Up on the mountain the morning was glorious. The Shenandoah Valley lay distant, far below, the view shredded with mists that dissipated as the sun rose behind the house. This was a cliff house, with a sheer drop below Christy’s window. Large black birds flew in and out of the crags below. They might be ravens, since someone had said there were ravens up here.
When she had showered and dressed, Christy went upstairs in search of coffee and found Nona in the kitchen. Lili was still asleep. She often stayed in bed late to recoup her energy after a session with Josef. Nona, in her dressing gown, with no scarf covering her head, looked tired and gloomy.
“What did Victor have to say after we left?” she asked.
Christy poured coffee for both of them and sat down at the counter. “Not very much. He seems to think Josef touched on some truths, even though we didn’t understand what he was talking about.”
“I don’t like what happened,” Nona said. “Someone got in here with Deirdre’s perfume. I had a sniff at the incense burners this morning, and they’d certainly been scented. And not by Lili! Her part in all this is genuine as far as she knows. How much she fools herself we can never be sure.”
“I don’t know,” Christy said. “Sometimes I wonder.”
“Wonder what?” Her aunt was turning bacon with a fork, dropping eggs into the pan.
“Mostly about me, I suppose. When I was small I hated what my mother did because it always took her away from me. So I was jealous. Sometimes people made fun of her, and then I was ashamed. You didn’t approve of her either, a lot of the time, and I was mixed up, confused. Perhaps I still am. Lili always seemed so happy in what she was doing—so serene. I wanted that for me. Instead, I had to share her with so many people who tugged at her and took her away from me—sometimes used her up, so she was tired and couldn’t give me what I wanted from her.”
“I know. I was jealous too—because I could never take her place with you.”
“But you always had your own place!” Christy cried. “No one else ever gave me what you did. You were the one I could count on—when I couldn’t count on her.”
Nona looked pleased as she transferred bacon and eggs to two plates and joined Christy at the counter. But talking about affection was not her thing, and she edged away from the personal.
“Victor must have said something more?” she prompted.
“Yes. He spoke about Hayden letting down his shield. What do you think he meant?”
“You’d better ask him—or Hayden.”
That was what Victor had said, but she could hardly ask Hayden. He had seemed terribly disturbed last night, and torn in ways she couldn’t fully understand. Losing Deirdre, perhaps not always loving her—but losing her, and never free of her—might leave him with a strong sense of guilt.
“I’m a total failure,” she told her aunt. “I want to be useful, but nothing comes to me. Except for glimpses that only concern me, I don’t see anything. Just when I might need—whatever this is—it vanishes.”
“Need it for what?”
Christy recognized that challenging tone. “I know you’ve always set yourself against Lili’s talents, and against whatever slight gift I have. Why? It’s in you too—though you never acknowledge it. You paint mysteries on canvas.”
“I’d rather see you happy than talented in that way,” Nona said sadly. “I never wanted you to follow in Lili’s steps. That road is fine for the dedicated woman she is. But I wanted a better life for you than she has had. You would know what you’d missed. I think you do know.”
She was beginning to know, Christy thought.
Nona continued wryly. “I’ve always believed that this genetic trait is due to something askew in the brain. It can skip generations, and I hoped it would skip you.”
“So I’m brain-damaged? Thanks! But what if this is perfectly normal for everyone, and just something that’s squelched out of us by our pragmatic, left-brain world, so it doesn’t develop?”
“God knows, I’ve tried to suppress it in you, Christy, and turn you in another way.”
“Sometimes I wish you’d succeeded. I’m not happy being different, so if these visions stop, I ought to feel relieved. But I wonder if they can ever really be suppressed?”
“If a talent isn’t used it grows weak, fades away. So why not let it go? That’s why you came to Redlands, isn’t it? To escape.”
“Instead, I’ve become more involved than I want to be. Last night I saw a rainbow—a vision of a rainbow. And it seemed to mean my own death.”
“Dismiss it,” Nona said, but she looked concerned.
“I don’t believe anything is inevitable. This may be a warning—something I’m to watch for. But I can still make choices. I must believe that!”
“A rainbow is for joy and promise,” Nona reminded her. “It’s a bridge to something wonderful, and I don’t mean that pot of gold.”
“I know all that, but I still felt afraid, even though I seemed to be alone in the scene that came to me. As though someone had been there and was gone, or as if someone were still coming. It isn’t like a dream—I’m wide awake. A premonition has a different feeling from a dream. It’s much stronger. And when this happened I was sitting right here among all of you.”
“There was no resolution?”
