For Jim Ellis, a friend for many lifetimes
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
A Biography of Lois Duncan
THE CRYSTAL PAPERWEIGHT SHOULD have been clear, but it was not. The man who had cast it was bewildered. He was certain that he had used the correct amount of selenium to counteract the iron in the silica sand and decolorize the glass. He had been in the glass-pressing business all his life and took great pride in the quality of his work.
Still, when he peered into the globe, which by rights should have been clear and transparent as window glass, he saw at its core what appeared to be gray wisps of smoke, twisting and curling, rising and darting, twining and intertwining like a nest of snakes preparing to strike.
With a sigh of regret he consigned the paperweight to a bin of defective glass products labeled Seconds. Eventually the crystal sphere, along with a sad assortment of hornless unicorns, tuskless elephants, and double-beaked swans, was placed on a special shelf of curios at the back of the showroom.
A surprising number of people made it a habit to browse the discount shelf in search of bargains and joke presents. One of those customers was an older woman with thick black hair and heavy-lidded eyes. She picked up the paperweight and examined it carefully, more than a little disturbed by what she saw in its depths. In fact the images she found there upset her so much that she left the shop without making a purchase.
The following day she came back and found the ball still on the shelf. This time she forced herself to buy it. When she got home, she took a seat in a straight-backed chair in a dimly lit room, placed the globe on a black velvet cloth on a table in front of her, and looked once more at the visions that appeared in the swirling mists. Being practiced in the ways of scrying, she knew what they meant and set about putting her affairs in order.
Ten days later, when she suffered a fatal heart attack, her house was clean, her bills were paid, and her will had been updated.
The woman’s son flew in from California for the funeral and put the small house up for sale. Since he was soon to be married, he had thought he might keep the furniture, but when he saw the condition of the mismatched chairs and the underslung sofa with cigarette burns in the upholstery, he sold them too, getting less than a hundred dollars for the lot. He gave his mother’s strange, wild clothes to charity, but took her personal effects home with him for sentiment’s sake.
Among those items was the paperweight, which he placed on a corner of his desk, where it remained for the rest of his comparatively short lifetime, clear and transparent as window glass.
THE FIRST TIME SARAH ZOLTANNE saw Eric Garrett, he was standing out by the flagpole in front of the school building talking with a group of friends. Backlit as he was by the afternoon sunlight, everything about him seemed painted in gold—his hair, his skin, and, as far as she could tell from where she stood some distance away at the top of the cement steps, it even appeared that he might have golden eyes. In her literature class back in California she had done a unit on mythology, and the image that leaped immediately into her mind was of Apollo.
From then on Sarah seemed to keep seeing him everywhere. Striding down the hall between classes with an armload of books. Seated in the bleachers with some of the guys from the football team watching cheerleader practice. Pulling out of the student parking lot behind the wheel of a red Dodge Charger filled with laughing teenagers. She was actually starting to wonder if Fate was trying to tell her something, when he turned up behind the podium at a senior-class assembly. Only then did she realize that he was president of the class. Since she herself was on the lowest rung of the social ladder, having just started as a transfer student in her senior year, she saw no point in further speculation.
Which was why she was taken totally by surprise when, one Thursday afternoon in late October, she arrived at her locker at the end of fourth period to find the Sun God standing there waiting for her.
“Hi,” he said. “We don’t know each other, but it’s time we did. I’m Eric Garrett.”
“I know who you are,” Sarah said. “I’ve seen you at assemblies.” She wondered what on earth he could possibly want. She already had learned the hard way that the “in” crowd at Pine Crest High School didn’t waste time on outsiders, especially on one who arrived under the circumstances she had. It occurred to her that he might be keynoting one of those degrading “Be Kind to New Students” programs, the kind that gave extra credit for being nice to newcomers. In her last school she had been so embarrassed for the new students that her natural friendly impulses had been immediately quelled.
“I know who you are too,” Eric said with a contagious twinkle. “You’re Sarah Zoltanne. You’re from Ventura, California. You and your mother moved here at the end of August. I know more. Ready? Your favorite food is—this is hard to believe—artichokes! You’re hooked on New Age music, and you’ve got a black cat named Yowler with a torn left ear.”
“Where did you hear all that?” Sarah asked in astonishment.
