In the Blink of an Eye (3 page)

Okay, well, maybe she's in the tub.

But that's her nighttime ritual. Iris is a creature of habit. She once told Julia that a long bath always relaxes her before going to bed. It wouldn't make sense for her to take one first thing in the morning. And she can't be taking a shower. There's no nozzle above the old claw-foot bathtub.

“Iris?” Julia calls after a few more disconcerting moments of silence, even as she realizes that Iris probably won't hear her because the windows are closed.

Wouldn't Iris have opened them this morning?

Wouldn't she have raised the shades?

“Iris?” Julia's voice is higher pitched than usual, taking on an edge of panic.

Still no answer.

Julia hesitates, her hand pressed against her mouth as she ponders the situation. She glances over at Pilar's house next door, but the older woman is nowhere to be seen.

What should I do?

I can't just leave. Something is wrong. I can feel it.

Her trepidation mounting, Julia bends to take a key from beneath the rubber doormat at her feet.

T
HE PHONE RINGS
just as Paine is stepping out of the shower. Grabbing a towel, he hurriedly rubs it over his body as he strides across the hall into the bedroom to answer it. He glances at the clock on the bedside table as he reaches for the receiver. It's only seven-thirty. Who would be calling at this hour of the morning?

“Hello?”

“Is this Paine Landry?”

“Yes . . .”

The caller's voice is female, and vaguely familiar. It takes only a moment for him to place it. When he does, his breath catches in his throat.

Until now, he's forgotten about Dulcie waking him in the wee hours. But the unsettling incident instantly rushes back at him, along with the disturbing memory of another phone call three years ago—a call that began just as this one is beginning.

“This is Julia Garrity. From Lily Dale—”

“I know where you're from,” he says tersely, sitting on the rumpled bed, the towel falling to his feet unheeded.

I know where you're from . . . and I know why you're calling.

“
I—I don't know how to say this. I'm so sorry to have to be the one to tell you . . .”

He waits.

He prepares.

He knows what she's going to say; yet still, when he hears the words, utter disbelief swoops in to claim him, momentarily stealing his breath, his voice.

“Paine, it's Iris. I found her this morning. She's dead.”

F
IVE MINUTES LATER,
Julia hangs up the telephone. Her legs nearly giving way beneath her, she sinks shakily into the chair beside the desk in Iris's small second-floor study and buries her tear-swollen face in her hands.

It's been more than two hours, but she can't stop reliving what happened. Describing it in the stilted conversation with Paine Landry didn't help to calm her frazzled nerves.

Again, she envisions the gruesome scene she discovered in the bathroom down the hall.

Iris, facedown in the full bathtub, her naked body dangling over the edge, her legs sprawled across the tile floor behind her.

Julia knew instinctively that she was dead even before she touched her hard flesh.

A freak accident, the paramedics said. She must have slipped on the wet tile as she was getting into her bath. She fell forward, hit her head on the edge of the tub. Unconscious, she toppled face-first into the water and drowned.

A freak accident.

Drowned.

Just like Kristin.

Julia's hands flutter to her lap, then back to her face. She's trembling, her entire body quaking at the unimaginable horror of Iris's death, and Kristin's death before hers.

Her breath is shallow, audible. The only other sound in the room—in the house—is the antique clock ticking loudly in the parlor at the foot of the stairs.

The old house is empty now, after the flurry of activity that kicked into motion when Julia ran shrieking from the house.

It was Pilar who dialed 911.

And it was Pilar who accompanied Iris—Iris's
body,
Julia amends—when they took her away. Somebody had to go, and somebody had to stay behind, to call Paine and tell him that his daughter's grandmother was dead.

Of course Julia volunteered. Pilar, after all, is a virtual stranger to Paine and Dulcie.

So is Julia, really. She only met them once, when they came east for Kristin's memorial service. They were all so caught up in raw grief during the week they were here that she barely remembers speaking to Paine, who spent most of the time silent, remote, lost in anguish.

But Dulcie . . .

Julia bonded with Dulcie during those muggy, gray August days.

Her heart tightens at the memory of Kristin's beautiful child—a child who was blinded as a toddler after a harrowing bout with meningitis.

So much tragedy in one family.

And now this.

