“If you’ve got anything that makes sense, anything concrete,” he said, “we should call the cops. They can put in a call to the sheriff’s department up there and get help sent out to the cabin real fast, faster than we can get there.”
“What I’ve got, my information, is harder than concrete, so far as I’m concerned,” Grace said. “But the police wouldn’t see it the same way I do. They’d say I was just a senile old fool. They’d want to lock me up in a nice safe place for my own good. At best, they’d laugh at me.”
He thought about the poltergeist — the sound of the ax, the splintering door, the airborne ceramic figurines, the toppling chairs — and he said, “Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”
“We’ll have to handle this ourselves,” Grace said. “Let’s get rolling. I can tell you everything I know on the way. Each minute we waste, I just get sicker and sicker, thinking about what might be happening in the mountains.”
Paul backed the car into the street and drove away from the house, heading for the nearest freeway entrance. When he was on the open highway, he floored the accelerator, and the car rocketed ahead.
“How long does it usually take to get there?” Grace asked.
“About two hours and fifteen minutes.”
“Too long.”
“We’ll do better than that.”
The speedometer needle touched eighty.
THEY had brought a lot of food in cardboard cartons and ice chests. They transferred all of those items to the cupboards and refrigerator, agreeing to forgo lunch altogether in order to indulge themselves guiltlessly in a glutton’s dinner.
“All right,” Carol said, producing a list from one of the kitchen drawers, “here’s what we need to do to make this place livable.” She read from the list:
“Remove plastic dropcloths from furniture; dust
everything; scrub the kitchen sink; clean the bathroom; and put sheets and blankets on the beds.”
“You call this a vacation?” Jane asked.
“What’s wrong? Doesn’t that sound like a fun agenda to you?”
“Thrilling.”
“Well, the cabin’s not enormous. The two of us will go through the list of chores in an hour or an hour and a half.”
They had barely started when they were interrupted by a knock at the door. It was Vince Gervis, the colony’s caretaker. He was a big, barrel-chested man with enormous shoulders, enormous biceps, enormous hands, and a smile to match the rest of him.
“Just makin’ my rounds,” he said. “Saw your car. Thought I’d say hello.” Carol introduced him to Jane and said she was a niece (a convenient white lie), and there was some polite chitchat, and then Gervis said, “Dr. Tracy, where’s the other Dr. Tracy? I’d like to give him my best, too.”
“Oh, he isn’t with us right now,” Carol said. “He’s coming up on Sunday, after he finishes some important work he couldn’t just put aside.”
Gervis frowned.
Carol said, “Is something wrong?”
“Well. me and the missus was plannin’ to go into town to do some shoppin’, maybe see a movie, eat a restaurant meal. It’s what we generally do on Friday afternoons, you see. But there isn’t another soul up here besides you and Jane. Will be tomorrow, bein’ as it’s a Saturday, and seem’ as if the weather don’t get too bad so that everybody stays to home. But there’s no one else so far today except you.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Carol said. “We’ll be fine.
You and Peg go on into town like you planned.”
“Well.. I’m not sure I like the idea of you two ladies out here all by your lonesome, twenty miles from other folks. No sir, I don’t like it much.”
“Nobody’s going to bother us, Vince. The road’s gated; you can’t even get in without a key card.”
“Anybody can walk in if he’s willin’ to go overland just a little ways.”
Carol required several minutes and a lot of words to reassure him, but at last he decided that he and his wife would keep to their usual Friday schedule.
Shortly after Vince left, the rains came. The soft roar of a hundred million droplets striking a hundred million rustling leaves was soothing to Carol.
But Jane found the noise somewhat unpleasant.
“I don’t know why,” she said, “but the sound makes me think of fire. Hissing. just like a lot of flames eating up everything in sight. Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle.. “
The rain forced Paul to slow down to sixty, which was still too fast for highway conditions, but the situation called for the taking of some risks.
The windshield wipers thumped metronomically, and the tires sang softly on the wet macadam.
The day was dark and growing darker. It looked more like twilight than like midday. The wind blew obscuring curtains of rain across the treacherously wet pavement, and the gray-brown road spray flung up by other traffic hung in the air, a thick and dirty mist.
It seemed almost as if the Pontiac were a tiny vessel sailing through the deep currents of a vast, cold sea, the only pocket of warmth and light within a million miles.
Grace said, “You probably won’t believe what I’ve got to tell you, and that would be understandable.”
“After what’s happened to me today,” Paul said, “I’m ready to believe anything.”
And maybe that’s what the poltergeist meant to do, he thought. Maybe it meant to prepare me for whatever story Grace has to tell. In fact, if I hadn’t been delayed by the poltergeist, I would have left the house before Grace arrived.
“I’ll keep it as simple and straightforward as I can,” Grace said. “But it’s not a simple and straightforward matter.” She cradled her torn left hand in her right hand; the bleeding had stopped, and the cuts were all crusty, clotted. “It starts in 1865, in Shippensburg. The family was named Havenswood.”
Paul glanced her, startled by the name.
She looked straight ahead, at the rain-sodden land through which they were rushing. “The mother was Willa Havenswood, and the daughter’s name was Laura. Those two didn’t get along well. Not well at all. The fault was on both sides, and the reasons for their constant bickering aren’t really important here. What’s important is that one day in the spring of 1865, Willa sent Laura into the cellar to do some spring cleaning, even though she knew perfectly well that the girl was deathly afraid of the cellar. It was punishment, you see. And while Laura was down there in the cellar, a fire broke out upstairs. She was trapped and burned to death. She must have died blaming her mother for putting her in that trap in the first place. Maybe she even blamed Willa for starting the fire— which she didn’t. It was accidentally started by Rachael Adams, Laura’s aunt. It’s even possible that Laura wondered if her mother had started the fire on purpose, just to get rid of her. The child had emotional problems; she was capable of melodramatic notions of that sort. The mother had emotional problems, too; she was capable of inspiring paranoia, for sure. Anyway, Laura died a gruesome death, and we can be pretty certain that her last thought was an ardent wish for revenge. There was no way she could have known that her mother perished in that fire, too!”
So that’s why the Havenswood identity didn’t check out when Carol put the police on to it, Paul thought. They’d have had to go all the way back to the 1800s in order to find the Havenswood family.
County records for that period probably don’t even exist any more.
A slow-moving truck appeared out of the mists ahead, and Paul passed it. For a moment the filthy spray from the truck’s big tires drummed on the side of the Pontiac, and the noise was too loud for Grace to speak above it.
When they had passed the truck, she said, “Since 1865, Laura has been pursuing revenge through at least two and probably three other lives. Reincarnation, Paul. Can you believe in that? Can you believe that in 1943, Laura Havenswood was a fifteen-year-old girl named Linda Bektermann and that the night before her sixteenth birthday she tried to kill her mother, who was Willa Havenswood reincarnated?