Читать книгу Secret Summers - Glynda Shaw - Страница 11

“Now,” Claire said to me, “has that girl been filling your head with stories of ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the attic?”

I nodded somewhat sheepishly.

She harrumphed, said “You’re as safe here as you could be anywhere,” then returned to scrutinizing my clothes. ”You’ll want a petticoat under that,” she decided. “Go clean up and I’ll see what I can do with the dress.”

I’d determined to object about the dressing up thing, but Claire pointed out something of which I’d become uncomfortably aware about an hour after I met Monique.

“She thinks you’re a girl,” my aunt said. ”Don’t look so shocked. I’m afraid things happened so quickly this morning, she kind of jumped to conclusions, and it’d probably be better to let her down easily. She’s been so lonely here summers. Let’s just see if anyone at the party guesses, shall we?”

Yes, I know that anyone reading this will say I could have resisted in any number of ways, and perhaps you’d be right, but at age ten in those days when an adult relative told you to do something and there was no parent handy to look for a veto, you generally did it. Had there been a dad, uncle, older brother in the house, I’d have surely balked, but the only names I heard since I’d arrived here were feminine, and the only person I’d met besides my aunt was Monique with whom I’d just spent the most fascinating and exciting few hours I could ever recall.

“Well,” I said, “Okay, just for tonight.”

“Fine.” Claire patted my shoulder. ”The shower’s rather old. If you have trouble with it, just call. Now scoot!”

I stripped, leaving scarf and dress on the bed, along with the shorts and tee shirt I’d been wearing, and covered up with the towel I’d grabbed this morning when first I’d noticed my clothes were gone. I made my way to the bathroom and took what I hoped was an adequate shower.

I returned to my room to find the blue dress, brushed clean and pressed, on a hook on the back of the door. On the bed were a new set of socks and underwear—oh, well, I’d have to change them eventually—and a white, cotton half slip from the new suitcase. Dressing wasn’t too much of a problem, although I had no idea how to retie the scarf that I’d had on previously.

“We’ll need to hurry up a bit if we don’t want to be one of the stragglers,” Claire announced without particular comment on my attire. ”Here, I’ll help you cover your hair. It’ll be chilly on the beach yet.” She’d changed into a long, white, flowing draped something or other. Awfully formal, I judged, for a yard party. About her neck, she wore a chain hung with what I now saw was a goddess image with a half moon. A circlet of silver wire and tiny emeralds sat on her loose-combed, dark red hair. I never saw my aunt use make-up or hairspray. She didn’t need to.

“Aunt Claire,” I said, “you’re beautiful!” The occasion demanded something, and that’s the first thing that tumbled out.

She kissed me on the forehead. ”And you too, my dear.”

It turned out that Monique’s house was about a mile along the coast from Aunt Claire’s. We walked the distance, my aunt maintaining that the exercise should give us a good appetite. The wind was blowing steadily from the south, and as we left the yard, I again heard the whup-whup-whup sound I’d noted earlier. ”What’s that sound?” I inquired.

“Wind mills,” she told me. ”It’s how your poor old aunt makes her living, more or less.” I must have looked puzzled, but the world of business wasn’t something that held a lot of interest for me at not quite eleven years of age. ”I’ll show you later,” she said, leading the way up the two-lane gravel road topping the seaside cliff.

The house that Monique and her mother occupied was near the turn off from the state highway and was, of course, the place from which we’d seen the light while driving here the night previous. There were already a number of people gathered in the coarsely grassed front yard.

“Claire!” A tall woman sharing Monique’s long blond hair and peaches and cream complexion bore down upon us, throwing her arms around my aunt and bussing her full on the mouth. I’d seen women kiss before but seldom with so much energy.

“Laina!” Claire held our hostess for a moment before releasing her. ”Wonderful to see you. It’s been all of what? Three days?” Both women laughed as if this were some shared hilarity. Then Laina turned to me.

