In the Blink of an Eye (12 page)

“So you named her Dulcinea.” Something stirs inside Julia. She doesn't want to find this man appealing. He's a stranger. He's a skeptic. He belonged to Kristin—still so obviously belongs to Kristin.

Yet she can't help being drawn to him.

“I never thought it would end up like this, though,” Paine says, a ragged edge in his voice, as he bends his head and runs a distracted hand through the wavy hair above his forehead. “I never thought she would lose her sight, or that we would lose Kristin . . .”

“I know.” Julia takes a deep breath, not wanting to add to his heartache, yet unable to keep it back any longer. “Paine, about Kristin's death . . . is there the slightest chance, in your mind, that it wasn't an accident?”

His head jerks upward. “Why do you ask?”

“I just never believed she'd go out on the water at night.”

After a long pause, he says slowly, “She couldn't swim.”

“I know. Iris says it didn't matter—that she was reckless and she might have been drinking. But she was always so afraid of the water when we were kids. And even when she came back to visit, that last time, I invited her to go sailing on Chautauqua Lake with a few friends of mine. She said no way—that she had never learned to swim. I remember it so clearly—I was teasing her about it. Telling her that I could get her some of those swimmies—you know, those blow-up things that kids wear on their arms . . .”

Paine leans so close to Julia that she can smell the coffee on his breath. “What are you saying, Julia?”

“That the more I think about it, the more positive I am that Kristin would never have willingly gone out on a boat alone at night.”

“Are you saying that somebody was with her? Somebody talked her into going? Or that somebody—”

“I don't know.”

“Oh, hell.” He buries his face in his hands. “I didn't want to go there, Julia. You know? I've been trying, ever since it happened, to get past it. But I can't. Something happened to her when she was here. Something led her to go out on the lake at night.”

“Or someone.”

“Or someone.” Paine exhales heavily. “You were one of the last people to see her alive, Julia. You know more than I do about what she was up to when she was here.”

“But I don't Paine. Not really. She closed herself off to me,” she says reluctantly. “Something changed between the time I picked her up at the airport and the next time I saw her. By then, she was acting strange. Withdrawn.”

Paine narrows his eyes. “Do you think . . . was she on something?”

“
On
something?” Julia echoes. “You mean . . . drugs?”

He sighs. “She had a problem in the past. Years ago. Before Dulcie.”

“I had no idea. Iris never told—”

“Iris never knew. Kristin didn't want her to know, even after it was over. And it was pretty bad, while it lasted. She left me. She went to live with a low-life dealer she had gotten tangled up with. But I couldn't let go of her. I kept trying to help her. Finally, it worked. She came back. She went into rehab.”

Julia nods slowly. “I can see her getting caught up in the drug scene. She always seemed so restless, when we were younger. Like she was looking for an escape.”

“Exactly. And for a long time, I thought it was me that she was trying to escape. But now I don't think so. I think it was something else. Maybe she didn't even understand it herself.”

They fall into an uneasy silence.

The rain has picked up again outside, pattering noisily on the roof as the wind gusts, stirring the branches above.

Again, Julia remembers the presence in the upstairs study the day Iris died. Again, her mind drifts back to what happened to Kristin here on that Halloween night.

She has to tell him about it. Maybe he knows something, too. Something Kristin told him about this house.

She ignores the nagging voice that reminds her that Paine didn't know about Kristin's gift.

She ignores the possibility that she herself might have been mistaken about it—that perhaps Kristin had no psychic ability.

“Paine—” Julia begins.

He cuts her off, his contemplative mood abruptly giving way again to derision. “Wait a second, Julia. Before we get even further off the subject, let me ask you one thing. Because this is really bugging me.”

“What is it?” she asks warily.

“If you really can communicate with the dead, why are you asking
me
what happened to Kristin? Why don't you just ask her what the hell she was doing out on the water that night? Ask her whether it was an accident, damn it.”

She clamps her mouth closed.
He's angry,
she reminds herself.
He's a skeptic.
And he's still grieving.

And so is Julia. For Kristin. For Iris. Doesn't he think that she would do everything in her power to help find out what happened to them?

No. He doesn't think that. Because he doesn't believe she's legitimate.

“I would if I could, Paine,” she manages to say levelly, collecting her whirling thoughts, regaining her composure. “But it doesn't work that way. I can't just tune in a specific spirit like it's . . . like it's a radio station.”

“Well, have you tried making contact with her?”

