The Mirror (30 page)

Only the knitting needles clacked in the silence.

Her mother scratched at the pink sleeves of her bed jacket. "You never told me about this," she accused Rachael. "You never told me I was in this place for months, maybe years. Or did I not listen?"

"Don't be ridiculous, dear. How could Rachael know this would hap pen, any more than the rest of us did?"

"She knew. Years from now, she knew and didn't tell me." Brandy Maddon turned her head to the wall. "And all this time wasted."

"If you're going to live to be as old as you say you are, you'll hardly miss it." Sophie laughed uncomfortably and looked at the other patient, who'd stopped knitting to stare at Brandy.

"But Hutch won't. I'm missing what time I have left with him."

Although Rachael would visit the Sanitarium often over the next five years, she'd never think of her mother as being there between visits. She would close her mind to the dark hole of the ivy-shrouded entrance and think of Brandy Maddon sitting easy and slim in the saddle, her hair fluffed by the wind as she rode the valley of the Bar Double M.

Her father razed the old Strock cabin and, mortgaging the ranch, he built a small comfortable cottage on the site. It had electricity and indoor plumbing and it was built for two. His arthritis prevented him from working the ranch alone now and he leased the valley to a neighbor. Hutch moved into the cottage and waited for Brandy.

Rachael was thirteen and a good head taller than her mother when Brandy left the Sanitarium. Brandy spent a few weeks at the Gingerbread House and the constraint between mother and daughter was more marked than ever. They were strangers.

Rachael ached to bridge the gap but Brandy's only interest was in her husband. "All the years of his life I've wasted in that Sanitarium . . ."

So Brandy moved to Nederland. But Rachael stayed in Boulder because, she was told, the cottage was small and besides she had friends in Boulder.

Rachael didn't consider friends a substitute for parents, but she was allowed to spend most of the summer months at the cottage. And many weekends Hutch would drive down for her.

Remy had a job training horses for a movie studio. (Rachael told her friends in school that her brother was a movie star.) Dan had married a girl whose father owned a used-car dealership in Los Angeles.

By the summer of 1939, when Rachael was fifteen, Remy and Elinore had two little boys and Dan had a daughter. The Bar Double M sold to a big outfit for a good price and several companies asked permission to inspect the Brandy Wine with an eye to leasing it. Tungsten from cheaper foreign sources was being diverted to Germany and Japan.

"So we're sitting better than we have for years right now, Bran," Hutch said one evening as the three of them sat in the living room at the cottage.

"I want you to get on the train and go out and see those grandkids of ours before they get any older. Bring back pictures."

"But I can't leave you--"

"Holy Jesus, Bran! I promise I won't die for a month. You watch me like I got one foot in the grave. Nobody ever died of arthritis. You make me so nervous I'm afraid to go to bed at night."

"Well, it would be nice to see the twins again." Brandy'd lost her sanitarium fat, and it seemed to Rachael that she looked years younger than Hutch.

It took a good deal more persuasion but her mother finally boarded the train in Denver. Rachael and her dad drove home in silence.

They turned off on the ranch road to the Bar Double M. One of the things they'd planned to do while Brandy was away was to clear out the remaining Maddon possessions stored in the ranch house. The buildings would stand empty, as the new owners intended to combine the valley with a neighboring ranch to form one giant spread.

Hutch stopped at the top of the lane and they sat looking down at their old home and the valley. Even at this distance the empty house looked sad and betrayed.

"We had a good life here." Her dad cleared the huskiness from his voice and spit it out the window but it was back when he spoke again. "I remember that first day I brought your mother here." He leaned over the steering wheel and chewed on his thumb.

Rachael blinked back tears. "Why does everything have to change?"

"She was sitting beside me as you are now. Only on the seat of a buck-board." The lines on his face deepened under silver-gray hair. "You know, she told me that day we'd have twin boys and a girl?"

"How does she know things ahead of time?"

"She says if she told me how, I'd think she was crazy. I just quit asking her."

"She's not crazy like people say."

"It's like living with a witch." The car started down the lane into the valley. "But I wouldn't have missed her for anything."

Most of the personal items had been removed from the house but some of the furniture remained.

"Dad, can I have this? There's room for it at the Gingerbread House." Rachael pulled out a drawer of Thora K.'s old buffet. The beveled mirrors were clouded with dust.

"Take anything you want. The rest we'll sell if anybody'll buy it." His voice carried hollow across the emptiness of the house. "About the only thing your mother's interested in is me."

"It's funny she didn't want your wedding picture." It still hung on the wall by the front door.

"Take that too if you want."

Rachael decided she would. That way she'd have her parents with her at the Gingerbread House.

Early the next morning they walked along the path behind the cottage to the Brandy Wine and pulled the boards off the entrance. Investigators from a mining company were coming to determine whether or not it would be worth starting up again.

Hutch stood back from the opening, the last board still in his hands, as if he didn't want to go into the dark hole any more than she did.

"Last time I ever saw your uncle was right here. Left him and ten cases of hooch in there." He was really talking to himself. "Eight years ago."

Rachael bent down to wipe a streak of dust from one of her anklets. Why did her father have to dwell so on all the sad happenings of the past?

"When I came back, the place was boarded up and Lon and the hooch were gone. Never saw him again."

"We don't have to go in there, do we?"

But Hutch was smiling to himself. "Jesus, we used to fight dirty."

"Dad, what's that?"

"Hm?" He tilted his head back so he could see under the rolled brim of his cowboy hat. "Oh, that's been there for years. Figured it was some old thing Thora K. stored here and forgot. Better get it out. Just be in the way."

