Time Windows (24 page)

Miranda gritted her teeth and pumped hard.

The cornfields gave way to the old graveyard on their right. They turned into the gravel drive, stopping in a grove of trees just outside the stone wall. They dismounted and wandered in.

"It's great that you're interested in old stones, too," said Dan. "Do you know how to take charcoal rubbings? I'll have to show you sometime. You just need a big sheet of paper and a piece of charcoal or a crayon. You tape the paper to a gravestone and rub the charcoal over it—and you get a perfect copy of the inscription and carvings!"

Miranda's mind was not on charcoal rubbings. She led Dan to the leaning stones of the older graves and stopped in front of one. "Look there!" she breathed.

 

In Loving Memory
LUCINDA WALKER GALWORTHY
Nov 1873–Jan 1904
Beloved Wife of Sigmund Galworthy
Cherished Mother of Dorothy
"
THE LORD GIVETH AND THE LORD TAKETH AWAY
"

 

"What's wrong?" asked Dan in alarm.

"It doesn't say that Dorothy's dead, too!" She ran to check the nearby stones. "See? Her grave isn't here at all!"

"Dorothy
who?
" he shouted.

Miranda burst into tears. "You really don't remember?" she cried. "Don't you remember anything about Dorothy and the dollhouse?"

Dan looked worried. "Come on, Mandy. Let's get out of here." He shook his head. "Come on, don't cry. I think we should go home."

Miranda hurled herself away from him. It was too much. He was staring at her as if she were not quite sane.

"Do you want to tell me what's wrong?" Dan asked gently. "Sometimes if you talk about what's bothering you, it helps."

Miranda took a deep breath and leaned against a fallen gravestone. Dan might not remember, but he had been the one who warned her: changing the past means changing the present, too. She needed him to remember—but maybe she would just have to consider herself lucky. The present could have become even
more
changed. What if saving Dorothy had meant that somehow the Brownes never moved to Garnet in the first place? What if it meant that so many little things were different because Dorothy hadn't died in the attic that the present was wholly unrecognizable? Dorothy's life might have influenced the world in such a way that, somehow, Miranda herself would never have been born! Things could be worse, she told herself.

Dan crouched beside her now. She stared into his eyes for a moment, then reached for his hands—the same warm hands she had held when they tried to summon Dorothy.

"All right," she said in a choked voice. "I'm going to tell you a story. Just promise you won't interrupt until I'm finished."

He nodded. She released his hands, then picked a blade of grass and stared at it. "It all began when we moved to Garnet and I went up to the attic and found the dollhouse a fugitive slave once built..."

Dan lay back and stared up at the sky, appearing to fall asleep as her voice droned on. Miranda carefully related the tale and his own part in it.

"And then after we found the body, I started thinking maybe Dorothy was somehow letting me see through the dollhouse windows because she wanted help. We tried to contact her to find out how we could help her to rest in peace." Miranda was dry-mouthed after more than a half hour of uninterrupted speaking. "But then you gave me the idea of altering the past. You pointed out that changing the past would change the present—and it kind of hit me that what Dorothy really wanted was for me to change things so that she didn't die in the attic at all! And that sure was something I wanted to do for her—it was so horrible, you know, seeing her fall into that hole right before my eyes. Anyway, eventually I figured out where to find the key. I put it in the dollhouse attic, and Dorothy found it there and let herself out. She was saved!" Miranda clenched a handful of grass, ripping it out of the ground. "Okay? The end."

Dan reached out and pulled her over on the grass next to him. "It sounds as if—," he began slowly, "—as if you really believe all this happened."

"It
did
happen, Dan!"

He leaned back on his arms and stared up at the sky, dark brows drawn together. "Let me make sure I get this. You are actually asking me to believe that you and I spent time doing all sorts of things this past week or so—even though I have no memory of them?"

"You got it," she said.

"Doesn't that sound pretty bizarre—even to you?" Now he was scowling. "I mean, look. What if I came over to your house and said, 'Oh, Mandy, don't you remember how we flew to Mars last week in this totally amazing spaceship piloted by beings with three heads? You don't? Well, that must be because they zapped you with a laser beam to make you forget it ever happened. But, lucky me, I remember everything.'" He glared at her.

