In the Blink of an Eye (6 page)

“Check out that cottage garden,” Kent comments, as they pass a pretty blue house fronted, like most on the block, by a medium's shingle. “I would love to do something like that in front of our place.”

“Kent, we live in a rental,” Miranda points out, glancing at the colorful beds of blooms in front of the porch. “Besides, we travel in the summer. You aren't around to take care of a garden.”

“A cottage garden is basically carefree, Miranda. It's supposed to look cluttered and chaotic, filled with cosmos and sweet peas and morning glory vines . . .”

As he continues talking about flowers, quoting a horticultural article he read in a recent issue of
Martha Stewart Living,
Miranda's gaze shifts to the next house on the block.

There is no medium's shingle here. Nor is there a garden, unless you count the few dandelions dotting the overgrown grass in front of the porch. Someone has taken care to paint the place in period colors—dark yellow with maroon and green trim—but the paint isn't fresh. An atmosphere of abandonment hovers about the place.

Abandonment, and something else.

Miranda stops walking, her practiced eye drawn to a sweeping tree tucked into the small backyard, in a patch of lawn just behind the porch.

“What's the matter?” Kent asks, stopping beside her and following her stare.

“That tree,” Miranda says. “There's something about it”

“It's not a tree,” Kent informs her. “It's almost two stories high, but technically, it's a shrub. A lilac.”

As he speaks, car tires crunch on gravel behind them.

Miranda turns to see a red sedan pulling up at the curb in front of the house. She glimpses a handsome, dark-haired man at the wheel and a small blond child in the back seat. The car has California plates.

“Come on, Miranda,” Kent says.

She looks again at the towering lilac branches.

A chill steals over her, despite the weight of Kent's sweater.

“I want to come back here later,” she tells Kent in a low voice. “There's something about that tree.”

“Shrub,” he corrects.

“Whatever. We need to check that out.”

“Just the shrub? Or the whole yard? Or the house? Because we'll need to get permission from the owners if you want to—”

“I know, I know,” she says impatiently, cutting him off.

Of course she knows how it works. They can't just go trespassing on private property in the middle of the night.

She glances back up at the Victorian structure, and then at the newcomers, who don't appear to notice her as they prepare to get out of the car.

“Let's go,” Miranda tells Kent with a shiver. “We'll come back after dark and see if anything's happening by that tree.”

Something tells her they won't be disappointed.

Chapter Three

T
HE HOUSE IS
more ramshackle than Paine remembers.

So ramshackle that even passers-by seem to stop and stare, like the couple that is now strolling off down the street. They're weighed down with camera equipment, which can only mean one thing: they're tourists.

That isn't surprising. The Lily Dale season is almost under way, and the small community is already filled with outsiders, just as it was the last time he was here.

As Paine stands looking up at the house his daughter has inherited, he wonders what Kristin thought of the place when she visited her mother here three years ago. He knows that for most of Kristin's life, her parents lived in a bigger Lily Dale home. When she couldn't convince her widowed mother to give up spending her summers here, she had talked her into selling the larger home.

But Paine recalls her being upset when Iris called to say she'd bought a new place. When he'd questioned her about the conversation, Kristin had simply said she knew the house her mother had bought and she didn't like it.

Now Paine can see why. The two-story frame house is hardly Kristin's style—she favored sleek modern architecture.

“I don't like it here,” Dulcie says, beside him. Her small hand is warm in his, and he squeezes her fingers reassuringly.

“It's going to be okay, Dulcie,” he tells her, summoning a confidence he doesn't feel. “You're going to love the house. It's like something out of a fairy tale.”

Or a ghost story.

A cold breeze stirs the towering maples overhead.

“Tell me,” she says tersely, shivering from the chill, removing her hand from his and jamming it, with her other one, into the front pockets of her jeans.

With a pang of guilt, he notices a threadbare spot on her knee, and that the sleeves of her red Gap Kids sweatshirt are too short. She's worn nothing but shorts and T-shirts for months, but she'll need warmer clothes here, despite the fact that it's summer, and apparently she's outgrown hers. He'll have to take her shopping—if there's any place to shop, that is. Looks to him as if Lily Dale is smack in the middle of nowhere. Well, there's always the Wal-Mart about ten miles back. All she needs are a few pairs of Levi's and—

“Daddy,” Dulcie prods. “Tell me.”

He takes a deep breath. “Okay, the house is painted a dark yellow shade, with maroon and dark green trim. Sounds awful, but looks nice. I bet it's historically accurate.” He seems to remember Kristin mentioning something about the place being restored by the previous residents. “There are porches upstairs and down at the front of the house—porches with railings and spindles and lots of carved wood. There are only two windows in front on the first two floors, one on either side of the doors that lead to the porches. No shutters. The third-floor attic is shaped like a triangle, and there are scalloped shingles on that section, and there's a round window up at the top.”

