Dreadful Sorry (21 page)

No beginning to the story, and no ending. There was only the middle, and that's where they were now. The middle of the middle, sort of like being in a maze, lost, looking for the exit.

Finally, Molly stopped talking altogether. They were at the steps of the porch, and the van was nowhere in sight. She stared at the stone steps, not daring to look at Jared for fear of what she'd see in his face. Ridicule? A sneer? Even simple disbelief would be hard to take now that she had allowed herself to put words to all that consumed her.

He remained silent so long that she had to look up. He was staring across the headland to the cliff. "Well?" she asked.

He turned to her, frowning. It was the same frown she remembered from the moment before he threw her into the pool. She got a good grip on his arm, just in case he had any ideas about hurling her down into the cove. But he just kept standing there, frowning fiercely. Then he closed his eyes and sank down onto the steps.

"The middle of the middle," he murmured. "Molly, either we're both totally crazy—or else you're really on to something."

It felt as if a great, oppressive weight rolled suddenly right off Molly's chest. Slowly, he touched her cheek with one finger. Molly remembered the feel of Hob's hands when he held Clementine's face, how he kissed her lips. She spoke quickly. "My mother would disown me if she could hear us." Her laugh was shaky.

"I really
did
feel I already knew Miss Wilkins," he marveled. "And now you're telling me Grace Wilkins is Hob's baby sister. But her brother died when she was only a baby. She wouldn't be able to remember him, anyway."

"Who knows what people remember?" Molly found her voice. "Maybe there's some essence of Hob—some
Hobness
—about you that she recognized."

"'Hobness.' That's a good one."

"Maybe—somehow—it's what I recognized in you, too. When we first met on the school steps, I mean."

Jared was leaning back against the stone steps, staring up at the sky. "I've never thought about reincarnation before. Never had to. But there's got to be some solution to all these mysteries, and maybe that theory fits better than any other." He hesitated, thinking it over. Molly could hear the surf pounding against the cliff walls in the distance. "It's all got to fit together somehow, you know, because there are just too many coincidences. Too many connections between you and me and this place for it all to be just
chance.
I read somewhere that when you get past a certain number, coincidence can't be called coincidence anymore. There starts to be a pattern. It has to be part of a plan. Facts add up."

"What plan? What facts?" she asked, her heart thumping.

He looked at her and held up one finger. "Fact: you're terrified of water. And now we know that Hob drowned."

"But you're the one connected with Hob. And you're not afraid of water."

He nodded. "True, but the water must figure in somehow." He held up another finger. "Fact: You have bad dreams about a big house. Then you come here to visit your dad and stepmother, and you recognize this house. There's another connection."

Molly held up a finger, too. "The girl I see in dreams—the girl I become in my visions—has dark hair in braids and really red cheeks, and her name is Clementine. And today I learned that a girl named Clementine Horn really did live in the house. That's a fact." The reed grass rustled in the breeze. "I forgot to ask Miss Wilkins what Clementine looked like."

"And the name itself is unusual. Clementine—just like the song," mused Jared. "I don't know why I keep singing it, but whenever I see you, it pops into my head."

"It's the tune that keeps humming in my head, too. It was in my head even before I met you." Her voice came out a whisper. She held up another finger; it trembled slightly. "It's the same song Hob used to sing to tease Clementine."

Molly stood and moved into the driveway, staring up at the big house. It loomed above them, all angles and windows and chimneys. Jared stood next to her, and they faced the house together as they talked. Molly felt they were working on a puzzle. One of those giant puzzles with five thousand pieces and lots of blue sky and blue water. Almost impossible to fit together—but then a piece would slip in perfectly and you'd be encouraged to keep on.

They walked along the headland. Molly led Jared through the reed grass to the cliff's edge. She told him about how Clementine used to escape from the children by coming out here. She stopped a safe distance from the cliff's edge, and together they leaned carefully forward to peer out at the spray.

Molly shivered. "Clementine used to play out here with her doll—the doll named Molly dolly, isn't that creepy? She had a game that she was a giant. And sometimes she would actually climb over the edge of the cliff down to a ledge where there was a cave. Can you believe it? She had a lot more guts than I do. Nothing in the world would get me over the side."

