They moved furniture and other items up a board ramp, the open doors of the truck serving as wings to shield the operation from passersby.
When all had been loaded and the ramp drawn back, the other two men drove through a gap in the fence, turned into the alley, switched on the truck lights as they entered the street and were gone. The entire process had taken little more than a half-hour.
Shoving Chris outside, the gray-haired man locked the door behind them. “Quickly now, help me with the fence.”
For a long section between the corner and the gate to the alley the iron posts were pulled loose from the crumbling concrete base. That section of the fence now lay flat on the ground.
“A repairman worked on this, this afternoon. Poor-quality work, wouldn’t you say, Chris? In some respects he resembled me.”
Chris helped him lift the fence and set the posts back into their holes. Even in moonlight he could see chips of concrete that’d been pried loose from the base to pull out the posts. Several that apparently wouldn’t cooperate had been sawed off at the bottom. So had the upper and lower cross rails at each end of the section.
“Didn’t anybody notice in broad daylight?”
“I dressed properly, acted as if I belonged and no one even paused to question me.” He patted the fence affectionately. “It should stand. Until someone leans on it or tries to open the gate. Let’s go.”
The man walked Chris to his car and handed over the payment.
“Sure nobody’ll connect me with this?” Chris asked.
“They’ll question you. But we wore gloves. You should be all right. Just remember to spend your new wealth slowly. Nothing big and flashy. Don’t worry. You won’t see me again. I never work the same area more than once. The world’s full of suckers.” He laughed and walked down the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets.
Chris drove away still wondering how his nameless benefactor had come to strike up a conversation with him in a bar. Someone had fingered Chris. Who?
What would old successful Rachael look like when she walked into the Gingerbread House and saw what’d happened? Some people had it all their way. They needed a little knocking down. He didn’t blame Shay Garrett for running off without a trace.
If he ever had anything of value, he’d install burglar alarms or buy a guard dog.
The only thing that bothered Chris at the moment was that he’d enjoyed the evening so much.
Rachael sipped her coffee, watched couples lean cozily across tables, gesture in whispered conversations.
She missed the Gingerbread House. Why do I cling?
She’d eaten a late but splendid dinner she hadn’t had to cook. Soon she’d go upstairs and sleep in a bed she wouldn’t have to make in the morning. Rachael could do anything she wanted. I can’t be too old to change.
The waiter refilled her cup and slipped a tray with the bill under her nose.
Rachael’d given up on the book with the deadline and begun a new one about a pregnant teenager who’d run away from a home in which her parents were on the verge of divorce. Was Shay confused and frightened, needing Rachael and unable to contact her?
Was Shay dead?
Rachael left the elegant but subdued atmosphere of one of the dining rooms of Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel, passed through the ornate lobby so rich in history and color, mounted the staircase to her lonely room.
By midmorning the wedding mirror was halfway across New Mexico, still heading south in the dark interior of a truck.
It stood next to the buffet that Thora K. Strock’s mother had brought to this country from old Cornwall over a hundred years before.
Brandy McCabe rested on Lottie’s bed that afternoon with a book propped on her granddaughter’s stomach.
She’d taken the obscene pictures from the walls and moved into this room some time ago.
Brandy’d helped Ansel put up his garden vegetables and cleaned the house from top to bottom while waiting for her granddaughter to make the wedding mirror work its switch in time.
Marek Weir’s child moved with an odd rolling motion like a boat floating loose on a gentle wave and the book rose and fell with it. A tweaking sensation in Shay’s abdomen. The prickle of taut skin stretching more.
Brandy fought an emotional attachment to the helpless being growing inside Shay Garrett. It had no more connection with her than its father. But she knew that even after her return to 1900 (and she would return) she’d always wonder what had become of this child.
Turning a page of the novel, she tried to force her attention back to it. Lottie’s books were as lewd as the pictures of naked men that had hung on the walls. Brandy knew she shouldn’t be reading them. Another temptation of this evil world she couldn’t resist.
