The Back Door of Midnight (11 page)

ALWAYS CHRISTMAS WAS
a world apart from Aunt Iris’s house, and as soon as I entered the shop, I felt better. Marcy and I got along well, maybe because I liked to work hard. About three o’clock that afternoon, when the temperature and humidity had soared high enough to keep vacationers inside whatever air-cooled place they’d found, the sleigh bells on the door stopped jingling. Marcy perched on a stool behind a counter, paging through wholesale catalogs, circling items. I picked up a spray bottle and attacked smudgy surfaces.

“Audrey mentioned meeting you two nights ago,” Marcy said. “I’d be willing to bet you had an interesting conversation.”

I glanced across the room at her and detected a smile. “Yes. When Uncle Will invited me, he didn’t tell me I’d be living in a house of evil.”

She laughed. “That’s Audrey for you. My friends find her very strange and wonder why I keep her on.”

“Why do you?”

“Loyalty. She worked for my parents and was very good to me when I was growing up.” Marcy turned a page, then looked up. “You and I have something in common. I was adopted. Most people would consider it lucky to be me, adopted by a wealthy family like the Fairfaxes. It would have been, except that my mother later gave birth to a son, one who happened to look like the portraits of every firstborn male Fairfax since the seventeenth century. They nearly worshipped at the crib.”

“That doesn’t sound good, for him or you.”

“It wasn’t for me. Unfortunately, getting into trouble was the one way I could get my parents’ attention. Audrey looked past the stupid things I did. While the other servants enjoyed reporting those things to my parents and making our relationship worse, Audrey always tried to make it better. I guess she figured it was her job to save me and took me on as her mission in life.” Marcy smiled wryly. “I certainly kept her busy.”

“I hope she doesn’t make
me
her next mission. Marcy, are there other people in Wisteria who think Aunt Iris is in league with the devil?”

She thought about the question. “A few, probably, because of her reputation as a psychic. People fear anyone who differs from what is considered normal, and in a small town the idea of normal can be as narrow as the streets.”

“Did anyone fear my mother?”

“Why would they?”

“She was psychic.”

“I knew she lived with Iris and William, but I was away at college when she moved in. She died in a robbery, didn’t she? How old were you?”

“Barely three. I don’t really remember her. When Uncle Will asked me to come, he said he wanted to tell me about my family. He said there were some things that he needed to explain.”

Marcy nodded and turned a page, her eyes on the catalog. The fact that she didn’t study me with the overly concerned expression of a school guidance counselor encouraged me. “I need to ask you a question.”

She waited a moment, her pen holding her place on the page. “No point in backing out now.”

“Aunt Iris can get angry, crazy angry. You heard what the elf man said yesterday. Do you think she could have killed Uncle Will?”

“No.” Marcy circled an item in the catalog, then looked up. “I don’t believe Iris is capable of really harming someone. She’s just not that kind of person, Anna. I would worry about her health, but not that she’s a murderer.”

She flipped the page of the catalog. “Oh, my.” She brought
over the book to show me the picture she had been looking at. “How do you like these?”

“Leprechaun angels?”

“Handsome, aren’t they? I could probably sell a bushel of them and turn a nice profit, but I do have some pride.”

“I didn’t know leprechauns were that big an item.”

“It’s angels. People collect them. I could sell an angelic choir wearing fatigues and riding in Humvees.”

“I like the ones by Cindy Reed.”

“Me too, but I’m afraid that’s the last of them. Cindy took her newest set of Christmas figures to Jeanette’s Crafts, showed them to Jeanette before she showed them to me.”

I walked over to the shelf of wooden angels. I was hoping to buy one for Mom’s Christmas gift.

Marcy returned to her perch. “Loyalty is very important in retail. Sometimes it is the only thing one can rely on. Unfortunately, Cindy doesn’t know what I know. Jeanette’s lease is up next year and she’s planning to retire. Cindy will be out of luck—I’m not buying from her again.”

Having no experience in business, I wasn’t going to argue, but it seemed kind of senseless to me to stop carrying a product that customers bought, just because someone else got first choice.

