The Opal Legacy Part 13

"Do you think she'd have the gall to come by herself without an invitation?"

"There's no accounting for what that one might do. There's always been a bit of the devil in her, ever since she was little. Did you know I had her in my fifth-grade cla.s.s when I taught school? Must have been twenty years ago. I remember telling her mother about some mischief she'd caused and she just threw up her hands." The woman lowered her voice. "She has Indian blood, you know."

"I didn't, but I should have guessed. She has that look."

"On her father's side. The La.r.s.ens come from near Ontonagon and when I was there a few years back I asked..."

Lesley walked quickly away. JoAnn La.r.s.en. They were talking about JoAnn La.r.s.en. But what had the woman meant, "And to think he'd invite her here tonight?" Jon and JoAnn? She tried to picture them together but could not. Did the two women mean that in some way JoAnn had caused Mary to kill herself?

With unanswered questions whirling in her mind, Lesley walked from crowded room to crowded room. The house at Iron Ridge was ablaze with light. People had begun to eat. "Wonderful party"-"My dear, you'll have to visit us when we have a few friends in the Sunday before Christmas"-"Marquette hasn't had a housewarming like this in years"-"An opal? I always thought opals were brown"-"Do you ski? I'm planning a trip to the Porcupine Mountains early in January. You don't? Why, Jon was never off skis when he lived here before."

Jon. She hadn't seen Jon since she left him him the kitchen. How long ago? An hour? Longer? She climbed the stairs to the second floor, looked in the room where coats had been piled on the bed, glanced into their own bedroom. Down the stairs again to the library, to the living room. Charles Randall leaned back against the wall, alone, sipping a drink, the crowd ebbing about him like water around a dangerous reef.

Lesley walked across the dining room, admitting to herself she was looking for JoAnn as well as for Jon. She saw neither of them. She went outside. Two points of light glowed from the dock and her heart stopped as she tried to make out the faces behind the cigarettes. A man laughed. Not Jon. She turned to go back to the house.

Strange, she thought, the light was on in the tower room. She followed the path to the door where she soundlessly turned the k.n.o.b. The door was locked. She walked to her right along the side of the building to the round, porthole-like window and looked inside.

Jon faced her. The woman's back was to the window, her tight curls dark above the white dress. Jon's arms were around her.

He doesn't love me. He's never loved me.

Lesley's hand went to her mouth as she felt the nausea rise in her. She ran toward the house. I hate him, she told herself. I hate him, hate him, hate him.

Chapter Seventeen.

Lesley heard the clock in the library strike one. The clock, she had discovered, did start of its own accord, and sometimes in the night she lay awake listening to the chime mark the hours until finally she would descend the stairs and open the back panel and reach inside to stop the pendulum.

Now she stood in the open front doorway with a shawl over her shoulders. In the light from the hall the steps were almost white and the frozen ruts in the driveway became shadowed black lines. The last car drove toward her from the direction of the garage, slowed as it pa.s.sed the house, and she saw the woman on the pa.s.senger side wave to her. The car accelerated, its headlights sweeping across the trunks of the pines, and the two red taillights grew smaller and smaller. The car rounded the curve in the drive and the lights disappeared.

Lesley closed the door, leaned back against it, her body sagging as she let out her breath in a sigh. Somewhere a beam creaked and the wind rattled a loose shutter in the attic; otherwise the house was quiet. She hung her shawl over the peg on the now-empty coat rack and went down the stairs to the kitchen. Gla.s.ses, plates, and silverware were stacked on the drain board; stained coffee cups sat on the table.

Mrs. McAllister will be here at nine tomorrow, Lesley thought. Not tomorrow, actually nine today, eight hours from now. The dining room table was still against the wall and both the table and the piano in the archway to the living room were covered with paper plates, c.o.c.ktail gla.s.ses, cups, saucers, and overflowing ashtrays.

Lesley coughed as she inhaled the thick after-smell of cigarettes. Her throat was raw so she opened a window, pushed the slot in the storm window to one side, and the night air sliced into the room. When she knelt to pick up a spoon she grimaced, seeing a mound of potato salad on the wood floor. The room seemed emptier than before, and larger. The sounds of the party lingered in her mind and again she heard the mingled hum of talk and laughter, the piano and the singing echoing like the whisper of the sea in a sh.e.l.l.

She edged past the piano into the living room. Jon, his tie off, his suit rumpled, sat in a reclining chair watching her. He had placed his shoes neatly on the floor in front of him.

"That wasn't exactly my most exemplary performance," he said.

Lesley removed crumpled napkins from the chairs and tables, wadded them together, and threw the ball into a wastebasket.

"I'm tired," he said. "Tired of everything, of needing money, of people. I feel like going to bed and never getting up."

