Sisters (22 page)

Amy Travers' house was a
block over and a block down. Sophie had decided the best approach was
a direct one, and so when she arrived at Miss Travers', she mounted
the stairs to the porch, went up to the door, and knocked. It wasn't
the kind of action likely to arouse suspicion should a neighbor be
watching, and it would help her make sure Miss Travers had indeed
left.

"Yes, it's Sophie
Dymond," she said to the imaginary voice. Still in a panic,
still pretending, she turned the knob as though the voice had invited
her in. Then she realized her playacting would soon fool no one. The
door would be locked, and why would a voice from inside bid her enter
a locked door? The person in the street would have to wonder at that.

But the door was open. She
heard the latch click, and she pushed inward. She stepped inside and
hastily shut the door behind her.

It was darker here than
outside, and she had to wait for her eyes to adjust. After a moment,
she saw that the room she was in was wallpapered with stiff
forget-me-nots. On one wall was a rack holding a row of plates; below
it was a tufted sofa with claw feet. In the center of the room was a
bow-legged table covered with a fringed cloth, and on the farthest
wall, behind the table from where Sophie was standing, was a large
photograph of Helen, framed by a hair wreath biggest than any Sophie
had ever seen. She moved across the room, around the table, and put a
hand on the wreath. Her touch set it quivering like a giant spider's
web. It looked like the spider itself, she thought with a shudder,
dark and bristling and venomous. Helen's hair. It must be Helen's
hair woven into a frame for Helen's picture. But so large a wreath,
so much hair. She shivered again, imagining Amy Travers leaning over
her sister's body with a pair of shears. Then she looked at the
wreath closely and saw that the hair tied and wound and braided onto
its wire skeleton was of different colors. The small, swollen buds
were a light brown, almost blond; the padded flowers somewhat darker;
and the leaves darkest of all, an ash-brown color. So perhaps it was
not all Helen's. Just the leaves. They were Helen's color.

There was a smell in the
room, a heavy sweet fragrance, which Sophie began to find
overpowering. It emanated from a trunk set just below the
wreath-framed picture, and when she bent to open it, the tongue of
the metal fastening made a a loud rasping noise. Startled, she
hesitated a moment, then raised the lid. The smell was stronger than
ever, amd Sophie saw that it came from pomanders nestled amid
delicate lace and freshly ironed cottons--Helen's clothes! Her
sister's clothes were lovingly packed away with spices and perfumes
and set beneath her picture as thought... as though it were a sacred
shrine.

She lifted several layers
of neatly folded undergarments from the trunk. Below them was a
purple velvet needlework box with gilded strapwork mounts, and beside
it a tissue-encased roll of cloth, which Sophie took to the table and
carefully unrolled. It was an almost completed sampler. Flowers were
being worked around the edges in stitches so delicate the cloth might
have been a page from an illuminated manuscript. Except it was not so
bright, Sophie thought. It was more subtle, and with depth and
texture. In the middle were the words: "How blest the sacred tie
that binds/ Its union sweet according minds!" And in the
lower-right corner, penciled in but not embroidered, "Helen to
Amy, 1885."

Sophie rolled the sampler
back up, but when she started to replace it in the trunk, she saw it
had been resting on top of two ribbon-tied bundles of letters. She
paused uncertainly, then set the sampler aside, gathered up the
letters, and took them to the sofa, where she untied one of the satin
ribbons and picked an envelope at random. It was plain, unaddressed,
and a notepaper with Amy Travers' perfectly formed script slid out
easily. The note was short. "Helen, my joy and my beloved,"
it began:

"Why do we stay? I
have no reason beyond a few pupils who would miss me briefly, and
your life would be infinitely better away from him. Let us go away
together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find
ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be
only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of
sweet refinement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work
your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our
bed, my dearest girl..."

Sophie read on through the
letter, then glanced up at the top. It was dated May 1885, a little
over a year ago.