“No. The fog that often comes with such pictures drifted in and wiped everything away. Nona”— Christy roused herself—“I wish you would paint Deirdre again. Just paint her from memory and let your brush go where it pleases. You might be able to tell us something.”
Nona stared at her, and then pushed her empty plate aside. “Believe me, I have never encouraged this—this parlor trick, or whatever you want to call it, in myself. It’s a bit like automatic writing for me. Sometimes I can’t help it. I don’t even know what my brush is doing, or what will appear.”
“Then try it for me. Try it now! I saw a pad on the desk in the living room. You could do a sketch of Deirdre, couldn’t you? And just see if anything takes over.”
Nona looked as though she might refuse. Then she shrugged and stood up abruptly. Christy followed her into the living room.
Apparently, Nona had been upstairs for a while, because the furniture was back in place, and all evidence of last night had been tidied up. She went to the desk and sat down, reaching for the white pad.
“I put this here yesterday, in case I wanted to make notes,” she said. “But there was really nothing specific enough to set down. Lili often uses a tape, but I didn’t bring a recorder with me.”
Christy sat in a nearby chair and watched Nona as she picked up a pencil, examined the point, cracking her joints. That was something Christy had loved to request as a child, and she smiled to herself as she watched her aunt relax and close her eyes.
For once, Nona wasn’t fighting whatever wanted to come, and in a few moments her pencil began to move on the paper. Christy could see that she was drawing a face, though from where she sat, she couldn’t make it out clearly. The old feeling of excitement crept in, as it had always done on the occasions when Nona had been willing to try this.
Now her pencil moved swiftly and with confidence. A figure took shape, filling the paper, though Christy knew better than to get up and look. Any interruption or distraction would break that flow of pencil across paper.
It was not just an outline she was drawing, but a figure dressed in jeans. Christy could see that much, but she received no feeling of Deirdre’s ethereal presence, and she was sure quickly enough that Nona wasn’t drawing Deirdre at all.
The pencil faltered, scribbled a meaningless line, and then seemed to fall over on the paper—released by whatever power had moved it. Nona opened her eyes.
“My God!” she said. “Look what I’ve drawn!”
The sketch was not as skillful as Nona would have managed with her conscious ability and it had been hurriedly done. Yet it was quite recognizable as the portrait of a young boy. A boy with Hayden’s face, as he might have looked when he was about ten or eleven.
“Now why did I draw that?” Nona asked of the air about her.
Picking up the pad, Christy carried it to window light and studied it carefully. The boy’s face wore an expression of grief, and Christy saw that Nona had sketched a rabbit that he held in his arms. A very limp rabbit. She brought the paper back to her aunt.
“Now I remember!” Nona said. “Though I haven’t thought of it in years. There was a summer I spent out in northwest New Jersey near the little Moravian town of Hope. I went there to be with an old friend who was ill and needed me. That was the summer when you spent a couple of months with your mother—remember? So you weren’t with me. Hayden and his father lived on the next farm.”
“You knew him before you came here? You never told me that!”
“It never came up. But that incident has stayed with me apparently. Hayden’s mother died that summer, and he was brokenhearted. I never liked Bruce Mitchell, his father, and he didn’t like me. But Hayden and I became good friends. The boy was lonely and unhappy, and perhaps I was a temporary mother figure for him to talk to. I could treat him as an equal—which nobody else did.”
“And the rabbit?”
“That was pretty awful. It died cruelly in a trap. Hayden had named it Maxwell, and Max was the source of the worst quarrel I ever saw between Hayden and his father. I’d never known his mother, but I gathered from one thing and another that she possessed the same genetic flaw that runs in our family, Christy. Bruce hated it. He wanted to make sure no such nonsense cropped up in his son. So any hint of precognition, anything vaguely psychic, was stamped out of the boy. His father ridiculed and raged until all that went underground. His wife couldn’t help when it surfaced, but Bruce would have none of that in Hayden.”
“Just as you did with me—that is, discourage it. Though you never ridiculed or got angry.”
Nona’s chin came up and she grimaced. “I was never as bad as Bruce! I wanted to help you, not hurt you—though I may have been wrong too.”
“Did Hayden see that his rabbit was going to die?”
“Yes. He told his father one evening just before it got dark. He’d had a vision of Max caught in a trap that Bruce had set out for beavers. He knew what had happened, and he led his father to the very place. The trap was hardly the humane sort, and the rabbit must have died painfully. When Bruce took it out of the trap and told Hayden to bury it, the boy just stood there with the rabbit in his arms and told his father what he thought of him.”
