Time After Time (9 page)

There was one last gift:
an envelope from Cornelius Eastman, the family patriarch. He was
sitting in the leather armchair alongside the beautiful mother of
one of the bored teenagers. He interrupted his chat with her to
watch Caroline open his card and hand Netta the check inside
without so much as a glance at it.

Netta's eyes opened wide.
She flushed and said, "I'm sure Caroline is very grateful,
sir."

Cornelius made some
ofthand, dismissive remark and went back to his tête-a-tête, and
Liz and Netta began cleaning up the wrappings.

Feeling herself like an
indentured servant, Liz was reconsidering whether to bother with
the puppet show. But the children were getting into Caroline's
presents, upsetting her, and Liz was forced to distract them while
Netta spirited the gifts upstairs.

As she sat the children —
little too forcibly — down in their chairs, Liz wondered anew that
East Gate housed neither wife nor mother. The mansion seemed oddly
empty with no one but poor old Netta shuffling around in it. Liz
shook her head. A bachelor and an apparently estranged husband:
these guys were hell on women. Well, it wasn't her lookout. All she
wanted to do was finish the godforsaken assignment and go
home.

Her standard routine was
to sit alongside the kids and wait with them a minute or two for
the show to begin, then announce that she was going backstage to
see what was holding it up. Today she did just that. Her heart,
meanwhile, started to beat more excitedly, as it always did before
a performance.

What the heck,
she thought, fully in the spirit of the show as
she slipped the puppets over her hands.
It's not the kids' fault I can't drive a decent
bargain.

She peeked through the
hidden peephole and saw their faces all aglow with expectation. She
was completely enchanted by this part: by the little squeezy things
the children did with their hands, and the way they grinned and
nudged one another with their shoulders as they waited and watched.
They were so full of joy, so willing to be made happy. Their eyes
were huge; they didn't want to miss a thing. It made no difference
how rich or how poor, how blond or how brown they were; kids at a
puppet show were all the same, and Liz loved them desperately,
every one — even Caroline.

Showtime.

Up popped the girl-puppet,
a wide-eyed charmer named Misha. "Oh dear oh dear oh dear!" Misha
said in Liz's high-pitched voice. "If I can't find him, I don't
know what I'll do!"

Out strolled the boy
puppet, a mophead named Kris with a skateboard on his shoulder.
"Can't find what, Misha?" he asked in a slightly less high-pitched
voice.

"My pet turtle," explained
the girl-puppet. "He's gone! I think he ran away!"

"If he could run, he
wouldn't be a turtle," the boy-puppet said breezily. "What's his
name?"

"Tommy," said the
Misha-puppet. "Tommy Turtle."

Through her peephole Liz
was surprised to see Jack Eastman stroll over and join several of
the parents who were standing off to one side, where they had a
view of the show and the children at the same time. She watched
nervously to see how Eastman would react to her innocuous little
script. He looked, she had to admit, bemused but rather
bored.

Okay,
she thought.
It's
not
Phantom of the
Opera.
But you're not exactly a Broadway
producer, pal.

Kris the boy-puppet was
busy peeking under the drapes and calling Tommy the turtle, when up
popped another boy-puppet, a big hulky kid wearing a baseball cap.
"Yuh?" he said in Liz's deeper voice. "What do you
want?"

"I want Tommy."

"I'm Tommy."

"You're
not a turtle!" said Kris, much to the delight of
the laughing kids.

And meanwhile Liz was
watching the oldest and pickiest member of her audience — and he
was actually smiling. Smiling! His face, earlier so tight with
repressed anger, had an expression a lot like the ones the kids
were wearing. Liz couldn't take her eyes away from him; he was so
much more attractive in this unguarded moment. She liked everything
about him just then, from the way his dark hair tumbled over his
forehead to the way he folded his arms across his chest, relaxed
and at ease for once.

Then she saw him notice
the children themselves, all of them gleeful and enchanted by the
puppets' antics. It was as if he'd glanced out a window and
discovered half a dozen rainbows on his property. His expression
mellowed still more, into one of tender, surprised
delight.

And Liz decided, right
then and there, that either she was in menopause or she was in
trouble.

She had to force herself
to stay on top of her plot — to bring up the dopey-dog puppet on
cue and to haul out the turtle-basket for her puppets to drag
around. She'd done the skit a hundred times, but never with her
heart in her throat the whole while.

As intensely preoccupied
as she was, Liz still was able to notice two-year-old Bradley,
apparently escaped from his nap, toddle into the room with Snowball
in his arms. Because of the seating arrangements, no one else in
the whole damned Great Room was able to see him plop down, puppy on
his lap, against the back side of one of the sofas.

Liz groaned inwardly and
thought about yanking the curtains shut in an impromptu
intermission and removing at least the dog. But the toddler and
puppy seemed content enough for the moment. She decided to let them
be.

Warily, she hurried
through her lines.

"Ow, ow, ow," cried
Misha-puppet. "This rocky beach is hurting my feet!"

Kris-puppet reached down
and brought up something for his audience to see. "I found him!
Oops. Nope. It's a stone."

"Here he is!" said
Misha-puppet. "Oh," she said, disappointed. "Another rock. Do you
think he swam into the ocean?"

At this point Kris, who
knew all about land versus aquatic turtles, was supposed to have
given a little speech explaining the difference, and Misha was
supposed to have decided that her turtle was smart enough to stay
on land and close to home where it was safe, and all the puppets
were supposed to have begun heading home because it was getting
dark and where of course they would've found Tommy
Turtle.

However.

Liz glanced over to where
Bradley was sitting and noticed that Snowball had moved a couple of
feet away, where he was now in a squatting position over the
antique Heriz carpet.

