Time Windows

Title Page

Table of Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Ever After

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

Happily ...

Copyright © 1991 by Kathryn Reiss

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at
www.harcourt.com/contact
or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

www.HarcourtBooks.com

First Harcourt Paperbacks edition 2000

Excerpt from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in
Collected Poems 1909–1962
, copyright 1936 by Harcourt, Inc., copyright © 1964, 1963, by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Reiss, Kathryn.
Time windows/Kathryn Reiss.
p. cm.

Summary: Thirteen-year-old Miranda moves with her family to a small Massachusetts town and a new house in which a mysterious dollhouse allows her to see into the past, where she discovers her new home exerts an evil influence on the women of each generation of inhabitants—including Miranda's mother.

[1. Dollhouses—Fiction. 2. Space and time—Fiction. 3. Moving, Household—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.R2776Ti 1991
[Fic]—dc20 90-22018
ISBN 978-0-15-288205-1
ISBN 978-0-15-202399-7 pb

Printed in the United States of America

DOM I K M O P N L J H

For
DOROTHY MOLNAR
, my mother,
EDMUND REISS
, my father,
and
TOM STRYCHACZ
, my husband

Three who have long sustained me
with support, encouragement and love

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions.

—
T.S.Eliot
From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Ever after, on muggy, magnolia-scented days, Miranda would stop whatever she was doing and stand silent for a minute or two. She was trying to remember.

Something special had happened once. Something wonderful and amazing. Something terrifying, too. Something absolutely impossible. But when she cast her mind back over all the events in her life up till now, she found nothing to account for this sharp certainty. Nothing was special in the way she knew
this
was.

The mystery tantalized her. When memory tickled, she'd stop her bike and stand in the road, tasting the hot summer air. And in her bedroom she'd stop playing her flute, staring instead at the old dollhouse in the corner by the windows. Strangest of all were the slips in conversation when she was with Dan. They'd be doing homework together, or walking to the bus stop, and she'd say: "Remember when—?" and then stop, with no idea at all what she had meant to say.

Threads of memory, like dreams, tried to weave themselves into a story. But—as with dreams—the harder she thought, face bent in a frown of concentration, the strands fluttered like spider gossamer, broke, and were gone.

Miranda's parents were singing Sinatra's old song "New York, New York" in the corniest way, trying to harmonize. Miranda tugged on her seat belt and twisted around to see out the rear window. The moving truck, which had been following their car steadily for the last hour, was now out of sight behind a curve in the highway. "Slow down! We've lost them!" she interrupted.

Her father halted in mid-yodel. "Don't worry. They know the way."

Miranda watched until the big truck lumbered into sight again, then leaned forward between the two front seats. "It's okay now."

Her parents launched into the last verse, raising their voices and grinning at each other. Miranda started laughing; they sounded so awful.

"Come on, Mandy," protested her mother when they'd finished. "You're supposed to be such a lover of music!"

"Well, that's just it, Mither. I love music so much, I can't bear to listen anymore!" she kidded. Her parents were always doing this in the car—singing their hearts out without a care for staying in tune or knowing the right words. Miranda would make snide remarks, but usually she couldn't help humming along.

"Okay, then how about if you sing us something?" said her father. "In your perfect pitch. That'll give us a chance to rest up for the grand finale."

"To be sung as we drive into our new driveway," added her mother.

"Okay," agreed Miranda. '"Home on the Range'?"

"Massachusetts doesn't have ranges," said her father. "How about something nice and sentimental, like 'Home Sweet Home'?"

"I don't know the words."

Both her parents screeched into song, her mother thumping the steering wheel to keep time:

 

"
Be it e-ver so hum-ble,
There's no-o place like home—
"

 

Miranda clapped her hands over her ears and pressed her face against the side window. But she was smiling.

 

The move from New York City to Garnet, Massachusetts, had not been Miranda's idea. She sulked when her parents first told her they would leave as soon as school was out for the summer. Miranda's mother, Helen Browne, was a doctor, and she had decided to open a private practice rather than stay on at the large New York hospital. "This is my chance," she told Miranda. "Garnet needs a new doctor, and I've wanted out of here for years." And Miranda's father, Philip Browne, who had taught history at the city college since long before Miranda was born, said the move would be a good change for him, too. "I'm just plain tired of teaching," he said.

"But, Dad!" Miranda protested. "Who's going to support us? You can't quit!"

"I quit smoking after twenty years. I can quit teaching after twenty years, too! Anyway, Mither's been earning a lot more than I have for a long time. I'll just take a year off and think about what I want to do next."

Helen laughed. "I'll try to support you in the style to which you've become accustomed, Miranda."

Philip glanced around their tiny, crowded apartment. "You'll be doing better than that without even trying. Just getting out of the city is going to make a big difference to me."

