In the Blink of an Eye Page 10

  “It’s okay.”

  But it isn’t. Will she ever hear anyone mention the word bathtub again without being blindsided by a gruesome vision?

  She tells Paine, “Iris didn’t take showers.”

  “What about the people who lived here before? You can’t tell me that nobody in this town has ever heard of a shower.”

  The way he says it—this town—sends a fresh ripple of dislike rumbling through her. Ever since she connected with him at the restaurant, she’s sensed an air of contempt about him. He obviously doesn’t like it here. Whether that has to do with the old-fashioned, no-frills surroundings or with the issue of spiritualism isn’t clear—nor does it matter. Not to her.

  Lily Dale is her home.

  If he doesn’t like it here, he should leave.

  “Some of us actually do take showers,” she says icily. “I can’t speak for the Biddles.”

  “The Biddles?”

  “The family that owned the house before Iris did. You can ask them about it when you run into them. And you will,” she adds ominously. “This is a small town.”

  Meaning, he’d better watch his step. He can’t go around slinging veiled insults about the place and its people without the locals picking up on his disdain.

  He takes his own cup of coffee from the counter and sits down across the small wooden table. Apparently her warning has escaped him because he says, with the tone and expression of a classic skeptic, “So you’re a medium.”

  She nods stiffly.

  “Will it offend you if I say I don’t believe in that?”

  “You’re an actor, right?” she shoots back.

  He nods, looking bemused.

  “Will it offend you if I say I don’t believe in that?”

  “What I do is different, Julia.”

  “It’s your career. Mediumship is mine.” She looks moodily down at her coffee. She’s had better. Much better. He’s made it bitter. Too strong.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Surprised, she looks up from her cup, momentarily thinking he’s talking about the coffee.

  She isn’t expecting an apology about his skepticism.

  “I can’t help it,” he tells her. “I guess I’m just too practical. I never believe anything unless I can see it.”

  “Really? It’s a good thing Dulcie doesn’t think that way.”

  The second the words are out of her mouth she wishes she could take them back.

  Yet, strangely, he doesn’t seem insulted. In fact, he almost sounds impressed when he says, “Good point. But Dulcie’s cut from a different cloth than I am. Than Kristin, too. She’s more like . . . I don’t know. Just not like us,” he says quietly.

  Julia senses that he was about to say Dulcie is more like Iris. Something stopped him. Perhaps the fact that he doesn’t—didn’t, she corrects herself grimly—know Iris very well. She only visited them in California a handful of times. But Julia is aware that she was always writing letters to Dulcie, and sending gifts, and calling.

  “So Dulcie isn’t a born skeptic?” Julia asks Paine.”Does she believe in spirits?”

  “And Wild Things, and God, and fairies, and leprechauns. You name it,” he says with a smile.

  “How do you suppose that happened?” she asks dryly.

  “You got me. My father’s a levelheaded banker. My mother’s a pragmatic accountant. They weren’t big on whimsy. Santa Claus and the tooth fairy never came. We never went to church.”

  “So you were raised agnostic?”

  “Atheist,” he corrects. “I doubt any of Dulcie’s spirituality or other creative beliefs came through my bloodline. Must have been Kristin’s side.”

  “You realize that Iris wasn’t a medium, right?”

  “But she believed in them.”

  Julia nods. “Her husband was an incredibly gifted, world-famous spiritualist. But then, you must know that”

  “I do.”

  “And you think he was a fake?”

  Paine takes a sip of his coffee and makes a face. “It needs sugar.”

  “I don’t think that would help.”

  He smiles.

  So does she. Yet she asks again, “You think Anson Shuttleworth was a fake, Paine?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Julia. I don’t believe that people can communicate with the dead. I think there are a lot of people out there taking advantage of widows who are desperate to talk to their husbands, and parents who need to connect with lost children . . .”

  “You’re right, Paine.”

  He raises an eyebrow at her.