"Oh, no!" screamed Misha,
out of character.
"Bad
dog, Snowball!"

At the sound of the name
Snowball, Bradley turned around, took in the situation in a glance,
and scrambled to his fat bare feet. "Snowbaw poopie! Bad Snowbaw!
Poopie poopie!"

Little Bradley made a
waddling dash, right through the poopie, for the runaway puppy. Liz
shook the puppets from her hands and shot her head up into the
theater, surprising everyone except maybe Snowball, who clearly was
used to being screamed at and chased from hither to yon. She
watched, frozen with horror, as Bradley tramped dog poop from one
priceless rug to the next in his pursuit of the puppy.

Jack Eastman, who had no
idea what was going on, naturally seized on Snowball and hauled him
out of the room. By the time he got back, it was very obvious, to
him and to everyone else with nostrils, that the party was
over.

"Good God!" he said with
an expression of disgust. "What the
hell—?"

Liz had already tackled
Bradley to the floor and handed him over to Netta for hosing down,
but that didn't make her feel any less guilty about the social
disaster that had taken place on her watch.

"I'm so sorry," she said,
mortified. "I saw Bradley bring in the dog ... but I had no idea
the dog was sick ... oh, lord," she said, trying not to retch, as
the guests began fleeing the house.

Jack Eastman was amazed.
"You're telling me you saw what was going on?"

"Well," she said lamely,
"sort of."

"For goodness' sake, it's
nothing that can't be fixed," said Netta, rallying to Liz's
defense.

But Cornelius Eastman
wasn't so sure. "It's so runny ... I don't know. . . the Kirman
looks bad."

"I'll clean it," Liz
volunteered. "A little Woolite—"

"Woolite!" Jack said,
unsure, apparently, whether to laugh or scream. "Woolite? And for
this you expect full payment?"

It was so gratuitous. Did
she really need this fresh humiliation? She lifted her chin. "I've
learned to expect nothing from you, Mr. Eastman. Neither courtesy
nor respect. Why should you confuse me with a payment of money due?
If you'll excuse me, I'll get a bucket of water."

She turned and found
herself face to face with Netta, who was clearly at the end of her
patience with everyone.

"You'll do no such thing,
child. You're working for peanuts as it is." She turned to the men
and said, "I'm the one who didn't put Bradley in his crib; you can
blame me. And what's the fuss, anyway? Those rugs have been in the
family for a hundred and fifty years. You think no one's ever
messed on them before? This isn't a museum. It's a home — or at
least it would be, if everyone would start acting like a family,"
she said, sweeping them up in a look of withering
contempt.

That was when it hit Liz.
Caroline Stonebridge is the old man's love-child, she realized
belatedly, remembering how he'd beamed every time Caroline came
into view. And that meant she was Jack's half-sister.
And Jack doesn't like it one damned
bit.

And she couldn't care
less.

"Go home, dear," said
Netta. She jerked her head in the direction of the two men behind
her and murmured, "Save yourself while you can."

Suddenly Liz was
completely exhausted. The climax, after a week of feverish
anticipation, was so completely crushing that she thought she'd
never coordinate an event again. And yet the very next day she had
to do a Mexican birthday for a mob of seventh-graders at a Taco
Bell.
Was
life
everlasting, then?

She tried to put on a good
face. "Good-bye," she said briskly to the men. "Thank you, Netta.
I'll come back for my things tomorrow."

She brushed past them all
and was promptly accosted in the hall by a reproachful Caroline.
"You gave everybody cake from the
ear,"
the child said, apparently
oblivious to what was going on.
"I
wanted the ear."

Liz stared at the child in
amazement, then led her to the cake, which sat on the tea cart,
still in the hall. "You want an ear?" she said. "Fine."

She took up a knife and
lopped off the intact ear with a stroke that would've made Van Gogh
cringe, then slapped the eight-inch circle on a plate. "Here. Have
an ear."

Then she turned and
marched toward the heavy paired doors at the end of the softly lit
hall. She was approaching the massive grandfather clock that graced
the near entry when her head began to fill with the sound — the
angelic, heavenly sound — of the chime-note that she'd heard at the
locksmith's.

It's the grandfather
clock, tolling the hour,
she thought,
catching her breath.

And then, whether it was
the thick fog, or the lateness of the hour, or the state of her
exhaustion — she saw a shadowy, vapory, and yet oddly clear figure
of a dark-haired man, well- built, wearing buttoned trousers and a
loose flowing shirt with ominously dark spatters on it. The
apparition was leaning, with arms folded, against the grandfather
clock.

Watching her.

Stifling a cry, Liz
stopped dead in her tracks. Before she could make up her mind what
to do, the hallucination passed, although the sound — the single
transcendental chime-note — did not. Liz took a deep breath and
hurried past the clock. The chime-sound followed her as she fled
through the fog to her van, parked off to one side of the mansion's
graveled drive. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably as she
struggled to fit the key in the ignition.

I have to get away from
here,
she thought distractedly.
Away from him ... it ...
them. Oh, God. I have to get away.

Victoria was in
stitches.

"This gives whole new
meaning to the term
party pooper,
she said, grinning, as she and Liz dunked
doughnuts in Liz's kitchen the next morning.

So far Liz had told
Victoria only about the party — nothing more. "I don't see what's
so funny," she snapped. "My long-awaited debut turned out to be my
unexpected swan song."

"You should've let me stay
on and help," said Victoria.

"How could I? I wasn't
getting enough to pay either one of us. Not to mention, the son of
a gun is stiffing me."

"Oh, he'll pay what he
owes, surely," said Victoria, still smiling. "Although
you
should know, of
everyone, that you're supposed to collect the balance before the
event."