The Treasure Box (21 page)

The hedge outside her office window—the one that gave her protection and privacy—was gone.

She dashed out the front door, letting the screen slam shut behind her, and bolted across the yard. “Eddy, wait!”

He closed the tailgate of the truck and turned. “Yes'm?”

“Eddy—the privet hedge—there, in front of the sunroom—”

“Yes'm?”

“Did you—did you cut it?”

“No ma'am.”

Vita felt her breath coming in short gasps. “What do you mean, ‘No, ma'am'?”

“I—well, I know it needs trimming, but my electric shears are in the shop. I could do it by hand if you want, but I reckoned it'd wait another week or so—”

Vita grabbed him roughly by the arm and dragged him over to the hedge. Now that she was outside, she could see that the privet hedge was cut even with the window sill, with a few stray shoots poking up this way and that.

“You're telling me you didn't cut this hedge, right now, today.”

“No ma'am.” He gave her a curious look. “You always said you wanted it just this high, right at a level with the windows.

I can trim back that new growth next week.” He grinned and pointed toward the back of the hedge. “But you oughta know there's a bird nesting in there. I didn't think you'd want her disturbed.”

Vita's eyes followed the direction of Eddy's point. Far back in the hedge, toward the wall of the house, she could see the sparrow's nest, with two bright beady eyes staring out from between the leaves.

“I was going to talk to you about it,” Eddy went on as if this conversation were the most natural thing in Vita's world. “See if maybe you'd want me to leave the hedge alone until the babies hatched and flew away.”

“Yes, but—” Vita paused. “I knew the bird was there—I could see it from my office. But the nest was—” She extended her arm above her head and pointed. “It was higher, way up there, almost to the middle of the window.”

Eddy gazed at her. “'Scuse me for asking, ma'am, but are you all right?”

“I'm perfectly fine,” she snapped. “I just don't understand about the hedge—”

“Miss Vita,” he said slowly, carefully, “that hedge ain't been up over these windows in years. You always tell me to keep it cut down to the window sill. Always.”

Vita could see that he was telling the truth. There was no sign of recent cutting—no severed branches, none of that ‘new-haircut' look that shrubs have after they've just been trimmed.

“Whatever you say,” she whispered, turning away. “Thank you, Eddy. Just send me a bill, all right?”

“Yes'm. You want me to leave it be—the hedge, that is—til summer, when the birds are gone? It'll get a little scruffy looking by then, but—”

“Yes, Eddy,” she murmured. “By all means, let's leave the birds in peace.”

Eddy grunted an assent, said he'd see her in a week or two, and trudged off in the direction of his truck. Without looking back, Vita fled for the sanctuary of the house and locked the door behind her.

20
BREAKDOWN

V
ita sat trembling in her office chair and watched through the window as Eddy's battered blue pickup drove away. By the time he was around the corner and out of sight, she had broken out in a cold sweat.

What was happening to her? She had lived in this house for years, and never once had Eddy trimmed the privet hedge against her office window. She wouldn't allow it. That hedge had been her protection, her shield against the world's insistent infringement. She must still be asleep, still dreaming. But if this was a dream, it was the most realistic one Vita had ever experienced.

She pinched herself on the tender flesh inside her elbow, so hard that tears came to her eyes and a red welt raised up on the spot. Not asleep. Not dreaming. A nervous breakdown, then, caused by a lack of rest and overtaxed emotions.

She closed her eyes, took in a deep breath, and looked again.

No hedge. She could see all the way to the corner, and beyond.

This was real. She wasn't imagining it.

But her mind had to be playing tricks on her, because she could remember . . .
both
. The privet hedge high above the windows, cutting off the sights and sounds outside, and that same hedge at its present height, neatly trimmed just to the edge of the window sill. Both memories went back years, and each seemed equally true.

And there were other overlapping memories, too. She remembered the sparrow's nest being both above and below eye level, from the vantage point of her desk. She recalled watching through the window as the huge limb from the oak tree came down during the storm; but she also could remember simply hearing the crash, and going out to the porch to see what had happened.

Anyone else in this situation, Vita knew, would go straight to the liquor cabinet for a good stiff drink. But Vita never touched alcohol, never kept a drop of anything stronger than cider in the house. She had never liked the stuff and had always deplored the way people like Gordon and his university friends acted as if liquor were an absolute necessity of life—enhancing one's celebration of the good times or medicating one's senses against the bad.

To Vita's way of thinking, that logic had always seemed a truckload of nonsense. If you were enjoying yourself, why anesthetize your senses to life's small pleasures? And if you were despondent, an additional dose of chemical depressant wasn't likely to make anything look better in the morning.

Still, she needed something to steel her nerves against this confusing and debilitating turn of events. Coffee. Good, strong coffee, that was the ticket. It would clear her mind and enable her to consider her situation more rationally.

Relieved to be liberated from the disturbing long-range views in her office, she went into the kitchen and poured a decanter of cold water into the coffee maker.

Think,
she ordered her mind. She had to sort this out. There must be a rational explanation.

But the only rational explanations Vita could come up with were the most irrational of all: either both situations were true, or she was losing her mind.

Vita could sympathize. All she wanted to do at the moment was crawl into bed, pull the covers up over her head, and escape.

But she was neither a morning glory nor a pouting child, and as a reasonable, intelligent adult, she needed to confront the dilemma head-on.

Her mind went back to the beginning—or what she identified as the beginning. The evening of the storm, when her computer locked up and the Treasure Box program first appeared. She could recall the rain, the wind, the thunder and lightning, the crash of the oak limb as it severed itself from the trunk and fell to earth, the power blackout. That much, she knew, was real. But her mind still held the dual memories—of seeing the limb fall, and of not being able to see it because of the hedge that surrounded her office windows.