  “There are plenty of fakes. More than a hundred years ago, with the birth of spiritualism, con artists went to great lengths to trick people during seances. They still do. But there have always been legitimate mediums, too. People who choose to use their gift to help others—and to make a living. There are also lots of genuine mediums who never put their gift to use. They simply choose not to acknowledge it—just like Kristin.”

  “What?”

  “I said, there are fakes, but—”

  “No. What did you say about Kristin?”

  “That Kristin apparentiy chose not to acknowledge her gift?”

  “What gift?”

  It dawns on Julia then.

  He doesn’t know.

  Didn’t Kristin ever tell him?

  Perplexed, Julia thinks back to their childhood. To that Halloween night when Kristin saw something—someone—in the Biddle house.

  Could that have been the only clairvoyant experience she ever had?

  Julia finds that impossible to believe.

  But Kristin lived with this man for years.

  They had a child together.

  Why would she keep something like that from him?

  “Julia . . . ?” Paine is waiting, watching her.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just assumed that Kristin was . . .”

  “A medium? No. Like I said before, she was like me. She didn’t believe in any of that stuff.”

  Did he say that earlier? He must have. Julia hadn’t realized what he meant when he said Dulcie was different.

  Now the implication sinks in.

  Dulcie is different.

  Dulcie, quite possibly, has a gift.

  A gift she won’t know what to do with, unless somebody helps her. Somebody who understands. The way Grandma helped Julia.

  “I didn’t know that,” Julia murmurs, realizing Paine has stopped talking and is waiting for her to say something. “Kristin and I never really talked about it, so—you must have known that we never really had much contact as adults. I don’t know why I thought I knew anything about her.”

  “She was a hard person to know,” Paine says quietly. “Sometimes even I wonder how well I knew her.”

  Julia looks into his clouded eyes, wondering what he means by that.

  “Did Iris ever tell you why Kristin and I weren’t married, Julia?”

  “Iris? No, she never told me why.” Uncomfortable to be discussing something so intensely personal with a man she barely knows, Julia senses that he needs to talk about it. Maybe not even necessarily with her. But she happens to be here. And she’ll listen.

  “It was because Kristin didn’t want to be anyone’s wife,” Paine says simply.

  Selfish.

  It’s the first word that pops into Julia’s head.

  Kristin could be selfish.

  She was so many other things, too . . . had so many traits that made her infinitely likeable. But her own needs always came first.

  How like her, to prefer to live her life solo, free to walk out on this man if the mood struck her. And what about their daughter?

  Julia doesn’t know what to say, other than, “That does sound like Kristin. But I knew her mainly as a rebellious kid.”

  “I doubt she changed all that much over the years. She was reckless and carefree, and she was hell-bent on staying that way.”

  “Even after having Dulcie?”

  “
Especially after having Dulcie. It was as if she wanted to prove that she wasn’t going to get stuck in a conventional life. She refused to consider marrying me and being a full-time mom . . .”

  I know, Paine. She told me.

  But Julia doesn’t tell him what Kristin told her that night three years ago about her relationship with Paine. It would feel wrong, somehow—like a betrayal.

  “She wanted to keep acting, and working, too—she was a waitress. Not that she had any choice, Julia. I mean . . . I’ve never made much money. But that wasn’t what stopped her from marrying me.”

  “And it wasn’t that she didn’t love you enough, either,” she muses, remembering the way Kristin’s eyes lit up when she spoke of Paine and Dulcie.

  “Did Kristin tell you that, Julia?”

  “No,” she says hastily. “But I doubt that she would have stayed with you for so long, or had the baby, if she didn’t love you.”

  He turns his head away. “She didn’t want the baby. When she found out she was pregnant, she—she fell apart. She kept calling the baby ‘it.’ She kept talking about having to make a choice . . .”

  “And you talked her into having the baby?”

  He doesn’t answer that directly. Instead he sits forward in his chair, looks at her again. “Have you ever seen the musical Man of La Mancha?”

