Return to Summerhouse

  “Hotheaded speed demons?” Primrose said so pleasantly that Amy laughed.

  “That’s about right.”

  “I’m not a trained therapist and I’m no psychic, but it seems to me that while your destiny may be on track, maybe the destinies of the people close to you are not.”

  Amy well knew that Stephen wasn’t as perfectly happy as she was. He loved her and his children, but his job was not of his choice. But Stephen wasn’t a complainer and he was a man of honor. When his eldest brother refused to take over the family business, it had gone to the next son, who had also refused to take it on. Too much work, too much responsibility, not enough excitement, was what they said. Stephen had also wanted to turn down the job, but he hadn’t been able to stand the disappointment in his father’s face and voice. When he was just weeks out of college, he’d gone to work for his father. Over the years he’d expanded the business and had made a very good living, but sometimes Amy had seen him looking at his brothers with envy. They went from one job to another and took off when they wanted to. When they got behind on child support payments, they “borrowed” from Stephen. After all, he was running a family business. To their minds, the profits belonged to all of them.

  It was Stephen in his unlikable job, and the callousness and ingratitude of his father and brothers, that made Amy often drive herself to exhaustion. She wanted everything at home to be peaceful and perfect for Stephen.

  Amy looked at Primrose. “Do you think that if I could change the destiny of this man who looks like my husband that I could change Stephen’s circumstances in this life?” Her eyes lit up. “Could I change his brothers? Maybe even change his father?”

  “I really don’t know,” Primrose said. “All I know for sure is that my sister only gives out her card to people who need her and that true love is always involved. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some things to do.” She stood up.

  Amy wanted to stay there all day and ask the woman questions, but she knew she was being dismissed. When she stood up, she glanced out the windows at the sunlight. “Do you think it’s pouring down rain out there?”

  Primrose laughed so hard that Amy was afraid the little old lady was going to choke. “You have brightened my day, my whole week,” she said to Amy at the door. “And I shall think about the questions you’ve asked me.”

  “If I do want to…do this, I mean, do what it says on the card, what do I do?”

  “The three of you come back here together and my sister will meet you at the door and she’ll tell you what to do.” Primrose lowered her voice. “I shouldn’t give you any advice, but I really think you must do whatever you need to to get your destiny back on track. And, dear,” she said in a warning voice, “you need to choose the time carefully. There have been mistakes made and some people return to the wrong time and don’t change a thing. My sister doesn’t allow them to try again.”

  She patted Amy’s arm. “But I think you know what time you want to go back to. And oh yes, each of you should bring one hundred dollars. That’s what she charges.”

  Amy stepped onto the porch, then turned back. “Could someone go with me?”

  “With you?” Primrose asked, surprised. “You mean go back with you to change your life?”

  “Yes. I wish Zoë could go with me. I think that right now, the way things are, even if she had a chance to return to the past, she wouldn’t go. I’ve never seen anyone with so much anger inside her.”

  “You have the most extraordinary ideas,” Primrose said. “Let me talk to my sister about this. She’ll have the answers when you return. But I would think that if anyone is to go with you, she’ll have to want to.”

  “Don’t worry. Zoë would go back just for the man’s horse.”

  Again Primrose laughed. “What is it about beautiful men on beautiful horses? Would that I could go back with you.”

  “Why don’t you?” Amy said, her eyes alight.

  “It’s your destiny,” Primrose said as she stepped back into the house. “Your destiny, not mine,” she said as she closed the door.

  “Mine or Stephen’s or the dark man’s or even Zoë’s,” Amy muttered. “I can’t figure out what belongs to whom.”

  Eleven

  “Poppycock!” Faith said. “That’s the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”

  “I’ve looked through everything I have and I have no business card from your magic woman,” Zoë said.

