In the Blink of an Eye (31 page)

Somebody has latched the doors from the outside, imprisoning Julia in the musty cellar.

“
P
AINE!”
S
TAN LOOKS
up from an issue of the
Chautauquan Daily
, obviously surprised to see him. “How did you know where to find me?”

“Hi, Stan. I looked for you at your office and somebody said you were here.”
Here
being the wide porch that runs the length of the Athenaeum Hotel, a grand, wood-frame period structure with a distinct curved mansard roof.

“Have a seat I'm just catching a break before my class starts.”

Paine sits in one of the painted ladder-back rockers beside Stan and looks over the rail, admiring the view. The porch runs the length of the building, which sits high on a sloping lawn above the lake. Today, with the sky a brilliant blue and the sun dazzling overhead, the crystalline water is dotted with sailboats and speedboats towing skiers.

“I wanted to thank you for letting me sit in on your sessions this week,” Paine tells Stan. “It's been invigorating.”

“I'm glad.” Stan looks thoughtfully at him. “Invigorating in the sense that you've changed your mind about live theater?”

Paine laughs. “I've got to make a living, Stan. Residuals from a chewing gum commercial pay more bills than being on stage ever could.”

“Not necessarily. Not if you're on top. On Broadway. And it's not nearly as fulfilling.”

Paine thinks about Margaret's son, the actor. For her last birthday, he sent her five dozen roses with a note that read
This is to make up for all the years I couldn ‘t even afford to send you a card.

Paine says slowly, “I can't afford to start over. I've got a daughter to raise.”

Stan shrugs.

“What are you thinking?” Paine asks.

“That you're making excuses. But feel free. We all do it. I've got a million of them for why I haven't quit cigarettes yet. Speaking of which”—he checks his watch—“I've got to head back over to the classroom. I can smoke while I walk. Come on, walk with me.”

Paine rises, and together they head down the broad wooden steps.

“I won't be back here again,” Paine tells Stan. “I'm heading back to L.A. in a day or two.”

He's made up his mind to go, no matter what's going on with the house. He can't afford to hang around waiting for the legal issues to be untangled. He'll handle the real estate transaction from afar if it turns out the house belongs to Dulcie. And if it doesn't . . .

Well, the money would have been nice, but they'll survive without it. They always have.

“Somehow, I can't see you living the rest of your life out there, Paine,” Stan says, pulling a pack of Salems from his shirt pocket.

“Why not? L.A. is home for me and Dulcie. Everything is there.”

“Everything. Huh. Good for you, then.” Stan lights his cigarette and takes a drag.

They walk in silence up a steep, shady street beneath a canopy of old trees.

Everything is there?

What the hell is everything? A rented apartment? Uptight parents I never see? A couple of minimum-wage jobs and a half-assed teaching assignment?

“You can't think I should stay
here,”
Paine says, frowning.

“Hmm? Did I say that?”

“You didn't have to. It's what you were thinking. That I should stay here in the East. Keep the house in Lily Dale. Teach at Chautauqua during the summers. Maybe even get back on stage. Start auditioning in New York, spend the rest of the year there, the way you do.”

“Is that what you want, Paine?”

“No.” He scowls. “That's not what I want.”

The trouble is, he doesn't want his old life in L.A., either. Not anymore. Not now that . . .

Now that what? What's changed?

“Then what do you want, Paine?” Stan asks.

I want Kristin back. I want to be married. I want a real family. I want to live happily ever after, and I don't give a damn where, as long as I can shake this oppressive restlessness.

“I have no idea,” he says glumly.

D
ULCIE . . .

Dulcie . . .

Abruptly awakened by the sound of someone calling her name, Dulcie groggily assumes that it's Julia. She sits up and pushes the blanket away, instinctively swinging her legs over the edge of the mattress, her feet onto the floor.