“You must be Nini-anne!” She pronounced my name with an inflection at the end that made it sound rather French and enveloped me against her tight bosom under its blue terry cloth beach robe. ”I’ve heard so much about you,” she said, confiding, “Monique has spoken of nothing else since she’s come home. You girls seem to have gotten on famously. Poor thing has no one of her own age to play with this summer! Welcome, welcome!”

I stammered my thanks and considered saying more, but Monique appeared around the house, carrying a bag of charcoal held at arm’s length to save her dress, which I noted she’d embellished with a silver necklace and a pair of matching bracelets. Her ponytails, retied, protruded from the back of a rose headscarf. ”Let’s go for a walk,” she offered without reference to the adults. Everyone having their own things to do with what was shaping up evidently to be a barbecue. There seemed to be no issues of politeness to worry us just now, so I looked to my aunt, who nodded, and we were off down the trail leading toward the water, first over largish boulders, then to clean swept sand that planed down to the water’s edge.

“Big storms,” said Monique, “can come in all of a sudden and just wash right over you and pull you in, drown you. You just never know.”

“And you walk here?” I asked with about equal parts horror and incredulity.

“Oh, sure,” she said offhand. “It’s been thirty years since anything like that’s happened. You just never know.” On the heels of that sentence, she asked, whispering though there was nobody but us and the seagulls to hear, “Did you get a chance to read more in The Book?”

“No,” I told her. ”Aunt Claire made me clean up for the party. I didn’t have time to even glance at it.”

“Did she say anything about us being up in the attic?” she demanded then. ”Did she know?”

“I’m not sure. She told me that you had some idea there was a ghost in the house and she said (Wait, what had my aunt said?) I was as safe here as I could be anywhere,” I repeated.

“But,” Monique pointed out, “she didn’t say there wasn’t a ghost.”

“No, I guess she didn’t,” I admitted. ”Has anyone seen the ghost?”

“Not close up anyhow,” Monique told me, “not so far as I know, but,” and here she stopped stock still in the sand and put her mouth directly against my ear, “there used to be a little girl living there.”

“You said that before,” I said. ”With Aunt Claire, you mean!?”

“That’s what I heard. Mom and I moved here a couple years ago. There was a rumor going on about something pretty bad that had happened just before we got here. Nobody would talk about it to me, but I think Mom knows more than she’ll say.”

“What kind of bad thing?” I implored, suffocated for details. What in hell had I gotten myself into? ”Did the little girl die or get kidnapped or what?”

“I’m pretty sure she died,” Monique said matter-of-factly. ”Nobody’s been looking for her or anything so far as I know. I’ve never heard of anybody visiting a cemetery. Still,” and here she dropped again into her dramatic whisper, “when I’ve been up at your aunt’s house, there seems to be somebody else there.”

“The ghost?”

She nodded. ”I think maybe the book we found is about that little girl.”

“That looked like a pretty old book though,” I protested. Then Monique said something that made me goosepimply all over.

“Just because The Book is about the little girl doesn’t mean that it was written while she was alive.” She hesitated. ”It could have been prophecy!”

“Nin-ee-an!” came a call from shoreward. ”Monique!” I recognized Claire’s voice and with a guilty feeling turned toward the direction of the summons. Monique caught my elbow.

“Listen. When you get back home, you’d better hide that box. I always get a real strange feeling about it.”

“So you have seen it before?” I asked again, though she’d severally denied it.

“I knew about it,” she admitted, “but I never tried to open it or anything. I was too scared.” We turned back along the beach, veering inland as the tide began to roll in, as if chasing us homeward.

The salt air was full of the smell of things sizzling and smoking. I realized with a pang that dinnertime had come and gone without me realizing I was hungry. Laina’s yard was full of people, including children, both boys and girls, most of them younger than Monique and I. Though I noted an absence of men, I guess I didn’t think about it much. Mom’s friends were mostly women too. Monique drew us toward the barbecue grill where plump sausages just now were spitting, along with foil packets of something smelling especially good. These turned out to be asparagus, mushroom, and red onion cooking together on the charcoal in their little envelopes. There were also potatoes with about twenty different things to put on them. I usually didn’t have much of an appetite in those days, but with the air, the exercise, and the excitement of the day, I realized a frisky emptiness inside.