  “No.”

  He takes a moment to make his point, his thoughts obviously drifting, a faint smile on his face.

  “I met Kristin in summer stock when we were both just out of college. We were at Chautauqua Institution. Do you know where that is?”

  “Of course.” The summer colony is as world-renowned for the arts as Lily Dale is for spiritualism. It’s less than a half hour’s drive from here, and Julia does recall that Kristin was enrolled in a summer theater program there years ago, after they had drifted out of touch. During Kristin’s few visits to Lily Dale that summer to visit Iris and Anson, Julia glimpsed her from a distance, sun-bleached hair, tanned and gorgeous. She remembers being awed as ever by the aura of glamour about her, and being too intimidated to approach her.

  “The first show we were cast in together was Man of La Mancha,” Paine tells her. “I played Don Quixote, the male lead. Kristin was the female lead. Aldonza. I’m not going to get into the whole plot, but the point is, Don Quixote was in love with his dream girl.”

  “Aldonza?”

  “No. Dulcinea.”

  Dulcinea.

  It’s Dulcie’s full name. Iris always called her that.

  “Don Quixote saw Dulcinea in Aldonza,” Paine explains. As if that makes sense.

  “What?” Julia doesn’t get it. She can feel Paine’s impatience—that he wants her to understand. That this is important.

  “Dulcinea is only a vision—a figment of Don Quixote’s imagination—but he’s convinced that she exists.” Paine sips his coffee, barely seeming to notice the bitterness now. “That was how I felt when I found out Kristin was pregnant, Julia. Even though she was calling the baby ‘it,’ and telling me that she wasn’t sure if she would terminate the pregnancy, I knew that she wouldn’t. I knew the baby was a girl . . .” He swallows hard, his voice hoarse when he continues, “ . . . and that she would be born, and that not only would I cherish her, but Kristin would, too. It was my vision.”

  “So you named her Dulcinea.” Something stirs inside Julia. She doesn’t want to find this man appealing. He’s a stranger. He’s a skeptic. He belonged to Kristin—still so obviously belongs to Kristin.

  Yet she can’t help being drawn to him.

  “I never thought it would end up like this, though,” Paine says, a ragged edge in his voice, as he bends his head and runs a distracted hand through the wavy hair above his forehead. “I never thought she would lose her sight, or that we would lose Kristin . . .”

  “I know.” Julia takes a deep breath, not wanting to add to his heartache, yet unable to keep it back any longer. “Paine, about Kristin’s death . . . is there the slightest chance, in your mind, that it wasn’t an accident?”

  His head jerks upward. “Why do you ask?”

  “I just never believed she’d go out on the water at night.”

  After a long pause, he says slowly, “She couldn’t swim.”

  “I know. Iris says it didn’t matter—that she was reckless and she might have been drinking. But she was always so afraid of the water when we were kids. And even when she came back to visit, that last time, I invited her to go sailing on Chautauqua Lake with a few friends of mine. She said no way—that she had never learned to swim. I remember it so clearly—I was teasing her about it. Telling her that I could get her some of those swimmies—you know, those blow-up things that kids wear on their arms . . .”

  Paine leans so close to Julia that she can smell the coffee on his breath. “What are you saying, Julia?”

  “That the more I think about it, the more positive I am that Kristin would never have willingly gone out on a boat alone at night.”

  “Are you saying that somebody was with her? Somebody talked her into going? Or that somebody—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, hell.” He buries his face in his hands. “I didn’t want to go there, Julia. You know? I’ve been trying, ever since it happened, to get past it. But I can’t. Something happened to her when she was here. Something led her to go out on the lake at night.”

  “Or someone.”

  “Or someone.” Paine exhales heavily. “You were one of the last people to see her alive, Julia. You know more than I do about what she was up to when she was here.”