Marcy laughed. “Your face is an open book. I admit, I have
a healthy streak of pride in me, and I am the kind of person who likes to know whom I can rely on. I built this business out of nothing. My parents, with all their money, didn’t loan me a nickel—they thought I couldn’t pull it off.”

“That must have been hard.”

“Yes, but most things that are satisfying
are
hard. Don’t let others tell you that you can’t have what you want, Anna. Go after it.”

“Most of the time I do.”

As I turned away from the shelf of angels, I glanced out the window. Zack was coming down the street, carrying cardboard mailing tubes and wearing the preppy office clothes I had seen him in before. When he started up the steps to Marcy’s shop, I quickly looked for another piece of glass to polish.

The sleigh bells jingled.

“Hi, Marcy. Hi, Anna.”

“Well, this is a nice surprise,” Marcy said to Zack. “Is everything all right with your father?”

“Yes, I’m delivering some blueprints for him, and I thought I’d stop by.”

“You never stopped by before,” she observed.

“I never realized what great air-conditioning you had,” he answered smoothly. “I may have to come more often.”

“Uh-huh.”

He flashed his stepmother a grin, then walked over to me. “Actually, I came because I have a last-minute invitation. My friend Erika Gill is having a big party tomorrow night, one of those all-out birthday bashes that girls like. Want to go?”

For a moment all I could do was stare at him.
This is just a coincidence,
I told myself. But in my gut I didn’t believe it. What I had dreamed two nights ago was somehow becoming real, just like the fire. He was carrying out the drama queen’s request to date me.

“No. Sorry.”

“Since it’s a catered thing, at a restaurant, I’ll pick you up at—what did you say?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”

Behind his back, Marcy watched, her eyes bright.

“You’re busy?”

“I just can’t do it,” I said.

“Maybe she has a boyfriend, Zack,” Marcy suggested.

“She doesn’t,” he replied quickly, then bit his lip. “I mean, it’s just that we talked about that last night.”

Was that why he had asked the question? Was last night also part of carrying out Erika’s plan?

“I thought you might like meeting new people,” he said.

“Will there be any cute jocks?”

He looked irritated. “Yeah, sure, if that’s what you want.”

What I wanted was to stop falling for guys who acted interested in me, when really . . .

“Maybe another time,” I said, and turned back to a display of glass figures.

When he left, Marcy shook her head in amazement. “Now I have seen everything. Zack never gets turned down. He needs a secretary to keep track of all the girls.”

“Then he’ll get over it.”

“Why did you say no?” Marcy asked. “It’s none of my business, but I can’t help but be curious. I hope it wasn’t because I was here.”

“It wasn’t.” I picked up a skinny Santa and polished his boot.

“Are you playing hard to get?”

“No.”

Marcy studied me, head tilted. “Well, I’m glad someone has finally said no to him. Being motherless and an only child, Zack is used to getting one hundred percent of his father’s attention, which I understand, but it isn’t good for him. And he is so popular with kids his own age, he expects everyone to do whatever he wants. This time, someone didn’t. You’re a different kind of girl, Anna.”

“I guess so.”

Playing hard to get? A guy had to be interested in you before you could play hard to get.

* * *

When I arrived home that evening, Aunt Iris and her gold Chevrolet were gone. I found two large trays of cat food and a scattering of nuggets on the kitchen floor, indicating she had recently fed the herd and let them out again. I fixed dinner and carried it into Uncle Will’s den. Two cats were sleeping on the porch, and I lured them inside with scraps from my plate, trusting them to tell me when Aunt Iris was coming home.

I sat at Uncle Will’s big oak desk, eating a chef’s salad and planning my search. The wall across from the fireplace was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves. Books, magazines, and newspapers were crammed between the shelves and piled on the floor next to an old leather chair, where Uncle Will must have read. The papers on the desk and things on the floor were neatly stacked, perhaps the result of a police search. But it didn’t look as if the stuffed bookshelves had been touched.

I began with the desk, rifling quickly through old bank records, canceled checks, and outdated warrantees. When I opened the last drawer, I stopped. It was filled with photos, pictures of my birth mother and me: me with a tricycle, me with an inner tube, several photos of me with a fishing rod. I had my own copies of the photos that included my mother, but seeing them here, in the place where we had lived together, made the woman in the pictures more real. Even I was struck by the
resemblance between us, especially since I was almost as old as she had been in the photos. If I wore my hair up as she did, we could have passed for twins.

