Legacy (6 page)

I lifted it, felt its weight, smelled the fresh green scent of new flowers. The hanging was going to be a gift for Hattie.
My best friend
. I’d made it myself, in honor of Hattie’s opening night, October 31, 1994.

1994?
That was before I was even born! I pushed. I struggled. I scrambled to make sense of things, but in the end I wasn’t
strong enough. When I looked down again I realized that the hands holding the wall hanging
weren’t mine.
They belonged to someone older than I was, not
old
, but a grown woman.

And I was not Katy Jessevar any longer. I was
her,
this woman with her slender, busy hands, who smelled like roses and wore blue shoes and white stockings. I had made the wall hanging with flowers from the Meadow and miniature pumpkins I’d grown myself, in a window box. I’d drilled holes into the “Hattie’s Kitchen” plaque and used wire to hold it in place.

Hattie wouldn’t see it, but on the back of the sign I’d drawn the sigils for “Best Efforts” and “Help From Others.” I’d wanted to wish her luck, but every witch knew better than to call for something like “Good Fortune.” That was a sure way to trip yourself up, because no one really knew what “good” meant. Or “fortune,” either. No, Best Efforts was straightforward. Hattie would always give her best effort. And you never knew when you’d need help. My wish for her was that when that time came, someone with a kind heart would step up to lend a hand. I hoped it would be me.

I put clear nail polish on the pumpkins as a finishing touch, then blew on them. Love breath. As I did, I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror on the dresser. It was disturbing. My eyes were as strange as everyone said they were, inside and out, strange eyes that saw farther than I wanted to see.

I wish, I wish . . .
but there was no sigil for what I wanted. I wanted a subtraction.
Take away the sight, the gift, the visions, the knowledge. I’ll trade them all, gladly, for a life like everyone else’s, a normal life spent with no thought of what was coming,
no thought of the Darkness, the Darkness and the fire that was its sou . . .

In the mirror the breath that poured out of me caught fire and spun around me like a dragon’s.

I shut my eyes tight.
Not real,
I told myself. I’d had these visions before. They didn’t mean anything. But behind that rational, clear thought was another, a voice speaking softly from deep inside, from a place that knew more than my mind could ever know. And that voice said,
Not yet. But soon.

Oh yes, it was coming. My nightmare vision would darken the whole sky and destroy us all. But who would believe me? Why was I the only one who could see it?

Run!
I thought desperately. I could run away, couldn’t I? Leave this place, take the people I loved, move far away. . . .

No, no, no. Darkness and fire. That was how my world would end, I knew, and nothing I could do would stop that.

The flames exploded around me. I felt my skin blistering, smelled my charring flesh.

I screamed.

I came to in Peter’s arms.

“Katy, Katy!” Hattie was pressing a wet cloth to my face. “What happened, child?”

“I don’t know,” I said. The parchment and the wall hanging were lying on the floor beside me. “I was bringing this thing to you, and—” I touched it with the tip of my finger. Instantly I felt the fire around me again. I jerked my hand away. “It was as if I was someone else,” I explained, bewildered. “A whole other person.”

“Never mind,” Hattie said. “Did you hit your head?”

“No, I’m fine, except . . .” I pointed to the hanging. “
She
made that. The person I . . . I was. It was for you, I think. She wrote something on the back of the sign.”

“Oh?” Hattie chewed her lip as she untwisted the thin wires. There on the back, just where the woman in my—what? Fantasy? Dream?—had drawn them, were two geometric symbols.

“Best Efforts,” I remembered.

“Help From Others,” she added, her eyes filling.

“They’re sigils.”

“Yes.”

“But how did I know that? I’ve never even heard that word before. ‘Sigil’? What’s it even mean?” I heard my voice growing shrill with panic.

“You probably read it somewhere,” Peter said. He made it sound as if I was showboating.

“I’m telling the truth!” I shouted.

“Shh.” Hattie stroked my hair. “I know you are. What else did you see?”

“Well . . .” I didn’t know if I should even mention this part.

“Go on.”

“And then the room burned around her,” I said quickly. “At least, I—she—imagined it did.”

