Time After Time (5 page)

Life would've been so much
easier if Keith had chosen to stick around.

Susy was peeking into the
shopping bag that sat on the ground next to her mother. "What's
this, Mommy? A present for someone?"

Liz smiled at her
daughter's subtle fishing expedition and rumpled her dark-brown
hair. "It's a box I found in the attic," she said, lifting it out
for her daughter and Victoria to see. "It's locked, so I'm going to
take it to someone who can open it for me. Do you want to
come?"

While Susy considered her
options, Victoria asked, "For heaven's sake, how did you get into
the attic?"

"Jigsaw," said Liz,
rolling her eyes at the memory. "I made an ungodly mess; I haven't
even swept it up yet. I found a trunk of old letters sealed away,
and this was in with them." -

"No kidding?"

Susy was tugging at her
mother's hand. "Mommy? I think maybe I don't want to go. I think. .
. maybe I should have some quiet time," she said with a tentative
look in her big brown eyes.

Stomachache,
dammit.
Liz threw Victoria a scolding
glance, then said to her daughter, "Okay, sweetie. I'll take the
box to the locksmith some other time."

"Liz, just go; I'll stay
with Susy," said Victoria amiably. She held out her hand to the
little girl and said, "You can have quiet time while I tell you
another adventure of the Princess and the Magic
Petunia."

Susy was all for that,
which left Liz with mixed feelings. Her daughter's early years were
precious ones, and on Liz's deathbed she was going to want every
lost moment of them. She felt guilty for wanting to open the box
... but she wanted desperately to open the box.

"Okay, then, sunshine.
I'll be right back."

****

Jimmy's Lock and Key was
located in a peeling colonial house, one of the many historic
buildings, most of them updated, that lined both sides of downtown
Thames Street. The concept of gentrification, however, had not yet
occurred to Jimmy; his ancient, tattered shop was a jumble of new
brass hardware, carousels of key blanks, and boxes of mysterious
metal innards. Liz laid the red-lacquered box on the painted
plywood counter and said, "Can you get it open without damaging
it?"

Jimmy, a bulldozer of a
man who could probably pry open a locked safe with one arm tied
behind his back, picked up the box in his thick, stubby hands and
said, "Shouldn't be too hard. Where'd you get it — flea market, or
antique shop?"

"Neither. It was in the
sealed-in attic of the house I've just bought, along with a bunch
of old letters. Isn't that weird? If this box were bigger, I'd be
afraid of finding someone's bones in it," Liz said with a
self-conscious laugh.

"Or ashes," said Jimmy,
shaking it back and forth the way Liz had.

Ashes! She hadn't thought
of ashes. "Can you pick the lock?" she asked with more dread than
before.

Jimmy shrugged and reached
under the counter. "Won't need to, maybe." He brought out an El
Producto cigar box and flipped open the cardboard top. "Let's see
what we got in here," he said, pushing an assortment of tiny keys
around in the box. "Sometimes we get lucky."

His eye lit on a little
brass key that must've looked promising. He picked it up and tried
inserting it. No luck. He tried another. Ditto. Liz's hopes began
to sag. Then he pulled out a third key, a tiny key turned dark with
age, and tried that one.

"Well, well," he said,
obviously pleased as the key turned smoothly in the lock. "Nothin's
frozen."

What Jimmy did next showed
he had an instinct either for chivalry or for caution, Liz never
did figure out which: he turned the box around to face her so that
she could open it herself.

Liz bit her lower lip and
laid both her hands gently on the lid. She'd half convinced herself
that there was an important letter wedged inside, or a map, a
treasure map left behind by Captain Kidd. But she did not want
ashes.

Slowly, expectantly, she
raised the lid. Almost at once her ears seemed to ring, as though
somewhere in the far, far distance, someone were playing an
instrument. A chime, perhaps: a single-noted chime whose echo began
to fill the room with its extraordinary tone.

She was confused; she
thought perhaps the box was some sort of music box or that —
bizarrely — it was rigged to sound an alarm when opened. But the
tone stayed with her, filling her head with its melodious
note.

"Well? What've we got?"
asked Jimmy.

"I ... what?" Liz asked,
hardly registering the question.

The inside of the box was
lined with rich black satin, and on the satin sat a heart-shaped
pin. The heart itself was open and gold, shaped into a twining
leafy pattern. The inside point of the heart ended in a tiny red
stone sitting on five gold petals. It was very pretty, but worth
less, probably, than the box it was pinned to.

"Are you all right,
miss?"

The single, chiming note
became more intense as Liz reached into the box and gently released
the heart from its satin anchor. "A pin," she murmured. Her own
heart had taken off at a flyaway rate; her hands began
unaccountably to tremble. The silvery ringing in her ears ... was
she about to faint? "It's a pin," she repeated in a whisper,
unbelievably distressed.

"Oh, yeah," said Jimmy
with a sideways tilt of his balding head. "Very nice. Got any idea
how long it was sealed away?" he asked.

"I ... do not. The house
was built in the thirties," Liz said, shaking her head, trying to
rid herself of the ringing sound. She took a deep breath or two and
looked around the shop in confusion, then said, "Do you have an
appliance somewhere that makes some kind of high-pitched
sound?"

"The fridge out back
drives me nuts," Jimmy volunteered.

"No, no ... this is more
... beautiful, than that."

"Beautiful?"

"And scary."

"Scary?" He frowned and
said, "An
appliance?"

"Maybe your neighbors have
chimes hanging outside?" she asked him without much
hope.

"Chimes! Don't get me
started on chimes," Jimmy said, snorting. "Damned clanging pipes.
As if we don't have enough noise blastin' outta car speakers all
summer long. The traffic eventually dies down; you can catch an
hour or two of quiet at night. But chimes! All day, all night ...
chimes just keep chiming. Chimes in the city," he said
pontifically, "are not a good idea."