Christy could remember with all of a child’s hurt the death of her own little poodle, and how she had known that the accident had happened, and even where. How strange to have this in common with Hayden.
“Of course this was the beginning of a complete estrangement between Hayden and his father,” Nona went on. “The boy hated him after that, and as soon as he was able he went off on his own. When Bruce died a couple of years ago, Hayden had never forgiven him. I think he blamed him in a way for his mother’s death too. The one heritage he kept from his father, and that’s been working in him ever since, is a rejection of anything psychic. Whenever this crops up in himself, he rejects and stifles it. And of course that made him impatient with Deirdre’s whimsies—though perhaps it was the very quality that attracted him to her in the beginning. The same sort of magic he’d glimpsed in his mother—and had come to hate in himself.”
“Was that what Victor was talking about last night? When he said Hayden needed to let down his guard?”
“It’s possible. Victor can’t know any of this, but he senses a great deal. I suspect that Deirdre, with all her other-worldliness, was the last woman Hayden would have wanted to fall in love with. Perhaps he was drawn to the same fragility he’d known in his mother. He’d been taught to abhor his mother’s gifts, but he had loved her deeply. I think Deirdre, who was a gentle, rather helpless little thing in many ways, even tried in the beginning to be the sort of wife he wanted. But her own nature could never keep her on that course. The result for Hayden has been a great deal of confusion that he’s tried to suppress. It’s strange that I sat down here to draw Deirdre, and pulled Hayden out of my unconscious—or whatever—instead. The boy Hayden used to be.”
This might have been a bridge by which she could reach Hayden, Christy thought. But instead, it was a further barrier, and explained some of his antagonism toward her. He hadn’t wanted to ask for her help, yet had been forced to, and resented that very fact. All his deeper feelings and reactions were mostly submerged, hidden. Perhaps even from himself. So that much of the time only anger remained.
“Well!” That was Lili speaking suddenly from the doorway. “I see you didn’t wait breakfast, my dears. And that’s perfectly all right. I’ll manage for myself.”
Christy could never remember her mother looking like someone who had just risen from her bed. Her hair always seemed miraculously combed. And of course her dressing gown was a designer’s item—green and floaty and trimmed with real lace. Even her bedroom slippers had satin heels, and her complexion was so beautiful that she needed no makeup to look perfect at any hour of the day. Though she didn’t believe this, and always took a great deal of time to enhance it after breakfast.
When she held out her arms to her daughter, Christy went to her as she’d always done as a little girl, and allowed herself to be folded into Lili’s sweetly scented embrace. This morning, however, her water lily perfume seemed a little cloying.
“I’ll get your breakfast, Mother,” Christy offered—as of course someone always did—and Lili thanked her affectionately.
“Just coffee and a roll, if there are any,” she said.
But before Christy went to the kitchen, Lili noticed the pad in front of Nona, with its sketch of a young Hayden. “What’s this? Is it one of your channeled drawings, Nona? Of course, it’s of that young man who was here last night. The one whose wife is missing. Tell me about the boy and the rabbit.”
“I don’t agree that it was channeled,” Nona said, but while Christy fixed her mother’s breakfast, she repeated the story she’d told Christy earlier.
Lili said, “Mm,” and “Ah,” along the way, and thanked Christy when she brought her tray into the living room.
Bright daylight poured in from windows along the valley side, unshaded by trees, and the cool morning air was heavenly. It swept out what Christy still felt was a sort of miasma left over from the night before. There had been inimical forces in the room during the session with Josef, but she had no idea of their source.
Nona stood up. “I’d better get dressed. We’ll need to start back before long. When is your limo coming to Redlands for you, Lili?”
“The time was to be this afternoon,” Lili said. “But I’ll call and tell Brewster to cancel. I’ve decided to stay for a while. Can you put me up, Nona? I think Josef and I are not yet through with what is happening here, and I want to remain until this mystery concerning Deirdre is cleared up. I have a very strong sense that Christy needs my protection—so I really must stay.”
Christy felt ridiculously pleased, as she always did when her mother interrupted her own life to take care of her daughter.
Nona was less happy. “I’ve got plenty of room. But don’t expect to be waited on, Lili. And I don’t want any of your entourage coming in.”
“No waiting on. No entourage. I’ll send Brewster home,” Lili said meekly. “Besides, I want to know more about Hayden Mitchell. You’re interested in him, aren’t you, Chrystal?”
Nona said sharply, “Don’t meddle!”
