Beloved (56 page)

This is a hologram,
Jane thought as she stared at the shimmering, wavering figure before her.
This is a trick. Someone with a vicious sense of humor and lots of money is t
r
ying to drive me mad.
But was there anyone else who knew about Judith in such detail? She tried to think it through but couldn
'
t. Hologram or not, the vision was utterly spellbinding.

Jane waited for a signal, for something
—
a
nything
—
t
o happen. But no sooner had the apparition reached a state of complete clarity than it began to fade, becoming a hazy column again, and finally disappearing altogether.

"
Judith?
"
Jane whispered, feeling absurdly self-conscious. But Judith was gone. The room warmed back to room temperature. Jane tried to capture the image in her memory. What was the expression on the apparition
'
s face? Tragic? Pleading? Threatening?

None of them,
Jane decided. If anything, it was
...
composed. Resolute. As though Judith had made a decision of some kind.

Jane looked down at her own body: it was shaking uncontrollably. She turned away from the rocking chair, then jumped back with a violent start: Aunt Sylvia
'
s roving cat Wicky was curled up on Jane
'
s pillows, oblivious to the whole drama. Jane remembered Buster as he cowered at the threshold and stared at the rocker on the night of Jerry
'
s accident. She thought of tonight, when he ran whimpering from the graveyard area.

There are only two possibilities,
she decided, pulling herself under control and gingerly approaching the big gray cat.
Either Judith was never here, or Wicky is so used to her that he considers her one of the family.

She eased Wicky off the bed and crawled into it, too overwhelmed to undress. Wicky jumped back on the bed immediately and, to Jane
'
s amazement, curled up with his chin on her thigh. The last sound she heard as she fell off the edge into oblivion was the old cat
'
s relaxed and rumbling purr.

****

When the call came from Phillip early the next morning, Jane was just back from putting her mother and her Volvo on the six-thirty boat.

Phillip apologized for calling so early and said,
"
Is Cissy with you, by any chance? I expected her last night but she never showed. I
'
ve just talked with her brother; he said the last he saw, she was packing a suitcase. The bag is by their front door, but there
'
s no sign of her.
"

"
Good lord. No, I haven
'
t
—
wait, there
'
s someone at my back door. Hold on; maybe it
'
s her,
"
Jane said illogically.

It was Bing and he was anxious.
"
Is she here?
"

She shook her head and motioned him back to the phone with her.
"
Phillip? We
'
ll meet you at your house; we
'
ll go the back way.
"

She hung up and they went out together, with Jane trying hard not to show the fear she felt. If Cissy had chosen to take the shortcut and go the back way, she
'
d have to go past the graveyard.
"
I don
'
t understand why she didn
'
t take the Jeep,
"
Jane said, almost angrily.

Bing
'
s voice was hollow with apprehension.
"
I wish I knew.
"

They tramped through the tall grass past the small graveyard, which looked quaintly desolate in the morning fog. Jane scanned the leaning stones, looking for bright clothing, appalled to realize what it was she was looking for. From where they walked, Jane could see the rugosa rose on Judith
'
s grave quite well. It was fully leafed out; there would be flowers soon.

They walked farther along and heard themselves hailed. Through an opening in an evergreen windbreak they saw Phillip standing in the gray mist, waving to them. Phillip yelled,
"
Anything?
"
and Bing answered,
"
Nothing!
"

But Jane had been scanning the grasses, looking for bright colors. Her heart plummeted when she saw a patch of floral on a background of white at the base of the footbridge.
"
Bing,
"
she said, gripping his arm,
"Something ..
.
"

They both broke into a run for the bridge. When they found her, Jane knew at once that there was nothing to be done. Cissy
'
s face, always pale, was a ghastly gray. While they stood there for one paralyzed second, absorbing the blow, another face, another grayness, flashed through Jane
'
s consciousness and disappeared.

"
Oh God. Oh my God. Oh no.
"
Bing fell to his knees in the wet grass and lifted his sister to his breast.
"
Call an ambulance,
"
he said without turning around. He brushed back the wet hair from Cissy
'
s face and repeated,
"
Call an ambulance.
"

It was obvious what had happened to her. The handrail had given way and she
'
d fallen off the footbridge and hit
her head on one of the rocks in
the gully. She may have drowned: her face was lying on its cheek in three inches of water.

Jane turned to run back to the house just as Phillip arrived breathless at the scene. The look on his face would stay with her forever; it was as if someone had ripped away the cold mask of indifference, leaving only raw horror and disbelief. Phillip, too, dropped to his knees in the gully, heedless of the standing water. Jane looked at the two men bending over Cissy
'
s lifeless form and thought,
She
'
s dead. Can
'
t they tell? She
'
s dead.
But she ran like the wind anyway, because that
'
s what they wanted.