  “But I don’t Paine. Not really. She closed herself off to me,” she says reluctantly. “Something changed between the time I picked her up at the airport and the next time I saw her. By then, she was acting strange. Withdrawn.”

  Paine narrows his eyes. “Do you think . . . was she on something?”

  “On something?” Julia echoes. “You mean . . . drugs?”

  He sighs. “She had a problem in the past. Years ago. Before Dulcie.”

  “I had no idea. Iris never told—”

  “Iris never knew. Kristin didn’t want her to know, even after it was over. And it was pretty bad, while it lasted. She left me. She went to live with a low-life dealer she had gotten tangled up with. But I couldn’t let go of her. I kept trying to help her. Finally, it worked. She came back. She went into rehab.”

  Julia nods slowly. “I can see her getting caught up in the drug scene. She always seemed so restless, when we were younger. Like she was looking for an escape.”

  “Exactly. And for a long time, I thought it was me that she was trying to escape. But now I don’t think so. I think it was something else. Maybe she didn’t even understand it herself.”

  They fall into an uneasy silence.

  The rain has picked up again outside, pattering noisily on the roof as the wind gusts, stirring the branches above.

  Again, Julia remembers the presence in the upstairs study the day Iris died. Again, her mind drifts back to what happened to Kristin here on that Halloween night.

  She has to tell him about it. Maybe he knows something, too. Something Kristin told him about this house.

  She ignores the nagging voice that reminds her that Paine didn’t know about Kristin’s gift.

  She ignores the possibility that she herself might have been mistaken about it—that perhaps Kristin had no psychic ability.

  “Paine—” Julia begins.

  He cuts her off, his contemplative mood abruptly giving way again to derision. “Wait a second, Julia. Before we get even further off the subject, let me ask you one thing. Because this is really bugging me.”

  “What is it?” she asks warily.

  “If you really can communicate with the dead, why are you asking me what happened to Kristin? Why don’t you just ask her what the hell she was doing out on the water that night? Ask her whether it was an accident, damn it.”

  She clamps her mouth closed. He’s angr
y, she reminds herself. He’s a skeptic. And he’s still grieving.

  And so is Julia. For Kristin. For Iris. Doesn’t he think that she would do everything in her power to help find out what happened to them?

  No. He doesn’t think that. Because he doesn’t believe she’s legitimate.

  “I would if I could, Paine,” she manages to say levelly, collecting her whirling thoughts, regaining her composure. “But it doesn’t work that way. I can’t just tune in a specific spirit like it’s . . . like it’s a radio station.”

  “Well, have you tried making contact with her?”

  For someone who doesn’t believe, he suddenly sounds more earnest than cynical.

  “Have I tried? Not necessarily. But I’m open to the energy, Paine. And hers hasn’t come through.” She chooses her words carefully, not wanting to come across as too New Agey, alienating him even further.

  “So you’re saying you can contact other spirits—strangers’ spirits. When somebody’s paying you. But you can’t contact—”

  “You know what? I have to go,” she says curtly, standing. “It’s getting late.”

  He doesn’t respond.

  Julia carries her cup to the sink, dumps the acrid coffee into the drain, and turns on the tap to rinse it. She is swept by a sudden, vivid memory of Iris standing in this very spot, laughing, chattering above the running water. Her eyes sting with tears. She wishes Paine would vanish and leave her alone with her grief.

  Damn him.

  Why did he have to ask her about it—about the one thing she’s wondered herself, many times, these past three years?

  She was telling the truth about not being able to tune in a specific spirit. She’s been in this line of work long enough to have confirmed that there are limits to her miraculous ability. That most spirit energy is weak, and that it takes a tremendous force for those who are able to come through.

  Yet she’s made contact with other people she’s lost. How can it be possible that Kristin, so powerful a force in life, hasn’t made herself known in death?

  There are only two viable explanations.

  It’s because Kristin isn’t able.

  Or because Kristin isn’t willing.

  Neither possibility sits well with Julia.