The Mirror (46 page)

"Now Lottie, you listen to--"

"And you." She whirled her skirt and hair around to Brandy. "All this time you took advantage of a crazy old man? It's incredible. I just don't believe this." Lottie pushed the pitchfork aside and walked out, leaving Brandy and Ansel staring at each other.

They were about to follow when Lottie reappeared, looking almost sick. "Gramps, you . . . you didn't get her pregnant. . ."

"'Course not. You don't stop talking long enough for a man to get a word in. She came sick. Run away because they was going to kill her baby with an abortion and lock her up in an asylum."

"So she's crazy too. That explains it."

"What would you of done, turn her away?"

"I'd have turned her in." Lottie's pretty face hardened to ugly. "And claimed the reward."

The truck carrying the wedding mirror and the car traveling with it pulled into a field near a low-roofed building. Other trucks parked on brittle grass outside the paved area surrounding it and people moved through chill shadows.

November wind scattered dust and paper food containers across the field, up over the concrete lip of the parking lot and against the side of the building, whipping the loose edge of the painted sign that faced the road
--
A
NTIQUE
A
UCTION.

The man who had changed his hair from gray to brown stepped out of the car and signaled the men in the truck where he wanted them to park. He moved his shoulders in a circular motion and stretched his neck to either side. It'd been a long drive. They'd stopped only to eat and to take on a load, legally acquired and paid for, stored along the way.

As his companions approached, their breathing clouded on the air. Dead grass crunched as it broke beneath their boots.

"Where's that motel? If I'm going to unload this in the morning I need sleep."

"Not yet, my good man. There's much business to be transacted tonight."

"But the auction doesn't start till noon tomorrow."

"The choice items sell by flashlight tonight." And many of the stolen articles from the house in Boulder, Colorado, would be scattered to the four winds in twenty-four hours, possibly even before the theft was discovered.

The door opened on the back of a nearby pickup camper. Light, smoke and the smell of coffee poured out to them. "Frederick, is that your voice I hear?"

"It is." The man who'd stolen the wedding mirror stepped inside the crowded camper. "And wait until you see what I've brought this time. I hope your flashlights and checkbooks are in good order, gentlemen."

Brandy Harriet McCabe stared at the ceiling. She pondered the strange turn her life had taken. If anyone had told her six months before she'd be sharing a bed with a harlot, Brandy would have been outraged.

Lottie turned a page of her book, her head propped on a folded pillow. Her small slim figure made Shay's tall body, now swollen with child, seem awkward and ugly in comparison.

The book hit the floor and so did Lottie. "I can't concentrate. This is all so . . ." She lifted her hands toward the ceiling in a gesture suggestive of her grandfather. "So ... I mean ... I'd turn you over to your folks tomorrow if I didn't think Gramps would get in trouble for hiding you."

She rummaged in a shoddy cloth handbag and extracted cigarette papers and a clear bag filled with what looked to be dried, crumbled weed. "Why, of the thousands of people in and around Boulder, did you have to pick on that crazy old man?"

"I think you do Mr. St. John an injustice. This world seems peopled with lunatics and your grandfather appears more sensible than most . . . at times." Brandy concentrated on averting her eyes from the pictures Lottie had rehung. She called them "posters" but whatever they were, grown men had posed naked to be photographed. "How any of you keep your wits about you is beyond me."

"You sure talk funny." Lottie sat on the foot of the bed and drew in on a cigarette, holding the smoke inside her, releasing it gradually through her nostrils. A sweet smell drifted over the covers toward Brandy, heavy, unlike any tobacco she'd ever been around before. "Almost like you aren't one of us. Did they send you off to school in a foreign country or something?"

"I'm no foreigner." In Brandy's world foreigners were all foolish if not suspect.

Lottie drew her nightgown up to bare her legs, pulled a foot high until it lay--dirty sole upward on top of the opposite thigh, and crossed the remaining foot over to do the same on the other thigh. She pressed her bents knees against the covers, making a folded crisscross of her legs that should have pulled her hip joints from their sockets.

Brandy looked away from the embarrassing spectacle only to have her eyes meet the reclining figure of a man with dark hairs on his chest and arms . . . and other places as well. The hairs reminded her of Marek Weir. She lowered her eyes to Shay's folded hands resting on the hump of stomach.

"That one turns you on, doesn't he? That why you took the posters down? He's not bad but I've seen better pricks."

"Pricks?"

"Yeah. Look, why don't you just go home and not tell anybody where you've been? Like I told you, you're too far along for an abortion."

"Would you have me locked away in some asylum, Lottie?"

"Anybody who could've had an abortion and didn't, belongs in one." Lottie affixed a hairpin to her cigarette and holding it by the pin smoked it down till Brandy feared she'd burn her lips. The cloying smell made Shay's head ache.

"If you're not found out before, you will be when you go to the hospital to have the kid. And if you think Gramps can afford that trip, think again."

"Hospital? It's a baby, not an illness."

Lottie unwound her legs and stood. She swayed and had to steady herself against the bedposts. "Man, that must have been good stuff." Her eyes appeared larger.

"Now there's a prick for you." She pointed to one of the pictures.

"Makes you wonder if they didn't do some trick with the negative or something."

"Lottie, must we have those disgusting things here?"

"Disgusting?" Lottie backed away as if to observe them all at once. "They're supersensational. Probably fags, but certainly put together right."

"They're unclothed." Brandy rolled over to face the window.

"They're more than that, they're bare-assed." Lottie came around the bed to block Brandy's view of limp curtains. "And what's the matter with that?"

"No decent woman looks at pictures of naked gentlemen in her bedroom or . . . anywhere." Brandy fought tears, but Shay's cheeks and the pillow were damp with them. She couldn't cope with this world.