She had dialed 911 and was giving a brief description of the accident when she saw an ambulance turn off the road into the foggy lane alongside the house.
"
Wait,
"
she said, confused,
"
it
'
s here already.
"

The dispatcher said,
"
That one
'
s for someone else. Stand outside the house if you can, and wave the ambulance in when it arrives. They
'
re going to need help with directions.
"

Jane was absolutely traumatized. There was an emergency at Mac
'
s, a death behind her house, and in the meantime she was expected to stand in front and direct traffic. She ran back through thickening fog almost to the footbridge before she could see them all. The two men were still bent over Cissy.
Mouth-to-mouth,
she thought. Her spirits soared. They must have seen something, some flicker of life that she
'
d missed. She turned and ran back toward Bing
'
s house but stopped dead in the middle of the lane that led to Mac
'
s place.

What about
them
? she thought wildly. What had happened to which generation under Mac McKenzie
'
s roof? The sound of a siren cut short her speculation and sent her bolting for the road to intercept Cissy
'
s ambulance. She waved it into the lane that ran between Bing
'
s house and hers and ran after it, breathless with panic, her mind no more than a blur of disjointed thoughts.

By the time she caught up to the vehicle, which had pulled off the lane as far as it dared, Phillip was leading the ambulance team to the footbridge. Jane was tearing after them when she heard sirens again, whirled around, and saw the first ambulance racing away from Mac
'
s place. It was impossible to tell who was inside. She prayed that it not be Mac, or Uncle Easy, or Jerry; but she knew that that prayer would go unanswered.

****

A short time later the medics stopped working on Cissy. Her body was wheeled into the ambulance and Bing, utterly in shock, climbed in after it. Phillip went home to get his car to drive to the hospital and Jane was left in a daze, standing at the footbridge. She wanted to go to the hospital, too, but not with Phillip or anyone else. She began to stumble back to Lilac Cottage, then on impulse detoured into the graveyard.

She went up to Judith
'
s grave and stood there, her heart immeasurably heavy, her mind and spirit completely exhausted from the past twelve hours
'
events.

"
Is this your work, Judith Brightman?
"
she asked in a low and angry voice.
"
Does it give you pleasure to punish the innocent?
"

She kicked at the gravestone, furious that she could not rid herself, or the island, of the spirit that hounded them all. It was an unthinking thing to do; Jane let out a cry of sharp, awful pain.

Afterward she decided that it was the pain itself that had triggered the vision. It was the same vision that had flashed through her consciousness when she first saw Cissy in the gully, only this time it lingered, more brutally explicit: She saw, in perfect detail, a woman in a deep blue gown being dragged over the side of
a small workboat by two strong-
armed scallopers. The waterlogged gown made her heavy; Jane could hear the grunts of the fishermen as they strained to bring her body aboard.

"
Oh, no, no, no,
"
Jane said in a low wail.
"
Not that. Not that.
"

She fell to her knees beside the grave, bitterly disillusioned.
All that love
..
.
all that fierce passion
..
.
and that
'
s where it led her. Did she really believe she could be reunited with Ben that way?
Jane remembered the calm and resolute look on the face of the apparition in her bedroom the night before. It was a strange kind of courage that had allowed Judith Brightman to walk into the sea; but it was courage, nonetheless.

So this is what they meant in 1852 by
"
fits
"
: death by suicide
—
death, obviously, by reason of insanity.

That fierce will, so misdirected then
—
was it being misdirected once more? Jane rose quickly to her feet and sprinted home, in fear for everyone else
'
s life now. She dialed Mac
'
s number. Jerry answered.
It must be Uncle Easy, then,
she concluded. It couldn
'
t be Mac; Jane believed completely that Mac himself was invincible.

"
Uncle Easy had a
stroke,
"
the boy said excitedly, obviously unaware of what that meant.
"
It was all the stimulation from last night, Dad thinks.
I
think it was blowing out all those candles. They
'
re at the hospital now.
"

Jane offered to take the boy with her, and before long they were joining his haggard and disheveled father in the waiting room. Mac was sitting in an armchair with his head in his hands when they walked in. He looked up and started; Jane flushed, remembering his impassioned embrace from the night before. She
'
d hardly allowed herself to think of it at all. She
'
d hardly had
time
to think of it at all.

He stood up when she walked in the room, which seemed endearingly old-fashioned of him. It seemed incredible to her that part of her could actually be charmed by part of him at a time like this.
I
'
m in love with him,
she thought, amazed that she was picking now of all times to admit it.

"
How is he?
"
she asked, flushing more deeply than before.