Rachael couldn't bring herself to go inside and help, though she didn't like him lifting things. She knew whenever he overdid he'd be in such pain he couldn't sleep nights. As it was, he moved differently than other people. She'd overheard one of his friends remark that Hutch Maddon walked like he'd got a wagon tongue stuck up his rear. Which wasn't very nice but was a fairly good description of his unnatural stiffness.

Hutch stood a tall object in front of her and removed the blanket and rope that covered it.

"I remember this . . . from somewhere." She was looking at her tall awkward self in a full-length mirror. As usual, Rachael wasn't happy with what she saw. Her shape was like a pear's, all hips and no bosom. Little wonder boys never looked at her twice.

"If you'd seen it once you wouldn't forget it, that's for sure." He touched the molded metal hands of the frame. "Funny. Feels warm. You'd think it'd be cold after sittin' in there."

Rachael caressed a smooth bronze hand. The warmth seemed to be cooling even as she touched it. "Do you suppose it came from Cornwall like the buffet? Maybe I've seen it in Thora K.'s old cabin when I was little."

"Question is, what do we do with it? Might just haul it to the dump."

"But, Dad, it must be ancient. You can't throw it away. Let me have it."

"Rachael, what are you? A young lady or a pack rat?"

"Please?" She looked at the back of the mirror, which was covered with some kind of black wood. "We can take it down to Boulder in the truck with the buffet."

"Your grandma's got a houseful of junk now. Where's she going to put any more?" But the gold-flecked eyes told Rachael she'd have her way.

He tied the blanket back on to keep it from getting scratched. "Although a few scratches couldn't hurt its looks none."

As they rounded the curve by the cave in the hillside, Rachael had the sudden thought that that's where she'd seen the mirror before. But she didn't like to think of caves. So she didn't.

The next day they loaded Thora K.'s buffet onto the truck at the ranch
and when they returned with it to the cottage a county sheriff's car was
parked in front. Mr. Skinner, a deputy, several local men and one of the
mining-company inspectors were gathered around it, smoking.

Her dad leaned out of the truck. "What's going on, Skinner?"

"Hutch, I think we found your brother," the deputy answered solemnly.

8

They buried Lon Maddon and held the inquest before Brandy returned from California. The probable cause of death was determined accidental.

"Nothing she can do about it now," Hutch said. "She'll find out soon enough when she gets home. No sense in spoiling your mother's vacation. Can't help but wonder if somebody didn't push him down that shaft and steal the whiskey."

Brandy bubbled with news of the twins and their families when Rachael and Hutch picked her up at the depot in Denver. They waited until they reached the cottage to tell her of Lon.

"Oh, God, I knew I should have moved it." The blood drained from Brandy's lips. "But I kept putting it off."

"What are you talking about, Mom?" Rachael poured her a cup of coffee.

"You're not the only one who doesn't think about things she doesn't want to, Rachael." She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. "Thora K. and I once stored a large free-standing mirror in the mine to--"

"We found it. And as Thora K. would have said, it was 'some hugly.'" Hutch spooned sugar into his cup. "But your daughter had to have it so we took it down to Sophie's along with a few other things Rachael wanted. That girl's going to grow up to be a junk collector."

Brandy stared at Rachael through the steam of her coffee. "So that's how it gets back there. You."

Her mother's gaze was haunted and so direct that Rachael squirmed. "We'll bring it up here again if you want it. I--"

"No. What will be will be, I guess. I just wish I knew how to get rid of it. Or what would happen to me if I did. Exactly where is it in the Gingerbread House?"

"I wanted it in my room but Grandma made us put it in the attic. She doesn't like it either. She said it was a gift to you from Grandfather McCabe a long time ago. Why did you keep it in the mine?"

"Oh ... to get it out of the way. It's a big thing. Was it covered at all when you found it?"

"There was a blanket tied over it."

"Are you sure? That's odd. Maybe it didn't have anything to do with it. Maybe . . ."

"Anything to do with what?" Hutch asked.

But Brandy would say no more. Her delight over her trip to California seemed to have evaporated.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and May Bell Smith dropped dead of a heart attack at the age of sixty-six. There was no known connection.

"You said December 11," Hutch said of the air strike.

"The only dates I can keep absolutely straight are 1492 and Rachael's birthday," his wife answered.

The Brandy Wine and several of the larger mines in the area were in full production. Nederland and the smaller town of Tungsten just below the dam showed renewed signs of life. No boom this time, but steady employment for the miners still in the area and others that would come. The Wolf Tongue Mill just above town belched forth steam for the war effort and dumped its wastes into Middle Boulder Creek.

Rachael was in her first year at the university in Boulder on the proceeds of the leasing of the Brandy Wine. She'd enrolled in liberal arts with an eye toward a teacher's certificate because her mother said she would become a writer and Rachael was out to prove her wrong for once. Her figure had reapportioned itself more to her satisfaction and she'd begun to date.

In January the abandoned house on what had been the Bar Double M burned to the snowy ground. Rumors of Nazi spies and "Jap" infiltrators sending signal fires made the rounds in Nederland. But Deputy Skinner told Hutch winter winds had whipped up the poorly doused remains of a fire left there by some cowboys who'd camped in the house the night be-On Decoration Day Rachael helped her aging grandmother decorate the family plot in Columbia Cemetery in Boulder and then drove to Nederland in the secondhand Chevy her folks had given her on her eighteenth birthday.

When she reached the cottage her father was out, but her mother, as usual, refused to accompany her to Nederland's cemetery.

"Graveyards remind me of pink granite tombstones," was all she'd say.

Rachael walked across the valley. Decoration Day was often late in Nederland because the cemetery sat on a shaded hillside and would normally be piled high with snow. But this year the thaw had begun early and though she picked up some mud on her penny loafers, she didn't have to walk in snow.