In the Blink of an Eye (9 page)

“Anyway, Rupert,” she goes on, back to the matter at hand, “you need more support—not just physically. Emotionally, too. Don't you think it's time you called Katherine?”

For a moment he's motionless, but his eyes have hardened.

And when he moves—toward the stove, turning his back on her—she realizes what she's done. She's said the wrong thing—the most wrong thing you can say to somebody nursing their loved one through a terminal illness. She, of all people, should have known better. She should have sensed that he doesn't want it to be time for that yet. He's not ready to summon their daughter for the bedside deathwatch.

And maybe it isn't time yet. It will be, soon enough.

“I only meant that it would probably be good to have her around the house, Rupert,” Pilar says softly, steepling her fingers in front of her, pressing them against her nose, watching him closely. “And I'd think she'd want to be here with you.”

“Katherine doesn't visit during the summer,” Rupert tells her stiffly. “It's too busy here. She likes to come offseason.”

“I know.” Pilar has never met Katherine, who lives somewhere on Long Island. Nan had once shown her a few snapshots of her as a child, but she doesn't speak often of her daughter.

Still, even if they're not close, Pilar would think Katherine would want to know the seriousness of her mother's situation.

Stay out of it.

The message in her head has come from Raul.

Pilar is startled to hear it. She rarely makes contact with her husband, but when she does, it's usually unexpectedly, like this. It never happens when she's consciously trying, which is typical of their relationship. When he was alive, Raul would often tune her out, absorbed—or pretending to be—in newspapers or ball games.

She doesn't blame him. She can be a nag. She knows it.

Stay out of it?

How like him. She finds herself smiling, but quickly straightens her mouth as Rupert turns toward her again.

“I'll send for Katherine when the time comes,” he says firmly. “But it's not time yet.”

“I know, Rupert. I only thought she could help you, so you won't have to bear this alone. I know I couldn't have done it, when I—when Raul was sick. If I hadn't had Peter and Christina there with me—”

“I'm all right,” Rupert cuts in. He reaches into a cupboard and takes out a mug, slamming it onto the counter.

Pilar has never seen him this way. But then, she's spent little time alone with Rupert. Nan is the one she befriended, the one with whom she had bonded through all the seasons they were neighbors on Summer Street, despite the fact that they didn't have much in common aside from the fence that separated their yards.

“Are you sure you don't want some tea?” Rupert asks, facing the cupboard, his hand still cupping the mug he just banged on the counter.

“No, thank you.” Pilar reaches for the yellow raincoat she'd draped over a kitchen chair earlier. “I really should get home. Tell Nan I'll come again tomorrow night, or Saturday.”

“I will.” Rupert leaves the mug and walks with her through the shadowy dining room and living room toward the front door.

The house is too dark and quiet, Pilar thinks. At home, she has a habit of turning on lamps and televisions and radios in deserted rooms—a routine that began long before she was widowed.

But since losing Raul, she leaves the living-room light on and the TV tuned to
The Tonight Show
when she goes upstairs to bed at night. Raul was a night owl, unlike her, and he always liked to watch Jay Leno. Pilar finds it easier to go to sleep listening to the familiar sounds of the late-night talk show. Sometimes she pretends that Raul is still down there, on his end of the couch, his feet propped on the coffee table.

She realizes, as she glances around the Biddles' living room, that they don't even have a television in here. It surprises her. She's never noticed it before—not that she ever spent much time in their home until Nan got sick. Even when they were living next door to her, Pilar rarely visited them.

But Nan has always been an avid gardener, and whenever Pilar saw her in the yard they'd chat over the fence. Sometimes Pilar would invite Nan for lemonade on the porch, but not often. What with Stump services, giving private readings, Assembly activities, and sitting in on workshops, her summer days are invariably too busy for socializing.

“It was nice of you to come and read to Nan,” Rupert says.

“I'm happy to do it.”

They've arrived in the front hall. He opens the door for her.

Outside, the rain is still coming down hard.

