Pat had planned to take a nice long hot bath. Instead she showered quickly and threw on the first clothes that came to hand-an old brown cotton skirt and matching print blouse. Somehow, against her conscious will, Mark had made a convert of her. The evidence was accumulating, slowly, inconclusively; and yet each new detail fit uncannily with the theory Mark had formulated at the very beginning. Knowing her son as she did, Pat would not have been willing to swear that Mark had told them everything he knew. He must have evidence beyond what he had shared with them, otherwise how could he have gotten the idea in the first place? At the start there had been nothing to indicate what Mark obviously believed: that Kathy was the object of a conscious attack, based on some spiritual identity between her and the long-dead Susan Bates.
Pat paused in the act of putting on makeup. Her face stared back at her from the mirror, her hazel eyes wide and shadowed with incredulity, her lips twisted in a wry grimace. Her hair needed cutting-or styling-or something; the dark locks had lost their usual luster, and surely she had more gray hairs than she had had a week ago.
Pat turned from the mirror. She didn't like what she had seen. The face of a blithering idiot, she told herself savagely.
When she started downstairs she heard the voices, raised in angry comment and counterretort. With a sigh she quickened her steps. How long she could keep those two from each other's throats was anybody's guess.
"What's the problem now?" she demanded, entering the kitchen.
Josef turned toward her, his face flushed.
"Your insane son wants to tear my house apart. I told him I won't have Kathy there-."
"It's perfectly safe in the daytime," Mark said.
"How the hell do you know that?"
"One a.m., on the dot, three nights running… Don't you see that points to a specific event?"
This was a new thought to Pat and, obviously, to Josef also. They considered the suggestion for a moment and Mark took advantage of their silence to make another point.
"See, Mom, it occurred to me that maybe Kathy isn't the only catalyst. Maybe it's the room itself. I'd like to know who slept in that bedroom in 1860."
"Your mind jumps around like a grasshopper," Pat said irritably. "I can't keep up with you. Are you suggesting that something happened at the witching hour of one in the morning, in that room? Murder and sudden death? It wasn't Susan's room, Mark. This was her home."
"I'd like to know whose room it was," Mark insisted.
"And how do you propose to find out?" Josef demanded.
Mark's eyelids dropped. He had long, thick lashes, and with his bright eyes concealed, his face took on a look of youthful charm that seldom failed to melt his mother.
"I've got an idea," he said sweetly.
II
After two days of unoccupancy Kathy's bedroom had acquired a hotel-room feeling. Pat went to the windows and threw them open.
Mark prowled, peering behind bookcases and bureaus, mounting a chair to stare at a corner of the ceiling.
"You really did a job on this place," he said to Josef, who was standing with his hands on his hips, watching. "Stripped off all the old paper, repainted, scraped woodwork-"
"I didn't do it; Joe Bilkins, contractor, did. At least I trust he did, that was what I paid him for."
"You shouldn't have," Mark said.
"I suppose we should have lived with the rotted wallpaper and flaking plaster."
"I mean, you should have kept records of what you found," Mark said. "Mom, remember when Dad was working on our house? Remember, he had a scrapbook, describing the color of the original paint, and structural details? He even pasted in pieces of old wallpaper."
"I remember," Pat said.
"See, Dad always said that every little bit of the past should be preserved," Mark explained, turning to Kathy; she was a much more appreciative audience than the others. "He said that the history of mankind is a long story of destruction, and he didn't want to be one of the destroyers."
Pat had packed the scrapbook away. Its reminder of frustrated enthusiasm and unfulfilled plans had been too much to bear.
"He said that if we ever got enough money he'd like to have someone duplicate the old wallpaper," she said. "Of course we never did have enough…"
After one quick glance Josef had turned away and was pretending to watch birds outside the window. She appreciated his tact.
"That is interesting, Mark," he said, over his shoulder. "But I don't see its relevance here. And perhaps your mother-"
"No, that's okay," Pat said. Mark was speaking of his father freely, fondly, without hurt. That was the way she wanted it.
"But it is relevant," Mark said. "Mom, remember the day we were working in the closet of my room? I was helping Dad strip off the paper in there. Remember when we found the name written on the wall?"
"Good heavens, I had forgotten," Pat exclaimed. "I'm surprised you remember, Mark, it was so long ago. You weren't more than-"
"I was twelve," Mark said indignantly. "And I had good reasons to remember it. It struck me as a neat idea, so I wrote my name on the walls too. When Dad found out he made me spend all day Saturday scrubbing."
"What else did you write, Mark?" Kathy asked, smiling. "Just your name?"
"And the date. That was what we found-'Edward Bates, aged twelve, 1857.' It seemed so funny to me then, that some kid, just about my age, had written that, over a hundred years ago. I thought, wow, it would be cool if a hundred years from now some other kid would find my name." Mark grinned. "Dad never did find them all. I put one in the back of my closet, next to Edward's."
"So you concluded your room was once Edward's." Josef's quick intelligence was learning to follow the curious leaps and twists of Mark's mind. "But perhaps he wrote his name elsewhere, just as you did."
"He wouldn't write it in anybody else's closet," Mark argued.
"Hmmm. Possibly. And you think the Turnbull boy did the same here? That's pretty farfetched, Mark."
"No, it's not. Look, you keep thinking about these people as grown-ups. Soldiers, mothers, like that. I think of them as kids. I mean, they grew up together-Peter Turnbull and his cousins, right next door. They must have played together, they were only a year apart in age. There were no other houses close by. Peter was the oldest. He was also an only child; I bet he was spoiled rotten, not only by his parents but by his big sister-"
"It's much more likely that she detested him," Pat said drily, remembering youthful battles with her own elder siblings.
"Boy, are you a cynic," Mark said. "I don't agree. Mary Jane was ten years older than Peter, just the age to appreciate a nice live baby doll. Girls in those days were trained to be motherly. I mean, all this Women's Lib-"
"Get on with it," Josef interrupted. "What are you driving at, Mark? As if I didn't know…"
"Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Peter would be the leader of the gang. Edward would imitate him, not the other way around. I suspect this was his room, as the corresponding room in the other house belonged to Edward, because it's the best bedroom next to the master bedroom in the front. And I'm hoping to find written proof."
His shining enthusiasm and unconsciously arrogant voice carried conviction. Kathy was an immediate convert.
"Of course! It would be in the closet, wouldn't it?"
She dropped to her hands and knees and began throwing out shoes, clearing the closet floor. Josef, contemplating his daughter's shapely bottom with dismay, exclaimed, "That is the wildest idea you've come up with yet, Mark. I gave orders that this place was to be stripped down to the bare plaster. Nothing like that would survive, even if-"