"Oh—never mind, Dan!"

"Yeah. Would you believe a story like that?"

"Probably not," she admitted. "But, I swear to you—everything I said is true."

"Magic Mandy the Mystic Oracle," he said mildly enough, but she couldn't bear it. She started to cry again. All the tight control of the past weeks, all the tension she'd carried with her from her parents' quarrels, all the stress of unshed tears and unexpressed terror poured out now. She turned and rested her forehead against Lucinda's gravestone, pressing her fist into her mouth to stifle the sobs.

She pushed Dan away when he tried to embrace her. "Just leave me alone! Forget it!"

"Oh, Mandy!" He wrapped her in his arms, ignoring her struggles. "I'm sorry! I really am—it's just that I don't know what I'm supposed to do!"

She finally rested her head against his chest. "I guess there isn't anything you can do. I just feel so alone!"

He ran his fingers through her hair. They were silent for several minutes while he twirled one of her curls around his finger. "You're a fantastic storyteller, that's for sure. You make me
want
to believe it!"

She shrugged and picked at the grass. "I could never make up something like this."

"Hmm. But—how did the magic work? How did you know Dorothy would be able to get the key out of the dollhouse?"

"I didn't know. But when you said yesterday that death is always a mistake, it got me thinking that maybe Dorothy was trying to tell me that she didn't want to rest in peace at all. I thought, well, how could she get out of the attic before she fell into the hole? And when I heard the key fall from Luanda's pocket, I thought of trying to find it again. The dollhouse was sort of a time machine—it was the only place I could put the key that connected
then
with
now.
"

She fell silent. Then a thought struck her. "You know, maybe it wasn't Dorothy's spirit after all. Maybe it was Lucinda's—there was always that perfume. Maybe she felt guilty all these years and wanted someone to. undo the damage she'd caused. Oh, I don't know!" She rubbed her head. "It gives me a headache to think about it. And, you know? I saw that scene when Lucinda dropped the key several times before I even thought about what it could mean! I can't believe I was so stupid."

"Wouldn't your parents have helped you? Didn't you tell them about the dollhouse?"

"I didn't—it seemed like the dollhouse didn't want me to." She remembered the lure she'd felt pulling her up to the attic. "I had the feeling it was
my
secret. Like no one else was supposed to know about the magic."

"So how come you ended up telling me about it?"

She smiled at him faintly. "You bullied me into it."

"That's about the first thing You've said that I can believe!"

Her smile faded.

"Look," he said, "I just wish you could show me some proof."

"I know, I know," she responded irritably. "That's what you kept saying before."

"Before—," he murmured and fell silent.

They lay there listening to the birds chirping. Miranda let her mind drift back to the first time she'd come to this graveyard and found Dorothy's grave: how she and Dan had tried to summon Dorothy; how the air and grass and fields around them all seemed to come alive. "Life," she murmured. "That's what Dorothy was trying to tell us."

She tipped her face up to the sun and let the other memories come—all the memories of her life since she had moved to Garnet and discovered the dollhouse. There were funny, shadowy areas, she discovered. Times she was not so certain about anymore. A hazy sort of feeling, with some new memories taking shape in the fog. Memories of picnics with Dan, visiting museums in Lexington and Concord with her father and Ed Hooton, helping her mother decorate the new office in town, making plans to visit the Hootons' summer house on Cape Cod—memories of events that had never happened, or had not happened until she altered time. Yet those foggy memories grew clearer every moment, and the dollhouse began to seem as remote and elusive as something she once dreamed. The old graveyard had never been so peaceful.

"I
didn't
make it up, Dan," she said softly. "But there's no way to prove it. It's all over now, anyway."

"Why is it over? What do you mean?"

"Don't you get it?" Miranda spit out a blade of grass and looked at him earnestly. "Because of Dorothy. If I altered time, then Dorothy never died in the attic, and we never found her body. Even if it were Lucinda haunting the attic, it works the same way. If Dorothy didn't die there, then Lucinda didn't need to feel guilty for killing her. It never happened! Dorothy escaped that day and left the house—she probably went over to your house, and her father found her there when he came home! She didn't die in the attic, so she didn't need to be saved. The magic dollhouse couldn't have happened."

