The Haunted Heart: Winter (20 page)

The shed door swung shut with a bang that
shook the entire structure. We were closed into pitch
blackness.

“Don’t tell her she’s dead,” Kirk said in a
low voice.

“She is dead, though.”

The entire shed began to shake. The tin roof
rattled. The boards groaned. The milk canisters clanked against
each other.

“Flynn!”

“Ines,” I rushed on, raising my voice to be
heard above the crack and pop of separating wood and metal. “We
know the truth. The truth is…”
Out there?
“Known. To us. To
others. What happened to you isn’t a secret. It can’t be hidden
anymore.”

What
had
happened to her? Did we even
know?

The shed shook harder. Something fell from
the ceiling and hit the ground with a crash. A lantern? The row of
milk canisters rattled like knuckle bones.

I said desperately, “We’re going to tell the
truth. Others will know too. Everything is okay now.”

Or not.

I closed my eyes. Forced myself to focus. I
tried to project soothing, kind thoughts.
It’s over. It’s all
over. We’re going to tell your story. We’re going to put it in the
papers. We’re going to write a book. We’re going to put on a
play.
My frantic thoughts rushed on but mostly I was fighting
the urge to jump up and run.

This was a mistake. What had I imagined I
could accomplish? Trying to face this wall of rage was like
standing in front of a tidal wave. Kirk had been right. There was
no fixing this. Our only possible chance was to get rid of the
mirror. Send it away. Lock it up good and tight.

I raised my voice. “Do you want to go home?
Do you want to go back to Bellehaven?”

As suddenly as it had started, the commotion
stopped.

A board fell out of the wall. Through the
gap I could see the swaying branches of the dead bushes. The
scratch of twigs against the wall slowly registered.

I looked back at Kirk. I couldn’t see his
expression, but I could tell all his attention was on the mirror.
Reluctantly, I turned back to face the mirror. Ines was there,
large as life, filling the frame. She was so close I could see the
tiny beauty mark next to her mouth, the sooty length of her
eyelashes, the tiny silver cross around her long, white neck. I had
the horrible feeling she was about to step through. I wasn’t sure I
could handle that.

My mouth was so dry, the words felt sticky.
“Is that what you want? To go home? To be with your baby?”

The mirror went black. It was as though Ines
had turned out the light.

“Is that it?” I whispered. “Do we just send
the mirror back?”

I felt Kirk start to answer, but then the
shed began to shake again. Violently. The tin roof lifted as though
it was about to tear away, and in the rift, I glimpsed
starlight.

The glass in the mirror seemed to turn an
eerie silvery green.

“That can’t be good,” Kirk said.

As we watched, the mirror started to rock.
It banged against the wall of the shed, like a heavy hand knocking
on a flimsy door.

Bang. Bang. Bang
.

Each time the mirror tipped forward, it
threw flashes of light against the heaving ceiling and floor like
green lightning strikes. It had a kind of hypnotic beauty to it.
Pockets of sky and stars were illumined in those brief flares as
the roof rippled and tugged.

From a distance I heard Kirk yell something.
The next thing I knew, he had hold of me and was dragging me out of
the shed. We landed in a mound of dirty snow. Kirk’s hand was still
fastened in my collar. His other hand gripped my arm with bruising
force.

The shed door slammed shut behind us.

I jackknifed up, wiped snow off my face, and
spluttered, “What the
hell
, Kirk?”

“Did you not see that goddamned mirror
nearly fall on you?”

No.

No, I hadn’t seen that. I’d been busy
thinking about the roof falling on me.

I looked back at the shed which was
gradually settling down again. “Oh God. Now I have to make myself
go back in there.”

“You are not going in there,” Kirk said with
finality. “I gave your father my word nothing would happen to you.
I’m going to keep that promise.”

“That’s not something you can promise.
That’s not something even
I
can promise. I have to go back
in there. We can’t leave it like this.”

“If that mirror had landed on you, you’d
have been killed.”

“Then don’t let the mirror fall on me.” I
stood, brushed the snow and dirt from my clothes. I stared down at
him. “Look, I don’t know why this is my problem, but it is my
problem. Maybe it doesn’t make sense, but I’m more certain every
minute that it’s up to me and no one else to fix this.”