She nods. Her eyes are closed, as they always are when he gives her descriptions. He wonders, as he often does, what she's envisioning—how close her mental image is to reality. Hopefully not too close, in this case.

He doesn't tell her about the drooping foliage poking forlornly from the hanging pots on the porch, or the too-tall patch of weed-ridden lawn that fronts the house like a fringe of overgrown bangs. Anyway, he can take care of all that—spruce things up, eliminate that woebegone, abandoned ambience that hovers about the place.

Somehow, until now, he had been picturing something completely different, having convinced himself that the dreary blur of images he had retained from his first visit were tainted by his own mourning.

Ever since he got the phone call about Iris's death and decided to come back to Lily Dale with Dulcie, his errant mind had conjured something bright and sun-washed and cheerful, a cozy lakefront cottage with screen doors, blooming window boxes, a flagstone path. The kind of home you might find in some other Victorian vacation spot—Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard, or Cape May, New Jersey. Even nearby Chautauqua Institution, where he and Kristin met doing summer stock a decade ago.

All the trappings of a summer resort town are here in Lily Dale—kids on bikes, small boutiques, a bandstand and gazebo, a playground, a beach.

But there's something else, too.

Maybe it's the gloomy weather.

Maybe it's the sorrowful cause of this repeat visit.

Whatever the reason, Paine senses that there is a distinctly funereal aura about this ancient Queen Anne in the heart of this strange, secluded village obsessed with supernatural communication.

Oh, well. He's stuck here for at least the next month or two. He'll go through Iris's stuff, unload the property on the first interested person who comes along, and then he and Dulcie will hit the road headed back West, where they belong.

“Come on, Dulcie, let's go inside,” Paine says, putting a hand on her shoulder and taking a step forward.

She doesn't move.

Her face is tilted up, toward the house.

“Dulcie.”

“I don't want to,” she says on a sob, and presses a hand against her mouth.

“Oh, Dulcie . . .” Paine crouches beside her and pulls her close. “I know. I miss Gram, too.” Not that they had seen Iris more than a half dozen times since Dulcie had been born.

“No,” she says in a small voice. “It's not that. I mean, I miss her, but . . . it's not that.”

A prickle runs down Paine's spine when he sees her uneasy expression.

He thinks back to that night more than a week ago, at home, when she awakened in the middle of the night saying Iris had been in her room . . .

And three years ago, when she was little more than a toddler, yet old enough to articulate to him in no uncertain terms that her mommy—who was back East, helping Iris settle into the new house—had come into her room in the middle of the night.

Paine went along with it, assuming it was nothing more than wishful thinking by a little girl who missed her mother.

Even when Dulcie told him what Kristin supposedly said—“I love you, Dulcie, but I have to leave you now”—he didn't think twice about it. After all, that was pretty much Kristin's parting message to their daughter that last day at LAX, when she embraced Dulcie at the gate. Only that time, there was something tacked on the end—“I'll be home as soon as I can.”

There was no such postscript to the supposedly imaginary message Dulcie reported to him.

Hours later, Iris had called. Kristin was missing. Iris told him not to come East, certain her daughter was inexplicably headed back home to California and Paine and Dulcie.

But she wasn't.

Days later, amidst a nightmarish blur of waiting and worrying and wondering, Paine got the other call. The one from Julia Garrity, reporting that Kristin's lifeless, bloated body had floated to the surface of Cassadaga Lake, identified only by the clothing she had been wearing the night she disappeared.

Numbed by shock and grief, Paine broke the news to Dulcie as gently as he could.

It was she who comforted him, patting his back as he sobbed. “It's okay, Daddy. I told you. She had to leave us. But she loves us.”

Of course Dulcie's vision of Kristin was a coincidental dream.

And so was her vision of Iris on the night she had died.

Paine chooses to believe that, because not believing it would mean that he believes in something else.

Something utterly far-fetched.

“Come on, Dulcie,” he says grimly. “We don't have a choice. It's going to rain. Let's go inside.”

This time, she doesn't protest. He takes her hand and together, they walk up the front steps and across the porch. He glimpses a green VW parked at the back of the driveway. Iris's car. That, too, now belongs to Dulcie. Maybe—if it has less mileage than his own car—they'll keep it, drive it back home. No. It's ancient. It'll never make the trip. He'll have to sell it. So many decisions to be made . . .

A musty scent hovers around the house. It's pungent, but not unpleasant. Like dry old wood, Paine thinks as he bends to lift a corner of the fraying mat in front of the door.

A key is there, just as Howard Menkin said it would be. It's supposed to fit the locks on both the front and back doors.

Hiding a key under a mat seems to Paine like something someone would do in a vintage Frank Capra film, but Howard had insisted people do it all the time in Lily Dale.

