Time After Time (25 page)

He ignored the pun, passed
on a kiss, and got out of there as fast as he could, leaving a hurt
and puzzled Liz to wipe the dishes by herself.

One thing she knew: Jack
had a wide choice of reasons to run from her. Tonight he'd got a
close-up look of a woman who abandoned sex at the drop of a hat;
who hallucinated regularly; and who didn't seem to care very much
for people who had either servants or boats. Which of these
sterling character traits had scared him the most?

All of the above,
Liz decided glumly. She was a pretty frightening
package.

****

Several days later Liz was
glued to her television, watching the weather, when the doorbell
rang.

"Who is it?" she yelled,
unable to move away from the weather map that had her
transfixed.
A hurricane. A frigging
hurricane!

It was Victoria, demanding
to be let in. "In a minute!" said Liz, ignoring the summons and
turning up the volume.

Wildly impatient by now,
Victoria began alternately pounding on the door and cranking on the
ear-splitting doorbell. "Dammit, Liz! Let me in! I know who he
is!"

The hurricane had formed
overnight west of Hatteras and was projected to follow a northerly
path. "Too soon to call," Liz heard the weatherman say over her
shoulder as she went at last to get the door. "We'll be watching
this one closely."

Victoria was standing on
the stoop, waving one of Victoria St. Onge's letters in Liz's face
like an American flag at the summer Olympics. "I got it, I got it!"
she cried, brushing past Liz into the living room.

"I promised Jack no rain
for his picnic," Liz moaned — unnecessarily, since Victoria wasn't
listening. "Wait'll he hears about
this.
A stupid
hurricane.
Of all the rotten,
miserable breaks—"

Victoria was scanning her
letter, searching for what was obviously the good part, oblivious
to Liz's latest problem. "Ah! Here it is. Listen!"

"'Last week I attended an
amusing affair—'"

"Oh,
please,"
Liz said, interrupting her
at once. "Not another amusing affair! I can't
take
any more. I've read through
endless years of endless accounts of endless balls, fêtes, tennis
matches, fox hunts, yachting parties, and soirees. God! How could
they
stand
such
nonstop idleness?"

Victoria shrugged and said
without irony, "You know how it is: same old same old. You get used
to it, like a job sorting mail. Are you sure you've made the right
career choice?" she added. "Anyway, trust
me
—
this
event will be worth it," she
promised.

She began over. "'Last
week I attended an amusing affair at
East
Gate,'
" she read, glancing up at Liz with
a look of triumph.

Liz became quiet. Not
outwardly — outwardly, she was leaning forward in the wing chair,
breathless to hear this of all the letters. But deep inside, in her
soul — that's where she became very, very still. She felt as if she
were at the altar of some great truth; that some impossibly
difficult code was about to be deciphered with the key that
Victoria was holding in her hand.

Victoria read on, in a
deeply pleased voice:

The event was a
fête champêtre,
hosted
by John and Lavinia Eastman, a coolly old-fashioned couple in this
overheated age. I have written before of their moody, reckless son,
the artist who so rudely removed me from his studio last year. To
this day, there is little love lost between Christopher Eastman and
me, but his mother, who is anxious to communicate with a recently
departed aunt, has decided to take me up. To that end, she invited
me to the festivity of which I now write.

Lavinia Eastman had urged
me to come early so that we might make arrangements for a sitting
later in the week. This we did, and as we had time to spare before
the arrival of the first guests, she carried me off to the dining
hall so that I might admire the artful arrangement of the
table.

It was charmingly done up
in a seashore theme. Shells and beach roses were scattered freely
up and down the service. The centerpiece was a stunning tableau,
rendered in crystal, of a mermaid cavorting with dolphins amid
roiling seas.

At each place setting
there was a small child's bucket, filled with sand and with a
shovel stuck into it. A nice bit of whimsy, I thought, and remarked
upon the fact — though I could not help feeling that very soon we
should all be tasting sand in our soup. Lavinia was pleased with my
enthusiasm and boasted happily that she had hit upon the sand
buckets as an ideal way to present the guests with their party
favors.

She told me that her son
Christopher had been assigned the pleasant task of inserting a
semiprecious gemstone — tourmaline, amethyst, citrine, agate,
topaz, and the like — into each of the buckets. Later, the guests
would be instructed to take up their shovels and dig for their
treasures. As I say: sand in the soup.

I thought no more about it
— the favors were neither diamonds nor rubies, after all — until a
few minutes later, when I returned to the room to fetch my
spectacles, which I had left behind. I was about to leave when my
nemesis came in to do his mother's bidding. He did not see me, and
as I felt rather awkward about engaging him alone, I tucked myself
behind a carved leather screen that stood nearby and waited for him
to be done.

From the crevice between
the panels I was able to observe his very odd behavior. The young
man walked directly up to one of the settings and replaced the
place card with one he had brought with him. Then he made a quick
circuit of the table, carelessly pushing a gemstone into each of
the buckets. When he returned to his original setting, the one with
the new place card, he took a small pin from the pocket of his
dinner jacket and, with a smile, stuck it, instead of a gemstone,
into the sand.

Consumed with curiosity, I
went directly to the altered place card after he left the room and
read it. I did not recognize the last name, but I certainly knew
the first: Ophelia, the servant with whom he had been having the
affair! I had heard nothing about the matter lately and had
assumed, if I thought about it at all, that the infatuation had
passed. "Apparently not," I murmured to myself And then I had an
inspiration.