Lesley piled the gla.s.s ashtrays one on top of another and carried them to the kitchen where she emptied the cigarettes into a garbage can. She washed and dried the ashtrays before returning them to the living room.

"I didn't invite Randall," Jon told her. "I never imagined he'd come tonight. In fact, I wish I never had to see him again." Lesley hadn't seen Charles Randall leave but knew his hat and coat were no longer on the rack upstairs.

She returned three books which Judge Tanner had brought from the library to settle an argument over the legal limitations on mineral rights.

"Have you decided to punish me by not talking?" Jon asked when she came back.

"I don't have anything to say."

"Are you ready to come to bed?"

"I intend to sleep down here."

"Oh? You don't have to; I will." He pushed his chair into an upright position and, with one hand on the arm, stood up, stepping on his shoes and almost falling.

"I have this strange feeling," he said when he recovered his balance. "When I was a boy I had a recurring dream. A great wave came from the lake into the house and I climbed to the attic, yet the water reached me even there. I had no way to escape; the water was all around me. I always woke up then. I feel that way tonight-like I'm drowning."

"Did you invite her?" Lesley asked.

"Her? Who?"

"JoAnn La.r.s.en."

"Ahhh." Jon sat on the couch, tentatively as though fearful of the reception it would give him. Rea.s.sured, he leaned his head back and stretched his feet straight in front of him. "The sins of the young men," he said, staring at the ceiling above her head, "shall be visited onto the first and second wives."

"Being blasphemous doesn't help. I don't consider what you did to be particularly amusing."

"Sorry. Why do I always seem to be saying sorry to you? Am I always in the wrong or do you just make me think I am?"

"Do you want me to bring you a blanket from upstairs?"

"A nurse, that's what you are, a registered nurse. To answer your question, the first one, no, I didn't invite JoAnn. What have they been telling you about her?"

"Enough. It doesn't matter anymore."

"JoAnn's from the past. She's over and done with as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't care if I never saw JoAnn La.r.s.en again."

"I'll get you the blanket," Lesley told him.

When she came back with a folded quilt in her arms she found Jon lying full length on the couch with two throw pillows beneath his head. He breathed heavily. She unfolded the quilt and laid it over him, tucking the end under his feet. Cold air raised goose pimples on her arms and, remembering the open window, she walked into the next room and pushed it shut. As she pa.s.sed the couch on her way to the stairs she saw Jon watching her from half-closed eyes. "JoAnn means nothing to me," he said. "And I had nothing to do with Randall being here. Or his being in San Diego for that matter. Nothing."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"I didn't know about his plan. Didn't know about it and had no part in it. Just remember that later." He shifted on the couch so he faced away from her and in a few minutes his breathing became regular and she knew he slept.

Lesley turned her back on the debris from the party and climbed the stairs. Her head throbbed behind her right eye, her entire body was stiff, a tingling in her arms and legs warning her she was getting sick. She paused at the top of the stairs where Jon had stood a few hours before. Jon. She repeated his name as she fought an urge to run to him, to kneel at his side and comfort him. No, she told herself, that was what the other Lesley Hollister would have done. She went into the bedroom.

Jon doesn't exist for me any more, she thought. I've put him out of my mind and out of my life. Now I have only myself. Actually, I've never had anyone else all along. If I'm to survive I must never forget I'm the only one I can depend on. When I relied on people in the past they left me, one after the other. It wasn't their fault, it's the way things are. I must have been born under an unlucky star.

My mother and father. I hardly knew them, can't picture their faces, they're just photographs in an alb.u.m now. And the young man, the construction worker in San Diego. What was his name? I've forgotten already. And now Jon. Jon-don't think about him, he promised me so much yet gave so little. He deceived me, betrayed me. Charles Randall. Who is he? Why is Jon so anxious to disa.s.sociate himself from Charles Randall? Stop. Don't think about Jon.

My grandmother. She was the only one who gave of herself without asking what I could give in return. And she tried to warn me. Each of us has to find out for herself, she said. Did she have a foreknowledge of what lay in my future? Did she know and, knowing, try to prepare me, make my way easier? She gave me the opal and now I have nothing else left. This house isn't mine, Iron Ridge isn't mine. I'm a stranger here, an alien. Why has it taken me so long to realize that? And Jon. He isn't mine either.

Lesley undid the clasp and laid the pendant on the bureau. She began to undress. I'm so tired, she thought. She realized Jon had spoken the same words a few minutes before. Jon. Where does he belong? With JoAnn? No, not with her. I believe him; she's from the past, he doesn't want her. Does she want him? Probably only as a trophy if at all.

Iron Ridge? Does he belong here? Perhaps, but he's about to lose Iron Ridge. He's like me, he has no one and yet, though I reached out to him, even touched him for a time, we never found one another, and now it's too late. Why do I keep thinking about him? I must put Jon from my mind.

