Time After Time (7 page)

"Which reminds me," said
Liz. "The box."

She ran out to the car to
retrieve it, then laid it on the table between them. "The locksmith
had a key that fit. Look what was inside," she said, lifting the
lid, not without trepidation.

But she heard no chiming
sound, only blissfully deafening silence.

"Ah, how pretty!" said
Victoria, taking up the pin. "I love it. Do you suppose it was
hers?" she asked in her guileless way.

"It could have been, I
guess. I'll tell you what," Liz said impulsively.
"You
have
it."

Victoria colored and said,
"I wasn't hinting for it. I just meant —"

"No, take it. To be
honest, I'm not sure I like it as much as you do. It made
me
feel ... odd. I feel
almost guilty, in fact, dumping it on you."

"That's crazy! It's
charming! Well ... thanks, Liz. Really."

Liz thought Victoria would
put it on then and there, but instead she slipped it into her
handbag.
She feels as f she's stolen it
from me, poor thing.
To reassure her, Liz
said, "This box is worth a pretty penny, I think. More than the
garnet pin, by far."

Victoria lavished endless
praise on the box, holding it and turning it this way and that.
Finally, she said, "But why do you suppose it's shaped like a
sarcophagus? Something to do with end-of-the-century
morbidity?"

"That's not the shape at
all!" Liz said, too sharply.

"Sure it is. Look: the
left side is wider than the right."

"That doesn't make it
coffin-shaped! It makes it asymmetrical, that's all." Liz wanted to
change the subject. "Are these all the letters? I thought there
were more."

"There are; this is all I
could carry from the attic in my arms." Victoria fished out one
letter from a pile on the table and handed it to Liz. "Here's the
most recent one I've found so far. It's dated 1935."

"Four years after the
house was built," Liz said automatically.

"Yes. Your land used to be
part of the East Gate estate— actually, it was a little service
road to East Gate. But it was sold off to a Portuguese builder who
tried to keep busy during the Depression building houses on spec.
Probably that's when the East Gate people put up the barbed wire.
Anyway, Victoria St. Onge bought the house new from the builder.
She was around eighty by then, so she — I? — must have been a
feisty old broad," Victoria said irrepressibly. "She paid sixteen
hundred dollars for this house — and she complained bitterly about
it."

"Gee. That doesn't sound
like you at all; everyone knows you go through money like water,"
said Liz, falling in with her friend's fantasy.

"Don't be smart. Anyway,
read the last sentence of the letter. It's very distressing. Very
... I don't know."

Liz flipped the letter
over and read the wobbly handwriting:
Stupid and wrong,
it said,
and now it's too late.

"Huh. Well, this doesn't
say much. She could be talking about anything, from picking the
wrong wallpaper to the current president. What does the rest of the
letter say?" Liz went back to the letter's greeting. "Who's
Mercy?"

"Her sister."

"Hmm." The short letter
was a rambling, disjointed mess, bits and pieces about different
people, all of it rather pointless and certainly
mundane.

"Almost all the letters
are to Mercy," Victoria explained. "The sisters were almost weirdly
close. I get the impression that Mercy was some kind of
healer."

"Wonderful," said Liz
dryly. "This gets better and better."

Victoria got up from her
rush-seated chair and stared out the window. But she wasn't seeing
Susy, lying in the grass with the cat on her stomach; and she
wasn't seeing the cool green oasis surrounding East Gate. Liz was
sure of it.

"Know what else?" Victoria
murmured. "Victoria St. Onge was — if you laugh, I promise I'll
leave — a spiritualist."

Liz confined herself to a
skeptical pursing of the lips. "Gawd."

Victoria turned around.
Her normally serene, almost spacey expression had been replaced by
a burning, focused intensity that Liz had never seen
before.

"That's what she was, Liz
Coppersmith," she said. "And like it or not, that's what we've got.
At least it explains some of my psychic skills."

"Oh, come on. You're
intuitive, I'll grant you. But
psychic?"

"Liz — do you remember
what you told me over cappuccino that last night of our
grief-management class, when we declared ourselves graduated? That
no matter what strange road my amnesia took me down, you'd walk
down it with me?"

Liz remembered the moment
very well. She'd been thinking of her own husband then: of how
after the baby was born, he had abandoned them both and taken off
for California, just when she needed him most. She was going down
for what felt like the third time when her mother talked her into
joining the grief group. Within weeks, Victoria had quietly stepped
into the breach left by Keith.

The gratitude that Liz
felt for her that night over cappuccino was profound. Victoria had
become an everyday part of her life. She'd supported Liz's decision
to start up Parties Plus; lent her money, advice, and time;
baby-sat Susy almost as much as Liz's parents had. She'd become the
sister Liz never had.

"Yes. I remember," Liz
said to Victoria, more humbly than before.

"Well, this is the road
I'm going down," said Victoria quietly. "And I'm a little
scared."

"Okay," said Liz with a
reassuring smile and a nervous shrug. "I'll get my walking
shoes."

"Watchit watchit! You're
bending his ear!"

"For pity's sake,"
Victoria said, frazzled, "he's got another one. There'd still be
plenty of cake for everybody. Why are you being like this,
Liz?"

"Because everything
has
got
to be
perfect." Liz slid one hand toward the middle of the huge cardboard
tray that held the flour-and-sugar version of Mr. Mouse himself,
and with her other hand she slid back the side panel of her
minivan. "Easy, easy! Keep it level! Oh, this damned fog; it's
going to wreck the frosting."

