The Mirror (31 page)

Flowers would still get pinched by night frost here, but she carried a trowel and clippers. Snow melt trickled down the gullies beside the road. Drifts hovered yet in the shadows where pines stood thickest.

Thora K.'s grave was bare of snow and Rachael cleared away winter-dried weeds. She rearranged the ring of white rocks that outlined the plot.

Here lies the body

Of Thora Killigrew Strock.

But her spirit is in Cornwall,

As it do belong to be.

Thora K. had talked so often of returning to Cornwall. But death hadn't waited.

Rachael straightened the weathered wooden marker where little Penny Strock slept beside her father, Corbin. Rachael wondered what he had looked like and why Penny's name had not been Penelope.

A sad job, but comforting in a way ... as if these mounds of earth retained an essence of lost loved ones. She left Lon Maddon's grave till last. She didn't like to think of him lying all those years in the dark hole of the Brandy Wine.

Rachael brushed the dirt from her hands. Someone had laid a wreath on old Doc Seaton's grave. Nearby, Mr. and Mrs. Binder slept side by side, hemmed in together by a low concrete wall.

The faint scent of spring's beginnings pushing green through rocky soil . . . the cool dampness that retreating snow left on the air . . . the musty dirt smell clinging to her still . . .

A cloud covered the sun, taking away the warmth, muting the contrast of spring and winter colors.

Rachael shivered, slipped her arms into her sweater sleeves and picked up her trowel and clippers. Shaking off her thoughts of the past, she noticed a solitary figure standing between her and the road.

He had his back to her and wore the dark blue of an officer of the United States Navy.

She felt an unreasonable resentment that he should bring the present and a reminder of that awful war to this quiet place of the past.

As she walked behind him he turned. His liquid brown gaze skimmed over her without recognition. But Rachael stopped short Jerry Garrett had grown into his bones. She could no longer look him eye to eye.

He stood before two graves secluded in a darkened hollow formed by three pines and a bare thorny bush. Snow obliterated all but the small close-set headstones.

Catherine Garrett's stone leaned toward the newer marker of May Bell Smith.

A broken branch of the bush swayed on a silent breeze, trailing an ancient cobweb across Catherine's last resting place.

He seemed to realize Rachael hadn't left and he turned to her again, his look questioning and as cold as the snow on his mother's grave.

"Jerry?" she said a little nervously, still trying to adjust to the transformation of that boy into this broad-shouldered young man. "I'm Rachael Maddon. Remember?"

Rachael blushed with the memory of Brandy's prediction that she'd someday marry him.

"Rachael Maddon," he repeated as if his thoughts were returning from a distant place.

He glanced her over in a fashion more in keeping with the U. S. Navy. "You've changed some, Rachael Maddon." A brief smile.

Rachael felt like an awkward girl again. "Have you been back long?"

Jerry turned to the graves in the hollow. "I'm on my way to San Diego and the war," he said, as if reporting in to his mother.

"Won't you stop by the house when you're through here? Mom and Dad would love to see you too. They live in town now. Dad built a cottage right where you and . . . Catherine used to live."

"There's nothing here," he said with a last look at the hollow. "I might as well go with you now. I didn't really expect there would be anything," he added defensively and followed her to the road.

They walked slowly, pausing often so she'd have time to fill him in on the people he'd known during his year in Nederland, the sale of the ranch, her life in two houses and two towns. "I feel like a yo-yo. But here I've been yacking on like an idiot. You probably don't even remember half these people or the things I've--"

"I remember some of it. I remember finding that dead man in that cave, I can tell you. Had dreams about it for years."

"You found a dead man in a cave near Nederland? That would have been news I'd have heard about. You must have it mixed up with some other place."

He stopped. His hands had been jingling loose change in his pockets.

That stopped too. With his head tilted, Jerry Garrett looked at her in the oddest way.

"What's the matter?" Rachael wondered if anyone noticed her standing in the middle of the road with this tall, good-looking serviceman.

"You really blocked it out, didn't you?" He removed his hat by its bill and smoothed his hair, replacing the hat in the precise manner she'd seen young officers do so often of late.

"I see a lot of uniforms like yours on campus. The navy has a language-training course at C.U. Are you going to take it?"

"Just finished it. I leave for San Diego tomorrow."

"You mean you've been here--what--six weeks? Why didn't you get in touch with us?"

"I don't know, Rachael Maddon. I thought about it. But ... I don't know." He shrugged and started jingling change again. "Who is May Bell Smith?" Jerry looked back up the road toward the cemetery.

"You know, I didn't know until last year? It was supposed to be a secret and Mom didn't tell us till May Bell died. Come home with me and ask Mom, she-"

"I'm asking you." He held her arm gently so she wouldn't continue down the hill. "Why is she buried next to my mother?"

"Because she's your grandmother."

"The bogus Smith Foundation that supported me through boarding school and a year of college?"

"Yes. Would you like to see the school? It's changed but--"

"My grandmother was Christine Pintor, not May Bell . . . May Bell. Was that the fat lady with the orange hair? You said she was a witch and she caught us peeking in her window."

"And you ran away, leaving me to face the music. I've never forgiven you that."

They were standing on the road between Doc Seaton's old cabin and the house that had been the Binders'. The birdbath and the gate were gone. Rachael wanted to be gone too. But he tightened his hold.

"Christine and May Bell were the same person? Why didn't she tell me then? Why all this Smith Foundation business?" The loneliness she remembered in the little boy had stayed to mature in the man. It echoed in his voice, hollowed out his eyes. "Why?"