“Fix it how?” He practically howled the
words, leaping to his feet and glaring at me. “In case you didn’t
notice, it wasn’t going well in there.”

“Because I don’t know what I’m doing!”

“I noticed!”

“That doesn’t mean I can give up.”

I could see Kirk struggling with that,
because he agreed with me, at least in principle. And we both knew
it.

I looked back at the shed. “I think maybe I
am
doing something right because she isn’t out of the
mirror.”

“She doesn’t need to be out of the mirror.
You came to her.”

“Or maybe that’s it.”

“For all we know, she only speaks French.
She may not even understand what you’re saying to her. You may
simply be antagonizing her. Did you ever think of that?”

“She understands. It isn’t just about the
words. She can feel what I’m telling her.”

I listened to the echo of my words and an
idea, a very small idea, sparked to life. “Okay. I’m going back in.
You don’t have to come —”

“Save your breath,” Kirk growled.

When I opened the door to the shed, I
thought maybe Ines had gone. Such an ordinary blend of scents
greeted my nose: diesel and moldering hay and long ago animals. It
was absolutely silent. The mirror reflected our tense shapes in the
doorway.

“Maybe she blew a fuse,” Kirk said.

“No,” I said slowly. “She’s here.”

I could feel that she was there, although I
couldn’t have explained how. I just…knew. Just as I knew that it
was my responsibility to deal with her.

I crossed the length of the shed and knelt
before the mirror once more. Over my shoulder I said, “Can you shut
the door again?”

Kirk pulled the door shut.

The dark felt too close and strange. Like
there were things I couldn’t see crowding beside me. I closed my
eyes and tried to think only of Ines. But this time I tried to
think of Ines herself and not how we could get rid of her.

No, I didn’t know her full story. I didn’t
know if she’d had an affair or if she’d driven her husband to
suicide or if she’d committed suicide. It didn’t matter. What I did
know for sure was…

Pain. Loss.

My breath caught. I kept my eyes closed
tight and just let myself feel. That was it. I didn’t need to know
the details in order to be sorry for everything she’d suffered. All
that anger, all that pain, all that loss. I understood that. What I
didn’t understand was how did anyone survive that? How did anyone
let go? Move on?

How?

But…I did know.

“Flynn.” Kirk’s voice was low, urgent.

I opened my eyes. Ines floated in the mirror
again. Her hand was outstretched, fingertips brushing her side of
the glass, as she tried to reach through.

I raised my hand and pressed it to the
glass, covering Ines’s. The glass felt cold. Shockingly cold.
Somewhere behind me I heard Kirk’s protest, felt him moving to stop
me, but I didn’t let myself think about Kirk. I didn’t think about
anyone except Ines. I stopped resisting, stopped fighting, simply
opened to her, thinking only
sorry. So sorry.

I shoved against the glass and my hand
seemed to slip through, like pushing through gel. No, like water.
Like cold, thick, deep water. I saw my hand touch Ines’s smaller
one.

I felt a kind of cool charge, a wash of
energy and light, a current flowing between us…

And then a bewildering rush of images, a
stream of memories that were not my own. Too much, too fast, like a
flip book of daguerreotypes. The pictures barely made sense. I was
seeing Ines but I was also seeing through Ines. So I saw Ines
preening at her reflection as she tried on a new hat. And I saw
Edward’s face as he forced himself on her. I saw the pale island of
her belly as she struggled to give birth. I saw the small, wrinkled
face of her baby. But it wasn’t just likenesses. I was feeling
everything Ines felt. I felt tenderness and grief and rage and
laughter and hunger. I touched velvet and smelled tobacco and
tasted sherry. I heard music and a roar of voices and talking.

I tried to stay calm, focused, but it was
hard to fight the panic that came with the idea that I was losing
myself in this torrent of someone else’s consciousness. I was being
swept away. I tried to hold fast to empathy and openness, but
instinctively I began to struggle, to try and break free, get my
head above water.

Water
.

And then something seemed to snap.
Everything was moving slowly, we were back in real time, and I
could feel Ines running, her heart hammering, her lungs on fire,
feet sliding and slipping on rocks and grass as she fled. I could
feel her terror like a weight on my chest, smothering me.