He grinned. “What would you say if I told you a psychic told me?”
“I’d say you’re pulling my leg. Pine Crest is not exactly a hot spot for metaphysics.”
“You’re a smart girl,” Eric said. “I see you’ve got your thumb on the pulse of this town, and you’ve only just got here. So you can see how we’re going to have a pretty rough time digging up a psychic in this community. How would you like to be one Saturday night?”
“What’s happening Saturday night?” His eyes weren’t really gold, she decided; they were hazel with golden flecks, like sun-speckled pond water, and his lashes were long and light, the exact same shade as his eyebrows.
“The Halloween Carnival. You must have seen the posters. Every year the senior class puts on a carnival to earn money to hire a band for the prom in the spring. There’re contests, games, a spook house, and all that stuff. I was hoping to talk you into being the fortune-teller.”
“I don’t know a thing about telling fortunes,” Sarah said.
“There’s nothing to it,” Eric said reassuringly. “You just read people’s palms or whatever and tell them their future.”
“There’s no way anybody can know the future.”
“No, of course not. So you’d just make things up, like they’re going to find money or take a trip or meet somebody sexy and irresistible. Nobody’s going to sue you if the predictions don’t pan out.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start,” Sarah said. “I don’t know anything about anybody in Pine Crest.”
“That’s what makes this idea so great and you so perfect,” Eric explained. “The kids here don’t know you either. The main reason there’s never been a fortune-telling booth at the carnival is because nobody wants to spend money having their fortunes told by somebody they’ve known since kindergarten. But it would be different if it were done by a stranger.”
Sarah had to struggle to hide her disappointment. For a few lovely minutes in the beginning she had actually thought that he might be getting ready to ask her for a date. But her first assumption had been correct. He had only sought her out because he wanted something from her.
“I wouldn’t be any good at that,” she said.
“Don’t say no until you’ve heard me out,” Eric quickly countered. “I’ve got this dynamite system that will make it a cinch for you. You’ll dress like a Gypsy—we can borrow a costume from the Drama Club—and under your scarf you’ll wear earphones. On the other side of the room we’ll station an accomplice with a hidden walkie-talkie. When she sees people enter your tent, she’ll secretly fill you in on their background. You’ll look at their palms and tell each person their whole life story so that they’ll think you are reading their minds! It’ll blow them away!”
“How will my accomplice know so much?”
“Kyra’s a walking encyclopedia,” Eric said. “Her parents were born and raised here, and she knows all the dirt about everybody. She’ll feed you so much info, you won’t know what to do with it all.”
“Oh, so Kyra’s behind this,” Sarah said stiffly. The pieces of the puzzle flew quickly together and made sickening sense to her. No wonder Eric knew so many things about her, including the tattered condition of Yowler’s poor ear! She shuddered to think of what other information Kyra might have given him about personal things that were none of his business. Did he know which deodorant she used? What brand of toothpaste? Did he know that she broke out in hives whenever she ate chocolate? Did he know that ever since she and Rosemary had moved to Pine Crest, she had experienced nightmares so dreadful that she cried out in her sleep? I can’t bear it, she thought. Not this on top of everything else. How dare that horrid girl make my private life public!
She managed to keep her voice steady and said politely, “No, thank you. I appreciate being asked, but I don’t want to tell fortunes.”
“Come on, be a sport!” He said it in a way that implied he seemed to think she wanted to be coaxed. “Think what a great way this will be for you to meet people. By the time the evening’s over, you’ll know everybody in town.”
“I don’t want to do it,” Sarah repeated. “Especially not if it involves Kyra. And as for knowing everybody in Pine Crest, that doesn’t really matter. I’m not going to spend my life here, it’s just for one year. Now, please, excuse me, but I’ve got to get a move on. If I don’t get going, I’ll be late for P.E.”
She took off down the hall so fast that she was almost running, half expecting to feel a restraining hand on her sleeve or to hear Eric calling her name as he hurried after her. It was not until she was almost at the end of the hall that she realized she hadn’t gotten her gym clothes out of her locker. She briefly considered going back for them and decided against it. Eric had seemed so self-confident that she might well find him still standing there, waiting for her to return to say she’d changed her mind.