For someone who doesn't believe, he suddenly sounds more earnest than cynical.

“Have I
tried?
Not necessarily. But I'm open to the energy, Paine. And hers hasn't come through.” She chooses her words carefully, not wanting to come across as too New Agey, alienating him even further.

“So you're saying you can contact other spirits—strangers' spirits. When somebody's paying you. But you can't contact—”

“You know what? I have to go,” she says curtly, standing. “It's getting late.”

He doesn't respond.

Julia carries her cup to the sink, dumps the acrid coffee into the drain, and turns on the tap to rinse it. She is swept by a sudden, vivid memory of Iris standing in this very spot, laughing, chattering above the running water. Her eyes sting with tears. She wishes Paine would vanish and leave her alone with her grief.

Damn him.

Why did he have to ask her about it—about the one thing she's wondered herself, many times, these past three years?

She was telling the truth about not being able to tune in a specific spirit. She's been in this line of work long enough to have confirmed that there are limits to her miraculous ability. That most spirit energy is weak, and that it takes a tremendous force for those who are able to come through.

Yet she's made contact with other people she's lost. How can it be possible that Kristin, so powerful a force in life, hasn't made herself known in death?

There are only two viable explanations.

It's because Kristin isn't able.

Or because Kristin isn't willing.

Neither possibility sits well with Julia.

D
ULCIE'S EYES SNAP
open.

Is it morning?

Snuggled cozily beneath the weight of her quilt, she strains to hear the usual telltale sounds—chirping birds, Daddy's footsteps, water running, traffic passing.

She can hear only rain and wind.

She remembers, then. She isn't in her familiar bed in the Long Beach apartment. She's in Gram's house in Lily Dale, in one of the upstairs bedrooms.

She lies still, searching for the usual clues that will tell her whether it's time to get up.

She yawns, still tired—but that doesn't mean anything. Dulcie loves to sleep late. Back home, Margaret always calls her “sleepyhead.”

She misses Margaret. Daddy says it won't be long before they're back home in California again, with Margaret there to take care of Dulcie. She doesn't want to think about that, though. However much she longs for Margaret and home, being in Lily Dale is an adventure.

And Dulcie feels closer to Gram when she's here. And to Mommy.

Concentrate,
she reminds herself, and goes back to silently, motionlessly searching for clues to the time. There isn't much to go by.

She notes that this room can't be very big—she can feel that the walls are close around her.

A damp, mildewy smell hovers in the air. Daddy said it's a “cottage” smell, and that they can open all the windows when it warms up in a day or two.

The rain patters loudly on the roof overhead.

It was raining when she fell asleep, with Daddy sitting at her side.

Is it still night? Has she only been asleep a little while? Maybe Julia is still downstairs with Daddy.

Dulcie considers climbing out of bed and feeling her way out of her room to find out. But that could be dangerous. She doesn't know this house yet; doesn't know where the walls and doorways are, or how many steps there are from her bed to the stairs. Daddy said for her to call him if she needs to get up to use the bathroom.

She doesn't need to use the bathroom.

That's not what woke her.

But something did. What was it?

Dulcie concentrates.

Gradually, she remembers that she was having a dream. It comes back to her in fragments now—something about being on a beach, picking up shells. Julia was there.

Dulcie smiles faintly. She likes Julia. She feels safe when Julia is nearby.

She feels safe when Daddy is nearby, too.

That's why she asked him to sit with her until she fell asleep. It isn't that she's afraid, exactly—more that she's a little nervous, being in a strange house. The house where her grandmother died.

It's sad, about Gram. Dulcie will miss her. Even though she lived far away, she always let Dulcie know that she cared about her.

Not like Dulcie's other grandparents, Daddy's mother and father. Grandma and Grandpa Landry only live an hour away, but Dulcie and Daddy hardly ever see them, and when they do visit, it isn't much fun. They never hug and kiss anybody, the way Iris did. They act as though they feel sorry for Dulcie, and they talk about her as if she isn't even there—as if she's deaf, rather than—

Dulcie realizes suddenly that she isn't alone in the room.

She can feel weight sloping the mattress near her legs. Oh—so Daddy is still here. It's not morning after all. She must have drifted off to sleep for only a few seconds.

And Julia must be getting tired of waiting down in the kitchen for him.

“You can go downstairs now, Daddy,” Dulcie tells him. “I'll be fine.”

The room is silent.

“Daddy?”

Silence.