"Decent? You're the one who's pregnant. You didn't get that way staring at a big star in the East either. And don't tell me he raped you with all his clothes on or something. Hey, don't cry ... I mean . . ." Lottie sat beside her, put a comforting arm on her shoulder. "Shay, I didn't say there's anything wrong in being pregnant. But it's kind of rough on a kid to let it be born if you can't take care of it. Seems wrong, you know?"

"No, I don't know." Brandy rolled over the other way and closed Shay's *eyes on naked men. "I've never even lain with a man."

"So, you did it standing up. It's a free world." Lottie gave a snort of disgust. "Jesus! Do you have some old-fashioned hang-ups."

Of the treasures from the Gingerbread House, the wedding mirror and a wooden rocker were all that found their way to the floor of the auction barn the next morning.

Antique dealers from different parts of the country had cleaned out the other items long before dawn. Thora K.'s buffet now sat, carefully padded, in the dark interior of a truck bearing California license plates.

Although the auction had not yet begun, the barn was a busy place. Prospective buyers threaded their way through old and sometimes odd merchandise deciding on biddable items.

Cindy Wilson checked the numbers on tags tied to a row of cast iron cherry pitters, of which her shop had an overload this year, and bent to force closed a drawer in an antiquated spool cabinet.

"Excuse me. Can I get through here?" A man in coveralls stood behind her, a roll of extension cord wrapped around his arm. : As Cindy stepped back to let him pass, something cold and sharp poked through her blouse in several places along the ridge of her spine. She turned to find bronze hands coiled about each other, the overlong nails on the little fingers jutting out slightly.

The hands framed a full-length mirror of ancient glass with a crack across the top. Cindy patted her tightly sprayed hair and then shook her head.

She and Ned had been in the business for five years now but this monstrosity had to be the weirdest thing she'd seen to date. Ned's wavy reflection appeared in the mirror as he came up behind her.

"Honey, have you seen this?"

He gave the mirror a cursory inspection and made a face. "It's god-awful."

"I know. So godawful it's almost interesting. Put it in a display window and you'd sure get the curious in off the street."

"Or scare them away," Ned said dryly and wandered off.

"Coming through again." The man in coveralls approached, unwinding his extension cord as he passed.

Cindy stepped over it and picked up her clipboard to continue checking her numbers against the tags on the remaining odds and ends from her shop.

The cord pulled tighter as the electrician reached the auctioneer's platform and slipped up over the claw base of the wedding mirror. There were several frayed places along the cord's length, exposing wires no inspector would have deemed safe. One of these places lay up against a curved index finger that supported the mirror's weight.

"One . . . two . . . three . . ." droned a voice from the platform, reaching to speakers throughout the cavernous building, echoing over the conversations of excited antique nuts. "Testing . . . one . . ."

Cindy stuck her pencil behind her ear and turned at the humming sound behind her. The tangled bronze hands seemed to glow. She blinked and looked around into the glass.

Cindy Wilson blinked again and dropped her clipboard.

Brandy McCabe closed the oven door on the loaves of bread she was baking and staggered back to the sofa as the familiar feeling came over her.

Her granddaughter must finally have discovered the secret of the mirror.
Oh, Shay, hurry!

Brandy leaned back, trying to relax, to give herself up to the fog rising in front of her eyes instead of fighting it as she had before. She strained to lean into the tugging motion inside Shay's body rather than pull back.

But the fog was so thin. She could still see the kitchen through it, and Lottie stepping out of the bathroom.

"Shay? Oh, God, you're not going to have a miscarriage on us or anything?" Lottie's voice sounded far away.

Brandy began to fall and swirl. A forest path and pine trees, an overturned bucket tilted in front of her. But still she could see Lottie behind them. Lottie's mouth moved now without sound.

. . . the smell of earth . . . the sound of wind rushing through layered pine needles above her . . . the sickness . . . the sweating . . .

Brandy fought to sink deeper but the tugging weakened. The forest path and the bucket slowly receded.

Lottie loomed above her, fully seen and heard.

Ned Wilson watched his wife anxiously as the ugly mirror was carried onto the platform. He'd never seen her so pale. "Well, okay, if you really want the damn thing. But you bid more than a hundred and I'll take it out of your hide."

When the mirror sat upright and in full view, the crowd hushed. The auctioneer did a double-take and checked the papers in front of him.

A woman in the audience giggled.

"I tell you, it's magic," Cindy whispered. "If you knew the things I saw--"

"The occult is for adolescents. Darling, what's gotten into you?"

"But I saw scenes or . . . things and people. And clouds of smoke. Not myself. And I was standing right in front of it."

"Bidding begins at fifty dollars," the auctioneer said with a grin, and the crowd laughed.

But Cindy Wilson raised her hand.

14

Lottie threw the dishes into the sink and broke a plate. "Gramps, it was like a fit. Her eyes rolled back. Maybe she's epileptic."

"Don't believe so." Ansel held the newspaper at arm's length, his head tilted back as if he were underscoring each line of print with the end of his nose.

"Will you get your brain together long enough to listen to me? She could be up there right now dying of a miscarriage or--"

"Just looked in on her. Sleeping, peaceful and healthy. She'll be all right by tomorrow. Tough as nails when she needs to be."

Lottie pressed the newspaper down on the table. "She's pregnant and hasn't even been to a doctor. If she did die what would you do?"

Ansel wrung a mashed pea from his beard. "When people die you bury 'em."

"Where? Out in your graveyard? Put up a cross with 'Stina Mark'? Gramps, they're liable to call it murder and kidnapping. If she's dead she can't tell anybody she wanted to be here."