Summer of Fear

  That “something” turned out to be on page seventy-three: “There is a superstition, widely held among believers in magic, that a witch cannot be photographed.” I read over the statement once, stopped, and read it again. It was followed by a series of stories supposedly gleaned from interviews with old-time residents of the backwoods area of the Ozarks. They all concerned attempts that had been made to photograph women who practiced the art of witchcraft.

  One told about a tourist who was driving through the Ozarks and saw an old woman leading a cow down a country road. She was so picturesque that the tourist had stopped his car and despite the woman’s protests had snapped her picture with his disposable camera. After arriving home, he’d taken his film to be developed at a drugstore. The prints he got back included one of a cow walking alone along a road. The lead rope stuck straight out in front and ended in midair. The woman was nowhere in the picture.

  There was another story about a national magazine that had sent a writer-photographer team back into the hills to do an article on present-day witchcraft. The writer had interviewed a number of women who claimed to be witches and the photographer had taken their pictures. When the photographs were printed, several of them contained no people.

  The author of the book called these “tales from the hills.”

  “These are the sort of stories that run from generation to generation,” he wrote, “growing stranger with each telling. Over the years the names of the people involved become lost or are replaced by other names. No one can offer any proof of their credibility. At the same time, they are accepted by a large number of older people and a surprising number of younger ones who have learned them from their parents. No fewer than three years before this book was written a female student at a Southeastern college refused to have her picture taken for the school yearbook. Her reason, confessed finally to her counselor, was that ‘witchcraft runs in our family’ and she did not want this revealed to her classmates by having the frame turn out empty.”

  It was not a large section of the book, only a couple of paragraphs, but it was enough to start my heart beating wildly. How was it that I’d missed this before? In my rush to find more applicable material I had skipped over a section that was in reality the most important thing in the book. It explained so much that I had found unanswerable. It explained, for instance, why Mike didn’t have a picture of Julia on his dresser. She had never given him one because she didn’t have one! It explained why Julia had no driver’s license. I had chalked that up to the fact that away at school she hadn’t had a need to drive. But now I had a better answer. To get a license you needed to have your picture taken!

  What better proof could there be of Julia’s status as a witch than a photograph taken of her in which she did not appear! And with my own mother a photographer, how simple it would be to have one taken! There was no way Julia could explain it. It couldn’t be blamed on the processing, because Mom did her own. Nor could it be blamed on the camera, which was a piece of expensive, professional equipment. If the situation weren’t so serious I might almost have laughed at the vision of Mom standing in the darkroom, surveying her roll of negatives, her brows raised, her forehead wrinkled in bewilderment.

  “What in the world could’ve happened?!” she would exclaim. “It’s impossible! I know that Julia was sitting right there in that lawn chair!”

  Quite suddenly, at the peak of my exuberance, I felt limp with exhaustion. Just the realization that I was finally headed somewhere definite was enough to release the tension I’d been under for so long. No longer was I groping blindly for a solution. I had a plan—something to go on. I set the book aside and let myself sink back on my pillow and then, surprisingly, I fell asleep. It was a sleep of such utter weariness, so deep and so intense, that I didn’t wake for hours, and then only because Mom came in and shook me.

  “Rae?” she said worriedly. “Are you all right, dear? It’s past noon!”

  “Okay,” I mumbled. “Okay.” Mom’s voice seemed to come from far away. A dream voice.

  “Rachel,” Mom said, “open your eyes. I want to see that you’re alive in there. I’ve never known you to sleep this long unless you’re sick.”

  With an effort I forced my eyes open and focused them on her face.

  “I’m okay,” I said, my voice still blurred with sleep. “I was just awake a lot during the night.”

  “Worrying over the professor, I imagine.” Mom nodded sympathetically. “I know how you feel. The first thing I did when I got up this morning was call the hospital. I think his condition must have worsened, because they’ve stopped allowing visitors. I was planning to go down there at lunchtime and sit with him a while so the Chavezes could go out to eat.”

  “Did they say he was worse?” I asked, alarmed.

  “No. They just said the ruling about visitors was changed. But I can’t think of any other reason. It’s such a sad thing. I was wondering . . .” She let the sentence fade off.

  “What?”

  “Oh, I shouldn’t even suggest it, I’ve got so much work to do. I’ve got to print up a batch of classroom shots for Teacher Magazine to illustrate that piece they’re running on the first graders who built a doll house, and there’s a dating article for Seventeen I haven’t even started on. They want a boy and girl smiling into each other’s eyes and I haven’t even located models. It’s just that we’re all so depressed a break might do us good.”

  “What sort of break?” I asked.

  “I was thinking about a trip to Santa Fe. I could call it a business trip because I do need to stop at the Department of Development and discuss some illustrations I’m doing for an article for New Mexico Magazine. But that wouldn’t take long, and we could go to lunch at La Fonda and do some shopping on the plaza. On the way back there’s a place I’d like to stop. There’s something there I might buy for you, if you decide you like the look of it.”

  “It sounds nice,” I said. “We haven’t done anything like that for a long time. We used to do so many things together.” Before Julia came, I almost added. But I didn’t.