Dan twirled a buttercup under her chin. "Hmm. Sounds like you need a course in logic when school starts."

She pushed the flower away. "Well, if there's one thing I've learned, it's that logic isn't everything."

"There are so many things I don't understand, Mandy. Things no one understands, I guess. Time, is one of them." He looked at her seriously. "Like we see only the tip of the iceberg."

"Yes," she agreed emphatically.

A gentle breeze drifted over the cornfields and stirred the grass near the gravestones. "Still," said Dan, "if it happened, it isn't fair I can't remember!"

"I wish you could remember, too," she told him. "It would make the whole thing seem less of a dream."

"The way you tell it makes me feel the story is almost a memory of mine." He took her hand and examined her palm. "And you're
positive
it wasn't a dream?"

She smiled at him, quite positive. And she realized it didn't matter if he ever believed her. Dorothy had lived;
that
was what counted.

Dan squeezed her fingers in his. "And your mother doesn't remember, either?"

"It doesn't look like it. God, yesterday I was so scared of her—I thought I hated her—but it wasn't really Mither at all. Lucinda was hanging around all this time, and I never realized it." She shivered, remembering those cold, glittering eyes.

"So you're the
only
one who remembers anything?"

Miranda hesitated, recalling the startled, wise expression in Dorothy's eyes as she met Miranda's through the dollhouse windows. "I'm not sure," she said slowly. "I think Dorothy knew for a second."

 

Back at the house, Miranda climbed the stairs to the attic again, and knelt on the cushions behind the dollhouse. The first thing she noticed when she rested her elbows on the dollhouse attic floor was the absence of the black-crayoned scrawl. Miranda rubbed her fingers over the tiny floorboards where WATER had once been written.

"Nothing was ever here," she whispered. "Dorothy left in time."

When she stared through the little windows, she saw only her own ordinary attic. The previously blackened corner of charred wood from the Kramers' fire was now clean and smooth. The fire, too, had never happened. She flopped back onto her pillows. The room was quiet and peaceful, the sense of waiting gone. A gentle breeze filtered in through the open windows.

"Dorothy?" she whispered. "What happened to you?"

But there was no answer.

Helen parked the car in front of Mrs. Wainwright's house. Miranda sighed as they climbed the porch steps. If Mrs. Wainwright only knew how busy she had been, she would not expect her to be note-perfect at this specially arranged lesson.

"I'm sorry if I'm late," she began as soon as Mrs. Wainwright opened the front door.

But Mrs. Wainwright brushed aside the apology. "You're not late at all," she said. "I'm afraid
I'm
running over today—but I blame it on my last student. She was the late one."

"Better late than never!" laughed a girl carrying a flute, who appeared in the hallway next to Mrs. Wainwright.

"That's a cliché, Susannah," chided Mrs. Wainwright. "But I suppose it's true, nonetheless." She held the door open for Miranda and Helen. "Well, come in, my dears. Susannah and I were just about to have a glass of iced tea. I need a little break in all this terrible humidity. Oh—I haven't introduced you! Susannah Johnston, Helen and Miranda Browne. Helen is a doctor, Susannah dear. So you'll have to talk to her." She turned to Helen. "I've been trying to make a musician out of Susannah, but she is determined to be a doctor!"

"And the music world will rejoice," said Susannah dryly.

"Nonsense!" said Mrs. Wainwright. "You just need to—"

"Practice!" chimed Miranda and Susannah together. They looked at each other and laughed.

"You girls will be in eighth grade this year, won't you?" asked Mrs. Wainwright.

Both girls nodded.

"And Miranda lives in the old Galworthy House now, so you two have something else in common." Just then the phone rang, and Mrs. Wainwright hurried to the living room. "I won't be long," she called back over her shoulder. "Why don't you all go pour yourselves some tea?"

Miranda led the way into the kitchen. They sat down at the kitchen table.

"Have you been taking lessons long?" asked Helen.

"Only about forever," sighed Susannah. "It was my great-grandmother's idea in the first place, but she and Mrs. Wainwright are old friends, so they're in it together now. Determined to wring music out of a rock. My great-grandmother thinks young ladies should have certain accomplishments. Like music, you know. And sewing."