The Mirror (45 page)

He pulled Chris into the stale darkness.

"You're sure you don't know when the lady of the house plans to return?"

"I told you, we didn't even know she was planning to leave. Sarah and I kept showing up on Thursdays to clean and the door was always locked. Then some friends of ours kept seeing Garrett up in Nederland so--"

"Yes, well, fill me in on the layout."

"This is the kitchen. Nothing much here." Chris turned a flashlight on the floor and led the way to the dining room, where the man decided on the chandelier and most of the furniture.

In the hallway he exclaimed over the buffet and had Chris shine light into each drawer as he opened it. From the bottom he lifted out folded tablecloths. A package wrapped in brown paper lay beneath. The man slit the wrapping with a pocketknife and held a green leather-bound book to Chris's light. "Diary" was lettered in gold on its front.

"No." The diary dropped onto the pile of tablecloths. "We'll empty all the drawers and take the buffet."

Chris led him into the living room, shielding the light with a cupped hand, hoping it wouldn't show to anyone in the street. "How do you think you're going to get all this stuff into the truck without being seen?"

"Remarkably easy once you get the hang of it. Ummm ... a signed Tiffany. This is a transient neighborhood with a goodly portion of businesses closed for the night. Ideal, really. Worst problems we have anymore are dogs and joggers. And the health nuts ought to be in bed by now. This cabinet is French. We'll dump the blue-glass collection and take the cabinet."

They went through the rest of the house, the man making his choices quickly. He deemed everything in Shay Garrett's room worthless but paused at the ugly mirror with hands.

"Definitely oriental. Oriental is out now but . . . give me more light here. Garish thing isn't it? The bronze work suggests India, the design is more China? Or someplace in between perhaps or . . . Tibet? No . . ."

"Who'd want it?" Chris was sweating. His heavy glasses kept sliding down his greasy nose. He felt the tingle of imminent danger and it was not altogether unpleasant.

"No one maybe. Mrs. Garrett ever mention where she got it?"

"I never asked."

"Give me the flashlight." The man inspected the back of the mirror. "I wonder . . . there's a tiny etching in the bronze here. Could well be a temple sign of some sort." He laughed. "That or the western equivalent of a curse ... or both. A flake resembling enamel here. The fingers at the top of the frame might possibly have held a jewel at one time."

"I wouldn't cross the street to look at it, let alone buy it."

The man laughed again. "Chris, where is your sense of mystery and romance? And you a poet. Some collector of weird
objets d'art
might take a shine to this. We'll have it."

They hurried down to the back door, where a low whistle brought two more men hurtling over the fence.

With little noise and a minimum of light the four of them set to work stacking chosen articles in the kitchen.

Chris and the gray-haired man had just deposited a rocking chair next to the growing collection when the other two carried in the odd mirror with only its claw-hand base showing beneath Shay Garrett's frothy bedspread.

"The spread is worthless and we have cover pads in the truck."

'The mirror felt funny when we lifted it so we covered it. Seemed like it was tingly or electrified somehow."

"Gentlemen, that object was made long before the age of electricity."

"How do we get all this stuff across the yard and over the fence?" Chris asked.

"We don't. We bring the truck to the door."

"But the fence--"

"Was conveniently altered this afternoon. Now hurry. We can move a few things closer to the door. We no longer need an aisle through all this."

Chris heard an engine outside and when they'd filled the aisle the door opened to the dim interior of a truck. He was sure now they'd be discovered.

They moved furniture and other items up a board ramp, the open doors of the truck serving as wings to shield the operation from passersby.

When all had been loaded and the ramp drawn back, the other two men drove through a gap in the fence, turned into the alley, switched on the truck lights as they entered the street and were gone. The entire process had taken little more than a half-hour.

Shoving Chris outside, the gray-haired man locked the door behind them. "Quickly now, help me with the fence."

For a long section between the corner and the gate to the alley the iron posts were pulled loose from the crumbling concrete base. That section of the fence now lay flat on the ground.

"A repairman worked on this, this afternoon. Poor-quality work, wouldn't you say, Chris? In some respects he resembled me."

Chris helped him lift the fence and set the posts back into their holes. Even in moonlight he could see chips of concrete that'd been pried loose from the base to pull the posts. Several that apparently wouldn't cooperate had been sawed off at the bottom. So had the upper and lower cross rails at each end of the section.

"Didn't anybody notice in broad daylight?"

"I dressed properly, acted as if I belonged and no one even paused to question me." He patted the fence affectionately. "It should stand. Until someone leans on it or tries to open the gate. Let's go."

The man walked Chris to his car and handed over the payment.

"Sure nobody'll connect me with this?" Chris asked.

"They'll question you. But we wore gloves. You should be all right. Just remember to spend your new wealth slowly. Nothing big and flashy. Don't worry. You won't see me again. I never work the same area more than once. The world's full of suckers." He laughed and walked down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets.

Chris drove away still wondering how his nameless benefactor had come to strike up a conversation with him in a bar. Someone had fingered Chris. Who?

What would old successful Rachael look like when she walked into the Gingerbread House and saw what'd happened? Some people had it all their way. They needed a little knocking down. He didn't blame Shay Garrett for running off without a trace.

If he ever had anything of value, he'd install burglar alarms or buy a guard dog.

The only thing that bothered Chris at the moment was that he'd enjoyed the evening so much.

Rachael sipped her coffee, watched couples lean cozily across tables, gesture in whispered conversations.

She missed the Gingerbread House.
Why do I cling?