Christy felt no surprise at her mother’s perception. She even wondered if she might talk to Lili openly about matters that troubled her—without having her consult Josef. She had never been altogether convinced about channeling. Was Josef simply another, useful part of her mother—even perhaps an unconscious part? Or was he really some outside entity who had lived in the past and whose present task was to be an adviser to Liliana Dukas? The old question. Yet there had been evidence at times of knowledge on Josef’s part that Lili couldn’t possibly have had. So was it ESP? Or what? These, of course, were questions that both believers and non-believers had wrangled about for years, and there were fanatics on both sides. Christy neither accepted wholly nor rejected. She couldn’t explain what happened in her own clairvoyant experience. How could she know these things? Once Josef had said to her through her mother, “You don’t need to understand.” But she could never accept that. She wanted to understand—and that was impossible in this stage of existence. One had faith, or one didn’t. An open mind helped.
Lili always knew a great deal about what was happening—too much! She looked at her daughter now with her special radiance and smiled warmly. “It will all come clear for you, Chrystal dear. Just be a little patient.”
Nona went off to leave them alone, and Lili drew Christy into the living room. “Tell me,” she said.
“I don’t know how. I don’t know where to begin, because most of the time I feel confused and discouraged and—helpless. I’m not patient, the way you are. How do you keep so calm, no matter what happens?”
Lili’s smile was warm, loving. “I haven’t always managed that. When all this started to come to life in me, I was frightened. I didn’t know how to deal with it. But my mother had been there herself, and she helped me. She told me I needed to be quiet and go down inside myself, where I could ask for help. Not that it came to me right away. But one day I touched something. I reached a place where I could feel a special joy and serenity. It isn’t always easy, and I still fail at times. I had to learn to accept myself. Accept my own gifts, so I could use them. You’ve fought yourself all the way. You weren’t ready to change, and I had to wait. Now perhaps you are ready, and help will be there—when you accept. Accept and make peace with your own nature.”
Lili put her hands upon Christy’s, and strength seemed to flow from her touch. Christy relaxed a little, let some of the tension fade away. She had never felt closer to her mother.
“There is a Sun Wheel,” Lili said. “I think you must go there. It has something to tell you. Go as soon as you can.”
In some strange way all the old resentments, old jealousies seemed to lessen and belong to the past. Until now, Christy knew, she really hadn’t been ready.
“I’ll go to the Sun Wheel,” she told her mother. “I’ll go as soon as we return to Redlands.”
Christy didn’t wait for lunch with her mother and aunt. As soon as they reached Nona’s house, she made some excuse to Nona and fled. She went across the valley on foot, climbing up the road that ran to Victor’s.
She called his name when she reached his cabin but had no answer. On the mountainside above she’d heard a car following the higher road, but there had been no other sound on the sunny air except for a few lazy bird calls. Oliver Vaughn lived up there, but the woods were thick, and since he didn’t like Victor, she wouldn’t be disturbed. For a little while she would sit inside the Sun Wheel and let herself dream. She would think of her mother’s words and try to find her own serenity.
White sand, circling the Wheel, shone in the golden brilliance of noonday. Victor’s cabin stood just below the space where Deirdre had created the Wheel. On three sides of the clearing, woods formed a dark half circle. Sun rays slanted through erratically, touching tree trunks here and there with bands of cinnamon light. Only the Wheel itself was bright in full sun.
Christy chose her quadrant carefully and sat down on the ground within the boundaries of sand and rocks. This quarter held earth energies for the south. The color of the basic stones was white, and the segment stood for children, soft winds, enlightenment. She would be safe here. Perhaps a child who was waiting to be born would come and sit beside her within this Wheel—where they might begin to know each other and the child could make the right choice. A strange whimsy, when she had for so long given up the idea of marriage and children. Yet now it was comforting. She could almost feel the caress of the soft south wind against her cheek, and the loving touch of the child on her hand.
Victor had told her that when he came upon Deirdre that last time she’d sat in the area that stood for death and the unconscious. These symbols weren’t necessarily sad. They could mean a merciful release into a happier existence. Perhaps that was what Deirdre had wanted. But why? Why would life on earth have become something from which she longed to escape?
Never mind—she hadn’t come here to think about Deirdre, except incidentally. She needed help for herself. She rested her forehead against her knees and closed her eyes. Meditation was part of her daily ritual, encouraged by Lili when she was a little girl. It was something Nona believed in too: to go within and shut out the world in order to find one’s own deeper peace. In many ways it was a form of prayer.