Mechanically she pulled out
another note. This one was dated a few months later:

"The sampler you have
began with Mrs. Barbauld's hymn--know it will be a gift I shall
treasure always. How well her words describe our love--or the way it
would be if we could remove all impediments, leave this place, and
join together as the Ladies of Llangollen did. Then our union would
be complete. Our lives would flow together, twin streams merging into
a single river."

Sophie kept looking at the
note when she had finished it. She had no idea what the reference
meant, who the Ladies of Llangollen were, but it didn't matter. The
note was clear. Miss Travers wanted Helen to run off with her, to
leave James, perhaps the children, so they could go away together.
But surely she couldn't have been serious. This was fantasy, wasn't
it? But even if it were, Sophie argued to herself, this was fantasy
of a sort one did not expect to find in correspondence addressed to
one's sister. A woman pleading with another woman to go off with
her--one might suppose it the plot of a French novel! But even as the
thought occurred, Sophie knew it wasn't quite correct, because the
letters were so unselfconscious; the writer seemed to have no
awareness she suggested anything shocking. The ingenuousness reminded
Sophie of something, but she couldn't put her finger on what it was.

She untied the other
bundle, observing that these letters were older, with a more fragile
feel to them; some had even begun to yellow: The first she picked up
was in an envelope which had been mailed to Helen in Cheyenne. She
took out the letter and saw at the top: "August 1874," the
date of Helen's marriage. She ran her eye down the page. "Being
separated from you has been an agony," she read, "and now I
must endure uncertainties as well. Will you still love me? Or 'will
you rent our ancient love asunder,/ To join with men in scorning your
poor friend?'"

The iambics were familiar.
They were the lines from "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the
ones Amy Travers had underlined in the book Sophie still had on her
bedside table. Had the thin leather volume been a wedding present,
perhaps? A gift to Helen from a lonely schoolteacher hundreds of
miles away at Fort Martin?

Wanting to know when the
correspondence had begun, Sophie took the first letter from the
bundle. It was quite dark in the room now, and she had to angle the
envelope toward the window before she could see that it too had been
mailed to Helen in Cheyenne. It must be from when Helen first visited
the Bellavances in Cheyenne, Sophie thought, from around the time she
met James. She started to read the note, but had so much difficulty
making out the words, she moved to the window. There in the
moonlight, she read:

"My darling Helen:

I have thought of you
incessantly since your departure, and I found comfort in your letter
since I am now assured that your thoughts have also been with me. But
knowing that you are unhappy at our separation is a double-edged
sword, one that brings pain as well as pleasure, for I suffer when
you suffer, and your anguish only increases the agony your absence
causes. How I long to see you again, to hold you, to kiss you a
thousand times. My darling, my own precious darling. What I would
whisper in your ear were you here this moment with me.

Your own Helen"

*

Sophie carefully folded the
note and put it back in its envelope, remembering as she did so the
notes that Helen and Miss Travers used to exchange at Fort Martin,
the long hours they had closeted themselves away together. These
letters were not the beginning, she thought. The beginnings were back
further, back when Helen was a child and Miss Travers, only a girl
herself, had come as a schoolteacher to Fort Martin. Almost
involuntarily, Sophie's eyes went to the wreath on the wall. Blending
with its own shadows in the darkness, it seemed even larger than
before. It was all Helen's hair, Sophie realized. It had been
collected over a lifetime so that one could trace its gradual
darkening, its shading from the pale ghostly color of childhood to an
ashy brown. A picture, startlingly clear, came into Sophie's mind:
she saw Miss Travers sitting on the tufted sofa, her lap full of
varying shades of Helen's hair, and the plump, babylike fingers
selected and twisted, moved in and out. Sophie shook her head,
refusing to go as far as her thoughts wanted to carry her. But it was
wrong, all of it. The wreath, the picture, the trunk of memorabilia.
Unmistakably wrong. And Miss Travers must know, for she hadn't wanted
Sophie to see this room, this shrine.