Peter frowned, but said nothing.

“Hey, I don’t understand it, either,” I said defensively.

“The Darkness,” Hattie whispered. “Even then she saw it coming.”

“That’s what she called it,” I blurted, astonished that Hattie would accept what I was saying so easily. “But it wasn’t really darkness. It was
fire
. And it was as if she knew . . .”

Peter pushed me onto the floor and moved away from me, a look of suppressed rage on his face.

“Hush up, boy,” Hattie spat.

He threw up his hands and stomped back to the vegetable table.

I pulled myself up to a sitting position. “Tell me what’s going on,” I said, too tired to play any more games.

“I should have known,” Hattie said. “The first day you worked here. When you touched that man’s hand, you could see his whole life.”

“I guess.”

“That is your gift, Katy.”

I shrugged. “It was more like a game, really—”

“No.” Her eyes were stern. “It was never a game.”

“But I was concentrating then. It doesn’t happen all the time.”

“It still happened. And now you touched this—” She smoothed the tips of her fingers over the hanging. “—and you saw the one who fashioned it. You
became
her.”

“But how?” I asked. “And why? Why me? Why
her
?” I rubbed my eyes. “I didn’t even know her.”

Hattie took my hand and exhaled, a long, ragged breath. “Yes, you did,” she whispered. “She was your mother.”

An ear-piercing shriek broke the tension. It was Eric. His screaming shook the walls. Peter wanted to go to him, but Hattie insisted that he stay in the kitchen with me.

It was embarrassing. I hadn’t meant to make a scene, especially not today. And Peter Shaw and his crappy attitude were the last things I wanted to have around while I was trying to figure out what had happened.

I’d somehow gotten into the head of my
mother.
My dead mother, who my dad and his girlfriend had called criminally insane. And what else? Oh, yes, demonically possessed.

“You’re supposed to be making coleslaw,” Peter reminded me. I jumped.

I had kind of come to a standstill over the twenty-gallon mixer. The vat was filled with eight heads’ worth of sliced, chopped, and marinated cabbage. All I had to add now was mayonnaise, seasoning, lemon juice, and twenty grated carrots. It was some time after carrot number ten that I’d zoned out.

“Yeah,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Don’t know what you’re doing here, anyway,” he grumbled.

“I was invited to work here,” I said, full of bravado.

“You were invited because you’re an Ainsworth.”

I slammed my fist on the counter. “Doesn’t anyone around here listen? My name is—”

“It’s Ainsworth,” he said quietly. “Whatever you say, whatever you
believe
, you’re one of them. What happened today proved that.”

I looked at the floor. “I think that was just . . . stress . . .”

He threw up his hands. “
Stress
? You were reading a dead person’s thoughts, Katy.”

“Hattie said it was a gift.”

“Yeah. An evil gift.” He picked up the wall hanging from the counter and threw it into the garbage bin.

“How dare you!” I huffed. “My mother made that!”

“Your mother was a psycho!” he spat.

I lunged at him. He grabbed both my wrists and held me at arms’ length. “Do you want to know what kind of person your mother was? I’ll tell you. When my brother was a baby—a
baby
—she picked him up and threw him against a wall.”

I felt the air whoosh out of me.

“I was there. I saw it. So did Hattie. And about a hundred other people.”

“You’re lying!” I screamed.

“Go to the library and look up the news stories,” he said. “Afterward, she walked away like nothing had happened.”

My arms felt suddenly too heavy to hold up. Peter dropped them with a look of disgust, as if my skin had dirtied his hands.

“And by the way, your dear old mom was right about the
fire coming for her. She set it herself. Burned down your house while she was inside.”

He walked back to the cutting table, picked up his knife, and began attacking a bunch of onions as if he wanted to destroy them. Then he gathered up the skins and roots and dumped them in the garbage, on top of my mother’s wall hanging.

The cool October air was a shock to my system as I burst out of Hattie’s back kitchen door. Between the wisps of coming fog and the tears streaming down my face I could barely see in front of me, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t ever going back to the restaurant. Or to school, for that matter.