"A cave?" asked Jared. He looked intrigued. "Where?"

Molly pointed. "Just down there, I think. It had a shelf you could stand on—about five or six feet wide. I guess it was safe enough, if you could get down there without falling into the cove."

She didn't go any closer to the edge, but Jared did. He lay on his stomach and scooted along so that his head was hanging over the side of the rock. Molly moved back a few feet. The height of the rock and the proximity of the cove made her nervous. She turned to look back at the big house.

"Hey, Molly, I see it," said Jared, still at the cliffs edge.

"Will you come away from there? You're making me nervous."

He stood up and stepped back from the edge. "Looks like eighty-odd years of erosion from the spray has pretty much worn the shelf away. I bet it's only about three feet wide now. Too bad. I wanted to see the cave."

"
Ugh,
" said Molly. "Come on, let's go back. There's the van."

The blue van crunched up the driveway. As Bill parked in front of the steps, Molly jumped up to open the door and help him out.

"So how did everything go?"

"Everything seems to be all right." Paulette grimaced. "But I'm feeling pretty rotten."

"Just seasick, probably," said Bill. "The cove was rough."

They greeted Jared politely, though Paulette raised one eyebrow at Molly behind his back.

"Maybe you'd better go up to bed," Bill said to Paulette, opening the front door.

"Maybe," she said. "I sure don't feel like eating lunch." She climbed the steps to the porch.

"Would you like to stay?" Molly asked Jared. She didn't miss the look her father and Paulette exchanged.

"Can't," Jared said, glancing at his watch. "I've got to be down at the wharf to work in about twenty minutes. It's my hew job," he explained to Bill and Paulette, "at the fish shop near the wharf."

Bill and Paulette said good-bye and turned to go inside. Paulette looked wan, and Bill was limping badly. Molly hurried to hold the door for them, then turned back to Jared. He was standing behind her, and she nearly bumped into him. He caught her by the shoulders.

"I seem to keep doing this, crashing into you on steps." She started to laugh, flustered by his sudden nearness and by her reaction to it. They stood together, each searching the other's face.

The sea breeze picked up and the reed grass swayed. "There's that wind," Jared said. "I've noticed that whenever I'm thinking about you, I feel wind."

"The wind is blowing, that's why you feel it," Molly reasoned.

"Yeah, but ever since the thing with the pool, I've felt the wind start blowing whenever I think about you." He tightened his hands on her shoulders. "Whenever I touch you."

He wants to kiss me. I know he does.

The day had been sunny and warm, but it seemed to her as they stood there that the breeze picked up, grew cooler. "I felt the wind as soon as we met," she told him. "Even before the—the
thing
with the pool, as you so eloquently put it."

He looked away. "It's just ... hard for me to say, okay? I can hardly bear to say it—that I threw you in the pool. Knowing you couldn't swim. Knowing you were afraid! It—it was a horrible thing to do, Molly, and I don't know why I did it, and it scares me. You're not the only one with nightmares, you know."

He looked so miserable, so perplexed by his behavior, that she understood something she hadn't before:
Weird things are happening to him, too, and he doesn't know why, and it's just as awful for him as it is for me.
"Jared, it's all right now." She said the words firmly. "I forgive you, okay? But when will you forgive me?"

"Forgive you for what?" His dark eyes glinted.

She hesitated; it seemed the answer was on the tip of her tongue, but then it was gone. "I don't know." She sighed. "Yet."

He bent his head and kissed her hard on the mouth, wrapping his arms tightly around her. She felt dizzy with the sense of having done this before, with Jared but
not
with Jared. He released her and stepped back. "I've been dying to do that since the moment I met you," he said. "But now—I've got to go to work."

"Call me tomorrow?"

"Absolutely. Nine o'clock in the morning—sharp!"

Tingling from his kiss, Molly went to the kitchen. Bill was assembling sandwiches for himself and Molly. "Paulette's in the study," he said. "Lying down. She says she's feeling queasy. But she hasn't had anything to eat for hours."