She would tell the coach she had forgotten that her gym clothes were in the laundry, accept a demerit, and chalk up one more victory to Kyra. At least, she told herself with some satisfaction, she had the comfort of knowing that she had handled an awkward situation with dignity. Thank goodness it had not turned out to be “Be Kind to New Students Week” after all.
“You shouldn’t have asked her!” Kyra exclaimed. “It’s not like you had to. If you were that hard up for a fortune-teller, you could have asked me! I would have been glad to do it.”
“You’re a junior,” Eric said. “The carnival’s a senior-class project. Juniors aren’t allowed to participate, except to help with the promotion.”
They were standing in the school entrance hall, just to the left of the open doorway through which the entire student body was trying to cram itself at once. Kyra was acutely aware of the picture they made together, with Eric, as tall and blond as the hero in a romance novel, and she, small, snub-nosed, and freckled, with a head of orange curls that came barely to the level of his shoulder. She was conscious, too, of the lack of curious glances from the students streaming past them. Everybody was so used to seeing the two of them together that nobody took it for anything more than a platonic friendship that dated back to preschool days when their mothers, who had been best friends since high school, had traded them back and forth as if they were cousins.
“So what if I’m a junior?” she asked, keeping the tone light. “That didn’t stop you from asking me to man the walkie-talkie.”
“That’s different,” Eric said. “Nobody would have known you were doing it. And even if you were a senior, you’re just not the type to play a Gypsy. Gypsies are dark and mysterious, not red-haired pixies.”
“What’s so mysterious about Sarah?” Kyra demanded. “It’s not like she comes from some weird place like Romania. Ventura is a California beach town full of stuck-up weirdos who call their parents by their first names and listen to recordings of people beating drums and chanting.”
“People around here don’t know where she’s from,” Eric reminded her. “Her name sounds foreign and exotic, and she looks like a Gypsy with that long black hair and those bedroom eyes.”
“Why not use Debbie Rice?” Kyra suggested. “She’s got dark hair, and her eyes are as bedroomy as you can get. On top of that, she’s president of the Drama Club, so she ought to be able to pull it off.”
“I don’t want Debbie,” Eric said stubbornly. “I want the Zoltanne girl. Doesn’t your dad hang around for student conferences on Thursdays? Let’s see if we can catch him before he takes off.”
“What do you want from my father?” Kyra asked in surprise. “You can’t think Dad has any influence over Sarah!”
“He might. He’s used to having people do what he tells them. And after all, he’s on the way to becoming her stepfather.”
“Don’t count on it!” Kyra snapped. “It’s a middle-age fling, that’s all! Besides, the first thing Dad will ask us is if Mr. Prue’s okayed it. Almost everybody on the school board is on the governing board of the church, and you know how they feel about anything that smacks of the occult. It was hard enough to convince them just to let us have a spook house.”
“Gypsies aren’t occult,” Eric said. “They’re a bunch of beggars who look at the lines in people’s hands and make up stories about them. Besides, we don’t have to tell him what sort of booth it will be. We’ll just say we’d like to have Sarah on the Carnival Committee and we need his help in convincing her. Come on, Carrot Top, let’s go have a talk with him. We need that carnival money to finance the prom.”
“I probably won’t even get to the prom,” Kyra said. “Juniors can’t go unless they’re dating seniors.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if a senior asked you,” Eric told her. “Stranger things have been known to happen.” He flashed her his white-gold grin, and a dimple appeared in one cheek, giving him the look of a mischievous ten-year-old.
As always, Kyra felt herself melting.
“All right, I’ll go with you to talk to him,” she said reluctantly. “I warn you, though, it’s not going to do any good. Sarah hates my father as much as I hate Rosemary. My dad doesn’t have any pull with her at all.”
THE HOUSE THEY HAD rented on Windsor Street was a small, one-story stucco structure with blue wooden trim. The front yard was almost totally devoid of grass because a huge oak tree had kept it shaded throughout the summer. Now the tree was losing its leaves, and sunlight slipped between its branches to fall in erratic patterns on the ground below, mottling the surface with patches of light and shadow.