  “Would you like to plan on it for tomorrow?” Mom asked me. “I could call the editor at New Mexico Magazine and set up an appointment. I could take the Seventeen pictures this afternoon if you and Mike would pose for them, and you could help me with the printing tonight.”

  “I don’t want to pose with Mike,” I said, sitting up in bed. My body felt numb from having lain so long in one position. “You know we aren’t going out anymore.”

  “What difference does that make?” Mom asked. “You’re still friends, aren’t you? And I can’t use you with Peter. You look too much like brother and sister.”

  “Use Julia,” I said. It was so easy! I couldn’t have planned the situation better if I had invented it from scratch. “Let Julia pose with Mike. You’ve talked about wanting to photograph her.”

  Mom frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know. She looks—”

  “Looks what?”

  “I don’t know exactly—just not quite right for the picture. She’s lovely looking, of course, but too old.”

  “How can she be too old?” I asked, surprised. “She’s seventeen, the same age as Mike.”

  “That’s true. It’s just that there’s something about her face that seems older than her years. Her eyes, maybe, or her mouth.” Mom seemed as confused as I was over the statement. “I never thought about it until now, picturing the way she would look in a photograph. I just have this feeling she might come across too old for Seventeen.”

  “I think she’d look fine,” I said. “Her dark coloring would be a good contrast to Mike’s blondness. “

  “Well—maybe. “ Mom still sounded doubtful.

  “Think how soulfully she and Mike could look at each other,” I said, trying to keep the bitterness from my voice. “They wouldn’t even have to act. It would be natural.”

  “There’s that, of course. Okay, you’ve convinced me.” Mom accepted the idea. “There won’t
be any problem getting them together. Mike’s out in the living room right now, and Julia was just asking if she could help me with anything. I’ll march them out into the backyard and go to it. I’d like to get them with leaf shadows across their faces.”

  “She might not want to do it,” I said. “She might be shy.”

  “She’ll get over that,” Mom said. “Anybody in this family has to be prepared to act as a model when needed. You know that—it’s a rule of the house!”

  She left the room, and I got up and got dressed and made the bed and let a little time pass as I washed my face and fooled around with my hair. When I left the bedroom at last I didn’t go outside but went instead up the stairs and into my room, which was now Julia’s, and over to the window where I could see down into the backyard. They were out there. Mom had her camera on a tripod, and Mike and Julia were standing together over by the elm tree. I couldn’t see Julia’s face but I could tell by the rigidity of her stance that she wasn’t happy with the situation.

  I almost laughed out loud.

  It’ll be over for you, Cousin Julia, I thought joyfully. You’re exposed at last! Now all I have to do is wait until Mom develops the film and then show her the paragraph I read last night.

  I could see the words, sharp and black in my mind’s eye, as clearly as though they were on the printed page: “There is a superstition, widely held among believers in magic, that a witch cannot be photographed.”

  The laughter stayed with me, joyous and triumphant, until I was halfway down the stairs, when there leapt into my mind another paragraph I had recently read. It was in Mary Nesbitt’s letter:

  My brother Kent saw your picture in the yearbook and he wants to be the one to meet your plane!

  It was all downhill the rest of the day.

  Of course, there wasn’t much of the rest of the day left. I went into the kitchen to get something to eat to represent breakfast and lunch combined, but my stomach was so knotted up I couldn’t face the sight or smell of food. Nor could I force myself to go into the backyard to watch the photo shoot. If I could, I would’ve gone to my room and thrown myself across the bed to weep, but I had no room anymore. The moment I had emerged from my new sleeping area, Bobby and two of his friends had gone in to work on model planes.

  So I made myself a glass of iced tea and sat down at the kitchen table and let the sick disappointment sweep over me. There was nowhere left to go, either physically or mentally. All the doors were closed.

  It had all seemed so perfect! For the first time that summer everything had seemed to fall into place! I’d been so sure that at last I had an answer, a method of exposing Julia for her true self ! Now the memory of one short sentence in a letter from a girl I didn’t even know had ruined everything. There was no way I could get past it—if Mary Nesbitt’s brother had seen Julia’s picture in a school yearbook, then Julia could be photographed.

  The pictures Mom was taking right now would turn out. More than that, they would probably be beautiful. Did this prove that I was wrong all along, that Julia was a perfectly normal seventeen-year-old girl whom I had completely misjudged?

  No, I thought. It didn’t prove that. The book hadn’t stated that witches couldn’t be photographed, only that there was such a superstition. The very word “superstition” implied a belief in something that wasn’t true. The more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that I had been carried away and in a surge of desperation had jumped to an illogical assumption. Professor Jarvis, in his description of witchcraft, had never suggested that there was magic involved in the sense that there was in children’s fairy tales. His explanation had accentuated the more scientific explanation of witchcraft as the utilization of a force of the mind to make things occur as desired. Beyond this, he hadn’t gone. And there could be no scientific explanation for the belief that a witch could not be captured by a camera.