"How about if I make her a cup of mint tea?" Molly suggested. "And maybe a bowl of chicken soup or something? You go on into the study and sit with her," said Molly. "I'll bring the stuff in when it's ready."

He nodded, looking relieved, and hobbled from the room while she searched the pantry for a can opener. She waited for the soup to heat and looked out the window at the sunny headland. No wind now at all.

Outside, while she and Jared were tossing out facts and bizarre coincidences, it had seemed to her that a pattern really
was
forming into a completed puzzle with all the pieces of sky and water firmly interlocked. But here inside, with her father and Paulette waiting in the other room, with the cheerful, everyday whistle of the teakettle filling the kitchen, all the fragments seemed ephemeral again. It was as if Jared's departure had sent the puzzle pieces all floating off into the air.

 

After they ate lunch, Bill settled Paulette on the study couch, where she lay for most of the afternoon, sipping iced herbal tea and watching soap operas. Molly set to work stripping paper in the dining room. Two walls were ready to be re-papered now, and she still had two more to strip. She dragged the ladder over to the windows and began ripping the old pattern off. She closed her eyes against the flurry of yellow dust from the ancient glue.

Her father joined her, holding the ladder for her while she worked.

"So Jared Bernstein isn't on your hit list anymore?" he asked, smiling up at her.

She pulled a long strip of floral paper away and tossed it down onto the drop cloth covering the floorboards. "I guess not." She remembered the feeling of Jared's lips on hers. "Not at all, anymore. You know, Dad, the strangest things keep happening to him, too. We don't know what it's all about, but it's a relief to know it's happening to both of us."

"Kind of rules out needing to see a psychologist—is that what you're thinking?"

"Well, doesn't it?"

"Your mother would be delighted if it were true."

"I don't know about that." She threw down several more strips. "I mean, there are things that make her even more uncomfortable than the idea of talking to shrinks."

"Ghosts, you mean?" he asked.

"That sort of thing." She sent down more strips and a shower of yellow powder.

Bill handed up a knife, and Molly scraped more flakes of glue off the wall. They worked companionably for another hour or so until the remaining walls had been stripped. Then Molly carried in the rolls of new paper from the hall. She unwrapped one and looked at the pattern of green vines. "Oh, this will be pretty."

"But we won't start till tomorrow," Bill said. "You're a regular workhorse. Come on, let's stop now. Go on in and see what's become of Paulette. Too much of those soap operas and she'll turn into a vegetable. I'll get us a snack."

Molly walked through the library into the study. Paulette lay on the couch with her hands covering her gently swelling abdomen. Her face was pale and her eyes were red-rimmed. Her carrot-colored hair stood in spikes, as if she had been running her fingers through it. The television was on, but she was not watching it.

"Hi," said Molly.

"Come and get cozy," Paulette invited. "I haven't seen you all day. And I haven't even had a chance to tell you who we met today at the hospital." She punched a button on the remote control panel and the television screen went dark. "In an elevator. You're going to die when you hear."

"Who?" She sat down on the couch next to Paulette.

Paulette grinned. "His name is Mr. Holloway."

Molly's eyes widened. "
Holloway!
Is he related to
my
Holloways?"

Paulette nodded. "We were on our way up to see my doctor and stopped at another floor. This ancient man hobbled in with a nurse, and she was saying, 'Mr. Holloway, you come along now,' and
of course
my ears pricked right up. So I just barged in and told him—even though most people usually never say anything to other people in elevators, have you noticed that, Molly?—I told him we'd bought a house over in Hibben called the Holloway House. I asked him if it was any connection to his family—and guess what?"

"He said yes?" A little thrill of excitement tickled the back of her neck.

Paulette shifted carefully on the couch. "He said he actually was born in the house and grew up here. He said he hadn't been here for years and years and would love to see the place sometime, and how about
today?
His nurse jumped in and said of course not, and that he wasn't being polite—honestly, she talked to him as if he were six years old! He lives in a private nursing home near the hospital and was just going for a checkup today, but aside from being kind of trembly, he didn't look so sick to me."