Maybe This Time (14 page)

Andie almost said, “In the spring, we'll clean it all up,” and then she remembered that in the spring, God willing, they'd be in Columbus. “We can plant a garden like this in Columbus.” She tried to remember how much sun the backyard of North's Victorian got.

“Last year, Aunt May collected seed. From the black-eyed Susans and the coneflowers and I forget what else.” Alice kicked at a bushy serrated-edged plant. “And this stuff takes over
everywhere
so we have to get rid of some of it.” She sounded like an exasperated adult, and Andie thought,
Aunt May said that.

She kicked it again, and a lemony smell floated up to Andie. “What is it?”

“Lemon balm,” Alice pronounced, and Andie pictured a kindly, older woman bending down and saying, “Lemon balm,” to Alice in that same tsking voice, Alice nodding wisely beside her.

“Aunt May really knew her plants,” Andie said.

“These are what butterflies like.” Alice pointed to a stalky-looking plant that looked like giant dead daisies. “Coneflower.” She pointed to another. “Black-eyed Susan. Parsley. Columbine. Joe Pye. Zinnia. Salvia. Milkweed. Bergamot. Aster. Butterfly bush.”

She pointed to each of them, naming them lovingly, with a softness Andie hadn't seen in her before, and then she stooped and plucked a big, ugly withered plant with a fuzzy stem. “Weed,” she said, disgusted, and threw it away.

“They must be very beautiful in the summer,” Andie said. Now, it looked like a garden of death except for the plucky asters.

“The butterflies are bee-you-tee-ful,” Alice said. “Swallowtails and monarchs and skippers. I'm going to be a lepidopterist when I grow up.”

“That's very cool,” Andie said, meaning it.

Alice nodded, accepting the approval as her right. “And sometimes we get hummingbirds, which are also very cool. Aunt May said we could plant hummingbird plants next summer . . .”

Her voice trailed off, and Andie thought,
Ouch,
and then Alice turned her back on the garden, her face blank, and marched back to the blanket, where she plunked herself down, put her Walkman headphones on, and picked up her book.

Andie sat down beside her. “We'll make a hummingbird garden, Alice. Either here or in Columbus, wherever we are, we'll have a butterfly and hummingbird garden. And we'll put the mulch down to keep these plants warm all winter.”

Alice shrugged and opened her book.

Andie thought,
Tell North we need a hummingbird garden, too,
and then went back to considering the thing that had been haunting her since the night before: the blue girl. Maybe Alice had inspired the dream. They were telling the Princess Alice story every night now, Alice correcting her and shaping it as they went, but the blue dancing princess was always in there. Maybe she was just dreaming Alice's story . . .

She smelled something horrible and looked over to see Alice poking at something with a stick. When she looked closer, it was a dead frog, bloated in extinction.

“Alice, don't do that, it's dead.”

Alice pulled her headphones off, and Andie repeated herself.

“It only looks dead,” Alice said. “It'll be okay.”

She poked it again, and Andie took the stick away before she broke it open and released God knew what. “It's dead,” Andie told her firmly. “Leave it alone.”

Alice looked up at her, her eyes flat. “You don't know so much.”

“Probably not. But that frog is dead.”

“No,
it isn't,”
Alice said, her face screwed up to yell. “No, no,
no, no
—”

She turned away as her voice rose, and then she stopped, staring across the pond.

“What?” Andie said, and looked, too.

There was a woman there, dressed in old-fashioned black, her flounced skirt motionless in the October wind, her body half-bowed.

“Who is that?” Andie said.

Alice jerked around and stared at Andie for a moment, her eyes wide with surprise.

“Alice, who is that woman over there?”

“There's nobody,” Alice said, and sat down with her book.

Andie looked back at the woman, thick-waisted and clumsy as she moved closer to the edge of the trees. “Alice?”

“I don't see
anybody.
” Alice stared at her book, and for the next minute the pages didn't turn while she stared down. Then she stole another look across the pond and closed her book. “Tell me the Princess Alice story again.”