But from them she’d discovered what she’d long suspected but hoped wasn’t true, people coupled just like animals. And in the books she’d read so far, they spent a great deal of time and energy doing just that. Moreover, they were rarely married to each other.
Although the authors made the process increasingly clear, one aspect confused Brandy completely. In these stories women seemed actually to enjoy the sordid business.
The stairs creaked and Brandy hid the novel under her pillow as Mr. St. John opened the door without knocking. His unpredictability was more and more a worry to her.
He stood now, panting as if he’d run too long a distance, a quivering finger pointing rudely in her direction. “Out the back way and TO THE BARN with you.”
“But Mr. St. John, what –”
“Hurry! Lottie’s walking up the road. Must of hitchhiked.”
Outside, Happy raised the alarm.
Chris Davenport’s gray-haired friend overtook the truck containing the wedding mirror as it began to angle east. Except that now the man’s hair was a deep chestnut brown.
His car and the truck traveled in convoy as they crossed the border into Texas.
13
Hooligan lowered his head and rammed the partition next to Brandy. She stepped back and her shoe crushed an egg nestled in a hollow of straw.
The goat reared as if to jump the partition to get at her. Hens squawked, fluttering to the far corners of the barn. A cat hissed from the ladder to the loft.
“Hush, all of you,” she whispered. Lottie would surely hear all this commotion even up in the house.
Fear tightened above the baby and below Shay’s throat. If she were discovered now, Brandy’d flee again before she’d allow them to murder the child.
As much as she’d tried not to, Brandy was growing involved with this tiny being. After all, this is to be my great-grandchild.
She crossed to the pitchfork leaning against a far wall as voices sounded outside.
Hooligan kicked an upright post supporting the floor of the loft. Dust seeped from cracks above her. Even the gentle goat, Stina Mark, eyed her with suspicion as Brandy took a stance behind the door.
A chill fall draft blew through the cracks in the barn wall by her ear. The pitchfork trembled in her hands.
“You crazy old coot.” A woman’s voice. “You’re lying again.” She giggled.
“Am not.”
“You expect me to believe you cleaned that house? You’ve got yourself a girlfriend somewhere and I’m going to find her. At your age too.”
“Lottie, I told you –”
“Come on, Gramps. I don’t care. I just want to meet her. After the way you treated Grandma I can’t believe you’d take in another woman but me. Where is she? I’m staying until you introduce us and I promise I won’t laugh.” Lottie laughed anyway. “Or does she only work days?”
“Don’t know where you get such ideas.”
“Is she in the barn?”
“No.”
The door opened and Brandy was pinned behind it.
“Well … if it isn’t a girlfriend, who cleaned the house? No man your generation would suddenly get so busy at woman’s work.”
“The social worker sent somebody out to do it.
”
“You’d sic Happy onto anybody from welfare. I know you. Gramps, you got yourself a girl. And I’m hurt you won’t tell me about …”
The door pulled away and Brandy found herself facing a young woman whose merry smile faded.
Massive man’s boots peeked beneath a long skirt. A shawllike garment – knitted, with only a hole for the neck and much like one Brandy’d once seen on a shepherd – covered most of the rest of her. Lottie’s dark hair bushed in frizzed snarls resembling Sarah’s, the girl who cleaned for Rachael.
Shock on Lottie’s face left her mouth agape. “But … you’re too young. You’re …” She shrugged. “Sorry, I thought –”
“Leave me be, you.” Brandy lowered the pitchfork to Lottie’s breast.
Lottie backed into Ansel. “Oh hey, I mean … I didn’t –”
“Shay Garrett, put that thing down!”
“Shay Garr … oh, Gramps. She’s not …” Lottie turned a whitened face to Ansel. “Tell me she isn’t the one from the Gingerbread House everyone’s been searching for. Gramps, she’s pregnant.”