Her mother had raked that day, Sarah noted as she crossed the yard to the house. It was probably as good a way for her to keep busy as any. In Ventura they had lived in a garden apartment. The landlord had been responsible for keeping the grounds up. But there, of course, her mother had held a full-time job and had not had any time to devote to yard work
Yowler was perched on the doorstep, slit-eyed and glaring, looking like a displaced alien. When Sarah opened the door, he continued to crouch there, defiantly expressing his lack of interest, until the very last moment before the door closed, when he slid in after her and disappeared behind an armchair.
Sarah sympathized totally. She, too, had a feeling that she should have rung the bell before entering. Although they had been living here for over two months, she still felt like a visitor in somebody else’s home. Her mother had made an effort to lay claim to the place by painting the walls the same shade of eggshell white as those in their last apartment, so that their furniture was set against a familiar backdrop, but the proportions of the rooms were so different that nothing seemed to fit or to look like it belonged there.
The house smelled of chocolate. Sarah crossed the living room to the kitchen, where her mother was removing a pan of brownies from the oven.
Rosemary Zoltanne glanced up with a welcoming smile. She was dressed in jeans and a bright red sweatshirt. Her soft, pale hair was combed back from her face and tied with a scarlet ribbon, giving her the look of a child at a Christmas party.
“Hi, honey,” she said. “I didn’t hear you come in. Did you stop to admire the job I did on the yard?”
“You must have used a vacuum cleaner,” Sarah said. “What’s with the brownies? You know I don’t eat chocolate, and we’ve still got half the spice cake you baked on Tuesday.”
“I wanted to make something special for the weekend,” her mother said, straightening up and setting the pan on the counter. “You can eat the cake while Kyra and Brian eat brownies. Something for everybody, right?”
“They’re coming again? We just got rid of them!”
“I don’t like to hear you talk like that,” Rosemary said. “They probably won’t sleep over, since they stayed both nights last weekend, but I’m sure they’ll be spending some time here. Ted wants to see as much of his kids as he can.” She paused and then deliberately switched gears. “So, how was school?” she asked brightly. “Did you talk to the sponsor of the Drama Club?”
“I told you the club’s filled up. They don’t have room for another member.”
“I’m sure they’ll make an exception for you,” Rosemary said. “Especially when they find out how active you were in the drama club at your old school. Ted will talk to the sponsor if you feel awkward doing it.”
“I don’t want Ted pulling strings for me,” Sarah said. “I put my name on the sign-up sheet and got turned down. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of the story.”
Leaving her mother to continue her culinary activities, she carried her books down the hall to her bedroom. Although it was close to the size of her room in Ventura, it seemed much smaller because of the extra bed. Her beloved, double-size waterbed was stored in the garage along with most of their other belongings until such time as her mother and Ted got married and bought a house. “After we’re married” was her mother’s favorite phrase these days, as though the date of the wedding were firmly set. Until it took place—if indeed it ever did take place—and the “nice big house with four bedrooms” became a reality, the tiny room off the kitchen was allocated to Brian, and Sarah’s room was also Kyra’s on weekends or whenever else she decided she wanted to sleep over. Even on nights when Sarah had the room to herself, it didn’t feel like it belonged to her, with Kyra’s bed positioned across from her own and two whole drawers of the bureau assigned to Kyra, even though she kept nothing there except pajamas.
Sarah shut the door and dumped her books on her desk, pausing as she did so to switch on her CD player. As the soothing strains of woodwinds and wind chimes filled the room, she threw herself down on her bed and closed her eyes. The remainder of the afternoon stretched drearily before her. Back home she had been involved in so many activities, what with club meetings, play rehearsals, beach parties, and trips to the mall, that the days had never been long enough to get everything done. Here she had nothing to occupy her time except schoolwork, which took a minimum of effort, since Pine Crest High was not as advanced as her school in California. Perhaps she should look into finding an after-school job, she thought. It would be nice to have spending money of her own again. Now that Rosemary wasn’t working, cash was tight, and when Ted had offered to give Sarah an allowance, she had refused it. There was no way she was going to be indebted to Ted Thompson for anything more than she absolutely had to be.
The irony of it was that if she had played her cards right, she could have kept her mother from meeting him. The complaint of a sore throat or even a bad headache would have done it. All she’d have had to do was say she didn’t feel well and Rosemary never would have left her to go to San Francisco. Still, there was no way she could have known what would happen there. For years her career-oriented mother had been attending educational conferences in the summer while Sarah was at camp or staying with one of her girlfriends, and she always had come home stimulated and revitalized, ready to plunge back into her teaching schedule in the fall.
