Time After Time by Antoinette Stockenberg Read Free Book Online Page A

not sure I like it as much as you do. It made me feel ... odd. I feel
almost guilty, in fact, dumping it on you."
    "That's crazy! It's
charming! Well ... thanks, Liz. Really."
    Liz thought Victoria would
put it on then and there, but instead she slipped it into her
handbag. She feels as f she's stolen it
from me, poor thing. To reassure her, Liz
said, "This box is worth a pretty penny, I think. More than the
garnet pin, by far."
    Victoria lavished endless
praise on the box, holding it and turning it this way and that.
Finally, she said, "But why do you suppose it's shaped like a
sarcophagus? Something to do with end-of-the-century
morbidity?"
    "That's not the shape at
all!" Liz said, too sharply.
    "Sure it is. Look: the
left side is wider than the right."
    "That doesn't make it
coffin-shaped! It makes it asymmetrical, that's all." Liz wanted to
change the subject. "Are these all the letters? I thought there
were more."
    "There are; this is all I
could carry from the attic in my arms." Victoria fished out one
letter from a pile on the table and handed it to Liz. "Here's the
most recent one I've found so far. It's dated 1935."
    "Four years after the
house was built," Liz said automatically.
    "Yes. Your land used to be
part of the East Gate estate— actually, it was a little service
road to East Gate. But it was sold off to a Portuguese builder who
tried to keep busy during the Depression building houses on spec.
Probably that's when the East Gate people put up the barbed wire.
Anyway, Victoria St. Onge bought the house new from the builder.
She was around eighty by then, so she — I? — must have been a
feisty old broad," Victoria said irrepressibly. "She paid sixteen
hundred dollars for this house — and she complained bitterly about
it."
    "Gee. That doesn't sound
like you at all; everyone knows you go through money like water,"
said Liz, falling in with her friend's fantasy.
    "Don't be smart. Anyway,
read the last sentence of the letter. It's very distressing. Very
... I don't know."
    Liz flipped the letter
over and read the wobbly handwriting: Stupid and wrong, it said, and now it's too late.
    "Huh. Well, this doesn't
say much. She could be talking about anything, from picking the
wrong wallpaper to the current president. What does the rest of the
letter say?" Liz went back to the letter's greeting. "Who's
Mercy?"
    "Her sister."
    "Hmm." The short letter
was a rambling, disjointed mess, bits and pieces about different
people, all of it rather pointless and certainly
mundane.
    "Almost all the letters
are to Mercy," Victoria explained. "The sisters were almost weirdly
close. I get the impression that Mercy was some kind of
healer."
    "Wonderful," said Liz
dryly. "This gets better and better."
    Victoria got up from her
rush-seated chair and stared out the window. But she wasn't seeing
Susy, lying in the grass with the cat on her stomach; and she
wasn't seeing the cool green oasis surrounding East Gate. Liz was
sure of it.
    "Know what else?" Victoria
murmured. "Victoria St. Onge was — if you laugh, I promise I'll
leave — a spiritualist."
    Liz confined herself to a
skeptical pursing of the lips. "Gawd."
    Victoria turned around.
Her normally serene, almost spacey expression had been replaced by
a burning, focused intensity that Liz had never seen
before.
    "That's what she was, Liz
Coppersmith," she said. "And like it or not, that's what we've got.
At least it explains some of my psychic skills."
    "Oh, come on. You're
intuitive, I'll grant you. But psychic?"
    "Liz — do you remember
what you told me over cappuccino that last night of our
grief-management class, when we declared ourselves graduated? That
no matter what strange road my amnesia took me down, you'd walk
down it with me?"
    Liz remembered the moment
very well. She'd been thinking of her own husband then: of how
after the baby was born, he had abandoned them both and taken off
for California, just when she needed him most. She was going down
for what felt like the