That's when she sees the lady, beckoning to her. The image isn't clear, but Dulcie can see her familiar blond hair, and her outstretched arms waving her forward. All around her is the black nothingness that is Dulcie's constant, whether her eyes are opened or closed.

Mesmerized, Dulcie moves toward the lady, somehow forgetting to feel her way along the furniture and the wall. Somehow, her steps are assured. Somehow, there are no obstacles in her path.

She moves in barefooted silence across the room and out into the hallway, guided by the vision floating in front of her. A voice in the back of her mind reminds her that Julia said not to try to go downstairs alone, but another voice is louder.

The lady's voice, calling her name.

I must be dreaming,
Dulcie thinks, dazed.
Otherwise I wouldn't be able to walk like this, without bumping into anything.

In the hallway outside her room, Dulcie turns toward the stairway, but the lady wants her to go the other way.

A sound drifts up from the first floor.

Somebody is downstairs.

Dulcie opens her mouth, about to call out Julia's name.

No! Shhh . . .

She realizes that whoever is down there isn't walking across the floor like a regular person.

Dulcie can sense the stealthy movements of someone sneaking quietly through the house.

Somebody who shouldn't be here.

Just like last night

Her heart pounding, she moves backward, away from the stairway, toward the lady. She can feel the pull, can feel the urgency in the lady's guidance.

Dulcie's outstretched hand encounters a doorknob.

Turn it.

She opens a door. Walks into a room. Disoriented, she has no idea which room it is; only knows that it isn't hers. She closes the door softly behind her.

She can hear the lower stairs creaking. Somebody is coming up.

The lady wants her to come farther into the room. Dulcie walks blindly, yet swiftly and strangely assured, moving forward until her outstretched hands encounter a window screen on the far end of the room.

Open it. Open the window. Get out of the house, Dulcie. Hurry.

She pushes the window upward. It isn't easy. The old wood barely moves a few inches, not enough of an opening for her to climb through above the screen. Dulcie's fingers find the edges of the screen, the old-fashioned kind that isn't built in, like the ones in the windows back home in L.A.

She can hear footsteps in the hall. One slow, steady step after another.

Dulcie shoves the screen until it contracts and falls forward, landing with a clatter on the hardwood floor at her feet.

The footsteps in the hall stop abruptly.

Then they start again, moving toward the door to this room.

Hurry, Dulcie. Get out.

Dulcie hesitates, reaching past the sill, feeling nothing on the other side but thin air. She tries desperately to remember Daddy's description of the outside of the house, struggles to remember which way she went in the hallway before coming into this room.

Is she at the front of the house, where the porch roof runs under the windows?

Or is she in the back, where it's a straight drop to the ground?

Get out, Dulcie. Get out. Hurry.

Her heart pounding, she raises a leg and straddles the windowsill. Her foot dangles into nothingness on the other side.

Trust me, Dulcie. Climb over the edge. You won't get hurt. Just get out. Yell for help. Get somebody's attention.

Her eyes squeezed tightly shut, the lady's outstretched arms beckoning, Dulcie holds her breath and hoists herself over the windowsill.

“
H
ELP!
S
OMEBODY HELP!”

Her voice hoarse, Julia rams the cellar doors again with the broom handle. This time, it splinters in two.

She tosses it aside in bitter frustration and looks around once again in a futile attempt to find another way out of here. No windows, no other doors have magically appeared. She's been trying to get out of here for what seems like hours, yet she knows it can't have been longer than five minutes, maybe ten.

What if nobody finds her?

Exhausted, Julia slumps on the bottom step.

Dulcie doesn't know where she is.

Paine might not think to look for her here.

The old house is solidly built. Yet surely whoever was walking around upstairs could hear her thumping with the broom handle on the cellar doors, and, at one point, on the ceiling.

Julia feels sick inside as she allows herself to wonder who is up there with Dulcie—and whether that person deliberately locked her down here.

She's been telling herself that it had to be an accident. That perhaps Paine came home, saw the doors open, and closed them, thinking she had merely been careless.