  “She’s not mine,” Amy said, exasperated. She had made dinner tonight, a lovely chicken dish that she often made for guests at home. She’d bought all the ingredients and done all the work by herself. Her plan was to tell the women about her visit to Primrose once they’d each had a few glasses of wine.

  But Zoë thwarted her. As soon as they sat down, Zoë asked, “So what do you want?”

  “Whatever do you mean?” Amy asked in her most innocent voice.

  Faith and Zoë just stared at her.

  “Okay,” Amy said, “I went to Madame Zoya’s house today.” She then proceeded to tell them what she wanted them to know of the visit. She left out anything that she feared would upset them.

  Neither Faith nor Zoë believed a word of it.

  “It’s not possible,” Faith said. “No one can change the past. You can’t go back.”

  “And I wouldn’t want to,” Zoë said.

  Amy looked at her in astonishment. “You wouldn’t want to go back to three weeks before your accident and stop it from happening?”

  “No,” Zoë said. “That accident was the best thing that ever happened to me. I found out who really loved me and I started drawing. The doctors said they thought parts of my brain were hit in a way that made me forget some things while others were enhanced. I’d rather draw than deal with a lot of people who never really cared about me in the first place.”

  Amy didn’t know how to deal with logic like that.

  “Besides,” Faith said, “we don’t have the cards so we’re not invited. Why don’t you go by yourself?”

  “I got the idea that if the three of us don’t go together, nothing can be done. It’s all of us together or no one gets to change her destiny.” This was the lie she’d come up with on her walk back from Primrose’s house. If she could go back in time—which was, of course, impossible—and she could take Zoë, then why not Faith too?

  But nothing Amy said changed their minds. They had no interest in going to a “charlatan” as they called the woman Amy had met. They didn’t want to talk to her and certainly didn’t want to pay money for her ridiculous claims.

  After dinner Faith and Zoë practically ran into the living room, leaving Amy to do the cleaning up.

  “If this keeps up, we’ll achieve nothing,” Amy muttered as she filled the dishwasher. She had a feeling that by tomorrow the other women would start talking about going home. And Amy knew that if her family were at home and waiting for her and not on a camping trip, she’d want to go home too.

  But she also knew that she was the only one who’d had dreams so real that they haunted her even when she was awake. She was the one who sat in sunshine when it was raining. She was the one who’d talked to a little old lady and come away feeling that changing a destiny that had gone in the wrong direction was a perfectly feasible idea. And most of all, she was the one who had a place and time so fully in her head that she sometimes got confused as to where she was. But no matter what she said, she couldn’t get Faith or Zoë to agree with her.

  On the other hand, everything had been shown to Amy, not to Faith or Zoë. So how could she expect them to want to participate?

  When she finished in the kitchen, Amy went into the living room, but Faith didn’t look up from the TV show she was watching, and Zoë’s eyes never left her sketch pad. Amy could see that Zoë was drawing Faith. She wasn’t making sketches of the man on the horse.

  “I think I’ll go to bed,” Amy said. The others didn’t look up as they said good night.

  She went to her bedroom, took a
long shower, then got into her nightgown and slipped under the covers. It was still early, but she was tired from what she’d been through that day. It took a lot out of a person to be beaten up during the night, then to wrestle with destiny questions during the day. The worst had been trying to talk to Faith and Zoë.

  Friends, she thought as she turned out the light. She’d really begun to think that Faith and Zoë were her friends, but they had looked at her just like Amy thought a person off the street would look at her at the mention of time travel and destinies—as though she were demented.

  As she fell into sleep, Amy thought that maybe she was losing, if not her mind, certainly her touch with reality. She had everything a person could want in life, so why was she considering fooling around with it? Why was she trying to change things? Not that she could change anything, but…

  She drifted off to sleep.

  The dream came almost instantly. The man was dead and everyone was crying. Amy, wearing a long dress of blue and white print, was too stunned to know what she was doing. She had a set of keys in her hand but she didn’t know what they opened. There seemed to be people asking her what they were to do, but she couldn’t focus enough to understand them. He was dead. Killed during the night with a big knife stabbed through his heart.