If he offers her a ride again, she'll take it, Pilar thinks as she looks out into the storm.

But he doesn't offer again.

Clearly, her unthinking comment about calling Katherine jarred him out of denial, and he hasn't yet forgiven her. Nor has she forgiven herself. She has nothing but empathy for the man.

“Good night, Rupert.” She puts her hood up and zips her coat, stepping out onto the front step.

“Good night,” he calls over the rain. “Get home safely.”

He closes the door.

She puts up her umbrella and splashes toward the street lamps. Normally, she enjoys an evening stroll through the sleepy village, when lamplight spills from the turn-of-the-century homes and you hear the sound of quiet voices and creaking gliders on porches.

But tonight's chill rain gives her the strange sense that summer is drawing to a close, rather than just beginning.

June is always her favorite month of the year—the start of another busy season at Lily Dale. But this June, nothing is the same. Things haven't been right here since Raul died, and now with Iris gone, and Nan so sick, everything is changing.

Maybe, Pilar muses as she heads down Green Street, she
should
give up on Lily Dale, just as she did on the Iowa hometown where she and Raul had raised their family.

Neither of them was bom in Cedar Bend. Pilar was raised in Cleveland, and Raul in Dayton, where Pilar eventually moved to attend college. They met after she graduated, when she was still trying to figure out what to do with her degree in English literature. Soon after they married, Raul took a management job with a large midwestem utility company. They settled in leafy Cedar Bend on the shore of Lake Erie, a place that felt like home for the next three decades—until Pilar was left alone there.

But Lily Dale is different from Cedar Bend.

Though the people here come and go, the essence of the place remains intact. Nowhere else in the world is there a community of people who understand Pilar's gift—people who not only respect it, but many of whom share it.

Pilar spent her growing-up years concealing her spiritual talents from her Roman Catholic parents and grandparents, who were convinced mediumship was the devil's work. She didn't share her capabilities with Raul, either, until well into their marriage. But Raul, bless him, understood. He encouraged her to read up on the subject of spiritualism, and to nurture her talent. He accompanied her on the four-hour drive up to Lily Dale for her first psychic seminar while their kids—Christina and her brother Peter—were away at summer camp. Later, when Raul's company offered early retirement, he took it. That was when they bought the summer place in Lily Dale and Pilar earnestly began training as a medium. By then, Christina was in college and Peter was in the navy, stationed overseas.

Renewed contentment courses through Pilar as she turns the final corner and spies her place ahead. The two-story blue house, with its mansard roof and wide front porch, is reassuringly lit up inside and out, the proverbial beacon in the storm.

As she quickens her pace, hurrying toward it, Pilar notices that the Shuttleworth place next door is dark. When Paine had asked her earlier where he and his daughter could get a decent meal, she'd suggested Lazzaroni's. There isn't much to choose from within the Lily Dale grounds, and coming from Los Angeles, he probably won't even blink at the pricey menu.

They must be at dinner, Pilar thinks as she passes the dark, obviously empty house.

Suddenly remembering something, she pauses in her tracks despite the pouring rain.

She's been so busy worrying about Nan that she hasn't allowed herself to consider the incident involving Iris's little granddaughter.

But now, as she looks up at the house, she wonders if her hunch is correct.

Dulcie was momentarily convinced that there was somebody in the kitchen.

Paine checked and said nobody was there.

Either the little girl was hearing things . . .

Or somebody was there.

Somebody Paine isn't capable of seeing.

“
P
AINE
L
ANDRY?”

Startled, he glances up from the three torn sugar packets in his hand, about to pour the contents into a steaming cup of coffee.

A young woman stands beside him. Her thick brown hair is cut boyishly short, framing attractive features that are enhanced by only a touch of lip gloss and a soft smudge of liner rimming her big brown eyes. She's wearing trim khaki pants with a slouchy beige fisherman's sweater.

How does she know my name?
On the heels of the question, the only possible answer pops into Paine's head.

“Julia?”