She relaxed slowly, allowing anxiety and troubling questions to flow away from her. Once she reached out to touch a white stone nearby, and its sun warmth seemed to fill her with life and hope. She wanted only to be quiet and empty herself. Only then would whatever might choose to speak to her come in. If she could reach that state of charmed serenity that always surrounded Lili, the Sun Wheel might bring her the enlightenment she longed for.
When the fog began to drift in, she tried to dispel its disquieting effect. No! she whispered in her mind. Not now, not here. But of course there was never any way to stop it when the mists started to billow around her. She could only sit helplessly and watch.
Then the mist lifted, cleared, and the vision came. Again she was on top of that cliff she meant never to visit. The arch of a rainbow curved above the trees—strangely ominous, since it always seemed to predict her own death. Then someone was there with her—someone who held her in a strong, murderous grasp, moving her toward the cliff’s edge.
In terror Christy cried out in her real voice, and the fog rolled in, obliterating everything.
With her face still pressed against her knees, Christy tried to quiet her trembling. The longed-for peace the Sun Wheel had given her so briefly was gone. Shaken, she opened her eyes and stared at the figure sitting on the big stone in the center of the Wheel. Victor had stepped quietly into the circle and was watching her.
“You’re all right, Christy,” he said quietly. “Whatever it was that frightened you, it’s gone now.”
“It was the future.” Her voice trembled as she answered him. “This time I’ve seen something before it has happened. My own death. And very soon.”
“Don’t accept that,” he told her. “Your gift hasn’t been used enough, and you may have misinterpreted. A talent needs to be exercised, not resisted. Hayden fights it too—harder than you do. Then the pictures that come are confused and misleading—perhaps even prompted by your own fears. You both need to open yourselves to the light and accept what has been given you.”
She tried to shake off the sense of horror and bring herself back to the present. “Talk to me, Victor. Have you thought any more about last night?”
He didn’t answer. She saw his stillness—an alert, watchful stillness—and stiffened to a sense of present danger.
Victor lowered his voice when he spoke. “Don’t move or do anything sudden, Christy. We have a visitor. Turn your head slowly and look behind you. But stay where you are.”
She obeyed, turning until she could see the snake coming across the grass outside the Wheel. It flowed along in its own mysterious way, its head raised and moving from side to side, its small black tongue flickering, testing whatever lay ahead. Strangely, she didn’t feel frightened now, even though she could see quite clearly the copper markings on the snake’s head.
Making no sound, the creature followed along the white sand and rocks that marked the Sun Wheel’s circumference. Now and then it paused to explore the air inside the rim of sand and stones, but it made no effort to come across the boundary. If Victor and Christy were anything more than rocks, the snake gave no sign. When it had examined a quarter of the Wheel’s rim, it seemed to lose interest, and Christy watched it glide over the grass and disappear into the woods.
She turned to look at Victor. “It’s strange, but I wasn’t afraid.”
“You knew you were safe,” he told her. “There’s nothing evil about a snake. It’s only trying to live its own life, and it really has very little interest in us, unless we threaten it. Besides, it would never cross the Sun Wheel’s boundaries unless we invited it in.”
Christy looked at him quizzically. “I’m not that close to the mystical that I can trust what you’re saying.”
“That’s true,” Victor agreed calmly. “You’ve lived too long away from woods and hills and unobstructed distances. But the mystical lives in you deeply, and you need to allow it the freedom to grow.”
She stirred uneasily, not wholly able to accept what he was saying. “Right here where there are woods and hills and distances—all this natural beauty—some terrible happenings have surfaced. Perhaps events we might call evil—though my mother doesn’t believe there is any such thing. She guards against dangers, but she forgives too much.”
“Perhaps it’s unwise not to believe. Maybe we need to make more moral judgments—first of all about ourselves.”
“That leaves the old, unanswered question,” Christy said. “How does anyone judge wisely? When we pretend that evil doesn’t exist, it can grow behind our backs without any opposition. Only I haven’t any idea what’s good and sound in me, let alone in others.”
Victor gazed off into the woods where the snake had disappeared. “I expect we’re all a mixture of good and evil. Maybe that’s what our lives are about—growing and learning how to tell between the two. In the end, we have to make choices for ourselves. It’s those who never accept the mixture who become dangerous.”
His tone was almost sorrowful, as though the struggle he had made in his own life to find a choice hadn’t always been sound. There was often a quiet wisdom in Victor Birdcall, but there was also a great deal of regret and self-blame.
“It’s strange to be afraid of a rainbow,” Christy mused. “In the visions I’ve had recently there’s always a rainbow—and it seems to be a warning.”