The phone call was as difficult as she had expected. His voice tight with emotion, Paine promised Julia that he and Dulcie would be here as soon as they could. When he asked her about funeral arrangements, Julia pointed out that he would most likely be in charge of that. After all, Dulcie is Iris's only descendent, aside from her stepson Edward. As far as Julia knows, Iris hasn't seen him in the three years since he showed up, stone-faced and distant, for Kristin's memorial service.

Suddenly weary, Julia leans her head against the high, upholstered back of the chair, her eyes closed.

Then she feels it.

Startled, she picks up her head, poised, listening.

She isn't alone in the house.

There is nothing to hear. No rush of sound, no distorted snatch of a voice.

Yet the presence is here, around her, tangible.

Her eyes still closed, she concentrates, struggling to make contact.

Who are you?

Iris?

Kristin?

Who is it? Who's here?

The energy is gone as swiftly as it made itself known.

Shaken, Julia rises from the chair and makes her way quickly down the stairs and out the front door, instinctively needing to get away—before it comes back.

Chapter Two

“
H
OW MUCH FURTHER,
Daddy?”

Paine glances at Dulcie, curled up in the backseat of the rental car, a braille storybook open on her lap. He notices that her pigtails are uneven. He'd tried to do them as her baby-sitter back home does, but a big loop of hair is sticking out near her ear.

“Only a few miles now, I think,” Paine tells her as they leave behind the bustling stretch of Route 60 in Fredonia, a small college town perched in the southwesternmost corner of New York. This is where they got off the interstate, and even the unremarkable strip-mall sprawl is a welcome change from hundreds of miles of freeway driving.

Only nobody calls it the “freeway” here in the East, Paine reminds himself. Yesterday, a service station attendant and a motel desk clerk corrected him about that. Here, it's called the thruway.

“Okay, tell me everything you see, Daddy.”

He smiles at Dulcie's familiar command—smiles at her innate bossiness, inherited from her mother, and at her insatiable thirst to know what's going on around her.

When she was younger, she was satisfied with broad descriptions: there's a red barn or the sky is blue with a few white clouds. Now, at six, she wants him to paint verbal pictures that are as detailed as possible. How big is the barn? Does it have windows? How many windows? Are there horses and cows? How many clouds, Daddy? What are their shapes?

When he isn't with her, he finds himself noticing the most intricate aspects of ordinary things, just as he does when he's being her eyes. Sometimes he catches himself scrutinizing strangers: subconsciously counting the rings on a woman's fingers or noticing the color of the stripes in a man's tie.

“Daddy?”

He smiles, clears his throat. “We're heading south, and we just passed through what looks like the last busy intersection on the fast-food strip—Arby's, McDonald's, Wendy's.”

“Wal-Mart, too?”

“How'd you know that?”

“Because there's always a Wal-Mart. In every town we've stopped in, wherever that other stuff is, there's a Wal-Mart”

Nothing escapes Dulcie's attention. Nothing. He smiles, thinking, as always, that she's an incredible kid. So much like her mother.

Oh, Kristin. If only you could see her. . .

If only he could believe that she could, that her life didn't end that traumatic day three years ago. That the essence of the woman he cherished still exists somewhere. That she's with him and their daughter, and always will be.

But that's religious crap. Kristin never bought into it, and neither does he. As far as he's concerned, when you're dead, you're dead. Gone. Buried. Forever.

“Go on, Daddy.” In the rearview mirror, he sees Dulcie settling back, her face tilted toward the window as though she's looking through it.

He swallows the bitter grief swelling from his gut forcing an upbeat tone into his voice. “Now the road is two lanes instead of four, and it's opening up more. I see hills ahead—we're climbing. And there's farmland—lots of corn, and it's as high as an elephant's eye.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind, Dulc.” He smiles faintly to himself.

The corn is as high as an elephant's eye. . .

Lyrics from the song “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical
Oklahoma!
Paine performed it in summer stock at Chautauqua a full decade ago when he first met Kristin. He played Curly. Kristin was Ado Annie.

“Why am I always cast as the slut?” she only half jokingly asked the director at that point, having previously played Aldonza in
Man of La Mancha
and Mary Magdalene in
Jesus Christ, Superstar.

“What else, Daddy?”

Dulcie's voice launches him back to the present.

“There are grape vineyards”—he glances from left to right—“and produce stands and two-story frame houses. Some of them have barns.”