  She could hear crying all through the house. A woman was crying loudly, and as she went up the wooden staircase, she heard a man sobbing. She opened a door and looked inside to see a gray-haired man in bed. He was thin, as though he were wasting away from some disease, and his face was red with his weeping. “Go! Leave me!” he ordered.

  She saw two young women who looked to be maids and their eyes were red. Behind them a door was open and Amy went to it. She felt unreal, as though she were in her body but not in it.

  Inside the room were three men, all dressed formally in black coats, white shirts, and tight black trousers. Two of them wore wigs. They were talking quietly among themselves while taking frequent glances at the man on the bed.

  Amy went to him. He looked like he was sleeping, his face calm, peaceful, as handsome as always. He was wearing his clothes and looked as though he’d lain down for a nap. If it weren’t for the dark stain where his heart was, she wouldn’t have known he was dead.

  “Who did this?” she asked the men.

  “We do not know,” one man said. “He was found that way this morning. By the coldness of his body, it must have happened yesterday. Did you see anyone?”

  Amy could only shake her head. The truth was that she didn’t remember anything that had happened since she climbed on the cart. How long had it been? By the way she was dressed and by the keys at her waist, she’d been given the job of housekeeper. For all she knew, it could have been years ago that she got on the cart.

  Reaching out her hand, she smoothed his hair back from his brow, then kissed his cold cheek. The men were watching her, but she didn’t care. Her tears began and they dropped onto his face. She’d never again see him laugh. Never again argue with him. She’d never tell him that he was wrong and had no idea what he was talking about.

  As she looked down at him, she realized that memories were coming back to her. She had never been subservient to him. She’d always stood up to him and told him what she thought. Many times he’d told her that he understood why her father had sold her. “And I paid too much!” he’d shouted at her.

  But through all the arguing, through the constant clash of wills, he’d elevated her to a high status—and he hadn’t sent her away.

  As she stood there a pretty young woman came into the room. From her dress she was of the same class as the man. It took her a moment, but then Amy remembered that the young woman was his sister, and that the man had loved her very much.

  The young woman bent over the man from the other side of the bed. “What will I do without you, Tristan?” she whispered. “How can I live without you?” She looked across him to Amy. “What will we do? How can we live without him?”

  All Amy could do was shake her head that she didn’t know. Her throat had closed and the tears had begun in earnest.

  “Amy!” Faith said, her hands on Amy’s shoulders. “Wake up! It’s only a dream. You’re safe. Wake up!”

  Amy opened her eyes and saw the two women hanging over her, but she couldn’t leave the place she’d been in her mind. “He was dead,” she cried. “Someone killed him.” She put her hands over her face and kept crying.

  Zoë stood beside Faith. Both women were fully dressed so it wasn’t late.

  “There was a girl there,” Amy said, still crying hard and her face still covered. “She was his sister and I could feel her pain. I could feel that she wanted to go with him. Who could have done such a thing? Why was such a horrible thing done to him? He was a good man.”

  “Amy,” Faith said softly as she pulled her hands away from her face, “look at me. It was only a dream. You’re safe now and you’re here. The dream will go away.”

  “It will never go away,” Amy said, looking up at her. “Don’t you understand that it’s real? It’s real and I’ll never be able to change it. I know I must go back and stop him from being murdered, but I can’t go. Primrose said I had to show up with both of you but you won’t even try to go!”

  The two women were silent for a moment, then Zoë spoke. “Faith, if we don’t agree to go with her to see some witch doctor we’re going to be here all night.”

  Faith sighed. “Okay. Amy, Zoë and I will go with you to see that woman tomorrow.” When Amy didn’t stop crying, Faith said it louder. “Did you hear me? We’ll go.”

