Timeless Desire (2 page)

“Oh, yeah, I can tell.” Marie gave her a gentle smile. “Charlie was a pretty great guy, wasn’t he?”

“The best.” Their life had been perfect: They were working at jobs that made them happy, reading and cooking, traveling when they could afford it. They had even been trying to conceive before he became ill. Her hand went to her stomach unconsciously, feeling the emptiness there. So many dreams she’d said good-bye to . . .

Widowhood sucked. There was no other word for it. During the first year, Panna felt like she’d been laid out on a rack and gutted. She had gone through the motions of living but could barely remember any of it. That time stood as a wrenching, painful blur in her head that she prayed would never reemerge with any clarity.

In the last year, however, she had begun to find some degree of normalcy, and she clung to her solitary routine like a nautilus to its shell, ready to withdraw into her nacreous walls at a moment’s notice if the need arose.

However, what gnawed at her most, even more than the coldness in her chest, were that words like “routine,” “solitary,” and “withdraw” had never applied to the old Panna. She and Charlie had always been risk takers, climbing rocks, trekking through Nepal, even skydiving on their honeymoon. But losing Charlie had made her lose her nerve, and she hated how she’d changed.

Panna’s cell phone began to buzz. It was Jerry Sussman, the attorney for the town. She walked away from the desk. “Jerry, hi. What’s up?”

“Sorry to call so late. I just got word from my contact in the state budget office. Nineteen percent reduction in funding.”

“What?”
She hurried into the soaring entry hall and stopped next to one of the curving stairways that stood on either end of the space. “That’s . . . that’s twice what we were thinking for a worst-case scenario.”

“It’s bad.”

“Nineteen percent. There are only six of us here. That means we cut evening hours and at least one position. Damn it.” She kicked the ancient little half-sized door on the storage room under the stairs and the knob rattled. This place was like a home to her, and the people who worked here were like her family—especially now. She didn’t know how she’d have survived without it. “Thanks, Jerry. I appreciate the heads-up.”

“Sorry it wasn’t better news.”

She said good-bye and hung up, shaking with the rush of emotion. This place was a landmark, she thought, gazing at the tiled Greek key design in the floor, a memorial to a time when people revered places like libraries. She swiped at a spot on the intricate wrought-iron banister with the elbow of her sweater.

She wondered if they’d be returning to the time before Andrew Carnegie taught America that libraries were worth investing in, back to a time when people had to pay subscriptions to belong to a library, and only the well-to-do could afford to have access to them.

Oh, John Bridgewater, why can’t you be at the forefront of this battle? We could use a little of your mighty sword. Or, at the very least, why can’t your descendant be around today to astonish us with his amazing generosity?

She stopped. His generosity. According to the town’s history, the viscount’s descendant had written a large check to the library’s building fund back at the turn of the century. He had also donated a bunch of books, most of which had either been lost to old age or sold. But he had also donated some objets d’art—at least, that’s what the agreement had said the one time Panna had looked at it.

One piece, she knew, was a piece of pewter tableware called a nef that sat on the mantelpiece over the library’s hearth, just under the dour portrait of Andrew Carnegie. The nef had been fashioned to resemble a three-masted sailing ship, with a conch shell as the ship’s body and decks that held the salt, pepper, and whatever other spices people in the eighteenth century thought to season their food with. It was extraordinarily gaudy and preternaturally ugly, and it frequently caused young children to laugh out loud just at the sight of it. But what—and where—were the other
objets
?

She’d never seen them. Maybe they’d been sold along with the books. The problem was that Panna had never had any dealing with the Bridgewater stuff, though she remembered Barb, the head librarian before her, making occasional reference to it. She remembered the agreement had been negotiated by Clementina Martindale, first librarian in the place when it opened in 1901. She also remembered there had been a rumor that Clementina had had a torrid affair with Bridgewater’s wealthy descendent, and inasmuch as Panna felt that the moral rectitude of any librarian reflected on her, she’d made it a point to push that rumor out of her head.

Panna combed her brain for anything else she could remember Barb telling her.

Last donated books sold or thrown away in the sixties. The statue repaired when a workman carrying a two-by-four damaged it. Newspaper clippings and other stuff related to the Bridgewater gift stowed safely in storage room.

Stowed in storage room?

Panna took a mental walk through the library, from the Grand Army of the Republic meeting room upstairs, through the director’s office, around the stacks on the main floor and even into the occasionally flooded basement. There was no nook or cranny she hadn’t thoroughly examined during her tenure here. And “stowed” was such an unusual word. Not “stored.” Barb had definitely said “stowed,” which to Panna implied lowness, the sort of place where bending would be required to reach it.

Her eyes lit on the half door to the storage room under the stairs. It was triangular in shape and a little under five feet tall, with an ancient glass knob. She’d never opened the door. Had never even seen it open. In fact, the door had been painted so many times that there wasn’t even a line separating it from the frame anymore.

Panna dug in her pocket and found her ring of keys. There were only three really old keys left. The rest of the locks had been replaced. She tried the first. No luck. The second wouldn’t even go in. The third one, however, fit perfectly. She turned it, and the dead bolt slid open with a satisfying click.

She grabbed the knob and turned, but the door was so tight, it wouldn’t open. She pulled harder, anchoring her feet. Knowing her luck, the door would fly open and she’d be flung across the entry hall. Finally, she put her foot on the frame and jerked. The door came open. Inside, the space was pitch black. Not just dark, but absolute nothingness—full light until the edge of the threshold, then a black plane that might have been a wall had she not known no wall was there. Her hairs stood on end. At the same moment something bumped the door, and she fell a step forward before catching her balance.