“Nice houses?”

“Some are,” he says, looking around as he gently presses the brake. “Some of them have nice yards with wooden tubs of flowers and flags and picnic tables. But a few are kind of shabby, with rusty piles of junk everywhere.”

“Why are we slowing down?”

“Because there's a semi in front of us that's only going about thirty miles an hour, and I can't see around it to pass on this slope.”

He's a cautious driver. Kristin wasn't. Being in her passenger seat was like riding the Scrambler at the county fair when he was a kid. You just closed your eyes and held on for dear life while you were jerked this way and that with nonchalant Kristin at the wheel.

She was so incredibly reckless on the road that he braced himself whenever she was late coming home from her late-night waitressing job in Santa Monica. Terrible images would run through his head: what it would be like to open the door to a somber-faced police officer who had come to tell him she'd been in a fatal wreck.

How many times did he imagine the blow of losing her before it really happened?

But when her time came, weeks after her twenty-sixth birthday, it wasn't a car accident. That was as shocking for him to absorb as her death itself.

He had never imagined her drowning.

Even now, three years later, he can't quite accept it. Whenever the unwelcome, horrific visions barge into his head—
Kristin, panicking, arms thrashing, going under, opening her mouth to breathe, inhaling water, no air, water, water, suffocating
—he shoves them away. The only way he can deal with what had happened is to focus on the big picture—
Kristin is gone forever
—and ignore the details.

Details.

Back to Dulcie.

“There are trees all around us, on both sides of the road, Dulc,” he says, forcing his gaze to the blur of scenery as the truck in front of him picks up speed at the crest of the hill. He accelerates, glancing in the rearview mirror to see if there's traffic behind him. Nothing. He's not used to this kind of driving. Two-lane road, rural setting, no congestion . . . what a pleasure after so many years on the feverish L.A. freeways.

He rises a bit in the seat to glimpse his own reflection in the mirror and barely recognizes the man there. His unruly dark hair needs a trim. His blue eyes are edged by a faint network of wrinkles that aren't there from smiling. What Kristin used to call his “pretty boy” face is shadowed with under-eye trenches and sparse patches of stubble—he hasn't bothered to shave in the ten days since he got the phone call about Iris's death. Maybe he won't shave until he goes home.

Nah.

Paine never could grow a beard. He tried when he landed the role of Tevye back in college. It came in laughably patchy, and after a few weeks, the director, Dr. Netzer, ordered him in front of the entire cast to shave it. Netzer wanted him to wear a fake beard but still smarting from the humiliation, Paine insisted on playing Tevye bare-faced. It wasn't his finest performance.

Dulcie's voice interrupts his thoughts again. “What kind of trees are there, Daddy? Palm trees?”

He smiles. She is truly a child of southern California, her sun-streaked long hair and golden skin testimony to long days at the beach. But those days are over for awhile.

Dulcie's been shivering ever since they left the blistering heartland heat and crossed into Pennsylvania earlier this morning.

Though he was born and raised in California, Paine did spend that one summer at the conservatory theater at nearby Chautauqua, so he wasn't necessarily expecting to be greeted in western New York with balmy temperatures and blue skies. Yet nor did he recall that late June in the eastern Great Lakes region can feel more like April, maybe March. The sky is weighted with dense gray clouds and the temperature can't be above the mid-fifties.

“Definitely no palm trees here,” he tells Dulcie. “There are maples, and oaks, and pines, and I don't know what else—you know I'm not good at trees.”

She grins. “You're not good at flowers, either. Not like Margaret.”

Margaret is the woman back in L.A. who baby-sits for Dulcie while he's working one of his three jobs. In between auditions, he bartends for a Beverly Hills caterer, he takes classified ads for the L.A.
Weekly
, and he teaches a night class in television commercial acting at a community college. Oh, and once in a great while, he actually acts, too. Sometimes. Just in commercials and industrials. His greatest claim to fame is being Ben Affleck's stand-in for a few weeks right after Dulcie was born.

Money has always been tight. Sometimes so tight that he can't afford to pay Margaret. But she always understands. Her oldest son is an actor, too. He wasn't always as successful as he is now, playing a supporting role in a new Broadway musical.

He glances at Dulcie again in the rearview mirror and sees that her grin has given way to a wistful expression.

