28

 

 

THE KNOCK STARTLED her. Despite having been working at the table before the window, she had seen no movement from the street, so engrossed had she been in the miniature on the block before her; she had made several unsatisfactory starts this afternoon. She leaned forward wearily and drew the curtain aside.

A dark suit. A fedora?

Gwynn made her way into the hall and snicked back the lock. She opened the door.

Her visitor turned and winked. “Let me in off the street, young Gwynn, before someone sees me.”

Dumbly she stood aside, waiting for Martin Scott to enter before closing the door again. In one hand he held a carry-all; with the other, he doffed his hat.

“I’d tell you to lock it,” he said over his shoulder as he entered the sitting room, “but I know our Mary has a key.”

“What—?” She followed him into the sitting room, where he’d set the carryall on the coffee table. “Mr. Scott—Martin—what are you talking about? Why are you here?”

“Busted out,” he said, and laughed. “Have to be back before Mary knows I’m gone.” He settled onto the sofa, tucking his trousers up at the knee. He took a deep breath, and then blew it out. “Haven’t been out and about without a minder in I don’t remember how long. It feels good.” He unbuttoned his suit coat and eyed her speculatively. “You haven’t got a spot of whisky about, then, have you?”

Gwynn shook her head, sinking slowly into the wing-backed chair. “They don’t know you’re gone. Mary. The visiting nurse?”

“Damn right, they don’t.” His blue eyes sparked. “And don’t you be telling them, either.” He looked up again. “Whisky?”

“Tea?” she countered.

Martin sighed mightily. “You’re as bad as our Mary.”

Gwynn eyed him warily. “Are you supposed to be out?” She caught herself. “Of course you’re not.”

If he could have spat, Martin would have. “I’m old, not senile, not sick. Definitely not bedridden. And now, thanks to you,” and he pointed at her with a bony finger, “I’m curious.” He lowered the finger to nudge the carry-all. “So I had that old battle-axe of a home health carer get the scrapbooks down from the closet shelf again, and didn’t she make a fuss.” Again his eyes darted around the room. “That tea, then, young Gwynn?”

“Oh. Oh, sorry.”

She slipped into the kitchen, where Mary had already laid the afternoon tea tray, as she always did before she left; all that was needed was a second cup and saucer. After the electric kettle came to a boil, Gwynn rinsed the pot, spooned in the tea, and poured the hot water over the leaves. Then she returned, tray in hand, to the sitting room. Martin shifted his carryall to the seat beside him, and she set the tray on the low table. He had, she saw, an album open on his knee. She turned back to the wing-backed chair, but a sudden guttural noise from him stopped her.

“Don’t sit there,” he said quickly. His blue eyes were not on her but on the chair.

She took a step back, and now she sank into the overstuffed chair at the other end of the sofa.

“What is it?”

He shook his head and didn’t answer. His jaw worked.

“I was sitting in the chair earlier,” she protested.

“And you looked good in it,” he answered, but automatically, as though from a distance. She saw his gaze still locked upon the wing-backed chair. For a moment he seemed to be wrestling, then he looked at her. His smile was forced. “I meant to say that earlier.” He cleared his throat. “Will you be mother, then?”

Gwynn poured the tea carefully and handed him the cup and saucer.

“Not English enough to put milk and sugar in first,” Martin observed, reaching for the tongs.

“I’ve been away all my life,” she countered. “But you’re not getting off that lightly. Tell me why you didn’t want me to sit in the chair just now.”

He pressed his lips together, dropping one sugar cube into the cup, then a second, as though sugaring his tea against shock. His eyes flickered to the chair, then back to the matter at hand.

Then she knew, with a sudden realization.

“You saw her,” she said.

He lifted his tea cup to his lips and took a sip. He put it back down in the saucer, the china clinked a bit. Shaking? He placed them both on the low table.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

“Martin.” Gwynn took a sip of her own tea, black. “Don’t lie to me. You saw her. While I was in the kitchen.” She took another sip. “Maybe you still see her. Is she in the chair now?”

Instead of answering, he folded his hands together and leaned back against the sofa cushions. “Is who in the chair?” he asked at last. Cagily.

Gwynn had to place her cup and saucer on the low table to keep from throwing it at the old man’s head. “My great-aunt. The other Gwynn. The woman you used to be in love with. She was sitting in her chair while I was in the kitchen. Wasn’t she? And that’s why you didn’t want me to sit there.” She shook her head. “That’s it, isn’t it?”

“You’ve seen her?” Martin countered. “Have you?”

“Yes. Once. And heard her. Several times.” It felt good to admit it. “I’m not the only one. Colin has seen her.”

“Has Mary?”

“I don’t know. She hasn’t said.”