How could Sarah have guessed that this time it would be different? She couldn’t have, of course, and yet there had been something—she couldn’t exactly call it a premonition, but something.
That “something” had caused her to wonder for a moment about her eyesight. It had happened the evening before her mother’s departure when she had passed by the open door of Rosemary’s bedroom and seen a flash of yellow in the mirror over the dresser. The room had been dimly illuminated by light from the hallway, and when Sarah stepped back to peer into it, she saw nothing more than the shadowy reflection of herself—a tall, slim girl with a mane of black hair, who was dressed in a white, sleeveless T-shirt and hot pink jogging shorts.
It was odd, she had thought, and she felt disconcerted but not particularly concerned. She hoped this didn’t mean she was going to need glasses. She turned to start back down the hall, and saw it again—at the edge of her line of vision, a glimpse of something yellow. This time she entered the room and turned on the overhead lights, only to find nothing yellow anywhere in sight. It wasn’t until her mother returned from the conference and Sarah was chatting with her while she unpacked that she saw the full-skirted, sunflower-colored cocktail dress.
“Is that new?” she asked.
“I bought it in San Francisco,” Rosemary told her. “I didn’t pack the right clothes. I forgot to take something dressy to go out to dinner in.”
“They wouldn’t let you into a restaurant in a suit?”
“Sure, but who wants to go dancing in something tailored?” Her mother’s voice held a lilt that was almost girlish.
“Dancing?” Sarah said slowly. “You went out dancing?”
“There are all sorts of wonderful dance clubs in San Francisco.” Rosemary was facing the closet as she spoke, and the statement was tossed back over her shoulder in a careless manner, but when she turned from placing the yellow dress on a padded hanger, her face had a glow that made the words seem magical.
“Who was this guy?” Sarah asked her.
“His name’s Ted Thompson.”
“An English teacher?”
“Who else would a person meet at a convention of English teachers?”
“Available?”
She expected her mother to say, “Of course,” but instead she paused and then said hesitantly, “Well, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“He and his wife are separated. They’re in the process of getting a divorce, but it hasn’t come through yet. He’s a very special man, so attractive, and unbelievably thoughtful. He said he’d call tonight to make sure I got home all right, can you imagine?”
As if on cue the telephone rang.
“I’ll get it!” Rosemary exclaimed, and went dashing to answer it. “Oh, hi!” Sarah heard her trill. “Yes, fine, it was a very smooth flight! … Nothing much, in fact we’ve just finished dinner. … We—my daughter and I—who did you think I meant? … No, I’m afraid I’ve had more than my quota of seafood in the past few evenings. Not that I didn’t love it, but Hamburger Helper is more the norm around here.” A pause and a giggle. “Yes, it was, wasn’t it?” A longer pause. “Me too. … Yes, really. I can’t say it now, but I do. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then. Sleep well, Ted.”
The receiver clicked back in place, and Rosemary sighed.
After that Ted Thompson’s phone calls came on the dot of eight every evening. Then he arrived in person, and that was a shock. Far from the gorgeous, charming type that Sarah had been anticipating, her mother’s “boyfriend” (Rosemary’s term, not Sarah’s) turned out to be a humorless, square-jawed man with horn-rimmed glasses and a head of rust-colored hair that was streaked with gray. Sarah could not imagine what Rosemary saw in him. Widowed for over twelve years, her mother had attracted plenty of men, and if she had wanted to remarry she could certainly have done so. Instead she had never shown the slightest interest in anything more than casual dating and had seemed quite content to devote herself to motherhood and her teaching career.
When Ted arrived in her life, that sensible, down-to-earth Rosemary vanished, to be replaced by a starry-eyed stranger who made senseless decisions. Although Ted started out sleeping on the sofa in the living room, by his third night there he was sharing the master bedroom. By the time the long week was over, it had already been decided that Rosemary would give notice at the school where she taught and that she and Sarah would follow him back to Missouri.