“Thinking about Margaret?” he asks.

“I miss her already. She was coming to New York, too. Why couldn't she drive with us instead of flying?”

“For one thing, she's uncomfortable in the car because of her arthritis. And for another, she's going to the opposite end of the state.”

He's explained this before, even showing her on the map—tiny Lily Dale in the lower left corner of New York State and sprawling New York City on the lower right—with more than four hundred miles in between them, according to the scale.

He goes on patiently, “Margaret's going to visit her son and her grandchildren for a few weeks. After the memorial service, and when we're done taking care of Gram's house, we'll go back home and so will she.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.” He doesn't intend to stay here longer than necessary, even though he doesn't start teaching his class again until late in August, and the caterer and the L.A.
Weekly
are flexible about letting him take time off.

“Knock, knock, Daddy.”

He grins, glad to be off the subject. Dulcie is into knock, knocks lately. He's heard all of hers a zillion times, but he always manages to react with hilarity. He's an actor, after all. “Who's there?”

“Ach.”

“Ach who?”

“Gesundheit!”

They laugh together.

Then Dulcie asks, “What does ‘taking care of Gram's house' mean?”

Paine purses his lips, glad she can't see his face. “I'm not sure, Dulcie. Her lawyer says she's left the place to you. But we can't live there.”

“I don't want to.” She pauses. “Why can't we?”

He takes a deep breath. “It's complicated.”

He knows Dulcie has no memory of their last trip to Lily Dale, for her mother's funeral. How can he explain to a six-year-old, without scaring the hell out of her, that this isn't a regular town? Better not to try. At least, not now.

“Hey, there's a sign,” he says instead. “Lily Dale, Next Right. We're almost there. Bet you're ready to get out of this car.”

“Uh-huh.”

He looks over his shoulder at her and sees her lower lip trembling. “What's wrong, Dulcie?”

“I want to go home.”

“Dulc—”

“I just want to go home, Daddy. Please.”

“We will, Dulcie. Just as soon as we—”

“I don't want to be here. This is where Mommy died. And Gram, too. It's a bad place, Daddy. Please. I'm scared.”

With a sick feeling in his stomach, he pulls over to the shoulder and puts the car into park. Then he leans into the backseat and wraps his daughter in his arms.

“It'll be okay, Dulcie. Maybe being here will make you feel closer to Mommy. And to Gram. They didn't just die here. They lived here.”

She says nothing, her slender little body quaking in his embrace.

“Listen, Dulcie, this is where Mommy spent her summers, growing up. She used to talk about how beautiful it is here.”

That's a stretch.
Beautiful
is not a word Kristin used to describe Lily Dale.

Paine goes on, “You were too young to remember being here the last time.”

He doesn't remember much of that trip either. He was too paralyzed by sorrow to grasp anything. This visit is different. He truly liked Iris, but her sudden death hasn't ripped his heart out or left a gaping hole in his life. This time, unlike last, he's capable of coping.

“We've got to do this, Dulcie,” he says quietly. “You and me, together. For Gram. And for Mommy.”

She doesn't reply. When he looks at her he sees that her jaw is set resolutely.

He puts the car into drive again and pulls back onto the highway. Moments later, coming into the run-down farming town of Cassadaga, he makes a right-hand turn onto Dale Drive. There's another sign.

LILY DALE, 1 MILE.

Okay. Almost there. Then everything will be better.

After all, it's been an endless trip. They left home a full week ago today, Thursday. His old Honda has 125,000 miles on it already, so he splurged on a car rental. Maybe he'll trade in this midsize sedan for a truck to drive back—if Iris's house has anything worth bringing with them. From what he vaguely remembers, he doubts it. Iris was a self-proclaimed pack rat and she loved old things.

Paine doesn't love old things, and the last thing he needs is to cart a load of junk cross-country. But you never know. Maybe there are valuable antiques. Or maybe Dulcie will want to keep some of it. She's just a kid, but it's technically her inheritance—her last link to Kristin and Iris.

He recalls a conversation he and Iris once had, about the estate she inherited when Anson died. There wasn't as much money as she expected. Apparently, he'd made some poor investments in the years since he'd become a successful medium, and there was far more debt than Iris realized. When she settled his affairs, in the end, all that was left was the house—and the insubstantial royalty money from his books, which still comes trickling in twice a year.