Andie looked back at the woman. Maybe just a neighbor. Alice wasn't the neighborly sort, maybe she didn't like people watching her. Andie didn't like people watching her, either.

“Princess Alice,” Alice said. “Tell me.”

“Right.” Andie started the never-ending Princess Alice story again, beginning with how brave the princess was and how her brother was the best artist in the kingdom, and how the mean witch was defeated once again—

“And Princess Alice got all the cookies she wanted,” Alice said, evidently still brooding on her lack of a fourth cookie.

—and how the dancing princess danced through the halls with her curly hair flying—

“And the Bad Uncle did not come because he was afraid of Princess Alice,” Alice said for the umpteenth time.

“No, he didn't come because he was busy working. The dancing princess has curly hair?”

“She dances,” Alice said impatiently. “And Bad Uncle is so afraid—”

“Bad Uncle isn't afraid of anything. He just
forgets
people. Alice, who is the dancing princess?”

“She dances. She has a glittery skirt like yours and she dances. And Princess Alice isn't afraid of anything, either. Now tell me new stuff.”

“Alice, did you know the dancing princess?”

Alice looked at her warily. “It's just a story, Andie.” She stole a glance across the pond.

Andie looked, too. The woman was still there, watching. “Who is she, Alice?”

“Princess Alice goes to the shopping center,” Alice said, “and she buys beautiful material and makes a beautiful cover for her bed, and then she goes to the bookstore and gets a book on butterflies because butterflies never die.” Alice stopped and looked back out over the pond quickly. “And then she comes home,” she said, jerking her face back to Andie. “To the Bad Witch. The Bad Witch is not so bad but she should let Princess Alice have many cookies.”

“Are there neighbors back there?” Andie said, shading her eyes to see the woman better.

“No,” Alice said. “And then what does Princess Alice do?”

The woman stepped out of the trees onto the shore, clumsy in her long, heavy clothes. She was wearing a long three-tiered skirt, and her hair was pulled back tightly in a bun. She moved stiffly, no grace at all, and she looked oddly old-fashioned, almost sepia toned.

Andie said, “There, do you see her now?”

“No.
I want my story!
”

“Okay,” Andie said, still watching across the pond. “After Princess Alice went shopping, she went to the Dairy Queen and she met a friend there.”

“Okay,” Alice said, keeping her head turned away from the pond.

There was something very wrong about that woman, wrong enough that Alice had forgotten her dead frog to pretend she wanted a story instead of yelling her head off at being thwarted. “Are you afraid of her, Alice?”

“Who?”

“The woman on the other side of the pond.”

“I don't see anybody.”

“Alice,” Andie said, staring at her. “What the hell is going on here?”

“I don't see anybody. I want my STORY!”

Alice stared back, wild-eyed and, Andie realized, afraid. “Okay,” she said soothingly. “The friend told Princess Alice about the school she went to, and Princess Alice said she wanted to go to that school, too, even though she'd have to leave the castle and go to Columbus—”

“I'm tired of that story,” Alice said, and picked up her headphones again.

Andie looked back at the woman who still stood there staring at them. Whoever she was, she was creepy. “Let's go in.”

Alice shoved her book into Andie's hands without a word of protest, stood up, and headed for the house at a good clip even for her. Andie got up and shook the quilt out, and then picked up their things and turned to go and caught sight of somebody up on the tower of the house. She shaded her eyes again but the sun was behind him so all she could see was a tall man up there, his shoulders oddly boxlike, as if he were wearing an old-fashioned coat, standing very straight, both hands on the ledge as if he owned the place.

It might be Bruce the contractor. If Bruce had started dressing funny and dyed his hair red and grown a beard and started showing up for work.

“I want a snack
now,
” Alice said from twenty feet away, and Andie pointed up to the tower.

“Who's that?” she said, and Alice jerked her head up to the tower.

“I don't see anybody,” she said, and kept moving toward the door, yelling back, “We have to mulch the butterfly garden today!” and Andie watched the figure on the tower watching her, and then looked back to see the woman in the trees, also watching her.

Okay, now I'm getting some answers,
she thought, and followed Alice in to find Mrs. Crumb.