She stood before the mirror, naked, her body white. When she took the pendant from the bureau the opal flamed. She had never seen the jewel so fiery, not in all the years since her grandmother gave it to her. She held the stone to her face, rubbing the smooth surface along her cheek, then looked down into its depths at the flashing reds, oranges, and yellows. I'll always have the opal, she thought.

Walking to the bed, she pulled back the covers, lay with the stone in her hand, the chain wrapped loosely around her wrist. Shutting her eyes, she held the opal before her, between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and the gem radiated warmth. First she saw only blackness, then the shape of the opal formed in her mind and the flickering red shafts of light expanded and became a ball of fire pulsating above her, filling the void, and she floated, all pain gone, a sense of fulfillment in her body. She knew peace and her mind closed. The red fire faded.

Far beneath her she saw the house, the forest, the strip of beach, and patches of mist over the lake. This is different, she realized, this isn't like the last time. She did not walk along the beach as she had before; she seemed suspended, weightless, hovering above Iron Ridge.

A girl left the house and walked to the dock and north along the sh.o.r.e. Not a girl, though she looked small from above. A young woman in a jacket with a fur hood over her head who pushed back a wisp of blonde hair blowing across her face. Lesley had recognized her at once, knew this was herself, Lesley, the corporeal, human Lesley, and she also knew she would go to the promontory.

The woman left the beach to climb the low embankment and enter the woods. The bluff rose ahead of her, the mist swirling under the trees on the lower slope while below the waves sent showers of spray over the rocks. In a few minutes she lost sight of the woman in the woods.

Someone ran from the house-a man, Jon. Why does my heart pound so? she wondered. The man sprinted along the beach, his eyes following the footprints in the sand. At the spot Lesley had gone into the woods he hesitated, glancing both ways along the sh.o.r.e. Lesley reappeared part way up the hillside, looking neither right nor left, intent, oblivious to all but her destination.

Now she could see both of them on the slope, Lesley walking, Jon running behind her, closing the distance between them until he finally caught her by the arm. She stopped and they appeared to talk. Jon pointed behind him as though asking her to go back but Lesley shook her head and turned from him, her arms folded. He walked away as she looked over her shoulder at him, hesitating.

"Let him go," she whispered to the Lesley below her, reaching out to stop her from going to him. Suddenly the fire of the opal returned and the gem pulsed, filling her mind with its radiance, and she opened her eyes and saw the dark bedroom. She had flung her hand to one side, the opal was gone, the gold chain no longer about her wrist. She patted the sheet with her hands. There, she found the pendant.

Once more she held the opal and closed her eyes but the dream would not return. She moved restlessly on the bed, reaching to one side, toward Jon, but he was not there. Shutting her mind, she thought of the opal, the everlasting opal, the same today and tomorrow as it had been hundreds of years ago.

She thought of her grandmother waving to her at the airport in New York, hugging the child from Scotland, and then her mind went farther back in time and she was in another bed in another land, sitting bolt upright, screaming in the night. The dream, the horrible dream-a train on a bridge; the bridge crumpling, the train falling, She cried, "Mommy, Mommy," and a woman opened the door, handed her a rag doll, but this wasn't her mother, this woman whose hands smelled of dishwater and soap, a woman who rocked Lesley in her arms as she crooned a lullaby to her.

Lesley's mind closed and there was nothing but the pulsing red light swelling and receding, a great fiery star, a sun from a galaxy millions of light-years away, growing, receding, and then the light faded and she was above the cliff. A raw wound cut into the earth on the side of the bluff and on the beach below rocks and earth had cascaded into the lake.

A man lay at the foot of the cliff; a man who did not move. Jon. She was just above him, so close she could have touched him. He was dead. She knew he was dead. And she smiled. Good, she told herself, I'm glad, and she was repeating the words as she awakened with the bed rumpled and the light of early morning on the curtains and drapes.

Lesley placed the pendant on the nightstand. Getting up, she went to the window, pulled the drapery cord while staying behind the folds of the opening drapes. The woods were shadowed and still. Thick gray clouds hung low over the choppy waters of the lake.

Today, she thought as she began to dress. Today. She was neither expectant nor fearful. She could change nothing. This had to be, this would be.

She went to the closet, walking stiffly, awkwardly, as though in a trance, put on her jacket and slid the hood over her head. Before she pulled on her gloves she crossed to the nightstand and slipped the opal pendant into the jacket pocket. She was ready.

Chapter Eighteen.

Lesley paused to look down at Jon lying on the couch in the living room, his mouth slightly open, face unshaved, his body relaxed in sleep, the quilt rising and falling with his breathing. She felt nothing. He's a stranger, she thought, not the man I loved.

She left the house through the kitchen. On the path to the beach a strand of hair blew across her face and she pushed it beneath her hood. She must go to the bluff over the lake. She had no choice; this was what she must do.