But the weight on the mattress is gone. She didn't hear creaking bedsprings or feel the slightest movement, but it's gone.

Dulcie sits up, feeling around at the foot of the bed.

She feels only the quilt, and the extra pillow Daddy said was there in case she needed it.

Dulcie slowly lies back down, listening to the storm outside. She could have sworn Daddy was here with her. She felt him sitting there.

Well, she felt
someone
sitting there.

She doesn't feel it anymore . . . but she did. She definitely did.

Could it have been Julia?

But why wouldn't she have said anything? Would she—
could
she—have snuck out of the room just now without Dulcie hearing her?

Hmm.

Daddy says Dulcie hears everything.

She yawns deeply.

Maybe it was her imagination.

Maybe nobody was here with her.

Maybe somebody was. But who?

Sleepy, she tucks a hand under her pillow, feeling for her book. She likes to keep
Where the Wild Things Are
under her pillow. Her fingers brush against the familiar rectangle, and she is instantiy reassured, thinking of Max and his magical journey.

Another yawn sweeps over her.

She's pretty certain that it's no longer evening. Nor is it morning. It must be the middle of the night.

She might as well go back to sleep. But in the morning, she'll remember to ask Daddy whether he or Julia snuck back in to sit on her bed after she was asleep.

Chapter Six

“
J
ULES?”

Julia cries out, nearly losing her balance on top of the ladder as she catches sight of a figure below.

“Lorraine! You scared me!”

“Sorry. I knocked. Your stereo is so loud I knew you wouldn't hear it. Good thing you never lock your door.”

The stereo
is
loud. There's nothing like blasting an old Rolling Stones album to erase a foul mood. And Julia has been in a foul mood ever since last night's encounter with Paine Landry. It's compounded by the realization this morning that her kitchen ceiling is leaking. Badly. Everywhere.

“What are you doing up there, Jules?”

“One guess, Lorraine.”

Her friend glances at the various buckets, pans, and bowls Julia has set out to catch the drips. “Oh. The ceiling again?”

“It's much worse this time.” The ladder teeters as Julia climbs down. It, like everything she owns—including the house itself—is ancient and rickety. “I've got to do something about the roof before the whole thing collapses.”

“I thought you said you got an estimate last summer and it would cost a fortune to replace it.”

“It
will
cost a fortune.”

“Can you afford it?”

Julia thinks about the savings account she opened last year over at Lakeshore Savings and Loan in Fredonia. She made only that one initial deposit—the money her grandmother left her in her will. It isn't much—and it's all she has, besides the house, which she owns with her mother. But she doesn't have a choice.

“I'll
have
to afford it,” she tells Lorraine.

“I'd float you a loan if I could, but I'm tapped out, as usual,” Lorraine says. More than a decade older than Julia and recently divorced from Bruce, her deadbeat ex-husband, she struggles to pay college tuition for her two daughters.

Julia notices that Lorraine's short, curly brown hair is damp despite the umbrella in her hand, and her fine-featured face is flushed as if from exertion, though it's a mere two-minute walk from her house to Julia's.

While Julia is clad in jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt Lorraine has on a lightweight, sleeveless cotton romper—in fact it's one she borrowed from Julia last summer. They're the same size, and Lorraine is forever raiding Julia's closet and forgetting to return things.

“Has it warmed up outside?” Julia glances at the gray scene through the window as she folds the stepladder and leans it against the worn laminate countertop. The world beyond the glass looks drippy and dreary.

“It's disgusting. Warm and humid. The rain is supposed to stop any minute now, and the sun is supposedly going to shine, but don't get your hopes up. Hey, by the way, I heard you left Lazzaroni's with Kristin's boyfriend and daughter last night.”

“You're kidding.” Julia lowers the volume on the stereo. “The news is out already? Who told you that?”

“Myra said Ted saw you there.”

That figures. Myra Nixon's husband Ted is even more of a busybody than his wife is.

“I went back to Iris's with Paine to show him a few things he might not know about the house,” Julia acknowledges, even as she realizes that she never did get around to showing Paine where to find the basement steps, or how to open the closet door in the master bedroom that sticks when it's humid.

Well, he'll have to figure things out for himself.

“How's the little girl doing, now that she's lost her grandmother too?” Lorraine asks sympathetically.

“She's hanging in there.” Julia feels a pang for Dulcie. She promised the child that she'd come back to visit. Eventually, she'll have to. It will mean putting up with Paine again, but she can't break her promise. Not when Dulcie looked so hopeful.