I had to pull my hair to stop myself from screaming. I coughed for a while, sobbing. And then I started to run. I ran until I could hardly breathe, and after that I walked. If I could have walked off the face of the earth, I would have, but I only made it as far as Old Town.

There was just too much to sort out all at once.
My
house? Peter had said that my mother had set fire to my house. Had I lived here once? Here in Whitfield?

I realized then that I’d been circling the library for an hour. There was no point in putting it off. I knew I wouldn’t get a moment of peace until I knew if the terrible things Peter had told me were true.

I didn’t know where to start looking in the microfilm files, because I had no idea when everything was supposed to have happened. Peter had said that Eric had been a baby, so I went back ten years in the local paper. While I was going through the headlines for each issue, I tried to remember my own life. It’s funny, how little you remember when there’s no
one to remind you. My father had never spoken a word about my mother. It occurred to me now that maybe he hadn’t just forgotten all about our time with her. Maybe he had made a point of keeping that part of our lives carefully blank.

Who was my mother? I didn’t remember. That is, I remembered
having
a mother. I remembered
missing
my mother, crying over her every night until I had no more tears left. I imagined her constantly, as an angel, or a movie star, or a pixie on my shoulder, whispering in my ear. But I really had no inkling of what she looked like until I found the photograph that Dad had thrown away. And even though I’d only been a little kid when she died, I’d always felt ashamed that I didn’t remember her.

For me, she was just a space, a hole in my heart that was never filled.

After a half hour I found the first story. “Local Woman Attacks Infant, Sets Fire.” A bizarre headline. And on the following day, an even stranger one: “Wonderland Scene of Attempted Baby Slaying.” Apparently, the “crazed woman who may have been under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs” had tried to kill Eric Shaw in the Home Improvements section of the biggest discount department store in Whitfield. And the third: “Witchcraft May Figure in Ainsworth Infanticide.”

By the fourth day permutations of the story were appearing not only in the local press, but also in the Boston and New York papers. By week’s end,
Time
,
Newsweek
, and every other national magazine were running pictures of Whitfield (“A New Salem?”); the house on Summer Street that my mother had burned down with herself in it; the desecrated interior of the Wonderland store where the incident had taken place (an
amateur photo for which the publication had paid an enormous price showed a stack of two-by-fours stained with Eric’s blood); a police mug shot of Hattie Scott, who had been arrested as a possible co-conspirator, but later released; and my mother. There were so many pictures of her: yearbook photos from high school, snapshots from picnics and Christmases and meetings in rooms with flags in the corners.
Where had they all come from?
I wondered. There were no other people in the pictures. Some of the photographs looked as if other figures had once been included, but had been removed. No one had wanted to be associated with her, I guessed.

Then came the secondary stories, many of them clearly public relations pieces about how the Wonderland Corporation had generously assumed all of Eric’s medical expenses, even though Wonderland and its subsidiaries were in no way involved in the tragedy.

“Our customers are like our family,” announced someone who I imagined was Madam Mim’s mentor, “and Wonderland takes care of family.” I wondered how long it had taken their Executive Committee to come up with that spontaneous outpouring of concern. Wonderland had gone to great lengths to eradicate the psychological mark left by those bloodstains on its lumber. It had built a $130 million children’s neurology center named “Planet Wonderland” alongside Whitfield Memorial Hospital. It was a state-of-the-art medical facility that looked like a theme park decorated in cartoon colors, with play areas on every floor and a toddler-size train in the lobby. Now, ten years after the incident that prompted this corporate altruism, the company was taking the last step in distancing itself from the horror by replacing the current building with
another, bigger, brighter Wonderland Megastore on the other side of Whitfield.

The other news sidebar—fortunately, one that didn’t amount to much in the press—was about my mother’s alleged association with the occult. (“Is Witchcraft Making A Comeback?”) None of these stories had any facts in them, and probably wouldn’t even have been conceived if Whitfield hadn’t been in the heart of Witch Hunt country back in colonial times. The only “evidence” that my mother had been a witch was the word of some New Age store merchant who’d once sold her something called a “scrying mirror.”