"I know this is your
Bellevue Avenue debut, but come
on
.
You're
out of control, Liz."

"Okay, in he goes.
Eee-zee-e ... good. Don't tell
me
about control," Liz snapped, once the cake was
secure on the floor of the van. She took the clipboard from the
front seat and ran one last check over her list of party
preparations.
"I
haven't been obsessing over some moldy letters for the last
week."

"You said you wanted to do
the party prep yourself on this one!" Victoria said, taken aback.
"You said if I babysat Susy while I worked on the letters, it would
work out well for both of us!"

Liz hardly heard her.
"Trays. . . flowers.. . puppets... favors.. . programs.. .
shit.
Where'd I put the
candles?" She looked up wildly.

"They're in your carryall.
If you'd let me take the letters to my house in the first place,
I'd probably be through them all by now."

"No! The letters stay
here."

"Why?"

"I don't
know
why. Right now I
don't
care
why.
We've got one hour before guests start arriving. I
knew
I should've taken
the cake over earlier. Why I thought I had to make a grand entrance
with it ...."

In an obvious attempt to
end the bickering, Victoria suddenly laughed and said, "The
cake
deserves
a
grand entrance, that's why. Look at it: it's
spectacular!"

Indeed it was. Mickey's
head — with its huge glossy ears, bug-eyed grin, and bright yellow
bow tie — was a thing of beauty, if not exactly a joy forever. It
had far exceeded Liz's expectations. Susy liked it so much that Liz
had to promise to make her one for her own birthday in
September.

"You're right," Liz said,
taking a deep breath. "Everything's going to be fine."

They got in the van and
began a reverse spiral of three quick left turns to get to East
Gate. The top part of the hill was very steep; Liz began fretting
that the cake would slide. "I don't know why I didn't just hand the
thing over the barbed wire to Netta," she said petulantly. "This
driving around every time is ridiculous. What I need is a gate in
the fence between my house and East Gate."

"What you need is Prozac,"
said Victoria, staring at her friend. "Why are you being this
way?"

Liz eased into her last
left turn as if she were ferrying a load of TNT. "You weren't there
when he called me stupid," she muttered.

"He didn't call you
stupid. He said your question was stupid. And it was, especially
considering the circumstances. For gosh sakes, the cake is
of
Mickey
Mouse
— so chocolate
and
white.
Obviously
.
No, there's more to this than that." In her
serenely blunt way Victoria said, "Liz Coppersmith — do you have
the hots for this guy?"

"Hots! I don't expect to
have hots until menopause. Are you crazy? Who has time to have
hots?"

"Okay, okay. Just curious.
Personally, I was
quite
smitten when he dropped in on us in the Great
Room yesterday. He's one heck of a hunk."

"Yeah. Until he opens his
mouth. Why can't he be more gracious about this party? 'No
thumbtacks in the woodwork, please.' God. I'd hate to be a kid on
Christmas Eve over there. He probably makes them lay their
stockings flat on the floor."

"You're overreacting. He's
the heir apparent. Naturally he wants to pass on the family
homestead in good shape."

"To
whom,
may I ask? The man's a
bachelor, and with that personality, likely to remain
one."

"Don't kid yourself,
madame. I've checked around. He's dated every new — not to mention
recycled — debutante in town, and every one of them thinks she has
the inside track. He must be doing
something
right."

"Really?" The news was not
only surprising to Liz, it was disappointing; she wanted to
believe, somehow, that the curmudgeon despised all women
equally.

She pulled the minivan
onto the graveled drive of the shingled mansion. Victoria,
impressed all over again, said, "Quite a nice little
cottage."

Liz laughed
sardonically.
"I
have a nice little cottage. He has a nice little
Cottage.
Capital
'C'.
"

"At least it's not chopped
up into condos like half the other mansions in town."

Netta, dressed in festive
attire — brown with mauve trim — was scurrying out to them with a
childishly eager look on her face. "The cake at last?" she asked,
thoroughly caught up in the party spirit. She peeked into the van,
oohed and ahed, and said, "Let me run get the trolley for
it."

While they waited for
Netta to come back, Victoria said, "What about this Caroline
business? Doesn't this long-lost-cousin bit sound fishy to you?
Would someone like the Eastman clan really lose a cousin? They seem
like the type that keep track of their stuff."

"Hmm. Well, that's the
official version, anyway," said Liz, but she was thinking,
I shouldn't have worn teal; I clash with the
mouse.
"The puppets!" she cried. "I forgot
the puppets!"

"In the bag with the
candles, dope," said Victoria, swinging the carryall over Liz's
shoulder. "I'll take in the cake with Netta. You clear a path ahead
of us."

"Yes. All right." Liz spun
on her heel and plunged through the massive double-doored entrance
as if she were charging into an unexplored rain forest.

She was all too aware that
she was being absurd, but she considered the birthday party a
watershed event in her career. She'd committed virtually every cent
of the agreed-on cost to an eager new caterer in town, while she
herself worked basically for free. From the hours of her labor to
the flour in the cake, Jack Eastman wasn't paying for any of it.
Liz had accepted that fact and was treating it as an advertising
expense. But it made her want, that much more, to blow the man's
socks off.

She passed the elder
Eastman in the entry hall and they exchanged greetings. Cornelius
was clearly in a relaxed and expansive mood today. He said
genially, "You look
very
nice today, Ms. Coppersmith. And so does
everything you've done. I'm quite impressed. As for Caroline, she's
absolutely thrilled."

"I'm so glad to hear it,"
Liz said.