They were right behind her.

The sun looked red in the late afternoon
sky; it cast an ominous glow over house and hill. The grass beneath
her feet looked bleached and gray. She wore satin slippers and she
felt every stone, every twig. Her night dress caught on one of the
azalea bushes. She ripped free and stumbled on. Tears blinded
her.

“
Flynn!
” someone yelled from very far
away.

If she could get down to the woods, she
could hide, and then later she could make her way to the Fitzgerald
place. Sarah would help her get home. Home to New Orleans.

Her foot slipped on the slimy rock and she
went down. I felt the shock of the cold water, the rush of green
and silver bubbles. The wet nightdress tangled around her legs. She
couldn’t swim. Dank, fishy water filled her nose and mouth. She
clawed the surface, grabbing at slimy lily pads.

Beyond the edge of the pool her pursuers had
gathered. They ringed the bank, watching her.

I saw it all. I felt it all. Time slowed to
a crawl. Her desperation and terror were mine. But I was not her. I
was the other one. Flynn. I held to that knowledge and waited while
she fought. With a pang, I recognized the moment Ines stopped
struggling. Her vision went dark. The connection between us broke.
At last I was able to tear free. I struck out for the surface.

I came back to the present coughing and
choking. I was flat on my back in a weird smelling shed. Kirk
gripped my shoulders, and he was saying, “Flynn? Flynn?” Over and
over.

“She didn’t kill herself. They let her
drown.”

“Flynn? Can you hear me?”

I caught my breath. “I’m okay.”

I wasn’t drowning. I wasn’t even wet.

“What the hell happened?” Kirk sounded
shaken. He still hung onto me with that reassuring fierceness. “I
thought you had a seizure.”

I shook my head. I rolled away from him,
pushed up to my hands and knees, and stumbled to my feet. Kirk rose
too, steadying me as I swayed.

“Do you feel that?” I asked him.

“Feel what?”

I freed myself, staggering over to the
mirror. Kirk’s flashlight beam eerily highlighted my white face and
shadowy form. I didn’t remember him turning the light back on, but
it now revealed Kirk’s wide eyes, the broken pieces of furniture
scattered around us, a beautiful and very old, but very ordinary
mirror.

“You don’t feel that?” I said. I turned back
to Kirk. “She’s gone. Ines is gone. Really gone this time. It’s
over.”

“I saw it,” Kirk said.

“What did you see?”

He shook his head, and I didn’t think he was
going to answer. Then he said, “You touched her. You reached
through the mirror and touched her. The light went out in the
mirror and you had what looked to me like a convulsion.” His hand
still held mine. His skin was like ice, his fingers not quite
steady. “I thought you were dying.”

“No.” I looked at the mirror again. “I saw
Ines die. I felt it.” I shivered. “I heard you calling to me.” Had
hearing Kirk call my name helped me find my way back? I wasn’t
sure. I couldn’t begin to fully understand what had happened.

I put my hand to the mirror’s glass. It felt
cold, but it was the normal, expected chill. Nothing strange.
Nothing supernatural.

“How long did it last?” I asked.

“A few seconds. No more than a minute.”

It had felt like hours to me.

“I don’t know what they were going to do to
her. Maybe they were just going to question her. Or maybe they were
going to arrest her. But they let her drown, Kirk. They stood there
and watched her drown.”

“Just take it easy, slow down.”

“I saw everything. I saw her whole life
here. There, I mean. I saw her life at Bellehaven. I watched it go
by like a film at high speed. Only I could feel everything. I could
experience everything.”

More than I had wanted. A lot more than I
had wanted.

“Then you know what happened to her?”

“I-I feel like I do. It’s kind of confused.
I don’t think she had an affair. I don’t think she stopped loving
Edward until the end, but at the end she did hate him. She couldn’t
forgive him for his betrayal. Except.” I rubbed my forehead. I
didn’t want to remember this, but it was there with all the rest of
it. “When she was dying she was calling for him. All I know is she
was in so much pain. But the pain turned to fury. Maybe that was
it. Her rage at the unfairness of everything that happened to
her.”