Finding no important documents in the desk, I turned to the wall of shelves. In my study nook at home, I tended to stick things on the shelves closest to where I was sitting. Since Uncle Will’s desk backed up to the wall, making some of the shelves within easy reaching distance, I decide to start three shelves from the bottom, then work progressively above and below that shelf, going from most accessible to least. Removing each book in turn, I flipped through it, hoping to find loose papers. If there was something in this room about my mother or family, something Uncle Will had wanted me to know, I was going to find it.

Most of Uncle Will’s books were about Maryland, the two World Wars, and wildlife, some of the volumes quite old. He must have subscribed to every fishing and outdoorsman magazine in existence. The magazines and newspapers were stuffed between the tops of the books and the next shelf up. I removed one newspaper, skimmed it, and finally found an article on a fishing charter service out of Wisteria, which may have been the reason Uncle Will had saved it. Realizing it would take forever to go through all the newspapers looking for the reason they had been kept, I began to stack them on
the floor with the plan to go through them when I had completed my search of the den.

As I removed book after book, I stopped reading the titles. Then I noticed one with pictures different from battlefields and shorebirds: mug shots. I thumbed back to the title page:
Psychosis and the Criminal Mind.
Well, that was interesting! I glanced at the binding of the next book:
Famous Psychotics.
I pulled it out, turned to its table of contents, and scanned the chapter headings: Criminals, Kings, Scientists, Musicians, Writers, Actors, Mediums. There was a penciled check next to the first and final chapters. Aunt Iris probably considered herself a medium, a channel for thought and feelings from “the other side.” I hoped she wasn’t a criminal. Continuing down the row of books, I found
A History of Psychosis and Healing.
I guess it wasn’t surprising that Uncle Will had an interest in mental illness. There were three more thick books on it, then the topic changed.
You and the Paranormal,
I read. He had about a dozen books on that subject.

I completed two shelves, petted the sleeping cats, telling them to keep up the good work, then moved on to a third. Halfway through it, I pulled out a wad of newspaper that was lighter in color than the others. Figuring it was more recent, I checked the date: May 22, one day before Uncle Will had written his letter inviting me to Wisteria.
I reviewed it carefully but found nothing that appeared related to him or Aunt Iris. Setting it aside, I pulled out the books beneath where it had been crammed. Another wad of newspaper came out with them, this one toast-colored—old. At first I thought that the wad was nothing more than neatly folded paper, then I realized something was wrapped inside it. I knew that the tape on the wrapping had been broken recently, because it had left behind white stripes. I carefully removed the layers of dry paper and found an old notebook with soft covers.

Fingers trembling, guessing that this was something important, I opened the book. My mother’s name was inscribed on the inside cover. I touched the ink, then traced her handwriting, as if I could read the person who wrote it in the slashes and curves of her letters. The phone number listed beneath her name belonged to Uncle Will and Aunt Iris—she had used this book when I was part of her life.

The first sheet was headed “Appointments,” the information beneath it written in neat columns: month, day, time of day, followed by initials. Many of the listings bore the designation “Paid.” It must have been my mother’s client book. I wondered why she had used initials; perhaps some people didn’t want it known that they were seeing a psychic adviser.

The entries ran for at least ten pages, with blank sheets
following. As I flipped through them, a piece of unlined paper slipped out. I unfolded it and read what appeared to be a poem:

The seed cracks open, the green sprout

of a plant emerges—

a green snake.

The snake slides past a rabbit,

glides past a cat.

Winding itself around flowers—

a garden shaped like a heart—

the snake turns to me.

It wears a mask.

Flowers wilt.

I read it three times, trying to understand what my mother was saying, finding it even more cryptic than the poems written by my old boyfriend. Slipping the paper back into the book, I flipped to the back cover. My mother had written down dates on which term papers were due and several names and phone numbers. One was labeled “Chase College,” where she was taking courses. Another said “Pharmacy.” The third belonged to someone named Elliot Gill.
Gill
—Erika’s last name. Were they related? It was, after all, a small town.