“How about the boyfriend?” Lorraine pulls out one of the mismatched chairs at the small, scarred wooden table and plops down.

“Paine is still bitter about what happened to Kristin,” Julia says, moving a half-full bucket a few inches across the worn linoleum floor, to better position it beneath a steady drip overhead. “I can't help feeling sorry for him. He's been through a lot. So has Dulcie.”

“Dulcie is the little girl? Now there's an unusual name.”

Julia finds herself telling Lorraine about Dulcinea in
Man of La Mancha.
And about Kristin not wanting to get married. And about Paine being a skeptic.

“I can respect a difference of opinion, but he's very irritating.” Julia paces, too edgy to sit at the table with Lorraine. “He's so irritating that I keep thinking I should stay as far away from him as possible. But . . .”

She falls silent, picturing Dulcie's face.

“But you won't stay away,” Lorraine says, watching her.

Julia smiles. “Is that a prediction?” Lorraine, of course, is a medium. One of the best in Lily Dale.

“It's a commonsense observation. You feel like they need you, don't you?”

“I feel like Dulcie needs me. Paine could do without me. Hell, he obviously could do without Lily Dale and everyone in it.”

“Kristin's feelings about this place must have rubbed off on him, then?”

“Maybe. The thing is . . .” Julia shakes her head, pondering. “I don't know exactly what Kristin felt about Lily Dale. All I know is that once she left, she never seemed to look back. I almost get the impression that she spent her whole life trying to stay away from here.”

“Why?”

Julia opens her mouth to tell Lorraine about the Halloween experience in the Biddle house. Before she can speak, the phone rings.

She sighs. Now that the season is almost under way, it's probably somebody wanting to schedule an appointment for a reading. Considering the pricey home-improvement project she's facing, she should be aggressively drumming up as much business as possible, but suddenly, she's not in the mood to work.

As Julia walks toward the phone on the wall beside the back door, Lorraine pushes her chair back and stands.

“Stay,” Julia tells her, reaching for the receiver. “I'll make us some coffee.”

She can use a decent cup after that awful brew Paine served her last night.

“No, that's okay. I just stopped by to find out what happened last night. I've got to get home. Mrs. Hanover is coming for a reading in fifteen minutes.”

Mrs. Hanover, a wealthy widow from Buffalo, is one of Lorraine's weekly clients. Julia has her share of regulars, too. But luckily, she hasn't scheduled any appointments today. She's free to spend the next few hours dealing with the soggy kitchen and her own thoughts about the Shuttleworths, Paine, and Dulcie. Tonight, of course, she has that date with Andy. They're going to see the new Julia Roberts romantic comedy that's playing over in Fredonia.

“I'll talk to you later,” she tells Lorraine, who waves on her way out as Julia lifts the receiver with a businesslike “Julia Garrity speaking.”

“Julia. How are you?”

Terrific. It's the last person in the world she wants to talk to when she's in this kind of mood. If only she had let the machine get the call. Too late now. She's trapped.

“Hi, Mom. I'm great, thanks.”

She doesn't want to ask in return, but she knows it's expected—and knows her mother will tell her regardless. So she takes a deep breath, sinks into a wobbly chair at the table, and reluctantly vollies the question back. “How are you?”

Naturally, Deborah Garrity is anything but fine. She launches into a detailed chronicle of the past few days. Julia barely listens, murmuring “mmm-hmm” or “oh, no” often enough to hold up her end of the conversation.

She marvels, as always, that her mother doesn't seem to notice that she's doing all of the talking. But then, that's how Deborah likes it.

Julia is swept by a wave of longing for her grandmother, the only other human on the face of the earth who understood how it is with Mom and who willingly, if helplessly, shared the burden of listening to her. Now Julia must tolerate her mother single-handedly. Thank goodness it's a long-distance relationship now—much easier than when Mom and Julia were sharing a roof, and Mom was forever cornering Julia with her run-on commentary and complaints.

It only became unbearable after Grandma passed away, leaving Julia alone with Mom. Before that, Julia and Grandma used to exchange secret glances behind Deborah's back, bound by mutual exasperation tempered with affection for the complicated, self-absorbed woman who had so little in common with either of them.

Granted, as a working medium, Deborah does share her mother's and her daughter's occupation. But Julia is convinced that she doesn't share their gift. Whatever slight psychic intuition Deborah might have inherited from Grandma at birth has long since given way to a shrewdly efficient ability to provide clients with surprisingly accurate readings based on nothing more than expert guesswork and luck.