“I’m so sorry,” the patron said. “I wasn’t expecting that door to be open.”

Panna could barely spare the man a response. What she had seen in that brief instant was too amazing to contemplate. On the other side of that black void was a room far larger than the space would permit. It had been the altar of a beautiful small chapel with a vaulted ceiling and a carved wood altarpiece bathed in sunlight.

Her heart raced as she tried to make sense of it. How could a chapel occupy a space under a staircase no larger than a powder room? How could a well-lit room be invisible through a pane of blackness?

No explanation came to her. None was possible.

She wondered if the ibuprofen she’d taken earlier had been spiked. She’d never heard of a drug that did this, but
something
had to be making it happen.

Another patron walked by as Panna held the door, and she looked at him as if to say, “Can you believe what you and I are seeing?” But the man only nodded pleasantly and kept walking. It was as if all the rules that applied in the physical world were gone, and she was the only one who could see it.

Panna put her hand into the space again cautiously, watching it disappear through the plane of black, and experienced a rush of adrenaline she hadn’t felt in a long time. She and Charlie used to spelunk. The darker the passageway, the more excited they had gotten. She knew she should be scared, and slam the door and report this to someone, though she had no idea what she’d say. But she also knew there was more than that keeping her from fleeing.

Librarians were born curious. If they weren’t, they didn’t make it in this field. Part of her was freaked out, no question. But another part—a more primitive part—was deeply curious about what was behind the door, what it all meant. Her unconscious mind knew what she was going to do even if her conscious mind hadn’t quite caught up. She could already feel the tingle running up and down her spine.

The hall had emptied, and she reopened the door. The void was blacker than anything she’d seen, blacker than black velvet. Teetering on the edge of a thrilling fear, she thrust her entire arm into it.

Gone from sight. Just like that. Her upper arm looked like the Venus de Milo’s where the demarcation between visible and invisible lay.

She bent and slowly let her head tilt into the void. . . .

The minute her eyes entered, she gasped. The chapel
was
beautiful. To the right of the altar stood a tomb, made entirely of marble, with the prone form of a woman clasping lilies of the valley carved into the lid. Tapestries hung on the wall behind her.

She looked down and nearly jumped. On her feet were a pair of embroidered mules, and the blue silk of her summer sundress had descended into a floor-length wave of cerulean and lace. The discovery so surprised her that she jerked out of the chapel and back into the library’s entry, slamming the door. There, the gown had reverted into the sundress.

For a long moment she stood absolutely still, trying to process what she’d just witnessed. An empty chapel . . . just over the threshold of a long-forgotten storage closet in Carnegie, Pennsylvania.

Something about the scene niggled at her super-revved brain. Then it struck her. The lamps on the wall hadn’t been lamps at all—at least, not as she knew them. They’d been unlit torches. There’d been no electricity. Long gowns and no electricity.

“Hey, Panna.” Henry, one of the children’s librarians, gave her a wave as he strode past.

“Hey.”

She could lock the closet door and throw away the key. It would all be over as easy as that. That would be the responsible thing to do. Not to mention the smart thing.

But Panna had had enough of being smart and responsible since Charlie’s death. She didn’t want to feel smart. She wanted to feel alive.

She slipped back inside the doorframe, pausing for a moment to bop her head between the long-gown world of the chapel and the sundress world of the Carnegie Library. She felt the same heart-fluttering giddiness as she had before leaping out of that plane.

“This is for you, Charlie,” she whispered.

P
ANNA EMERGED IN THE CHAPEL
,
SKIRTS RUSTLING AS SHE MOVED
. The chapel was tiny, with room for only a few dozen people, and it seemed to open into a carpeted hallway off the middle of the nave.

Her nerve endings quivered as she walked. The warm, pleasant air of the evening felt like a dream. Even the dust motes floating lazily in the streaming rays of the setting sun seemed magical.

The burnished wood floors gleamed under her feet, and the thick green velvet upholstery on the pews was marked with a large
B
embroidered in gold thread. No retiring chapel owner here. No devotee of sacrifice, either.

She caught a glimpse of her reflection in a polished silver urn beside the tomb. The dress, a jacquard the color of an afternoon sky, fell in gorgeous, soft ripples, and when she looked closer, she could see the exceedingly low-cut neckline was trimmed in jet beads that converged at the ribbon-laced bodice and formed the center of the dress. She wasn’t exactly sure what was under the dress, but she knew it wasn’t enough, for her breasts felt unbound, and despite the muslin slip peeking beyond the silk as she walked and the hose knotted tightly at her thighs, she could feel the evening air moving over her hips and belly.

Several tall candle holders, the height of a man, were arranged on the floor around the room, but only the candles in one—the one near the tomb—showed any signs of use.

She touched her head to feel if the pencils she always wore in her hair were still there. Her hair was up, but the pencils had been replaced with a French knot and several metal combs. In addition, three loose blonde ringlets trailed past her collarbone to the neckline of her dress. With the deep décolleté and the delicate jet beads, the dress felt just this side of wicked. Panna knew she had the body for it, with full, high breasts and rounded hips, though it was not in her nature to leverage this fact. In fact, her usual work outfit was jeans and a silk blouse. Charlie hadn’t been fooled. He had always made her own up to the full potential of her body when they were in bed. Oh, yes, she thought with a heated stab of longing, that was something he had done
very
well.

Whether ingrained in her nature or not, however, she found herself bowing to the power of her dress and throwing back her shoulders.