Monique drew us toward the gathering around the broiler, and we snagged bratwursts on forks, repairing then to the picnic table for buns, mustard, catsup, and paper cups of limeade. We moved toward the edge of the crowd, for crowd it was by now, the yard seeming to be full of every female neighbor for miles and their kids.

Somewhere a guitar strummed, and a high, clear sound, a flute like the one my sister had sent me, trilled above the hubbub.

“Here we are!” Aunt Claire came wading through the sea of blue jeans and peasant dresses. ”I need to introduce everyone to my summer housemate!” she announced. Taking me by the arm, the one connected to the hand which held the limeade, she pulled me into the crowd, somehow finding empty space as Monique, sticking close, followed us from group to group. People were greeting all of us: Monique whom they knew, Claire, of course, and me, I was sure, out of respect for my aunt. Laughter, welcomes, blessed be’s trailed us through the yard as we smiled, mustard-faced and I agreed that, yes, I was very happy to be there and was having a wonderful summer.

Somehow Monique and I managed to work our way through the various food offerings until we were full. We tried to slip off again, but Laina crooked a finger at us, and when we came to her, she said, “Stick close, girls. There’ll be a divining Circle in a little while. I don’t want you two lost somewhere!” Monique nodded, and I accepted the directive since some of Mom’s friends, sometimes Mom herself, did things like that too. Going as far toward the edge of the yard as we dared, we settled on a perimeter log that divided yard grass from sand more or less where we sat, swinging our feet and staring toward the water.

“Who’s that?” Monique demanded suddenly.

I looked where she pointed. A way down the beach, far enough not to be taken as part of the party, but yet close enough that his presence didn’t seem casual, was a tall figure in the shadow of a huge boulder. He was clad in what may have been an overcoat of some sort, dark and out of character for the day. A casual glance might have indicated a general interest in the surroundings or even a sense of searching his way, but for an instant I felt his eyes lock with mine.

“How should I know?” I said with much more bravado than I felt. The sunny day had suddenly gone cold.

“Let’s go sit with Mom and Aunt Claire,” Monique suggested and slid off the log, brushing sand from her dress.

Lawn chairs had been drawn up near the house. The remainder of the food and several varieties of drink were laid out on the picnic table, and two folding affairs had been pressed into service for the occasion.

“What’s wrong, Honey?” Laina inquired of Monique. ”You look as if you’d seen …” Laina’s voice trailed off. ”Something that’s upset you,” she rallied. Aunt Claire said nothing and held her face devoid of any expression.

“The wind brewed up suddenly,” Monique said, “and we got cold. We’d been talking about tsunamis and stuff.” Her mother nodded.

“Well,” she said, “that hasn’t happened for a very long time.” She knew as well as we did that nothing unusual had occurred wind- or water-wise, but the chilling look the shrouded man had given us still made me shiver.

“A nice cup of tea,” my aunt suggested. ”That should warm the two of you.” While Monique’s mom went for china cups, Aunt Claire fetched a primrose teapot from one of the adjoining tables. A light brownish decoction with a flowery bouquet was poured into ancient-looking, shamrock-patterned china cups. I learned much later this was a slightly caffeinated mixture of rose hips and several other special herbs useful in women’s magic. Both of us accepted honey and were each taking care in our movements because we sensed this was much more than an effort to warm us up inside.

A gray-shawled lady, perhaps forty years older than my aunt, had been standing by, leaning on a gnarled walking stick. Now she came to join us.

“This is Mother Morland,” my aunt informed. ”She’s our herbalist, among many other things.” I bowed slightly and Monique looked a little frightened. The old lady nodded to us without speaking, accepted a cup of tea, and sat opposite Monique and me.