She'd eaten a late but splendid dinner she hadn't had to cook. Soon she'd go upstairs and sleep in a bed she wouldn't have to make in the morning. Rachael could do anything she wanted.
I can't be too old to change.

The waiter refilled her cup and slipped a tray with the bill under her nose.

Rachael'd given up on the book with the deadline and begun a new one about a pregnant teenager who'd run away from a home in which her parents were on the verge of divorce. Was Shay confused and frightened, needing Rachael and unable to contact her?

Was Shay dead?

Rachael left the elegant but subdued atmosphere of one of the dining rooms of Denver's Brown Palace Hotel, passed through the ornate lobby so rich in history and color, mounted the staircase to her lonely room.

By midmorning the wedding mirror was halfway across New Mexico, still heading south in the dark interior of a truck.

It stood next to the buffet that Thora K. Strock's mother had brought to this country from old Cornwall over a hundred years before.

Brandy McCabe rested on Lottie's bed that afternoon with a book propped on her granddaughter's stomach.

She'd taken the obscene pictures from the walls and moved into this room some time ago.

Brandy'd helped Ansel put up his garden vegetables and cleaned the house from top to bottom while waiting for her granddaughter to make the wedding mirror work its switch in time.

Marek Weir's child moved with an odd rolling motion like a boat floating loose on a gentle wave and the book rose and fell with it. A tweaking sensation in Shay's abdomen. The prickle of taut skin stretching more.

Brandy fought an emotional attachment to the helpless being growing inside Shay Garrett. It had no more connection with her than its father. But she knew that even after her return to 1900 (and she
would
return) she'd always wonder what had become of this child.

Turning a page of the novel, she tried to force her attention back to it. Lottie's books were as lewd as the pictures of naked men that had hung on the walls. Brandy knew she shouldn't be reading them. Another temptation of this evil world she couldn't resist.

But from them she'd discovered what she'd long suspected but hoped wasn't true, people coupled just like animals. And in the books she'd read so far, they spent a great deal of time and energy doing just that. Moreover, they were rarely married to each other.

Although the authors made the process increasingly clear, one aspect confused Brandy completely. In these stories women seemed actually to enjoy the sordid business.

The stairs creaked and Brandy hid the novel under her pillow as Mr. St. John opened the door without knocking. His unpredictability was more and more a worry to her.

He stood now, panting as if he'd run too long a distance, a quivering finger pointing rudely in her direction. "Out the back way and TO THE BARN with you."

"But Mr. St. John, what-"

"Hurry! Lottie's walking up the road. Must of hitchhiked."

Outside, Happy raised the alarm.

Chris Davenport's gray-haired friend overtook the truck containing the wedding mirror as it began to angle east. Except that now the man's hair was a deep chestnut brown.

His car and the truck traveled in convoy as they crossed the border into Texas.

13

Hooligan lowered his head and rammed the partition next to Brandy. She stepped back and her shoe crushed an egg nestled in a hollow of straw.

The goat reared as if to jump the partition to get at her. Hens squawked, fluttering to the far corners of the barn. A cat hissed from the ladder to the loft.

"Hush, all of you," she whispered. Lottie would surely hear all this commotion even up in the house.

Fear tightened above the baby and below Shay's throat. If she were discovered now, Brandy'd flee again before she'd allow them to murder the child.

As much as she'd tried not to, Brandy was growing involved with this tiny being.
After all, this is to be my great-grandchild.

She crossed to the pitchfork leaning against a far wall as voices sounded outside.

Hooligan kicked an upright post supporting the floor of the loft. Dust seeped from cracks above her. Even the gentle goat, Stina Mark, eyed her with suspicion as Brandy took a stance behind the door.

A chill fall draft blew through the cracks in the barn wall by her ear. The pitchfork trembled in her hands.

"You crazy old coot." A woman's voice. "You're lying again." She giggled.

"Am not."

"You expect me to believe you cleaned that house? You've got yourself a girl friend somewhere and I'm going to find her. At your age too."

"Lottie, I told you--"

"Come on, Gramps. I don't care. I just want to meet her. After the way you treated Grandma I can't believe you'd take in another woman but me. Where is she? I'm staying until you introduce us and I promise I won't laugh." Lottie laughed anyway. "Or does she only work days?"

"Don't know where you get such ideas."

"Is she in the barn?"

"No."

The door opened and Brandy was pinned behind it.

"Well. . . if it isn't a girl friend, who cleaned the house? No man your generation would suddenly get so busy at woman's work."

"The social worker sent somebody out to do it."

"You'd sic Happy onto anybody from welfare. I know you. Gramps, you got yourself a girl. And I'm hurt you won't tell me about. . ."

The door pulled away and Brandy found herself facing a young woman whose merry smile faded.

Massive man's boots peeked beneath a long skirt. A shawl like garment --knitted, with only a hole for the neck and much like one Brandy'd once seen on a shepherd--covered most of the rest of her. Lottie's dark hair bushed in frizzed snarls resembling Sarah's, the girl who cleaned for Rachael.

Shock on Lottie's face left her mouth agape. "But . . . you're too young. You're . . ." She shrugged. "Sorry, I thought--"

"Leave me be, you." Brandy lowered the pitchfork to Lottie's breast.

Lottie backed into Ansel. "Oh hey, I mean ... I didn't--"

"Shay Garrett, put that thing
down!"

"Shay Garr . . . oh, Gramps. She's not . . ." Lottie turned a whitened face to Ansel. "Tell me she isn't the one from the Gingerbread House everyone's been searching for. Gramps, she's pregnant."