She forced herself forward in time. The insidious virus that wouldn't let her back into her own computer. The voice from the speakers:
“Love is the key that unlocks every portal.”
And her first glimpse into Jacob's tiny hovel of a shop. What had the voice said then? “
Watch and learn.”

Where had she heard that voice before—low and entreating, dark and a little mysterious? She couldn't remember—or, more precisely, couldn't get her mind to retrieve the memory. It was there, Vita was certain. But it wouldn't come to the surface.

She pushed that problem aside and focused on the words.

Watch and learn
. Clearly, she was meant to learn something from the images on the screen. But what? And from whom?

Without warning Vita's cynicism kicked in, that sneering little voice in the back of her mind, mocking her, dragging her back to objective reality. Did she really think there was some intelligent presence at work in this program, some larger mind that could see her reactions and judge whether or not she was learning her lessons? Computers had advanced rapidly in the past few years, but Vita was pretty sure that the techno-geeks in Silicon Valley had not yet come up with a computer that truly interacted with its owner and thought for itself—or if they had, such a machine was not in Vita Kirk's price range.

Still, the voice had been clear—the Treasure Box program had been intended to teach her something. Tabling for the moment the question of who the Teacher was, Vita turned her attention to the possible “lessons” inherent in the program. She would evaluate this rationally, one step at a time, and a logical answer would undoubtedly materialize.

First there was Sophie—open, loving, vulnerable Sophie, who had sacrificed her young life to save her best friend. Vita tried to consider what she might learn from Sophie.
That loving someone could get you killed?
No, that was just her cynical voice interjecting its negative perspective. Vita tried to remember how she had felt when she had watched Sophie lying battered and bruised in the shallows of the river—and later, when the child exhaled her last breath and floated peacefully into the arms of her willow-mother. There must be some message here— But Vita found that her memories wouldn't stay still long enough for her to get a firm grasp on them. Images from the Treasure Box program kept getting mixed up with images from her own life. Jacob Stillwater's laughing eyes overlapping with Hap Reardon's gentle expression and genuine smile. Sophie and Rachel sharing secrets, and Hattie Parker walking away. Cathleen looking and sounding remarkably like Mary Kate. The infant Sophia Rose and the abandoned baby of her most recent dream.

Vita closed her eyes and shook her head violently. She had to get this straight, had to separate what was real from what was not real. That was one test of sanity, wasn't it—the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy?

And yet it all seemed real—all of it. The Treasure Box program. The jumbled memories from her own past. The high hedge and the low one. The gateless garden of her dream and the actual garden, the one with the missing padlock.

In the midst of her confusion and despair, an idea occurred to Vita—a tiny glimmer of light in the darkness. Maybe she hadn't gone far enough in the Treasure Box program to discover what its images meant for her. Maybe there was more she needed to see before the pieces would all fall into place.

She swallowed down the last of the lukewarm coffee, dashed through the living room into her office, and clicked on the computer.

Even before Vita saw the scene that materialized on the screen, she found herself tense with apprehension. The voice, low and entreating, emanated from the speakers.

“Love, dear friends,” it said, “is the key that unlocks every portal.”

The starry background dissolved to reveal a tall, dark man in a black suit with a white clerical collar. He was holding a prayer book, and in front of him, with their backs to Vita, stood a man with curly reddish-blond hair and a woman in white, with long dark tresses that flowed down her back like a waterfall.

A wedding.

The groom turned to face his bride, and the bride, holding something in her arms, moved toward him for a kiss. Then Vita saw the face.

Rachel Woodlea. The squirming bundle in her arms had to be Sophia Rose. And the groom? Vita looked more closely at him.

Michael McCall, the Chicago mounted policeman who had delivered Cathleen's baby the night she died.

A surge of pleasure rose up in Vita. Rachel deserved a happy ending.

But the elation didn't last long. The tall dark man—a minister, evidently—was speaking again.

“Take care,” he said. “You hold in your hands—and in your hearts—something more rare and valuable than you can possibly comprehend—”

Vita's mouth went dry. She had heard those words before, coming from that very same voice. And she had seen that face— older, much older, but with the same bright brown eyes and intense expression.

The minister went on talking for a moment or two about the joys and commitments of marriage, and the additional responsibility of raising a child. Then he looked up from his prayer book and turned his attention outward, beyond the wedding couple, so that Vita felt as if his eyes were fixed directly upon her. “Walk the path God sets before you,” he said in that same low, entreating voice. “And hold to this one unshakable certainty: it will lead you where you are meant to be.”

Vita sat immobilized, speared to her seat by the man's intense gaze. The ceremony was over; the newlywed couple turned in Vita's direction and, as if she were standing at the end of the aisle, walked hand in hand toward her until they disappeared from view.

Somewhere outside her range of vision, an organ played the recessional. The dark-clad minister reached behind the pulpit, retrieved a cane, and leaned on it as he came down the aisle.

She studied his face as he drew closer, replaying his words in her mind, trying to place where she had seen him before. And then, just before he vanished off the screen, he paused and raised his cane to the tip of an imaginary hat brim.

An ebony cane, with the figure of a bird worked in brass on the handle.

21
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

B
y the next morning Vita knew she must, indeed, be on the slippery slope toward a total breakdown. Her brain would not shut down to let her sleep. All night long her mind kept replaying the same tape over and over: The minister at Rachel and Michael's wedding. The stranger who had approached her in Pastimes the day she purchased the Treasure Box. The voice on the computer program. All one and the same.

Impossible,
her logical mind insisted. Even if by some incredible chance it was the same man, he couldn't have been younger than twenty-five on the day of the wedding.