The waves mounted higher than she had ever seen them, the spray arching toward her, darkening the sand. The forest huddled to her left-flat, one-dimensional, and never changing. The beach, the lake, and the woods reminded her of the background in a motion picture she had seen many times before. Yet this is happening, she told herself, this is real.

She climbed the low embankment separating the beach from the hushed forest. No birds sang and no squirrels chattered as she walked toward the promontory. The pines thinned around her and she pa.s.sed beneath bare-limbed maples, then the ground rose and she looked ahead to the bluff, its dark bulk ominous and unfeeling. As she climbed she felt her legs stiffen and begin to ache.

Now, with the pines behind her, she felt the bite of the wind sweeping across the unprotected slope. Against the backdrop of the bluff she saw random flakes of snow whirl earthward. She hesitated for a fraction of a second, frowning, staring ahead in disbelief. A flake from the ragged, uncertain snowfall landed wetly on her forehead. Her mind rejected what her senses told her to be true. Snow where there should be no snow. She was confused, as though the movie she had seen so many times had become subtly different. Snow did not belong; snow was wrong.

Above the wind a voice called from behind her. Jon. He shouted her name but she gave no sign she heard. Loose rocks clattered down the hillside as he clambered after her, and, as he came nearer, she heard his quick hoa.r.s.e breathing.

"Lesley." His hand gripped her arm. "Come back to the house." She pulled away. "Please," he said, "we need to talk."

She walked away from him to the edge of the cliff where she looked over the lake, folding her arms across her chest, closing her mind to him. His eyes, she sensed, never left her as he waited for an answer, but she held her body rigid and unyielding. She did not turn to him, would not turn, could not turn. Finally he sighed in exasperation and his footsteps receded. She blinked as snow blew into her eyes, yet she did not move.

When at last she looked behind her she saw Jon higher on the slope. He raised his head to look past her toward the pine forest, his face too far away for her to see his expression. Again she felt a shock of wrongness. He raised his arm, called to her, but his words were lost in the wind. She looked down the slope in the direction he pointed, saw nothing, so she walked toward him, trying to make out what he said.

She gasped-in front of her she saw the boulder and the chokecherry tree. The earth trembled beneath her feet. The snow fell thicker about her as the ground shook, the rumbling growing, and she looked into the swirling snow toward Jon but could no longer see him. Did she hear his voice? She couldn't be sure. Covering her face with her hands, she waited until the trembling of the earth lessened and then stopped. When she lowered her hands the tree and the boulder had vanished. A chill ran up her legs and along her spine.

"What have I done?" she whispered aloud.

"Jon!" She called his name, all of her anguish in her cry.

Only the wind and the waves answered. She ran to the edge of the slide with the snow flying about her, looked into the chasm only to see a veil of white. She waited, hands clenched at her sides, felt the wind shift, and all at once saw the lake. Jon lay facedown on the rocks below, the waves licking onto his bare head.

I've killed him, the thought. I willed him to be dead and he died. But it's not my fault, the opal is to blame. She brought the pendant from her pocket and as she held the stone in her gloved hand a snowflake struck its surface. The opal clouded over and at the same moment Lesley felt a spasm of pain as though a hand had clutched her heart. She looked from the opal to the lake, shaking her head. I can't, she thought, the opal is all I have. She thrust the pendant back into her pocket.

Lesley wanted to cry but, though her throat was tight, her eyes were dry. She felt the wild pounding of her heart. I must go to him, she told herself, hastening down the slope, stumbling and falling, pushing herself to her feet again. The ground leveled and snow whispered in the branches of the pines above her.

She gasped. A man stood in front of her, unmoving, his hands in the pockets of his black overcoat, his hat pulled down against the snow. Charles Randall. Lesley backed away until her foot struck a small fallen tree. Off balance, she staggered sideways and he strode to her and grasped her arm.

"Where is he?"

She shook her head, not understanding what he meant.

"Where is he?" Charles Randall asked again, shaking her.

"Dead, he's dead."

"Your husband? Jon?"

"The cliff. The slide. He fell. He's down there on the rocks. He's dead, dead, dead!" Her voice rose to a cry as the enormity of what she had done overwhelmed her.

Charles Randall released her arm and she lowered her head into her hands, sobs shaking her. She was numb; could not think. With his hand beneath her elbow he tried to urge her forward. Was he talking to her? She couldn't hear his words above the roaring in her ears.

"Oh!" The slap spun her face to one side. Stunned, she drew in a deep breath and opened her eyes. Charles Randall's face loomed inches from hers, chin and cheeks dark with the beginning of a beard, gla.s.ses streaked with water so she could not see his eyes. His lips pursed in a mirthless smile.

"I'll take you to Iron Ridge," he told her, "then come back and look for your husband, make sure he's dead. I should have done this my way from the first."