With a start, Sophie
realized she had no idea how long she had been at Miss Travers'. She
looked at her watch--well past nine o'clock. Miss Travers might come
back at any moment. Hastily Sophie tied the letters together again
and put them back in the trunk, covering them with the sampler and
the scented linen. She moved to the door. With her hand on the knob,
she glanced around the room. The trunk lid! She had left the trunk
lid up. Quickly she closed it, then opened the door just enough so
she could see the street in front. It seemed to be empty, so she
moved out onto the porch, shutting the door behind her. She hurried
down the stairs and turned left, then left again in another block,
heading for the park. She had almost entered it when she sensed she
was no longer alone. She glanced back and saw someone walking slowly
up the street toward her.

She had no idea who it
might be. The moon was behind a cloud now, and it was too dark to
see. Probably the person had nothing at all to do with her;
nevertheless, she stepped quickly into the park and walked hurriedly
up the gravel path.

After she had gone several
hundred feet, she stopped, stepped to the side, and looked back to
where she had entered. He was down there--or she, whoever it was, was
down there--hovering uncertainly at the bottom of the path. Then the
shadowy figure disappeared. If it had been someone after her, Sophie
thought with relief, he would have followed her into the park.

Then suddenly she saw the
layout of the park in her mind's eye. There were other paths like the
one she was on, all of them radiating from a circular path which went
around the park's grassy center. The shadowy figure could enter at
any of the paths and lie in wait for her at the center.

She turned and ran further
into the park. She would cross the point where the paths came
together before anyone else could reach it. If she were fast enough,
no one would be able to intercept her.

When she came to the
circular gravel path, she decided against following it around the
central area. She would save time by cutting across instead. She ran
between two saplings and started across the round grassy area--where
her left foot slipped into a prairie-gopher hole.

She fell hard, knocking the
wind out of her. She lay on the grass and tried to catch her breath,
tried to assess the pain shooting up her leg. Had she broken
something? Should she try to move her foot? She lay still for a
moment, listening to the sounds of the night, thinking how loud each
one was to her, but how silent the park must seem to anyone outside
it. She doubted anyone outside could hear her if she cried out, not
with the close-planted saplings and the grass muffling her cries. How
long before her absence would be noted? And then how long before
anyone thought of looking in the park for her?

What was that? A footstep?
Had she heard a footstep on the gravel path? Or had it been the
rustling of the leaves again? Fear pricked at her and she forced
herself to move her foot. New pain shot up her leg, but not, she
thought, the kind she would feel if a bone were broken. Still, she
couldn't walk. The wrenched ankle hurt too much. But she thought she
could crawl, and then she began to form a plan. It made no sense for
her to stay here. Those who wanted to find her wouldn't think to look
here, and if the shadowy stranger came, she was quite helpless. She
needed to make her way to where people were, and she tried to think
what lay on the outskirts of the park. She didn't remember seeing
anything across from it on the north and east sides, but across on
the other two sides there were houses, and if she remembered
correctly, they were clustered near the southwest corner. That was
where she should head.

She gathered up her skirts
with her left hand and crawled toward the circular path, intending to
follow it around a short distance before taking the path which headed
where she wanted. But the gravel bit painfully into her flesh, and
even before she reached the path which led where she wanted, she knew
she couldn't do it this way. She stopped and held her right hand
close to her face. She could see the torn flesh, the dark stains of
blood. Then she heard a sound, and she scrambled awkwardly off the
path, frantic for the shelter of the saplings. She lay curled on the
ground listening, listening, but she heard only the leaves rustling
above her.

She would not venture onto
the path again. Instead, she crawled alongside it in an awkward
three-legged manner. She would put her right hand forward, then her
right leg, then bring the left even with it. But she kept her weight
on her right knee as much as she could because of the pain when she
let her left knee support her. As she made her way along, she thought
about the noises she had heard, the overwhelming sense she had that
someone was pursuing her. It could be imagination, of course. Or it
could be Jake Rodman trying to frighten her again. But the shadowy
figure she'd seen at the pathway entrance--there'd been something...
feminine about it, hadn't there? Amy Travers? Could Miss Travers have
found out she was in her house, that she had read the letters?