A Widow's Curse (28 page)

“Hek,” June said soothingly, “it most likely come as a shock, your news.” She lowered her voice. “And you know that boy's from over there in England,” she added, as if that were the perfect excuse for all of the patented Andrews foibles.

But it worked on Hek. He sat back down, even if his face was a little flushed.

“Your mother sold the coin,” he concluded, as if no one else had yet thought of it.

“She only thought she'd get funeral money,” June concluded. “But that man give her five thousand dollars, she said.”

“That was about the last time we seen her, your mother.” Hek nodded once, his benediction, and went back to work on the field peas.

“Her final words at the funeral were words of anger,” June said softly. “Some people are that way about death—mad at the one who's gone. Last thing I heard her to say was to call your father a bad name.”

“A curse,” Andrews said softly to himself.

“And of course at that point,” I murmured, looking directly at Andrews, “she was a widow.”

 

Skid called not long after Andrews and I got home from Hek and June's. Professor Briarwood was being held in the hospital's psychiatric ward. Apparently, his Mr. Hyde persona had interfered with an emergency room doctor's care. Burly orderlies were dispensed; Briarwood was sedated.

The man calling himself Detective Huyne, along with his friend, had checked out of the Mountain Vista Hotel in Pine City and had disappeared. Skid was pursuing the issue, but he held little hope of finding the false policemen, given the limited resources of a small-town sheriff's office.

I asked if he knew anything more about lawyer Taylor. Skid told me that Taylor had filed half a dozen legal documents to block anyone, myself included, from ever looking at Briarwood or Devilin files in his office. If I wanted to fight him, of course, I could. I would eventually prevail, but it would be a considerable battle. The primary ingredient in a successful legal war of that sort, Skid reminded me, was always funding. Taylor had it; I didn't. And Taylor's bid for governor was proceeding very nicely, so he had every reason to keep me from exposing his foibles. Skid concluded by suggesting I let it rest, then telling me to fix my living room window.

So Andrews and I spent a bit of time covering said broken window with plywood and also looking at the damaged lock on my door. They both would be properly repaired later in the week; our stopgap measures would hold for a day or two.

As the sun was going down, we sat in the kitchen, deliberately talking about nothing—bad movies we loved, good books we hated, people we thought were funny. Anything to avoid a reexamination of recent events.

I knew Andrews wanted to go home, but I was glad he was going to stay one more night.

Just as I was about to tell him so, I noticed a strange shift in the shadows behind my house—a pattern of light like a giant swan in the pine trees. I squinted into the woods, and the image came clearer. I only saw her for a moment, through a hard slant of white from the setting sun, but there she was: the woman from the Cotman portrait, Eloise Barnsley. She was wandering slowly around the perimeter of my house, so pale that she was nearly transparent. I instantly thought of the Welsh story of the Widow of the Swans, the enchanted woman who outlived everything she loved.

Before I could make my voice work to alert Andrews, she was swallowed by the darker leaves; gone into the first black of night. But he could see my face, and noticed the odd expression there.

“Fever?” Andrews stared into my eyes, then over his shoulder out the kitchen window. “What is it?”

“I saw Eloise Barnsley.” I could barely form the words.

“Oh.” He relaxed, turning back toward me. “Jesus. The way you looked, I thought maybe Professor Bizarro had escaped from the hospital and was out there in your yard. Gave me a bit of a startle. Your imagination is going to be the death of you
and
me.”

“I saw her.”

“Which, you realize, is completely impossible, right?”

I looked down at my fingers. They were shaking.

“Right,” I admitted.

“What you saw, boy-o,” he intoned, “was an echo of the past few days. And I guess I can't fault you for that.”

“Maybe.”

“Look,” he said, trying to explain, “it's all part of a kind of pattern, the way the mind—no, wait, you're the one who doesn't believe in patterns.”

“Please shut up.”

“What's your take, then? What
did
you just see? And please don't feed me a ghost story. I'm already full.”

“I don't know.”

“All right, I'll give it another go.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I think you were quite taken with the tale of your ancestor and Lady Barnsley, and then you fell in love with the portrait you saw in Atlanta. I watched it happen on your face while you were looking at it. That image is wandering around in your
brain,
not your yard.”

“Maybe.”

For some reason, I had a fleeting thought of the coin hidden upstairs in my mother's room, a silver ghost of the moon, just waiting there. I wondered when someone would ask me about it and want to know where it was. Maybe, I thought, I could use it to buy the portrait of Lady Barnsley; hang it in my living room. Maybe that was all she wanted: for her portrait to be back among family.

Andrews mistook my musing.

“Okay, then.” He sighed, exasperated beyond measure. “What do you think it is? You're obviously dying to tell me.”

I rallied, sipped a quick breath.

“Something much more frightening than a ghost story.”

“Oh for God's sake.”

“What if a curse actually has its own kind of energy field? And what if we take quantum physics seriously?”

“What if we do?” He was irritated because he couldn't see where I was going.

“Suppose a curse is like all other energy: It can't be created or destroyed; it can only change form. Suppose the curse that Dan and I lifted last night isn't really gone—or what if the rage Lady Barnsley let loose is still floating somewhere in the air? They've only changed form and are wandering now, looking for somewhere else to land.”

I thought of where I'd been when the events of the previous few days had begun: engaged in useless pursuit, moving rocks up a hill and sweating in September heat.

“You mean you think that the form of some curse has found its way to your house,” Andrews asked, “and is wandering in those woods? God, but you're a hopeless wretch. I give up. You can believe all that—if it makes you happy.”

He shook his head. It was the face of Dr. Andrews but the voice of Dan Battle.

And the voice may have caused me to have a small epiphany. I was forced to consider that although it was clearly possible to see the events of this world as a series of chaotic, unrelated moments, maybe there was another possibility.

What if I
did
take new physics seriously? In Einstein's universe, the reality of an event depends entirely on the person who sees it happen. The observer
makes
the observation.

And if that were true, I thought, then it might be possible for me to see the events of this world the way Dan might, as a completely interdependent web of relationships, where everything relied on a kind of miracle of perfect connection.

“Maybe,” I began slowly, as if conceding some long-battled game, “if I'm the observer of my own life, I have a choice. I can see my existence as a meaningless mess, or I can see it as a constant miracle.”

“Right,” Andrews responded hesitantly, staring into my eyes, still not certain where I was going.

“So I suppose I have to ask myself this: If it is up to me how I see everything, then what kind of world do I want to live in—a rocky place that's empty of significance, or a green place filled with wonder?”

But before I could finish the thought, my eyes widened and I blinked back what I was seeing in the woods outside my kitchen window.

Thank God Andrews turned around just in time to see it, too: a huge white swan bursting from the shadows and rowing upward toward the autumn sky.