  “But it’s too late,” Amy said. “He’s already been killed. Murdered in his sleep. There was a man in a bedroom, crying. He was very ill. I don’t know who he was, but I don’t think he was going to live much longer.” She looked up at Faith. “I think he was Tristan’s father. No, he was an uncle. Yes, that’s who he was and he was dying. He—”

  “Amy!” Faith said loudly. “Stop it! I mean it. It was just a dream.”

  Zoë had picked up the old book from the bedside table and opened it. “It says here that Tristan Hawthorne was stabbed to death in 1797 by an unknown assailant.”

  “So long ago,” Amy said, tears still rolling down her cheeks.

  “Yes and no,” Zoë said. “Maybe if you can go back in history you could go to a time before 1797 and save him. You could prevent his death.”

  “How? I don’t know who could do such a thing,” Amy said. “You should have seen it. Everyone was crying, even the maids. He was a man who was loved by everyone.”

  Zoë sat down on the bed in front of Amy. “You need to get hold of yourself. Something is causing these dreams, and no matter what you think now, they will go away. I know because after I was in the crash I had horrible dreams.”

  “About the wreck?” Amy asked, sniffing and wiping her face with the tissues Faith handed her.

  “No, about things that made no sense to me. I saw a man shoot himself in the head. I saw it over and over. I’d wake up screaming and the nurses would come running. After a while they gave me pills so strong that I had no more dreams.”

  “But Zoë,” Amy said, blinking back her tears, “don’t you see that that might have really happened? Maybe seeing that is what made you drive a car too fast or whatever made you crash. Maybe—”

  “I have one therapist I don’t want, so don’t you start on me,” Zoë said. Her words were harsh, but she picked up Amy’s tear-soaked hands and held them. “Tomorrow morning bright and early, the three of us are going to this woman you met and see if her sister can help you. Maybe she can hypnotize you deeply enough that you can get rid of these dreams. Faith and I are getting tired of every morning seeing you with bruises all over your face.”

  Amy looked at Zoë and managed a bit of a smile. “You’re a very nice person, aren’t you? And without all that makeup you’re quite pretty.”

  Zoë stood up. “Now go back to sleep and don’t do any more dreaming, you hear me?”

>   “Will you go with me?” Amy asked.

  “I said we would,” Zoë answered.

  “No, I mean back to the past.”

  Zoë gave a little laugh, but Faith looked at Amy in wonder.

  “You can’t possibly believe that that woman can really—” Faith began, but Zoë stopped her.

  “Yes, we’ll go back with you,” Zoë said. “Won’t we, Faith?”

  “Oh sure, why not? Better the eighteenth century than going back to New York and spending my days trying to make Jeanne believe that I am not suicidal.”

  “Do you promise?” Amy said.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die,” Zoë said, making the gesture.

  Amy looked at Faith.

  “I promise,” Faith said. “If you go back in time, Zoë and I will go with you.”

  “All right,” Amy said as she moved down into the bed. “I feel better now. The three of us will go back and save him. We’ll find out who hates him and we’ll stop them. I think I’ll turn that knife on the killer and jab him in the heart with it.”

  Zoë stood up, turned out the bedside light, and she and Faith left the room.

  As she closed the door, Faith said, “What in the world have you done? I don’t want to go to some two-bit psychic and have her tell me my fortune.”

  “Me neither,” Zoë said as she walked into the living room. “My real fear is that she’ll tell me what happened in my life.”

  Faith looked at her. “Did you really see a man kill himself?”

  “I don’t know, but I dreamed it often enough. I figure that I saw it as much as Amy saw an eighteenth-century man lying on his bed dead.”

  “Did you tell Jeanne about your dreams? Not the ones you made up, but the real ones?”

  “Not a word,” Zoë said.

  “I see,” Faith said.

  “Don’t start sounding like Jeanne. And what do you mean by ‘I see’?”

  Faith smiled. “I think you and I have some things in common. I never told her my dreams either.”