“Now Lottie, you listen to –”
“And you.” She whirled her skirt and hair around to Brandy. “All this time you took advantage of a crazy old man? It’s incredible. I just don’t believe this.” Lottie pushed the pitchfork aside and walked out, leaving Brandy and Ansel staring at each other.
They were about to follow when Lottie reappeared, looking almost sick. “Gramps, you … you didn’t get her pregnant …”
“’Course not. You don’t stop talking long enough for a man to get a word in. She came sick. Run away because they was going to kill her baby with an abortion and lock her up in an asylum.”
“So she’s crazy too. That explains it.”
“What would you of done, turn her away?”
“I’d have turned her in.” Lottie’s pretty face hardened to ugly. “And claimed the reward.”
The truck carrying the wedding mirror and the car traveling with it pulled into a field near a low-roofed building. Other trucks parked on brittle grass outside the paved area surrounding it and people moved through chill shadows.
November wind scattered dust and paper food containers across the field, up over the concrete lip of the parking lot and against the side of the building, whipping the loose edge of the painted sign that faced the road – ANTIQUE AUCTION.
The man who had changed his hair from gray to brown stepped out of the car and signaled the men in the truck where he wanted them to park. He moved his shoulders in a circular motion and stretched his neck to either side. It’d been a long drive. They’d stopped only to eat and to take on a load, legally acquired and paid for, stored along the way.
As his companions approached, their breathing clouded on the air. Dead grass crunched as it broke beneath their boots.
“Where’s that motel? If I’m going to unload this in the morning I need sleep.”
“Not yet, my good man. There’s much business to be transacted tonight.”
“But the auction doesn’t start till noon tomorrow.”
“The choice items sell by flashlight tonight.” And many of the stolen articles from the house in Boulder, Colorado, would be scattered to the four winds in twenty-four hours, possibly even before the theft was discovered.
The door opened on the back of a nearby pickup camper. Light, smoke and the smell of coffee poured out to them. “Frederick, is that your voice I hear?”
“It is.” The man who’d stolen the wedding mirror stepped inside the crowded camper. “And wait until you see what I’ve brought this time. I hope your flashlights and checkbooks are in good order, gentlemen.”
Brandy Harriet McCabe stared at the ceiling. She pondered the strange turn her life had taken. If anyone had told her six months before she’d be sharing a bed with a harlot, Brandy would have been outraged.
Lottie turned a page of her book, her head propped on a folded pillow. Her small slim figure made Shay’s tall body, now swollen with child, seem awkward and ugly in comparison.
The book hit the floor and so did Lottie. “I can’t concentrate. This is all so …” She lifted her hands toward the ceiling in a gesture suggestive of her grandfather. “So … I mean … I’d turn you over to your folks tomorrow if I didn’t think Gramps would get in trouble for hiding you.”
She rummaged in a shoddy cloth handbag and extracted cigarette papers and a clear bag filled with what looked to be dried, crumbled weed. “Why, of the thousands of people in and around Boulder, did you have to pick on that crazy old man?”
“I think you do Mr. St. John an injustice. This world seems peopled with lunatics and your grandfather appears more sensible than most … at times.” Brandy concentrated on averting her eyes from the pictures Lottie had rehung. She called them “posters” but whatever they were, grown men had posed naked to be photographed. “How any of you keep your wits about you is beyond me.”
“You sure talk funny.” Lottie sat on the foot of the bed and drew in on a cigarette, holding the smoke inside her, releasing it gradually through her nostrils. A sweet smell drifted over the covers toward Brandy, heavy, unlike any tobacco she’d ever been around before. “Almost like you aren’t one of us. Did they send you off to school in a foreign country or something?”
“I’m no foreigner.” In Brandy’s world foreigners were all foolish if not suspect.
Lottie drew her nightgown up to bare her legs, pulled a foot high until it lay – dirty sole upward – on top of the opposite thigh, and crossed the remaining foot over to do the same on the other thigh. She pressed her bent knees against the covers, making a folded crisscross of her legs that should have pulled her hip joints from their sockets.