Now, as she often did, Sarah blocked that memory from her consciousness and let herself pretend that the move hadn’t happened. It had all been a silly dream, and if she didn’t accept its validity, she was bound to wake up and find herself still in California, where the scents of summer lingered in the damp salt air of October and crimson hibiscus bloomed in front of their garden apartment. The cries of gulls would replace the harsh caws of crows. And the clouds would be puffy and white and blow in off the ocean like cotton balls, not dull, striated layers spread out like thin sheets of plastic against the sky behind Garrett Hill, whose pine-covered slopes gave the town of Pine Crest its name. When the phone rang, the calls would not be from Sheila, Ted’s soon-to-be ex-wife, whining about how lonely she was or begging Ted to come over and repair her dishwasher, but from longtime pals like Gillian or Ryan or Lindsay—or from Jon, who had been on the verge of being more than a “friend”—each one wanting to know if Sarah was free to party or to go to the beach or a movie or just out cruising.
She was zipping along the beach road in the backseat of Ryan’s Jeep, with her head tipped back against Jon’s shoulder, roaring with laughter at one of his crazy surfing stories, when a knock at the bedroom door caused her eyes to fly open. To her surprise she discovered the afternoon was over. The CD had long since played itself out, and the room was heavy with silence and bathed in the glow of softening twilight.
“Sarah?” The voice was her mother’s. “Will you come out here, please? There’s something Ted and I feel we need to discuss with you.”
“Okay,” Sarah called back. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Her voice was foggy with sleep, and her limbs felt leaden. She realized that she must have been sleeping like a dead thing if Ted had managed to come home and she hadn’t heard him. He always made a point of parking at the side of the house instead of in the driveway next to her mother’s car, under the ridiculous assumption that if his own car wasn’t visible from the street, nobody would suspect that he spent his nights there.
When she dragged herself to her feet and went out to the living room, she found Ted on the sofa munching brownies, with a worried-looking Rosemary seated next to him. It was obvious to Sarah that they had been discussing her, for the moment she appeared, her mother said, “Don’t tell me you’ve been sleeping!”
“All right, I won’t tell you,” Sarah said. “I’ll let you guess.”
“Why? Are you sick?”
“Since when is napping a crime?”
“Excessive sleeping is a sign of depression,” Ted said in the classroom-lecture voice that Sarah found so irritating.
“It’s also a sign of boredom,” Rosemary said, frowning. “Honey, it isn’t healthy for you to spend all your afternoons closed up in your bedroom. You’ve got to start getting involved in some after-school activities.”
“I was thinking of maybe getting a job,” Sarah told her.
“I’d rather see you out doing things with friends.”
“What friends?” Sarah snapped. “All my friends are in California!”
“There are plenty of nice kids here who could be your friends,” Ted said. “Kyra stopped by my office today with Eric Garrett. He told me he asked you to help with the Halloween Carnival and you turned him down.”
“Why would he come to you about that?” asked Sarah.
“He wanted my help in getting you to change your mind.”
“Well, you can’t,” Sarah said. “I don’t want to run the fortune-telling booth.”
“Are they going to have a fortune-teller?” Ted seemed surprised. “I would have expected the school board to have raised an objection.”
“Well, I think it sounds like fun,” Rosemary said with enthusiasm. “Sarah, with your background in drama you could do that beautifully! And I know just the thing you can use for a crystal ball!”
“I don’t want to be in the carnival,” Sarah said stubbornly. “Is this what you called me out here for, or is dinner ready?”
“Your mother and I are going out to dinner,” Ted said. “It’s the four-month anniversary of the day we met.”
“You’re more than welcome to come with us—” Rosemary began.
“Another time,” Ted interrupted. “Tonight is a special occasion, a celebration for the two of us. There’s plenty of lasagna left over from last night’s dinner.”
“That’s fine with me,” Sarah said sarcastically. “It would be a shame to let dried-out lasagna go to waste.”
She turned on her heel and started back to her bedroom.
“Sarah—” her mother called after her.
“Rosie, don’t,” Ted said, cutting off the plea. “You know she’s only trying to wreck our evening. You mustn’t keep letting yourself be manipulated this way. Our kids have got to adjust to the fact that our relationship is important to us and that we have to be allowed time alone together to cement it.”
You’re the one who’s wrecked things, Sarah longed to fire back at him. Rosemary and I had a great life back in Ventura!