The door is heavy and old-fashioned, dark wood with three vertical inset panels in the bottom and a large oval pane of beveled frosted glass in the top half. He turns the tarnished brass knob with more effort than he'd expected and pushes it open, peering into the space beyond.

“It's okay, Dulc, come on,” he says, squeezing her hand.

Together they step over the threshold. They're in a foyer. The walls are covered in striped paper, the colors impossible to discern in the dim light. Paine feels for a switch beside the door. His fingers encounter a raised plate. He turns to see that it's an antique wall switch with two vertically stacked round black buttons, the top one protruding, the other depressed. He presses the top in and the bottom one promptly pops out as an overhead light fixture illuminates.

“Interesting,” he mutters.

“What's interesting, Daddy?”

“I never saw a light switch like this. It's an old, old house, Dulcie.”

“I can feel it” she says, her voice hushed. “Tell me about it.”

“We're in the foyer. There's a stairway leading up—a really beautiful stairway with lots of carved wood and a banister with spindles and big round newel posts at the bottom. Looks like the kitchen is straight ahead, and on the left there's a dining room with a fireplace, and there are double French doors over here to the right . . .” He tugs on one, pulling it open. “Oh, it's a parlor. There's lots of furniture, and it's definitely not modern. A dark green sofa with a curving back and high arms, a couple of matching chairs, floor lamps with fringed shades . . .”

Definitely not his style. That's okay. They can sell the stuff. Maybe it's worth something.

“There's pretty rose-colored wallpaper,” he informs Dulcie. “It's textured. Here, feel it.”

He guides her hand to the wall beside the door, letting her run her fingers over the velvety brocade as he describes the rest of the vaguely familiar room for her. “There are tall windows covered in heavy maroon drapes with tassels, and there's a fireplace. Lots of framed pictures on the mantel.”

“Pictures of who?”

He lets go of her hand and steps closer. “They're mostly family pictures. Iris, and your grandfather, and your mother,” he says, fighting to keep the emotion out of his voice.

He picks up a photo of Kristin that he's never seen before—an enlarged snapshot of her on a beach somewhere. It's most likely Florida, definitely not here. White sand and palm trees. She looks about seventeen—flashing her dimples, blue-eyed and gorgeous, her long, pale hair blowing back from her face.

He sets down the photo and glances at the one next to it. It's a posed shot diagonally stamped
Olan Mills
in gold script lettering. Paine smiles faintly. When he was growing up back in California, his mother used to take him to Olan Mills studios for pictures, too. This photo shows a little boy awkwardly holding an infant on his lap. He recognizes the baby as Kristin and realizes that the boy must be Edward, her older half brother, Anson's son from an earlier marriage. Kristin and her parents were estranged from him for years, and Paine knows little about the situation, other than that it was bitter and Kristin didn't like to talk about him. He remembers Julia telling him after the funeral that Edward had been there, among the hundreds of mourners, but Paine didn't meet him.

Now he wonders fleetingly why Iris kept this photo of him on the mantel. Had she reestablished contact with Edward in recent years? Or has it been here all along? He doesn't remember it from the first visit—but then, what
does
he remember? Only soul-searing heartache.

“What are you doing, Daddy?” Dulcie asks.

“Just looking around.” He returns the photo to its place on the dusty mantel and looks around at the cluttered bookshelves, tables, cabinets. “This room is full of knickknacks, Dulcie. The whole house is. Looks like we've got our work cut out for us.”

“
A
ND NOW,
I
'D
like to introduce our next medium, Ms. Julia Garrity. She's our youngest medium in residence this season, and she was raised right here in Lily Dale as a spiritualist. Julia?”

Along with the handful of other mediums, including her friend Lorraine, she had been leaning against a low platform to the right of the stage, beside the open door that led outside. Now she strides across the room to the head of the wide aisle between the rows of wooden seats.

She takes a deep breath, exhales slowly, and looks out at the audience, scanning their faces with practiced scrutiny. She barely notices the outside sounds drifting through the big rectangular open-air gaps in the wooden walls—voices of passersby, children playing in the park across the way, cars crunching slowly along a nearby street.

While waiting for her turn, she intended to begin by selecting an elderly woman in the center of the section on the right. Julia is certain she's made a connection with the woman's dead husband, or perhaps her brother.

But now Julia's gaze falls on the overweight woman in the purple polyester, the one she'd seen on the street. The woman is looking back at her with incredulous recognition, obviously surprised to see her here, among the mediums.

Julia sees that a haze of energy is beside her, vaguely human in form. She closes her eyes, again hearing the fleeting surge of sound in her mind. This time it's almost intelligible. She expertly strains to hear it again. The spirit obliges. The message is repeated, even more clearly this time.