Locating my own placecard,
I carefully fished out my favor—a dull little citrine — and
switched it with the pin in Ophelia's bucket. As of this writing, I
still do not know why. It can hardly have been because I desired
the pin, which was a small, quite humble little heart with an
insignificant garnet set inside. So it must have been because I
wished, purely and simply, to make things as awkward for
Christopher Eastman as he had for me that afternoon in his studio a
year ago. (You know, dear sister, how I can be.)

It was clear to me, as I
left the dining room in haste, that this besotted man had every
intention of forcing his paramour on Newport society. Perhaps, I
thought, the pin was meant to be the catalyst to an announcement of
his betrothal to Ophelia, or even a public proposal of marriage to
her; the man was outrageous enough to do either. I had no doubt
that Ophelia would present very well — in the nude paintings she
had presented very well indeed — but I could not imagine how he
dared risk his parents' wrath.

Still, it was obvious to
all that his mother doted on him. She respected and trusted her
older son, who had already assumed the responsibility of running
the family's large holdings. But it was her younger son whom she
loved, and dearly. As a consequence, he probably realized that the
risk was not—

Victoria looked up through
a mist of happy tears and folded the pages of the letter gently on
her lap. "So now we know," she said with a limpid smile.

Liz was so thoroughly
prepared to hear the end of the tale that she simply sat there,
waiting for more. And yet it was clear that there was no more. She
said stupidly, "You're not going to finish the letter?"

Victoria sighed, then
leaned over and handed Liz the folded, heavy sheets. "This is all
there is, this middle section. The pages weren't dated — they
weren't even numbered — so I'd stuck them in one of the
‘miscellaneous' shoeboxes. I guess they should've gone in the 1896
shoebox."

"But that can‘t be all,"
Liz wailed. "Did you look through everything else in the
miscellaneous boxes?"

"I didn't read every word;
but there were no other sheets with the same ink and nib. And you
know how erratic her handwriting is; nothing else there matched
this style, which is oddly legible — for her, anyway."

Victoria undid the clasp
of the heart that was pinned to the lapel of her blouse. "So now we
know," she repeated, studying the little bauble that lay in the
palm of her hand. "Isn't it amazing? You see so many pins in flea
markets ... in antique shops ... at yard sales ... and you never
have a clue how they got there. But we know exactly how this pin
ended up in your red-lacquered box."

Liz wasn't as satisfied as
her friend. In a fit of frustration she flung the pages into the
fireplace, where they got hung up in a basket of dried flowers that
she'd placed on the metal grate for the summer.

"Oh, I can't believe it!"
she said, jumping up from her chair and pacing the three strides up
and then down the length of the room. "I simply can't believe it!
I'm going to go out of my mind if I don't resolve this
soon."

Victoria, nestled in the
down-filled cushions of the chintz sofa, was puzzled. "Resolve
what?" she asked, clearly amazed by Liz's reaction. "We know now
where the pin came from—"

"We know practically
nothing!" Liz said angrily. "We know Victoria St. Onge stole the
pin. We don't know why she stole it —
she
didn't know why — and we
certainly don't know why she kept it."

"That's true,
but—"

"And Christopher Eastman!
Did he marry Ophelia or not? Obviously not," she said, answering
her own question. "His wife was blond; Ophelia was a redhead. I
don't understand; what could've happened? Oh, damn, damn,
damn."

"How do you know his wife
was a blonde?"

"Jack told me."

"Jack!"

"And why does he keep
appearing to me, anyway? What does he want?"

"What! He's appeared more
than once?"

"Twice. Where do I fit in?
Where do
you
fit
in?"

"Twice!
But where—? No; tell me later. I can answer your
last question, and I will!" said Victoria. She got up to retrieve
the letter fragment from the fireplace grate, then carried the
pages over to the foyer table that stood, in lieu of a larger
table, behind one end of the chintz-covered sofa. For a moment she
stood quite still, with her back to Liz, as if she were composing
herself before a difficult feat of acrobatics.

She turned and said,
"Listen to me, Elizabeth!" in a voice that was shaking with
excitement. "I know
exactly
where I fit in.
Finally.
Now that I've found the
letter." Her eyes were deep green pools of liquid fire.

Liz, herself a jumble of
conflicting impulses, took one look at Victoria and decided that
each of them, in her own special way, had completely lost touch
with reality.

Victoria took Liz by the
hand and led her to the sofa. She laid the heart-shaped pin in
Liz's hand, then placed her own hand over it and held it there.
Lowering her voice to a breathy whisper, she said, "I'm here — I
came back — to return the pin to its rightful owner."

"He's
dead,"
said Liz. "Despite what I may
have implied."

"Not Christopher. Jack.
His heir." Victoria smiled dreamily and took the heart back, then
pinned it to her blouse.

Liz watched her do it,
hypnotized by the simple, ordinary act. "You honestly think that
Christopher Eastman is haunting the area because he wants that
dinky pin back?"

Without in the least
taking offense, Victoria said, "The pin must've had some
sentimental value. He could've afforded to give Ophelia a diamond
necklace if he'd wanted to."

"Not necessarily. He was a
younger son, remember."

"Even so. He could've done
better than this," Victoria said, tapping the heart that lay across
her own heart.

They became silent a
moment, each of them caught up in her own thoughts. By now, there
was little doubt in Liz's mind that some strange game was afoot,
and that she had a role to play in it. The game was perhaps not so
complex as chess, but neither was it as straightforward as
Parcheesi. It fell, like life itself, somewhere in between.
Victoria had figured out the rules — at least, as they applied to
her — but Liz was still reading the back of the game box,
scratching her head and wondering what the ultimate goal was, and
just how many players were allowed.