Rachel hobbled to the corner of the room and knelt beside her sister. “Cathleen,” she whispered, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“Cathleen, wake up.”

Cathleen rolled over and jerked upright. Her eyes, wild and white in the firelight, did indeed look like the eyes of a frightened animal, and her whole body tensed in terror.

“Hush,” Rachel soothed. “It's all right. It's Rachel, remember? You were having a nightmare. I heard you call out.” She stroked her sister's back and felt a shudder run through her. “Are you cold?”

Cathleen nodded.

“Come over near the fire, then. Come on, I'll help you.”

Getting an expectant woman up from the floor was no easy task, but at last Rachel managed to put an arm around her and help her to her feet. Together they lumbered over to the sofa and sank down in front of the hearth.

“Here, take some water,” Rachel urged, retrieving the bottle from the table next to the sofa and putting it to her sister's lips.

Cathleen upended the bottle and drank deeply. “Better?”

Cathleen nodded again. “The dream—it was—” Her shoulders twitched violently, and she shut her eyes. “Shooting. Blood everywhere, an ocean of it. I was trying to get away, but—”

“But you couldn't.”

She hung her head. “I—I should have died. I'd be better off.”

She laid a grimy hand over her swelling midsection. “We'd both be better off.”

“Cathleen, you don't mean that!”

Her head shot up, and her eyes bored into Rachel's. “Didn't you wish me dead, after what I did?”

Rachel hesitated. For just a moment, all the old anger came flooding back—the memory of Cathleen's deception and selfishness, the shame of standing at the altar waiting for Derrick, that horrible moment when she pulled up the loose board in the barn floor to find that everything she cherished was gone. A hot stab of resentment knifed through her. She shouldn't have to be here, in this hideous place, trying to comfort the sister who had betrayed her so terribly.

Then her eyes rested on the scarred and filthy face. Cathleen had never possessed Rachel's intelligence or abilities or likable nature. She'd never had a friend like Sophie or a mentor like Elisabeth Tyner. All she ever had was her beauty. She had always depended upon her looks, upon her ability to attract the lads and manipulate them into doing what she wanted. Her only hope for a secure future had been to find a man, get married, and be taken care of. Even if she had to steal her sister's fiancé and life's savings in the process.

Poor Cathleen. She had chosen so unwisely. And now, scarred and broken, she would bear the guilt of what she had done—to her sister, to herself, to her unborn baby. Was it so much to ask that Rachel should now give her the benefit of the truth, and a little compassion?

“I was angry with you, yes,” Rachel admitted. “Running away with Derrick was a terrible thing to do, although I suppose you got the worst end of that bargain.”

Cathleen acknowledged Rachel's words with a crooked smile.

“And stealing the money I had worked for—well, I was furious about that, even though I was fairly certain Derrick had put you up to it. But it was taking Sophie's Treasure Box that was the last straw. You knew how much I valued it—how important her memory was to me.”

“I know.” Cathleen averted her eyes.

“So yes, I was angry. I wanted not just to get the Treasure Box back, but to get revenge—or at the very least, retribution. To hurt you the way you had hurt me.” She paused, fumbling for words.

“But—but I never wished you dead, Cathleen. I never hated you.”

Cathleen peered through her hair at Rachel. “Never?”

Rachel thought about the question for a moment, and at last forced out a half-truth, the words she knew she ought to say but did not feel. “For a while I thought I did. But no, I don't hate you. You're my sister. I could never hate you.” She got up and went to the hearth, laying on more wood and poking at the embers with a broken chair leg. “Tell me about Derrick.” She kept her back turned toward Cathleen. “I want to know what happened.”

“I loved him,” Cathleen answered miserably. “At least, I thought I did. He told me he loved me—oh, Rachel, I was so stupid to believe him!”

“Until I was forced not to, I believed him, too,” Rachel said quietly. She faced Cathleen and raised an eyebrow. “So which one of us was more stupid for believing him?”

“That would be me.” Cathleen let out a pent-up breath. “He never even promised me the altar.”

“He didn't marry you?” Rachel's eyes went to her sister's protruding abdomen. “I assumed—”

“I assumed a great deal, too.” She shifted on the sofa, trying to get more comfortable. “We honeymooned on board ship during the crossing. We just never got around to the wedding.”

Rachel looked around at the room, then back at her sister's face. “Cathleen, what happened here?”