Brandy looked away from the embarrassing spectacle only to have her eyes meet the reclining figure of a man with dark hairs on his chest and arms … and other places as well. The hairs reminded her of Marek Weir. She lowered her eyes to Shay’s folded hands resting on the hump of stomach.
“That one turns you on, doesn’t he? That why you took the posters down? He’s not bad but I’ve seen better pricks.”
“Pricks?”
“Yeah. Look, why don’t you just go home and not tell anybody where you’ve been? Like I told you, you’re too far along for an abortion.”
“Would you have me locked away in some asylum, Lottie?”
“Anybody who could’ve had an abortion and didn’t, belongs in one.” Lottie affixed a hairpin to her cigarette and holding it by the pin smoked it down till Brandy feared she’d burn her lips. The cloying smell made Shay’s head ache.
“If you’re not found out before, you will be when you go to the hospital to have the kid. And if you think Gramps can afford that trip, think again.”
“Hospital? It’s a baby, not an illness.”
Lottie unwound her legs and stood. She swayed and had to steady herself against the bedpost. “Man, that must have been good stuff.” Her eyes appeared larger.
“Now there’s a prick for you.” She pointed to one of the pictures. “Makes you wonder if they didn’t do some trick with the negative or something.”
“Lottie, must we have those disgusting things here?”
“Disgusting?” Lottie backed away as if to observe them all at once. “They’re supersensational. Probably fags, but certainly put together right.”
“They’re unclothed.” Brandy rolled over to face the window.
“They’re more than that, they’re bare-assed.” Lottie came around the bed to block Brandy’s view of limp curtains. “And what’s the matter with that?”
“No decent woman looks at pictures of naked gentlemen in her bedroom or … anywhere.” Brandy fought tears, but Shay’s cheeks and the pillow were damp with them. She couldn’t cope with this world.
“Decent? You’re the one who’s pregnant. You didn’t get that way staring at a big star in the East either. And don’t tell me he raped you with all his clothes on or something. Hey, don’t cry …
I mean …” Lottie sat beside her, put a comforting arm on her shoulder. “Shay, I didn’t say there’s anything wrong in being pregnant. But it’s kind of rough on a kid to let it be born if you can’t take care of it. Seems wrong, you know?”
“No, I don’t know.” Brandy rolled over the other way and closed Shay’s eyes on naked men. “I’ve never even lain with a man.”
“So, you did it standing up. It’s a free world.” Lottie gave a snort of disgust. “Jesus! Do you have some old-fashioned hang-ups.”
Of the treasures from the Gingerbread House, the wedding mirror and a wooden rocker were all that found their way to the floor of the auction barn the next morning.
Antique dealers from different parts of the country had cleaned out the other items long before dawn. Thora K.’s buffet now sat, carefully padded, in the dark interior of a truck bearing California license plates.
Although the auction had not yet begun, the barn was a busy place. Prospective buyers threaded their way through old and sometimes odd merchandise deciding on biddable items.
Cindy Wilson checked the numbers on tags tied to a row of cast-iron cherry pitters, of which her shop had an overload this year, and bent to force closed a drawer in an antiquated spool cabinet.
“Excuse me. Can I get through here?” A man in coveralls stood behind her, a roll of extension cord wrapped around his arm.
As Cindy stepped back to let him pass, something cold and sharp poked through her blouse in several places along the ridge of her spine. She turned to find bronze hands coiled about each other, the overlong nails on the little fingers jutting out slightly.
The hands framed a full-length mirror of ancient glass with a crack across the top. Cindy patted her tightly sprayed hair and then shook her head.
She and Ned had been in the business for five years now but this monstrosity had to be the weirdest thing she’d seen to date. Ned’s wavy reflection appeared in the mirror as he came up behind her.
“Honey, have you seen this?”
He gave the mirror a cursory inspection and made a face. “It’s godawful.”
“I know. So godawful it’s almost interesting. Put it in a display window and you’d sure get the curious in off the street.”