But that doesn't make sense.

Paine would have seen the light, heard the radio, checked down here for Julia. He knows she's been working on the dresser.

Something tickles Julia's bare leg, just above her knee. She glances down.

A large brown spider with jointed, furry legs is crawling lazily upward there, toward the hem of her shorts.

With a piercing shriek, Julia bolts to her feet, flinging the loathsome creature away, not seeing where it lands.

Shuddering, wary, she brushes off her arms, her legs, her hair, feeling as though her skin were crawling with whatever lurks in the crevices of this musty old cellar. Spiders, centipedes, mice, bats . . .

Julia snatches up one half of the cracked broom handle and climbs back up the stairs. She has to get out of here. What if the lone lightbulb burns out and she's trapped here in pitch-blackness?

She lifts the splintered wood above her head, but before it makes contact, the door moves.

Stunned, Julia realizes that somebody's outside, opening it.

She's been saved!

Breathless, she watches as a crack of light falls through the opening. As it grows wider, blue sky and green branches appear, along with the silhouette of a person.

Julia blinks, momentarily dazzled by the sunlight.

Then she sees her rescuer's face looking down at her, his eyes masked by a familiar pair of sunglasses.

It's Andy.

P
ILAR PACES IN
front of the bank of pay phones, one eye on the nearby set of glass doors. Any second now, Christina and her husband and children are going to burst through with their luggage. Then it will be time to board the massive ship that looms just outside, and set sail to the Caribbean.

With a disinterested glance at the dark-suited businessman barking orders into one phone and the pudgy, Hawaiian-shirt couple sharing the receiver of another, squealing farewells into it, Pilar walks, not for the first time, to the last phone in the bank, farthest away from the others.

She picks up the receiver, fumbling in her pocket for a plastic long-distance calling card paper-clipped to the small scrap of paper that bears the three numbers she's considering dialing.

Katherine Jergins's.

Lincoln Reynolds's.

The Biddles'.

Again, uncertainty seeps in.

Should she make a call?

Whom should she call?

What on earth should she say?

She settles on Lincoln's number. Perhaps there's something he didn't tell her, something he can share that might shed light on Katherine's reaction to the mention of her parents.

It seems to take an eternity to punch in the numbers on the calling card and wait for a line to open up so that she can dial.

When she finally does, the phone at the Reynolds residence rings . . . and rings . . . and rings . . .

With an anxious glance at her watch, and then at the glass doors, Pilar hangs up, consulting her list of numbers.

Katherine or Rupert?

Why can't you leave it alone? Just forget about it and go on your vacation. Stop meddling.

The paper trembles in her hand. Pilar thinks of Nan, lying—dying—in that small, unadorned room. Of Rupert, hovering at her side, anguished, alone. She has to help them.

Even if it means admitting to the old man that she's stolen his daughter's phone number from his address book and contacted her behind his back?

Pilar exhales heavily. He'll be furious.

Katherine or Rupert?

She makes up her mind and begins to dial again.

Katherine answers on the second ring.

She speaks in a rush. “Hello, this is Pilar Velazquez and we met earlier, when I stopped by your house. I'm so sorry to bother you again, but there's something that I think you should know.”

The woman says, icily, “First of all, I told you, I have no idea what you're talking about. You must have me mixed up with someone el—”

“No, Katherine, please . . . I understand that you must have your reasons for denying—”

“Look, what are you? Some kind of scam artist?”

“Scam artist?” Pilar echoes incredulously. “No! I'm—”

“I saw your business card. I know what you people are like.”

Her business card.
Pilar Velazquez, Registered Medium and Spiritual Counselor.

“
I have to go,” Katherine says brusquely.

“No! Please don't hang up.” In desperation, Pilar seizes the one name that might keep her on the line. “Please—I have a message for you from Lincoln. He says he wants to hear from you. Please don't—”