The Mirror (52 page)

Jerry Garrett was leaving the Gingerbread House to go back to his office after lunching with Rachael and the nurse. A motorcycle stopped on the street in front and a girl got off the back before the guy driving could get the kick stand down. She ran to meet him at the gate.

"Mr. Garrett? I'm Lottie Ralston. And I want to talk to you about your daughter."

By her appearance Jerry sized her up as one of the idle young, the voluntary poor who infested the area.

"She's had her baby and she's living with my grandfather. I don't want to get him in trouble and I don't want the reward, but--"

"What do you want, Lottie Ralston?" Jerry asked suspiciously.

"I want you to get her and that kid out of there. He can't afford them and you can. She's sponged off him long enough."

* * *

Jerry turned the Oldsmobile into the drive and stared at the dilapidated house, the litter of junk automobiles and ancient farm machinery. How could she have been this close to town and gone undiscovered?

A fat dog barked on the end of a chain.

Jerry swallowed back the acid taste coming up from his stomach.

He didn't want to face what was in that house. If the diary were true . . if she wasn't Shay ... he didn't want her back.

"Selfish bastard," he muttered at himself and got out of the car.

The dog made it obvious he wouldn't allow Jerry near the front door. So he followed the drive around the house, where more junk sat rusting and rows of diapers flapped on a clothesline.

A black cat with yellow eyes sat in the sun on a crumpled car hood.

And his daughter bolted from the back door, dressed like a destitute hippie and carrying a plastic clothes basket.

"Shay?" It came out choked but loud enough for her to hear over the protesting cries from the clothes basket.

She threw him a terrified look over her shoulder and kept running.

He started after her and then stopped. "Brandy?"

She paused at a gate in a board fence to stare at him.

"Brandy McCabe?" He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. She slipped through the gate as he approached. "We know about the wedding mirror, Brandy McCabe."

The intruder in his daughter's body watched him warily. Unfamiliar expressions played across a familiar face.

"We know. There's no need to run anymore. We . . ." Jerry Garrett felt suddenly tired. "I want to help you."

Bruised shadows around her eyes. Reddened hands clutching the basket so tightly the soft plastic folded inward. He tried to feel sympathy for this stranger . . . but his own loss was too great.

"I will kill you," she whispered, still poised as if to run if he should startle her, "before I let you harm these children."

"Children?" He tried to peer over the gate and the yellow rim of the basket but she backed away. "There's more than one?"

"You are the grandfather of identical twins, Mr. Garrett." She showed him two tiny heads, fine black hair fluffing around white faces, eyes screwed shut against bright sunlight, four little fists purposelessly flailing air. "Your daughter has two fine sons." Her voice softened as she looked at them. "And I intend to keep them safe until she returns."

"She's not returning, Brandy."

"Of course she will. She must."

"No. It looks like you'll have to take care of them. I guess they're yours now . . . and Marek's."

Lottie and friend arrived to add to the confusion. And a few minutes later, Ansel St. John in a rattletrap truck.

Jerry worked hard to convince him he meant the mother and twins no harm, that there had been a misunderstanding, that he wanted only to help them.

"She's of a legal age to do what she wants," Ansel decreed. But then he admitted the three of them were getting to be a handful for an old man.

Finally, Ansel shooed Lottie and Roger from the kitchen and made Jerry write on paper that he would not send his daughter to an institution.

Jerry signed it knowing it had no legal value but hoping to placate Ansel. "You see, when she overheard us speak of institutions and such, we didn't know she--"

"Was Brandy McCabe?" Ansel St. John seemed to know the whole story and he'd swallowed it without blinking.

The man had to be crazy and it made Jerry more determined to get his grandsons out of there . . . grandsons ... he peeked into the clothes basket. The twins slept.

He told Ansel he'd move them into his cabin in Nederland. "They'll have everything they need there. I'll see to it."

"Good. Boulder's a little raw for an old-fashioned girl to start out with." Ansel turned to the woman in Shay's body. "And I'll be up to check on you. He tries to pull anything and this paper goes right to THE POLICE!"

Brandy still seemed nervous about the move. But, after writing the old man a generous check for his trouble and expenses, Jerry loaded her, the twins and a ton of swiftly folded diapers into the Oldsmobile and drove off.

"The reason I can't take you to the Gingerbread House is your mother ... I mean . . . your daughter . . . Rachael has been hit hard by all this. We're worried about her. I think she'll have to take you on gradually."

He made a quick stop at the Gingerbread House, leaving them in the car, to pick up the diary and ask the nurse to stay late.

"What are you going to do about Marek?" he asked as they started up the canyon.

"That I will leave for Shay to decide when she returns." Brandy fiddled with the diamond ring. "It's not for me to--"

"She's not returning!" Jerry took a curve too hard and fought the Olds back off the shoulder. "Don't make this any harder for me than it already is. Looking at you, knowing inside you're not her--"

"I must get home, Mr. Garrett. Then you can have your Shay back inside as well as out. Perhaps if I could have the mirror with me in--"

"It's gone. Stolen. Along with almost everything else. You'll understand more when you've read the diary."

Brandy marveled at how the canyon had been cleared, at how quickly they reached Nederland along the sweeping road, at the dam built below the town. Ice covered the water behind it, spread over what she'd known as a vast mountain meadow.

Nederland was in its proper place, but held nothing familiar to her. Pines covered the surrounding slopes now and smoke puffed into a leaden sky from chimneys hidden among them. Snow lay in grimy drifts along the edges of the streets.

Shay's father drove through the town and across a bridge, passing a railroad sitting by itself in a field.