She choked back the words, however, and kept on walking, knowing that nothing she said would have any effect on him and not wanting to upset her mother any more than she had already. Once back in her bedroom, she left the door open to prevent any accusation from Ted that she was in there sulking. Turning on the light and taking a seat at the desk, she set about doing her algebra assignment.
She could hear her mother and Ted getting ready for their night on the town, as if eating at a Pine Crest restaurant were something to get excited about. The toilet flushed, water gushed through the rattling shower pipes, and her mother’s hair dryer buzzed in harmony with Ted’s electric razor. Finally the preparations were completed, and Sarah could hear the two of them arguing out in the living room about whether or not her mother should come back to say good night and tell her how many minutes to microwave the lasagna. As always, Ted won. The front door shut with a firm click, and a few minutes later Ted’s car roared to life outside her window.
When the sound of the engine was finally lost in the distance, Sarah felt a release from tension that left her as limp and exhausted as if the stress had been physical. She considered heating up dinner—it was past seven-thirty—but she didn’t feel hungry enough to make the effort.
By now she had finished the algebra, and with no other class to study for except American history, which she liked to postpone until bedtime so that she could read herself to sleep, she was faced with an evening as empty as the afternoon had been. The only thing she could think of to do was watch television, which she seldom did these days since the TV set was in the living room and it made her uncomfortable to sit there with her mother and Ted cuddling on the sofa like teenagers.
Now, with the house to herself, Sarah switched on the set and was flicking the dial in an aimless exploration of channels when the telephone rang. She was tempted not to answer it since she was sure it wasn’t for her, but when it kept on ringing persistently, she gave in.
“Hello,” she said, her eyes on the flickering TV screen.
“Is that you, Sarah?” The voice was all too familiar.
“Your father’s not here,” Sarah said. “They’re out for the evening.”
“I’m not calling Dad,” Kyra said. “You’re the one I want to talk to. Eric says the reason you won’t do the fortune-telling thing is because I’m part of it.”
“He told you right,” Sarah said. “That shouldn’t surprise you. You and I aren’t exactly the best of friends.”
“No, we’re not,” Kyra conceded. “But Eric and I are. We’ve known each other all our lives, and he’s a cool guy, and I don’t want to let him down. As for you and me, like it or not, we’re stuck with the disgusting fact that our parents are having a—a—” She paused, and then with obvious distaste forced out the word—“relationship. So what do you say we try to make the best of it?”
For a moment Sarah was too surprised to respond. This overture was the last thing she had anticipated, and she couldn’t imagine what lay behind it.
“It’ll get your mom off your back,” Kyra continued hurriedly, as if she was afraid Sarah was going to hang up on her. “She keeps bugging you about getting involved in school activities. I bet this would make her happy.”
“What do you care if my mother’s happy?” Sarah asked suspiciously.
“I don’t,” Kyra said. “But you do. And you know as well as I do that she’s not going to find much happiness here.”
There was a moment of silence as Sarah struggled unsuccessfully to come up with an appropriate retort. As much as she hated to admit it, Kyra was right. Rosemary, who was obviously a victim of middle-age insanity, had sacrificed the career and friends of a lifetime to follow her heart to a little town filled with narrow-minded bigots and take on the dubious role of a married man’s “lady friend.” Even if Ted did marry her, she would never be accepted here. The most she ever could hope for would be simply to be tolerated.
As that thought took form in her mind, Sarah found herself struck by a feeling of such abrupt and intense foreboding that it was as if a black void had opened directly in front of her. In that instant of dislocation, as she fought to maintain her equilibrium and keep from tumbling headfirst into the pit of darkness, a voice seemed to shout directly into her right ear.
“Guilty as charged!” it bellowed. “Away to Gallows Hill!”
“No!” Sarah heard herself whimper. “I didn’t really mean it!”
“Poor little Betty,” another voice said more gently. “The child is too frightened to remember.”
Betty does remember, and she’s sorry! She never should have done it!
For an instant the chasm gaped wider, and then the illusion was gone as if it had never been. With a gasp of relief, Sarah found herself safe again in the living room, where the only activity was on the television screen and the only voice was Kyra’s, tinny and tiny at the other end of the phone line.
“You didn’t mean what?” it was asking. “Does that mean you’ve changed your mind?”