We sipped almost in synchrony, looking each from one to the other, but none of us found anything to say. The tea was slightly minty, somewhat deeper than tea, rather more like coffee, a little fruity, a little grassy, with the hint of a peppery aftertaste, but smooth not bitter. It warmed through the recently acquired chill that the now fogging evening was imparting and soothed somewhat that other chill that had nothing to do with the passing of the sun.

“You have not visited us before, child?” Mother Morland said suddenly. Her voice was thin and rather shrill but sounded determined.

“No, Ma’am,” I answered, now a bit nervous myself. ”I haven’t.” She looked at me sharply as if testing the truthfulness of my reply but said nothing more. In time, my tea was drained to the last few swallows, and I saw there were the remnants of leaves, brown and muddy, at the bottom of my cup. Aunt Claire reached out, taking my cup, then Monique’s. She spun Monique’s cup first, three times clockwise, then sat peering into the murkiness at the bottom. Mother Morland leant to inspect as well and nodded satisfaction.

Now Claire took up my cup and spun it once, twice, thrice. She set it back on the table between herself and Mother, and both women bent their heads over the results. I caught only a glimpse of Aunt Claire’s face, just the briefest revelation, but even at ten years of age, I had an artist’s eye. Before she masked the emotion, I caught the terror that whatever she’d seen had caused. Mother Morland continued to look impassive, but very seldom during the time I knew her, did I see her looking otherwise.

“The Mother has you in Her care,” Claire said, including Monique, then inclining her head a little skyward. ”Keep Her protection around you, and you shall be safe.” Laina then busied herself with seeing to the remaining guests, refilling teacups, distributing zucchini cookies, pieces of carrot cake, and slices of sweet potato pie. Monique found us a couple of Cokes since neither of us were much accustomed yet to sipping herbal tea throughout an evening. We sat for a time listening to the stories of the elder women, some of them exhaling clouds of cigarette smoke, others quaffing from glasses of something deep red and potent smelling, some doing both, some neither. In the background a guitar struck up again with the silver flute trilling along in a cunning harmony, a low-hummed melody, a few snatches of song phrase.

“Lots of stories about the sea,” from an orange-haired woman in a tie-dyed blouse, half hidden in the shadows at the next table. Those about her, including our group, hushed to listen. ”People going into it,” she said. ”People coming out of it. Stories about a mother who’s lost her child, wailing through the night like a banshee. Sometimes though, it’s the child, usually a little girl, looking for her mother. It’s told around where I live,” she gestured vaguely southward, ”a five-year-old haunts the area near the lighthouse.” Heads nodded. “Hotels nearby claim the mother or the little girl drops in now and again for a visit.

“My aunt told me a story when I was still a teenager, maybe fifteen, twenty years ago. She said she was at a dinner party. She was helping to bring things from the kitchen to the table when another of the guests came in from the living room with a real puzzled look on her face. The guest said there was a black-haired woman in a long red dress standing in the middle of the room when she’d walked through. The woman looked lost or confused. The guest asked her if she was coming to eat. They’d sounded first call for food just about then. The black-haired woman just stood there, staring straight ahead. So the guest turned to go, and now she heard the sound of crying. When she looked back again, the woman wasn’t there anymore.

“The hostess was in the kitchen,” our storyteller continued after a sip from her wineglass. ”And when my aunt told her what she’d just experienced, she said, ‘Well, she’s back.’ Aunt Jessie said that story still made her get the chills every time she thought about it. She said her friend, the hostess, told her that the black-haired lady, always in the long red dress, just showed up from time to time in the house, always looking for something, never speaking, I guess sort of like a member of the family. My house guests always have to talk!” the tie-dye blouse woman said with a snorty sort of laugh, breaking the tension of the moment, and most everyone else laughed too. I did but not very hard. Monique reached over and squeezed my hand.