"Did they finally bring the railroad to Nederland then?" Brandy looked back wistfully. Here at last was something familiar.

"It came through someplace up closer to Caribou. That's just a fancy antique shop. I don't know how they got that old caboose in here."

"Antique, yes." It was awful to be an antique oneself. "Caribou, I remember well. Is it--"

"Hardly even a ghost town. Nothing left but the cemetery. And not much of that."

"Ghosts are all that's left, it seems."
And I should he one of them.
Brandy wouldn't believe she must stay trapped here.

Jerry stopped before an odd building in the trees. It was shaped like a capital A, its front of glass, its frame and full-length porch stained reddish-brown. Stacks of chopped wood lined one end of the porch.

He leaned over to stare across her. "This is the spot where the Strock cabin used to stand. I lived in it once when I was a kid."

"Where I shall live when I return. But not in so grand a building, I'm sure." Corbin Strock seemed a remote phantom.

Jerry drove up a steep incline beside the cabin and parked behind it. A rusted lift pump stood on a platform of broken concrete, reminding her of the one at the trough for the carriage horse at home.

Well, this'll be your home. For a while at least." He carried the diapers in and she the twins.

The air was sharp on the mountainside and chilly in the cabin. "I'll light a fire in the fireplace and turn up the thermostat. There's not much here. I'd better run down to the store."

Brandy sat before the fire and hurried to nurse Shay's infant sons before his return, feeling the prickly relief as Shay's breasts emptied.

This structure would hardly have passed as a cabin in her time. Cushioned furniture sat deep in rugs thicker than those in the Gingerbread House. One vast room, with kitchen and parlor combined, a railed balcony at one end on which she'd seen a bed. Jerry Garrett did seem intent on making them comfortable rather than causing trouble. The place had a soft pillow like atmosphere, protective, enclosed.

When Jerry came back he made several trips to the car for paper sacks filled with food. And meat. All cut to size on paper plates and wrapped in that clear filmy substance she saw so often in this world.

"You're going to fry T-bones?" he said when she began to prepare supper. "Whoopee-twang ... as Shay would have said."

He seemed to sober at his own words, stood for a long moment staring into the air, jingling coins in his pocket. Finally he shook his head and poured himself a glass of scotch whiskey. When the supper was ready he did full justice to the meat and the potatoes fried in its grease.

"Mr. St. John didn't approve of eating flesh. He was very fond of animals. It's been so long since I've tasted meat."

"I'll look the other way if you want to nibble off the bone." He managed a smile. "You can call the local store for anything you need and put it on my account. Mrs. Tyler said she'd find some school kid to deliver it. I'll bring Shay's clothes up tomorrow."

He showed her another bedroom in the cellar and a clothes-washing machine and dryer.

As he slipped into his coat, he bent over the basket from which much cooing and gurgling emanated. "Have you named them?"

"I'm sure their real mother will wish to do that, but for now I'm calling them Joshua and Elton after my brothers."

"Read the diary," was his only answer.

Brandy watched him drive away through the front wall of window. Snowflakes fell across the lights of the automobile's lanterns.

She washed the dishes, bathed Shay's babies at the kitchen sink and treated herself to a steamy shower in the bathroom off the kitchen.

After building up the fire, Brandy reached for the green leather book she'd seen the night of her abortive visit home.

Wind sighed a timeless winter lament without, making all seem snug within.

Elton twitched comfortably. Joshua snored an infant sound.

Brandy laid the diary aside unopened and curled up on the deep sofa to sleep until the next feeding.

19

"They got the Maddon eyes, that's for sure." Remy knelt stiffly beside the clothes basket and let Joshua clasp his forefinger.

"Yes, and Marek's hair." Elinore Maddon bent to touch Elton's cheek.

"Your Uncle Dan knew you weren't dead, Shay." Dan set a large flat box against the wall. "Nation full of quitters, that's what we are." He glanced at Jerry Garrett in a grouchy fashion and stood beside his brother to admire Shay's babies.

"You and Marek fix it up fast. Kids need a name," Dan Maddon continued. He had the decency to blush. "I don't hold with these one-parent families." His wife, Ruth, tried to hush him up with an elbow in his ribs. Her stiff-curled hair had a bluish tinge to it.

Dan ignored her. "These boys raise half as much hell as two sets of Maddon twins did, you're going to need a man to knock heads together."

Jerry brought in another flat box and the men began to assemble baby beds by the fireplace. The aunts helped Brandy hang Shay's clothes in a closet on the balcony and then sat at the table drinking coffee while their husbands bickered over the meaning of the printed instructions that came with the cribs.

"You're breast-feeding twins?" Elinore Maddon said when Brandy explained why she didn't need more baby bottles. Her eyes widened until the creases in her plump face came together. "I suppose you delivered without anesthetic and the doctor laid them on your tummy and everything. Ruth, are you listening to this?"

"I think this back-to-nature kick can be carried too far." Ruth Maddon made a clucking noise like Nora used to. "All those years of developing painless, safe ways of doing things and then shucking them to the winds. Shay, tell us the doctor put you out."

"There was no doctor," Brandy said. Jerry'd warned her that only Remy knew the trick the wedding mirror had played on them all. "But Mr. St. John did lay them on my . . . bosom until he could attend to them."

The sisters-in-law glanced at each other and turned shocked faces to Brandy as if they were puppets attached to the same string.

"No doctor," Ruth repeated.

"Mr. St. John ... the old man you stayed with?" Elinore sat back in her chair as if she needed it to brace her. "He delivered the twins?"

"Yes, and as you can see they're--"

"Jerry"--Elinore set down her cup with exaggerated care--"did you know those kids were born in that. . . that farmhouse?"