 

When Alice was curled up in the library with her book on butterflies, her Jessica doll, a cup of milk, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and two cookies, Andie went back to the kitchen to find Mrs. Crumb sitting at the table in another of her faded flowered aprons, hunched over a cup of heavily pepperminted tea, holding a hand of cards and facing the card rack across the table.

“There was a woman out by the pond,” Andie said to her.

“Woman?” Mrs. Crumb said, suddenly cautious.

“In a long, old-fashioned dress. Alice saw her. I think she knew her.”

Crumb looked startled. “Alice told you that?”

“No. She pretended not to see her, but Alice is not that good an actress.”

“On the other side of the pond?”

“Are there neighbors over there?”

Mrs. Crumb shrugged and went back to studying her gin hand.

Andie sat down across from her and shoved the card holder to one side, and Mrs. Crumb looked up, startled.

“You know, I'm getting really tired of mysteries,” Andie said. “Is there some weird-ass neighbor wandering around?”

“Language.” Mrs. Crumb looked more offended by the “weird-ass” than she was alarmed at the idea of a stranger wandering the grounds.

“Who was that woman? Because Alice doesn't want me to know so it's no good asking her.”

“You won't believe me.”

“Try me.”

Crumb hesitated and then put down her cards and leaned closer. “It's
her.
She watches Alice. She wants a child to look after. She won't hurt Alice. She
protects
her.”

“Tell me you're talking about a fired nanny. I'll get a restraining order—”

“She was the governess in this house once,” Crumb said, warming to her tale. “A long time ago. A hundred years ago. More. In England. Miss J, Alice calls her. She was a lady, but a bad man dragged her down. Peter. She died. And now she
walks.
”

Andie looked at the light in the old woman's eyes and thought,
She really believes that.
Or maybe she just wanted Andie to believe so she'd run away screaming. Maybe she'd hired somebody to stand on the other side of the pond. The woman in the dream would be harder to fake, but—

“It was that Peter's fault.” Mrs. Crumb was positively animated now. “He was a hound, an
evil
man. There were lots of women. She was just the last. And the poor woman paid for it!”

“Mrs. Crumb—”

“Pregnant, you know.” Crumb shook her head sadly, playing to the balcony. “I'm not sure how she died. She doesn't speak of it.”

“She talks to you.”

“No, but she'd sit with me. Before Alice came. Alice's mother died when she was born, so they brought the poor babe here and that's when she stopped sitting with me. She just takes care of Alice now. That's all she wants, to look after Alice. She thinks Alice is her baby. Now Peter, he wants the house. Peter and Carter, they're
close
.” She said the last with contempt.

Oh, dear God,
Andie thought. Either Mrs. Crumb was completely nuts or there were ghosts stalking Alice and Carter. Andie wasn't sure at this point which she'd prefer. “How do you know all this?”

“I know things,” Mrs. Crumb said, her eyes shifting away.

“Who told you this?”

Mrs. Crumb got up. “It you don't want to believe me, fine.”

“Look.” Andie regrouped. “You believe this ghost exists. That . . . disturbs me.”

“
You've
seen them.” Crumb looked arch. “And Alice likes Miss J!”

“I think even Alice would draw the line at the undead.”

“That little girl has seen a lot of death. She knows there's Something Else out there.”

Andie rubbed her forehead. “Okay. Forget Miss J and . . . uh, Peter. Did a nineteen-year-old girl ever die here? Beautiful, curly hair, liked to dance?”

Mrs. Crumb shivered for a moment and then leaned back looking calmer, saner. “A lot of people have died here. This house is over four hundred years old.”

“I keep dreaming about a nineteen-year-old-girl. At least she says she's nineteen. She talked to me last night in a dream. I know she's not real. Look, there's something going on here, and I'm going to find out what it is, and if it turns out that this is some scam you've cooked up—”

Mrs. Crumb laughed, a much gayer sound than Andie had expected. “How would I give you bad dreams? Or make you see a woman at the pond?”

“Or the guy on the tower?” Andie said. “I thought it might be Bruce finally come to start work, but he was dressed funny.”