“Warnings may be good. They can be portents to help guide us. In any case”—he smiled—“there’s a concept others have offered that you might think about: Dying isn’t dangerous. If there is nothing afterward, you won’t know the difference. But, more likely, there are still more adventures ahead—and that could be interesting.”
“But I want to do so much more with my life now. I haven’t begun yet. Not really.”
“Of course it’s better to live—but without fear. And there’s still time for you, Christy.”
How blue his eyes were—how bright and deep. Eyes that had come to him from another heritage than his Indian side.
She smiled back at him. “You’re so different now from when we first met. I didn’t trust you at first, and now I seem to.”
“Thank you. I don’t care to be easily read. Perhaps that’s one of my conceits.”
They were silent for a little while, dreaming within the safety of the Sun Wheel. But that couldn’t last, and Christy roused herself.
“Victor, what am I to do? How can I help Hayden and Donny? I care about them both—but I can’t even help myself.”
“There’s a possible way,” he said, pointing. “Go over there into the fire quarter of the west and ask for wisdom. When you’ve been told what you need to know, come into the house. I’ll wait for you inside. Then you can tell me what you mean to do.”
She felt comfortable with him now. “Thank you, Thunderbolt Man,” she said, and stepped from the gentle south quadrant into the fires of the west. Victor went away and left her there, and she sat down again on the grass. This time she crossed her legs and rested a hand on each knee, palms up and open—in the way she’d so often seen Lili do.
At first she was aware only of the woods about her, with Victor’s cabin below; aware of the point where the snake had entered and lost itself among the trees, quickly camouflaged. Far overhead man-made contrails streaked white paths across the blue of an otherwise cloudless sky. Then she closed her eyes and invited the western fire to fill her and bring the wisdom to act, and to overcome her own fears.
This time when the mists cleared she saw the past. A dark-haired woman sat sketching rather crudely with a pencil. She worked quickly, so that a llama figure emerged on the pad. The woman was trying to give it human characteristics, and she smiled wryly as she worked. Not a happy smile. Christy sensed that she was trying to draw herself—though she was a writer, not an artist. Those were Rose’s big, dark eyes—in caricature. The llama lips smiled as Rose had done in those photographs on her book jackets. Then the sheet was removed from the pad, and everything faded away.
Overhead the sun grew hot, and Christy felt as warm as though the western fires of the Sun Wheel had lighted her from within. Her direction had been given. Now she knew what she must do, and there must be no more delay.
She went to the back door of Victor’s cabin and tapped. The door swung wide at her touch and she stepped into a room that welcomed her. She had vacationed with Nona in Western states, and she recognized some of the objects Victor had chosen for his surroundings.
Before the hearth lay a Navajo rug of brown and beige earth colors, laced with a lightning slash of turquoise blue. Zuni dolls—kachinas—rested at each end of the mantel, with a pottery bowl in the center— perhaps from Taos. Over the wooden couch an Indian blanket had been spread, adding a touch of warm reds to the room.
Christy expressed her delight. “This is perfect, Victor. It suits you.”
He looked quietly pleased. “When my wife and I lived in New Mexico our house was full of plastic and chromium because that was what she wanted. I didn’t care. At that time I’d grown a long way from the reservation of my grandparents and I wanted her to be happy. Here by myself I have a few things about that I really like.”
How deeply did he miss his wife? Christy wondered. How had her terrible death affected him? Especially with the aftermath of false accusation and imprisonment. He must still be trying to work his way out of that.
Behind the couch stood a long oak table, and Victor gestured her toward it. “Is this what you want to see?”
Spread over the surface were a number of crude sketches, and Christy knew at a glance that this was Rose’s work. She must have intended these as a base from which Nona could develop her more professional drawings for the llama book.
“What about your promise to Donny?”
“You have his permission. He consulted with me this morning, and I agreed that it would be a good idea if you went through Rose’s plans for the book. He trusts you not to tell anyone else about them yet.”
Christy hesitated. “How can I promise that? What if I see something that I’ll need to tell Hayden about? Or Nona? Or anyone?”
“Then I think you would need to talk to Donny first.”
“Have you gone through the sketches yourself?”
“Donny said it was okay. I think you should look through them now, Christy. Even if they don’t trigger anything consciously, they may prompt you to sense something I haven’t caught. They aren’t happy drawings. They’re not much like Rose Vaughn as I knew her.”
Victor drew a ladder-backed chair to the table and Christy sat down to pick up the first picture. The stream that ran through Floris’s property was recognizable, and so was a glimpse of the high steps that climbed to her house.