Kristin's friend nods, flashing a brief, tight smile. “I wasn't sure you'd remember me. I know we spoke on the phone the other day, but it's been a long time since . . .”

“Yeah,” he says uncomfortably when she trails off. “It's been a long time.”

Not so long that he shouldn't have recognized the woman who had been a constant presence in those terrible days here at Lily Dale. But there are so many details he doesn't remember—details he must have blocked out. Anything to get past the initial, debilitating stage of grief.

“You must be Dulcie,” Julia says gently, crouching beside his daughter's seat across the small table, and touching her sleeve. “I can't believe how grown up you are. I haven't seen you since you were a little toddler.”

“Are you Mommy's friend?” Dulcie asks, spoon poised above her bowl of ice cream.

“Yes,” Julia says, looking as pleased at the unexpected recollection as Paine is startled.

“Do you remember Julia, Dulcie?” he asks.

“Not really. But Gram used to tell me about her when she visited. She told me about the silly things my mom and Julia used to do when they were little girls. And she said Julia took care of me when Mommy died.”

Paine's gaze collides with Julia's. Caught off guard by the intense sadness in her brown eyes, he looks away.

Kristin rarely spoke of her girlhood friend, and he knows they didn't see each other much in the past two decades. Yet Julia picked up Kristin at the airport on that last visit, and she stood staunchly by Iris in the days after Kristin's disappearance. She was a comfort to Dulcie, too, Paine recalls with sudden clarity.

Memories pop back to him.

Julia sprawled on the floor of Iris's living room with Dulcie, guiding the little girl's fumbling hands through the assembly of a simple jigsaw puzzle . . .

Julia sitting on the front porch cuddling Dulcie on her lap as the house filled with strangers after the funeral . . .

Julia wiping Dulcie's mouth and hands after a drippy chocolate ice cream cone . . .

“Thank you,” he says abrutly.

“Thank
me?”
She appears confused. “For what?”

“For helping me and Iris with Dulcie back then. At the time, I was so distracted that I never quite realized what you were doing for her—and then I never had the chance to talk to you again.”

She looks flustered. “It was . . . it was fine. I didn't mind at all. In fact, I loved spending time with her.”

“What did we do together?” Dulcie asks. “Gram told me that you took me to the beach.”

“I did,” Julia says, mildly surprised, as though she's forgotten all about it until now. “It's not much of a beach here by the lake, though. You kept asking me why there wasn't lots of soft sand to walk in like there is on the beach back home. Here, it's mainly grass. And gravel mixed in with the sand. It hurt your feet.”

“Gravel?”

“Little rocks,” Paine explains to Dulcie.

Simultaneously, Julia says, “Little stones.”

They smile at each other.

Julia tells Dulcie, “We picked up lots of gravel. You wanted to collect it. You liked the smoothest, roundest ones.”

“Now I collect shells.”

“There are probably lots of those on the beach back in California.”

“Haven't you ever been there, Julia?” Dulcie asks.

“No.”

“You should come and visit us sometime,” Dulcie offers with the innocent enthusiasm of a child who has no idea that this last connection to her mother's past has been severed with Iris's death.

After all, Paine notes, there is no reason for Julia to keep in touch with them, really. No reason for Dulcie to see her ever again. Not after this. Not with Iris gone, too.

Paine is struck by an inexplicable pang of loss, yet . . .

Why?
Here is a woman he hasn't thought about in the past three years—a woman he barely noticed on the one tragic occasion they did meet. Yet for some reason, he finds himself wanting to chime in with Dulcie's suggestion that Julia come visit.

“Maybe I will,” Julia says tightly.

“Knock, knock.”

“Who's there?” Julia says it simultaneously with Paine.

“No, Daddy, I was knocking for Julia,” Dulcie says.

He holds up his hands with a grin. “Sorry. Julia, it's all yours.”

“Who's there?” Julia repeats.

“Dewey.”

“Dewey who?”

“Dewey have to go to bed? I'm not even tired!”

Julia's laugh is genuine.