Yes, her mother is, in all likelihood, one of the frauds Paine Landry considers universal and so despises—a fake who, in her shady proficiency, has contributed toward diminishing the profession's credibility.

Julia has never confronted her mother with her suspicions. Of course, Deborah would only deny it. Or maybe, with her characteristic narcissism, she's convinced herself that she's done nothing wrong. After all, she had quite a following in Lily Dale, and does now in Florida. Her clients seem satisfied.

A knock on the door allows Julia to cut the phone call short, but it takes three attempts before she successfully interrupts her mother. She manages to hang up with a hasty, insincere promise to call back later.

As she hurries through the small living room to the door, she wonders, fleetingly, if the visitor could possibly be Paine. The ludicrous thought is promptly banished, even before she sees the two strangers standing on her porch. Both middle-aged women are clutching the familiar pamphlet-sized Lily Dale visitor's guides and both are wearing pastel sun visors, shorts sets, and anxious, expectant expressions.

“We saw your sign out front,” one of them says. “We've never been here before and we were wondering if you could do readings for us.”

Julia hesitates.

Normally, she takes walk-in appointments if she's not busy. And she does have to worry about replacing the roof and kitchen ceiling. She can be nearly a hundred dollars richer an hour from now if she agrees to read these women.

This morning, though, she'd rather be alone with her thoughts. About Paine and Dulcie. And Iris. And Kristin.

Or would she?

You're not going to talk me into going sailing, Julia. I never did learn how to swim.

Bulldozing the disturbing memory from her mind, she holds the door open for her visitors with a decisive “Come on in.”

“
O
KAY,
D
ULC, ONE
more step and you'll be down,” Paine says, guiding his daughter's hand along the polished wooden railing. Her foot, clad in a white sneaker, feels its way to the edge of the stair tread and over the edge.

“Great! You made it,” he says, behind her, his hands on her shoulders.

“Can you go back up and check one more time for my book, Daddy?”

“Let's go into the kitchen and get some breakfast first,” he suggests. He needs to get the phone and call his voice mail back home, just in case his agent has left a message about one of the auditions he had before he left.

“But I need my book.”

“We'll look for it again later.” He's already checked everywhere it can possibly be—under the bed, in the crevices between the mattress and the wall, among the sheets and blankets. She insists that she put
Where the Wild Things Are
under her pillow last night as always when he tucked her in, but he's certain she must have forgotten. Dulcie is certainly a creature of habit, but she was exhausted, and distracted by Julia's presence, and in a strange house.

“Don't worry, Dulc, it'll turn up. Let's go eat. We bought Lucky Charms yesterday, remember?”

“But there's no sugar to put on them.”

“Lucky Charms are sweet enough without sugar.” Paine wonders how he's ever going to undo all the bad habits Dulcie's picked up from him over the years. Luckily, dumping piles of sugar on presweetened cereal is about the worst of his habits.

Kristin had more than her share, though. From not wearing a seat belt to . . . well, to the drugs. There's no telling what kind of influence she'd have been on Dulcie, had she lived.

“Daddy?”

“Hmmm?” Paine is steering her toward the kitchen. After breakfast, they'll head to the nearest hardware store for a shower head. Splashing warm water on his face at the bathroom sink just now didn't do the trick. He won't feel fully awake until he's immersed himself under a hot spray and scrubbed himself clean. He'll shave, too, he decides, rubbing the itchy stubble on his cheeks.

“Were you in my room last night, Daddy?”

“I sure was. Remember? I promised I wouldn't leave till you fell asleep, and I didn't” He makes a mental note to pick up some wire mesh to repair the screens, too. The last thing he needs is an indoor mosquito or fly infestation.

“No, not when I went to bed,” Dulcie says. “Were you in there later?”

“Yup. I tucked you in before I went to bed. You were sound asleep.”

“Oh.” Dulcie's tone is thoughtful.

Coming into the kitchen, he half expects to see her missing book sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. But all that's there is a circular milky brown stain where his and Julia's coffee cups sat. He was too exhausted to sponge it away before going up to bed.

“Okay, here we are.” He pulls out a chair for Dulcie. It's the one Julia vacated last night, when she left before he had a chance to ask her any more three-year-old nagging questions.

As though she's read his mind, Dulcie asks, “When will Julia come back? Did you invite her over for lunch?”