The Rose llama was the heroine of the story, obviously, and Rose must have drawn her tongue in cheek—at least in the beginning. The first sketch showed an affectionate creature, eager to kiss anyone who came along. In the next drawing a human figure—clearly Oliver, as Christy could recognize by his handsome profile—stood at the fence, and Rose’s long llama neck reached over the top rail, and she was kissing him on the cheek. It seemed a teasing gesture more than a loving one, and Oliver’s response seemed to be displeasure. Christy felt suddenly uneasy. Rose hadn’t been joking in these drawings—there was a certain mockery here. Perhaps of herself, first of all.
The Deirdre llama was recognizable at once, and Rose had not been flattering. She was recognizable in her Deirdre role because she was dressed in lace and furbelows, and her llama hoofs wore open sandals, but she seemed a giddy, distraught creature. Fastened on her forehead like a diadem was a sparkling crystal. Rose had sketched in the rays that represented its shining center. The Herkimer?
Behind the Deirdre figure came a small boy llama, lovingly depicted as Donny—no satire here. Behind him pranced a small creature that was clearly a cat—Sinh pictured as herself.
There were no pages of text to accompany the drawings—perhaps Rose would have done those later. If she ever intended this as a book, which Christy was beginning to doubt.
As she turned the sheets, a male llama came trotting along outside the fence. He wore Hayden’s glowering face, as he seemed to observe what was going on in the llama pen. Oliver appeared to be ordering him away, indignant with his presence, perhaps protecting the females.
The next sketch was of an adoring Eve llama, all her attention focused on Oliver. This seemed a cruel sketch, and Christy wondered about the friendship that was supposed to have existed between the two women, in spite of Oliver.
Christy held the sketch up to Victor. “This was never intended to be developed into a book for children, was it?”
“I’m sure it wasn’t. I don’t think it was intended for any publication. Maybe therapy for Rose. Keep going.”
Christy picked up the next picture, startled. This was of Floris, and she was not portrayed as one of her own llamas but as an elderly witch. She wore a peaked hat, her chin elongated, as was her nose. She held the conventional broomstick in both hands and was waving it aloft. Rose had certainly not felt affectionate toward Floris when she drew this sketch. But who was the Floris witch threatening? There was no other figure in the picture.
Three more sketches remained. Again Eve appeared, and she was trying to kiss Oliver, though he didn’t look interested. Rose had drawn the Eve llama with bangs and an untidy hairdo and, from under the frowsy hair, wide eyes looked pleadingly at Oliver. This was hardly unexpected, since Rose knew very well that she had taken Oliver away from her best friend, who had expected to marry him. Strangely, Oliver didn’t seem to be interested in either of these two.
The next sketch was of a llama wearing an Indian kachina mask over his head and covering his long neck. He seemed to be an observer, taking no part in the action.
Christy looked at Victor, tapping the drawing. “Apparently Rose didn’t think of you as a participant in whatever was happening?”
“She was right,” Victor said. “Perhaps if I hadn’t stood apart, tried not to get involved—” He shrugged and let the matter go.
The last finished sketch was of Deirdre, again as a llama. But, this was the strangest drawing of all, for this creature seemed frightened and wild-eyed. Her forepaws were trampling her own lacy garments, and the crystal diadem was askew over one ear. Nearby, the small boy llama watched her in terror, and he was crying. Sinh, still a cat, clung to Deirdre’s shoulder with claws dug in, and her look was as wild as that of her mistress.
Only one more sheet with an unfinished sketch remained—just the face of Deirdre as herself, with tears rolling across her cheeks, and her mouth curved down in a mask of tragedy.
Christy stacked the sheets and set them down. “What was Rose up to? What did she mean?”
Victor gestured toward several objects hung in a row along one wall. They were Indian masks he must have collected over the years, and each one wore a different expression—human, yet distorted.
“Yes,” Christy said. “All those masks we wear! But Rose was dipping behind the masks. She saw something ugly she was trying to set down. I wonder why?”
Victor returned the sketches to a large manila envelope. “She must have held in a lot of unhappiness she never showed anyone.”
“If truth lies in these drawings,” Christy said, “she was still in love with Oliver and he was pretty aloof and maybe upset about something himself.”
“Don’t try to read more than is there,” Victor warned. “If you start to interpret, you may go down the wrong road.”
“This might even mean that Rose was so unhappy and desperate that she committed suicide.”
“Or that she had become such a threat to someone that she was killed deliberately? So now we’re guessing again, and it’s no good, Christy.”