"Because she was the town prostitute. And she didn't want you to know."

He let go of her arm as if it was hot. "You always did like to drop bombs on people, didn't you?"

They walked in silence down the hill and through town, Jerry studying the toes of his shoes. He paused on the bridge to stare into Middle Boulder Creek.

Rachael dared to slip her arm through his. "Jerry, my Grandfather Maddon was hanged for murder and no one even discusses my grandmother. It's not such a terrible thing."

"It takes a little getting used to, though." But she could feel his body relaxing.

"Stay for dinner and talk with the folks. They've spoken of you often. Wondered how you were doing."

He considered her solemnly over the edge of his shoulder. "Do I have to kiss you for it?"

Rachael laughed. "Oh, so you remember that too, do you?"

Before she could remove the arm she'd slipped through his, Jerry Garrett's arm swung at the elbow and came up behind her. It pressed along her back, tucking her against him, till his hand was on her neck under her hair.

His brief smile returned, with a hint of mischief this time and a rather startling maturity.

Rachael tried to regain her balance and think of some suitably flip remark. But he wrapped himself around her, kissing her not just with his lips but with his whole body. A series of dangerous squirming sensations prickled where she was caught up against his leg.

9

Jerry Garrett disappeared without trace after dinner that night, without even asking Rachael to write. She knew that one of her mother's predictions would prove wrong at least. He had no roots in Colorado. She'd never see him again. Or have any way of knowing if he were killed in the Pacific.

She must forget him. Yet she thought of him every time she saw a navy uniform or crossed the bridge over Middle Boulder Creek.

By the end of that summer Rachael didn't have to cross that particular bridge any longer.

Hutch Maddon had a heart attack in late August and moved into Community Hospital in Boulder. Brandy rented the cottage to a miner's family and moved into the Gingerbread House to be near him.

There were several offers to buy the cabin but Brandy refused them. "Jerry will need it to get away from this mausoleum sometimes."

"Jerry? Jerry Garrett? What's he got to do with it?" Rachael asked.

"Oh . . . he'll show up. One of these years."

When Hutch recovered enough to join them at the Gingerbread House, a weak heart plus his arthritis made him a semi-invalid and he chafed against the added restrictions on his life.

Brandy worried about him constantly.

He worried about the twins, truly separated now, Dan in Africa and Remy in the Pacific.

Rachael worried about the war spreading to the United States and the enemy dropping bombs on the Gingerbread House.

And Sophie worried about the men who came to call on Rachael. They were generally older servicemen with medical discharges or home on leave. Sophie thought they drank too much and wanted only one thing of her granddaughter.

When Rachael took up smoking and came home with alcohol on her breath, Sophie worried they were getting what they wanted.

One night when Rachael was a junior, she returned from the campus library to find the Gingerbread House ablaze with lights and her father on the living-room floor. Brandy knelt beside him holding his hand.

"We've called the doctor," Sophie said. Her head had the permanent nodding quiver that very old people often have and she used a cane to steady her balance. "I'm afraid it's his heart again."

Rachael sank down on the other side of him but when he opened his eyes they saw only her mother. "Bran?"

"I'm here. Don't try to talk."

". . . twins, Bran? This war--"

"They'll be all right, Hutch. They come back alive. I'm sure. I know . . . Hutch?"

But he stared past Brandy with a look of confusion. "That you, Lon?" Then he was just staring without seeing.

Rachael and her grandmother watched with horror as Brandy put the heel of her hand against his chest and gave it a swift hard blow with the other hand. "Oh, dear God, it's been so long since I've seen this done." She socked Hutch's chest again.

"Mom?" Rachael said in a half-stupor. "Mom, he's . . . Dad's dead.

"I know."

"Rachael, what's she doing? For heaven's sake stop her." Sophie waved her cane over them.

But Rachael could only sit on her heels and blink away tears as her mother tilted back her father's head and, with one hand pinching his nose, began blowing into his open mouth in slow, evenly measured breaths.

"Rachael, she's gone mad. Do something."

"Mom, please." She reached over Hutch Maddon's body but Brandy's outstretched arm shoved her back. This was a nightmare beyond any Rachael'd known as a child. Through a buzzing noise in her ears she heard the chime of the doorbell, was aware that her grandmother had left the room.

"Leave him be, Mrs. Maddon. Leave him be, I say." The doctor pulled Brandy to her feet and Rachael's dad stared sightlessly at the chandelier. "Rachael," the doctor said gently, "your mother needs you now."

She had to push on the floor to stand.
My mother needs me now.
Her legs wobbled under her but she managed to walk around her father and catch up Brandy in her arms.
My mother needs me , . . finally.

Rachael steeled herself to make all the funeral arrangements. Brandy came out of her daze only long enough to cling, childlike, to her daughter. "It's all right, Mom. I'll take care of you."

She hoped now they'd finally establish that closer relationship for which she'd yearned so long, but when not clinging, Brandy was as elusive as ever.

The family plots in Nederland were full and they buried Hutch in Columbia Cemetery, leaving a space by John McCabe for Sophie. Rachael ordered the stone and it was later placed on his grave. When Brandy seemed a little more lifelike Rachael asked if she'd like to see it.

"No. It's pink granite and I don't want to see it."

"But how did you know?" And then Rachael remembered that day her mother refused to decorate graves because cemeteries reminded her of pink granite tombstones. Had she seen into the future?

Brandy sighed and shook her head. "Life will be so different now. Hutch was many things. But he was never boring."

Sophie Euler McCabe passed away two days before President Roosevelt did the same. She left the Gingerbread House to Rachael.