Martin closed his eyes. “Probably she hasn’t. Too practical to be haunted, that daughter of mine. She misses a lot that way.”

For a moment they fell silent, both watching the wing-backed chair. To Gwynn it looked perfectly empty. No one sitting there at all. But she was coming to learn that that meant nothing.

“Yes,” Martin said at last. “She was there.”

“She’s not now?”

“No.” He sighed. “It was just for a moment.”

“Did she say anything?”

He turned his head quickly. “No. Does she speak to you?”

“In dreams.”

“You’re lucky, then.” Martin looked as though he meant it, looked as though the thought brought him sorrow. “I miss her. I miss her voice. I miss the way she moved. Even when she was alive. I missed her as soon as she married Tommy and he turned her into someone else.”

With her eyes closed, Gwynn could almost imagine what her great-aunt would have looked like, sounded like, walked like as she moved across the dance floor toward a much younger Martin. She felt him place the scrapbook in her lap she looked down at the page to which he pointed.

“That’s her,” he said, his voice low. “Down at the Palais.”

It was the dance floor she had imagined, and the younger Gwynn was wearing the flowered dress with the puffed sleeves from the vision in her mind’s eye—but by now she scarcely even thought about the strangeness of that. She stared down at the girl waltzing in the arms of a barely recognizable Martin Scott in his uniform, her chin tilted up in the laugh she threw over her shoulder toward the photographer, her shoulder-length hair swinging about her face. In the way one recognized colors in black-and-white photographs, Gwynn knew the girl had red hair, knew the dress had blue flowers, knew the curtains on the long windows in the background were deep crimson.

“She looks happy,” she whispered.

“I thought she was,” he said sadly. “Then I was gone, and when I came back she was with Tom, and I don’t think she was ever happy again. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know how everything changed so quickly.”

Again they fell silent. Gwynn looked down at the picture of her laughing great-aunt, feeling an unaccountable sorrow for a young woman who died long before her own death. She reached out a tentative finger to touch the black-and-white face, the laughing cheek, the bright eyes. What had happened? What happened, Gwynn?

“Tommy,” Martin said, flipping the page quickly.

Again the dancing couple, and off to the side and slightly back, another uniformed man had his eyes firmly on them. For a moment Gwynn stared in shock, seeing not eyes, but burning dark holes in the stranger’s face. She put out a hand, this time as if to ward off a blow, and the sorrow was replaced by fear, waves and waves of fear. Animal loathing, and a need to escape something that she knew she never would. There was screaming in her head; she pressed her hands to her mouth to keep the sound in, though she knew it was not her own voice she was hearing. What happened, Gwynn?

The scrapbook slipped from her lap to the floor, and landed facedown on the worn carpet.  Only then did she look up, to find Martin Scott watching her with his blazing blue gaze.

“Steady on, young Gwynn,” he murmured. He put a hand on her shoulder.

She jerked away convulsively.

 

“DRINK IT,” MARTIN ordered sharply, pressing the glass into her hand.

She raised it to her lips, and the smoky acridness filled her nose before spreading across her tongue.

“Where—”

“Cellarway, shelf overhead. I knew she had to have some here, and that seemed a logical place.” He glanced at her, up and down, appraisingly, then resumed his seat on the sofa.

“You knew it was here all the time,” she whispered.

Martin shrugged. “I’ll tell you about it sometime. But not now. Now you have to tell me about what you saw. After you drink the rest of that, I mean.”

Gwynn’s eyes slewed to the scrapbook where it lay on the carpet. The pits of hell. She raised the glass to her lips and took a longer drink, letting the fire of the whisky burn its way down the back of her throat. It was a picture, she told herself. A photograph, sixty-some years old. With a dead man. It couldn’t hurt her. It couldn’t threaten her.

Unless she let it.

She wouldn’t let it.

She drank down the last of the whisky and set the glass on the table. Then she took a deep breath, and leaned forward to pick up the scrapbook, closed it carefully, and set it next to the empty shot glass.

“I didn’t see anything,” she said slowly, “except Tommy’s eyes. And they scared me.”

Martin nodded.

“But I heard something.”

Martin’s gaze hardened, his eyes narrowing. “What did you hear?”

Gwynn took a deep breath. “Screaming. The word no over and over. A woman’s voice.”

Martin looked stricken. “Was it Gwynn’s voice?”

“I don’t know.” She pressed her hands to her face.

“You do know,” he insisted. “Was it your great-aunt’s voice?”

She nodded, biting her lip. “I think so. I think so. She was frightened. Maybe hurt.” She couldn’t bring herself to say the rest: she was sobbing.

“Bastard.” Martin looked away, toward the chair, his hands clenched into fists on his knees. Gwynn could see him blink, once, twice, several times; his Adam’s apple worked up and down. She thought he might be crying.