“There always seems to be a deep anger in Oliver,” Christy went on, paying no attention because she had to speculate—she had to discover the key. “I wonder if Rose was afraid of him? And I don’t understand the two views of Deirdre—the happy Deirdre and the one with the sorrowful, weeping face in the unfinished sketch.”
“You’ll never find your answers that way. You have the power to understand, Christy, if only you’ll use it. Perhaps you have it even more than your mother. But you block yourself by trying to force your conscious mind to solve everything. Why are you afraid to trust yourself?”
She rested her elbows on the table and pressed her forehead against clasped hands. “Because I’ve never wanted this—gift. Even when I was a little girl, my friends thought I was weird. I always wanted to be like everyone else. Nona understood. She did her best to suppress this in me.”
“Nona’s a remarkable woman, but I think she didn’t understand. Or maybe she wouldn’t allow herself to understand or accept. In herself, or in you. The talent is there, waiting, and it’s better to use it. Look, Christy—while I make some tea—you sit there and put your hands on that stack of drawings. Let them tell you.”
For a moment she wanted only to push Rose’s sketches away. But Victor had stepped into his adjoining kitchen and was paying no more attention. Hesitantly, she did as he’d suggested and rested her hands on the drawings. She closed her eyes and quieted her thoughts, allowing herself to open, to be inwardly ready for whatever might come. The only times she’d ever used this in the past were for the police—and on a few occasions here. But this seemed different. The sensation that trembled through her was something she’d never felt before.
This time there were no mists, no vision emerging. She was no longer Christy Loren. It was as though she occupied some other body, some other mind. Her thoughts were sad, frightened, confused. There was some terrible knowledge that she must resist and fight against. Danger was very near—a threat she didn’t know how to resist. She must escape—flee from this prison that held her, though there seemed no way. Something, someone, stronger—someone ruthless—would never let her go. She had no key to the lock on the door.
A cry of agony sounded in Christy’s mind: Help me! Help me!
Perhaps she cried out herself, as she’d done in the Sun Wheel, because Victor came quickly from the kitchen and put his hands on her shoulders. “It’s all right, Christy. You’re here. Nothing can touch you or hurt you.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Rose was afraid for her life. She knew someone would try to kill her. But that’s all I know. For a moment I was inside Rose crying out for help.”
“You didn’t get any hint of who was threatening her?”
“Nothing,” Christy told him.
“Then relax. Come and sit in my kitchen.”
She sat at a square wooden table and drank raspberry tea Victor had poured into a blue mug. The bread he’d baked was sprouted grain and delicious. Since she’d skipped lunch the food tasted wonderful. She would think of nothing except how hungry she was. Victor had been wrong. There was no point at all to her encouraging her “talent.” She only wanted to be through with all that.
Then, just at the moment when she rejected and denied, a new conviction possessed her, and shook her so that her hands trembled, spilling tea on the table.
“It wasn’t Rose I went inside of just now!” she cried. “It was Deirdre!”
I know Rose was working on another book—a book about llamas. Before she put words down for the story, she used to draw little caricature sketches that an artist could later base real illustrations on. Once she showed me a single sketch. There weren’t any llamas in that one—it was just Deirdre’s face—like a mask—and she was crying. That was a face she never showed anyone, but Rose had guessed.
Rose let me see the sketch to let me know how much she’d suspected about what she called Deirdre’s “pain and suffering.” Idiotic, of course. Deirdre never had any real depth for either joy or sorrow, even though she cried easily. But Rose told me there were more sketches that tried to tell the truth about Redlands. Now I wonder if any of those drawings might point to me.
Of course I never really intended what happened. It was one of those spontaneous explosions, for which I couldn’t be responsible. Rose brought it on herself. It happened suddenly, unexpectedly, that last time we walked together in the woods. I can still hear the way she screamed as she fell—a perfect punishment for what she’d done. Of course there was no one about to hear her or see me there.
Later, after my exultation wore off, I was a bit shaken. I hadn’t planned this and it happened too quickly for me to take precautions. I didn’t remember the drawings until later, when I began to worry about them; about what they might reveal. But they didn’t turn up among her things—I searched for them thoroughly. They must be somewhere around—I don’t think she destroyed them.
Rose was very close to Donny. I never liked that, because you can’t trust small children. What if she let him keep them for her? I wonder if I can find out without giving everything away?
If he has them, he must never put those sketches in Christy’s hands. Especially not that one of Deirdre crying. I know who can help me—who must help me. Guilt makes a wonderful weapon. I’m glad it has never been a problem for me. I’m certainly not to blame for what has happened. People bring disaster upon themselves.
I still have that amusing notion to try, and I think now is the time.