So it was settled. For Miranda, the worst part of moving was leaving her best friend, Nicole. But she stopped feeling sad almost as soon as their car left the New York City limits. Thirteen and a half years in New York City—Miranda's whole life—had left her with a keen appreciation for wide open spaces and fresh air. And both of these, Miranda could see as they left the city behind, would not be hard to find in Garnet. She wound down the window and gulped in the fragrant rush of wind.

Fresh air had as much to do with her parents' decision to move as her mother's new practice did, Miranda knew. Her father had been sick for the past two years—short of breath, overweight, with high blood pressure. He had dizzy spells and coughing fits that seemed to shake the walls of their apartment. But even when his doctor told him what Helen had said for years, that he'd die before he turned fifty if he didn't give up smoking and lose sixty pounds, Philip didn't listen. It wasn't until the day he keeled over while teaching his American History class at the college that he agreed they might be right. He smashed his head on a desk when he fell, and he had to have eighteen stitches and stay in bed for a week.

The rest gave him plenty of time to think. And when he got up again, he had a new determination.

"You two are the most important things in my life," he told Helen and Miranda. "I've been stupid. Things are going to change around here."

As always, he was a man of his word. He gave up smoking and joined a weight-loss program at the hospital where Helen worked. As Philip began to emerge from ill health a new man, his complaints about his work increased. "This teaching," he grumbled, "is a rat race. Packs of students every term—and are they listening? Does anything ever sink in? The frustration is what drove me to smoke and overeat in the first place, I'm telling you."

"Then get out, Phil," said Helen.

And so here they all were, getting out.

 

The road into Garnet wound past cornfields, an old cemetery, whitewashed barns and farmhouses, and so many trees that Miranda felt they were driving into a forest. The town itself was small and full of oldfashioned brick buildings, frame houses, and more trees. Outside the town the road narrowed and became a lane, and after about a mile Helen turned the car onto a side road that was paved in brick and wound up a hill. This was their new street, she told Miranda. There were only four houses on it—two at the bottom of the hill and two at the top. Theirs was at the top, across the street from what seemed to be a mansion. Both houses were surrounded by pine woods.

Philip awoke with a grunt as the car stopped—he had been dozing since they left the highway.

"Well!" said Helen. "
Be it e-ver so hum-ble
—"

Miranda stared at the house in amazement. It was nothing like what she had imagined when her parents first described their new home. They had driven to Garnet one day while she was in school, spent a few hours with a real estate agent, and returned to the city jubilant at the great deal they'd stumbled upon. Philip had said the house was big, but he hadn't mentioned how it seemed to brood, looming among tangled weeds.

In the tradition of New England architecture, the house was of white clapboard, or of what had once been white clapboard but was now a tattered gray-white. Peeling paint flaked off the porch railings, and Miranda saw that a front window was smashed. Helen had told her there would be room enough for a vegetable garden, but she had not prepared Miranda for the expanse of flowering bushes, waist-high grass, and overgrown shrubs that created a fairy-tale nest in which the house squatted.

"Welcome home, ladies." Philip smiled. "What do you think, Mandy?"

Miranda jumped out of the car without answering and ran up the tangled path to the front door. She felt giddy with excitement.

Helen hurried up the walk behind her. "Oh my," she moaned. "It looks a lot more dilapidated now than it did last month."

Philip laughed, following on her heels with the door key dangling from one finger. "I've got my work cut out for me, I'll give you that. But that's good—it'll keep me off the streets."

Helen squeezed his arm. "City slicker turned handyman!"

"You'd better believe it," he said. "I have big plans for this place." He turned the key in the lock.

"I know. But it looks so unlived-in." Helen stepped into the entrance hall.

"It
is
unlived-in," he said, right behind her. "But we're here to change all that."

"Oh, it's spooky!" cried Miranda, pushing past them. The hall was large and dim, and her voice echoed. She had not counted on the new place being much, but she could tell right away that her parents had found something special. It had to do with the atmosphere. A flash of intuition told her there was something here she'd missed out on in the city—maybe just the nooks and crannies for privacy. Maybe something else.

"Spooky only on the outside, Mandy," Philip responded. "The whole place will change once we get a few coats of paint on the walls and fix the shutters." He flicked a switch and the hall lights blazed, illuminating a carved oak stairway. "Well, at least the real estate agent is taking care of us. Last time we were here, the lights weren't working."

"Why not, Dad? Who lived here before?" Miranda stood in the middle of the hall feeling disoriented. She was half listening to her father's answer, half planning which of the several doors off the hallway to open first.

"I don't know the whole history of the house, but I do know the last family to live here moved out in the 1940s after the place caught fire. No one has lived here since."

Miranda opened the first door on the left, and they walked through a large dining room and into the kitchen, where the late afternoon sun shone orange through the milky glass of the back door. "No one has lived here in fifty years? Weird."

"It's a long time," agreed Helen, leaning up against the counter. She stood, silent, looking around the kitchen. "It sure is different from our kitchen in New York. Look at these old, beat-up cupboards. And all this floor space! I'll have to walk a mile just to prepare a meal."