"Yes, like that," Liz
whispered, ignoring his speech. "You have some nearby?"

"No," he answered grimly.
"Not anymore."

She needed some air. She
slid the pin back into its satin cushion and closed the red box.
The silvery, penetrating sound ceased at once.

That left Liz more
disturbed than before. She wanted to lift up the lid, just to test
the box, but she was so grateful for the quiet, the peace, that she
let it stay closed.

"I guess my ears
were
ringing," she said
in a clumsy lie. "How much do I owe you for the key,
then?"

Jimmy flapped a beefy hand
at her and said, "Ah, nothin'. It's just an old key."

"Thank you," Liz said,
still in a subdued voice. "That's awfully nice." Afraid that she
wasn't seeming properly grateful, she took a business card from her
purse and handed it to the locksmith. "If I can ever return the
favor. . ."

Jimmy read the card.
"Parties, eh? Well, I got grandkids, and no mistake. Do you have
one of them Barney getups available?"

Liz smiled wanly and left
with her red box and her new old key.

One mystery was solved,
anyway: There was no treasure map, only a pretty little
pin.

But now a new, more
daunting mystery faced Liz: what had produced the strange and
melodious chime-note? She glanced at the red box sitting innocently
on the front seat alongside her as she crawled through downtown
traffic on her way back to her cottage. As it happened, she was
trapped behind a Jeep blasting rap music; it was all she could do
not to march over to the driver and rap him on his damned head.
Jimmy was right. It was all so rude.

She tried not to think
about the traffic or the box and instead turned her thoughts to the
Eastman birthday party. She could save money by making the cake
herself: say, a giant Mickey Mouse head, with eight-inch cake-pan
ears. It would be the pièce de résistance of the affair. No one
would ever remember that the decorations were skimpy; everyone
would go home raving about the huge Mickey Mouse cake. Good. The
cake idea was good.

She glanced again at the
red box beside her.
Had
she imagined the sound? By now, she was as
curious as Pandora. She took a deep breath, then lifted the lid an
inch. Nothing. Thank God, nothing. Relieved that
that
was over, Liz swung
up to Bellevue Avenue, hoping against hope that traffic would be
slightly less crushing there than on narrow Spring Street, the only
other northbound street to her cottage.

Wrong. On a steamy Friday
in June, Newport traffic came in only two versions: horrendous and
murderous. Obviously she should have walked, but old habits died
hard. The deep Fifth Ward, where she'd been brought up, was just a
few blocks too far from downtown to be quickly walkable. Then,
after she married, she and her husband had rented a little ranch
house in Middletown, farther up the island, because it was close to
both their jobs at Raytheon. But now she had a house smack-dab in
the middle of everything. Walking was the only way to
go.

Eventually Jack Eastman's
exquisite manor house loomed ahead. With its steeply pitched roofs,
multiple chimneys, intricate shingles, and half-timbered stucco,
the house was one of the finest and biggest Queen Annes in a town
that overflowed with them. Liz could still remember pedaling down
Bellevue Avenue on her way to the beach when she was a child,
liking the Queen Annes more than any of the French chateaus,
Italian villas, or granite castles that lined the famous avenue.
Something about the brooding Gothic lines of the shingled English
style appealed to her.

And scared her, of course,
which she loved.

Liz turned off Bellevue
Avenue toward her house and then, entirely on impulse, she pulled
up in front of the Eastman mansion. She had a question for Jack
Eastman. She could have asked it by phone; but she had changed into
a stylish skirt and a new knit top, and she wanted to prove that
she didn't
always
look like something the cat dragged in.

Scanning her image in the
rearview mirror of her minivan, Liz poked her thick blunt-cut hair
back into place, then decided that maybe she needed a bit more
lipstick.

And a little
mascara.

And a touch of eye
shadow.

Whatever it takes to make
him see that I'm ... I'm
—
what?
Professional?
Hardly. A professional would have called first before dropping by.
She strode up to the front door, trying not to listen to the little
voice running around madly inside her head screaming, "You idiot!
You just want to show him you can look pretty! You
idiot!"

But it was too late for
second thoughts. Ignoring the doorbell above the discreet brass
nameplate engraved with the name "East Gate," she lifted the heavy
dolphin doorknocker and brought it down in three sharp
thumps.

Netta answered the door
immediately, as if she'd been hovering on the other side. Startled,
Liz said, "Oh, hello, Netta. Is Mr. Eastman in? I wanted to ask him
about the cake and, if it was convenient, to look around the—
"

She was interrupted by the
very gentleman in question, whose outraged voice thundered from
behind a set of closed paneled doors off the massive,
portrait-lined entrance hall, itself as big as the whole first
floor of Liz's toy cottage.

"What the
hell
do you think you're
up to, inviting those slimeballs on the property!" she heard him
shout.

The hair on Liz's arms
stood on end as she murmured, "This may not be the right time
—"

"Dear, it surely isn't,"
the housekeeper said uneasily. Liz heard another man's voice,
obviously attempting to calm Eastman down, and then Eastman again,
interrupting him.

"You want to hang out with
those sewer rats, go ahead — but do it in their sewer, not the
shipyard! If I see them there again, I'll run them off
myself!"

Again the other voice,
soothing and yet urgent.

Then Eastman's voice,
hoarse with rage: "Are you
crazy?
You mess with them, you'll end up in jail! You
think they're along for the ride? They want the
land,
you bloody old fool! Not the
business!"

Then the other voice, also
angry now.

And then Eastman again,
cutting him off. "They'll do whatever they have to do to get it!
You bloody, bloody old fool!"