  So now I was back where I had started, further back, really, because I was out of ideas. Now, after the rise of hope and the crushing defeat, I felt too emotionally exhausted to attempt another move. Let her go, I thought wearily. Let her do what she wants to do. Nothing she does now can be any worse than the things she’s already done. But still, there was the professor. I couldn’t accept defeat and leave him forever in his present state. Could I bargain with Julia, perhaps? What was it she wanted? If I knew, I might be able to make her an offer in exchange for the professor’s release. But what did I have to offer her? She already had everything: a place in our family, an inheritance from her parents, a boyfriend—two, in fact, if you included Peter—a wonderful best friend, Carolyn, and now, for all I knew, a budding career as a model.

  I drank my iced tea and stared at the tabletop. Outside the kitchen window summer was at its glorious peak. The sky rose blue, clear and cloudless beyond the rose-covered fence and hummingbirds whirred dreamily about on the far side of the window screen and the sunlight splashed heavy and golden across the table and turned my tea glass to amber.

  The longer I sat the more upset I became.

  After a while Mom came through the kitchen carrying two rolls of newly exposed film.

  “Goodness,” she exclaimed, “are you just sitting here doing nothing?”

  “What does it look like?” I said shortly. “Is there a law against doing nothing?” The words came out snappish and rude, and I saw Mom wince as though she’d been slapped, and I didn’t care. At this point I didn’t care about anything.

  “There’s no law,” Mom said, “but you slept all morning and you know I’m trying to get caught up on my work so we can go to Santa Fe tomorrow. You might have motivated yourself to do something around the place, like putting the breakfast dishes in the dishwasher.”

  “I didn’t eat breakfast,” I said. “Why should I clean up the kitchen? Why can’t wonderful Julia do that?”

  “She can,” Mom said, “and she’s going to, bless her. And as for you, you can come along to the darkroom and help me with the printing of the doll house story. I want to get those pictures into the mail first thing in the morning and I need to be able to get them spotted tonight.”

  “What fun,” I said, but I got up and followed her out to the garage and into the little room where she spent so many hours of her time.

  I had started helping her with her printing when I was twelve and we now had a routine so well established that we never even bumped into each other in the darkness. As we entered the room Mom dropped the film she was carrying into the “hold” box, marked a wall pad with the notation “J & M for SEV.” and started rummaging through her negatives for the doll house series. I mixed fresh developer in one of the flat plastic trays, dumped out the smaller tray of stop bath, which had turned the color of wine from having sat too long, and refilled it, being careful not to splash any of that particular chemical on my skin. I had done that on several former occasions and found out it was painful.

  “Okay?” Mom asked. “Ready to have the lights off?”

  “Yes,” I said. She flicked the switch by the door and the room went into a darkness slightly relieved by the yellow safe-lights, which sent out enough of a glow to function by but wouldn’t wreck the photographic paper. I took my position at the chemical trays and Mom took hers at the enlarger. She inserted a negative and began to sharpen the focus. When she had it right she clocked off the enlarger light and put a sheet of paper into an eight-by-ten holder and pushed the button to expose it. Her hands danced about for a few seconds, shading some areas, directing more intense light onto others. Then she took the paper out of the holder and handed it to me. I put it into the developer tray and stood, gently swishing the paper in the solution with some rubber tongs, while the picture began slowly to appear. When it had developed to the right degree I lifted it with the tongs and dropped it into the stop bath, which kept it from continuing to grow darker, and then into the rapid fixer, which would secure the image so it wouldn’t fade.

  At first we worked in a strained sort of silence. Then, gradually,
as I moved through the steps of the long-familiar process, I felt my tension begin to melt away. The little room became a world of its own with just Mom and me to inhabit it. The years seemed to slide backward, and I could remember what it had been like to be twelve and happy.

  Mom handed me another picture to run through, and as I took it from her our hands touched.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have been so rude there in the kitchen. You were right. I should’ve helped out.”

  “It wasn’t that,” Mom said. “I mean, the dishes aren’t that important. It’s just—Rachel, what is it that’s happening between us—all of us? You seem so angry all the time, so apart from us. Are you jealous of Julia?”

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’ve tried to tell you,” I said. “Over and over again, I’ve tried to make you listen, and none of you will. I thought for a while I was going to be able to prove it, to make you listen, and then I couldn’t after all. I was frustrated, and I took it out on you, that’s all. I said, I’m sorry.”

  There was a moment’s silence as Mom changed negatives. Then she said, “I told you there’s something I want to get you in Santa Fe tomorrow. I think it will make you happy. It may make a difference in the way you feel about things.”

  “I don’t need a present,” I said.

  “You tell me when you see it. If you don’t want it, then we won’t get it.”

  “All right.”

  “We should start early,” Mom said. “It’s an hour’s drive, and my appointment with the editor is for ten. That means we can do a little shopping before lunch, and afterward we can drive up to the outdoor opera house. I’m sure Julia’s never seen anything like it, and the mountains around Santa Fe are so totally different from the Ozarks.”

  I froze, the tongs in my hand, a picture held in the air halfway between two trays. My voice came out in a kind of croak.