Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Shadowgate 02 (21 page)

 
          
I'm running out of time,
Winter thought
desperately.
Won't someone tell me what's
going on before it's too late?

THE WINTER CARNIVAL

In spite of all their friends
could say, On a winter's morn, on a stormy day, In a Sieve they went to sea!

— EDWARD LEAR

 
          
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON WHEN WINTER TURNED HER
new Saturn down the dead-end street in the working-class
New Jersey
suburb where Janelle Baker lived.
Why every single house in this development
has to look the same I'm sure I don't know
—
and if they
DO
have to, why
don't they make the house numbers bigger?
It would also help if there weren't
both a
Medmenham
Drive and a
Medmenham
Lane in the development. Winter checked her jotted notes for the twentieth
time since turning off the main road.

 
          
She'd
left Glastonbury this morning just as the sun was coming up, and just managing
to get this far had given her a purely physical sense of accomplishment that
had done much to bolster both her spirits and her determination. Though it
would be foolish to pretend that she was not still physically weak and out of
condition, and certainly she lacked the stamina she remembered having, just
knowing her limits and being able to push them was a source of ongoing pleasure
for her.

           
It's
like being reborn.

 
          
She'd
wanted to leave Glastonbury without telling anyone, but a sense of guilty
responsibility—for Truth's injuries as well as for Nina's car— had made her
phone Dylan Palmer at the Institute yesterday, as soon as she was back from her
errands. It was the morning after the disastrous Elemental summoning, and
weariness still dragged at her. The interview had not been pleasant, but she
hadn't expected it to be.

 
          
"You can't just go running off like
this!" Dr. Palmer's voice crackled over the telephone line.

 
          
"Perhaps you'd like to tell me, then,
just how it is I ought to run off," Winter shot back coolly, in a tone her
former colleagues at
Arkham
Miskatonic
King would have recognized and backed down from. "And I don't believe I
need your permission. I'm notifying you as a courtesy, nothing more. How is
Truth?" Winter added, ruthlessly changing the subject.

 
          
"She's . . . okay," Dr. Palmer
admitted grudgingly. "But I hope you'll reconsider this, Winter. It's not
as if you're alone in this . . . thing. You have friends, allies. ..."

 
          
"I appreciate your concern,"
Winter said, a shade more warmly. "But I think I need to do a little more
research before accepting your offer." The sentence was a ghost out of her
past and its resonance made her smile briefly. "I think I may know how to
find out who this 'magician' is that you and Truth say is after me."

 
          
"You think it's Hunter Grey son?"
Dr. Palmer asked shrewdly.

 
          
no!
Some powerful instinct within her could
not accept that Grey could be responsible for something that carried so much
of hating and hurting with it. Aloud she said, "Grey's the only magician I
ever knew, Dr. Palmer. Maybe he'll know where to start looking for yours."
IF I CAN FIND HIM. . . .

 
          
But
if Hunter
Greyson
remained maddeningly elusive, at
least the rest of her school friends were not so hard to find. Winter had
reached
Rappa-hoag
around
noon
, checked into the first large hotel she
saw, and called the number Nina Fowler had found for Janelle Baker.

 
          
Only I have to remember she's Janelle
Raymond now,
Winter reminded herself as she pulled the car to a stop
outside
167
Grammercy
Park Road
. Janelle was married, and, like the others,
had gotten on with her life, but she'd been delighted to hear from Winter when
Winter phoned her from the nearby Marriott.

           
Should she tell Janelle that she
didn't really remember her? Winter fretted. She was hoping she wouldn't have
to—she was counting on the sight and presence of the woman who had once been
one of her closest friends to shake loose her repressed memories.

 
          
Repressed? What an odd idea. What on earth
could there be to repress about four years of college?

 
          
"Winter!"

 
          
But
the thought vanished at the sight of the plump redhead standing on the porch of
the small tract house. Janelle stood on tiptoes, waving and wearing a
kelly-green
sweatsuit
with a row of plaid heart
appliques
across the bosom, and a matching plaid bow
holding back her wavy flame-red hair.

 
          
She looks like a Cabbage Patch doll with no
fashion sense,
Winter thought with automatic unkindness, before guiltily
curbing the thought. But there was something about her friend's appearance that
generated a faint impulse of alarm, though Janelle looked clean and healthy—and
certainly well fed.

 
          
Oh, stop it!
Winter told herself sternly
as she got out of the car. She waved back at Janelle and started up the walk.

 
          
The
inside of
167
Grammercy
Park Road
was as relentlessly ordinary as the
outside; Janelle led her into a living room that looked to Winter as if it had
been furnished with one of those "decorator room groupings" from a
national chain department store. There was a gray velveteen La-Z-Boy with the
Scotchgard
label still on it in the corner and French
Provincial end tables in white pickled polyurethane waterproof finish flanking
the overstuffed couch upholstered in peach floral
Herculon
.
The floor lamp coordinated with the two peach-colored ginger-jar lamps on the
end tables. Wall-to-wall acrylic pile in a harmonizing shade of gray swept
across the floor to vanish beneath the edge of the companion entertainment and
media center. The open spaces on the shelves of the entertainment center were
filled with untidy piles of the current popular videos and the sort of soulless
decorative "accents" that came from the same place that everything
else in the room had—creating a room that was both cluttered and impersonal.

 
          
Winter
felt a faint sense of recoil, and didn't think the cause was anything as
simple and unflattering as snobbery. It was true that the room looked like a
page from a less-expensive catalog, but that wasn't what gave the room the
ambiguously chilling sense of emptiness. Winter pushed the thought away,
unwilling to follow it to its logical conclusion.

 
          
The
only thing that didn't fit in with the rest of the room was the picture over
the couch.

 
          
It
was a landscape, painted with all the hot bright colors of a New England
summer—a forest surrounding a mixed field of poppies and lupines, leading the
eye inevitably to the flash of gleaming silver at the center; the pool in which
the rising moon was reflected even at midday, and the unicorn that waited
beside it.

 
          
"Do
you still paint?" Winter burst out impulsively, cheered by remembering.
Janelle had been an artist. She was sure the memory was a true one.

 
          
But
...

 
          
"Who
has time?" Janelle said, shrugging. "If you only knew. . . . But here
I am babbling on and you're hardly in the door. Give me your coat— um,
Burberry, very nice—and you're going to stay for dinner, right? Of course you
are—then you can meet Denny; I've told him so much about you that he's just
dying to meet you. But let me hang up your coat; come on back to the guest room,
it's in through here. Where are you staying?"

 
          
Following
Janelle down the hall, Winter felt a traitorous pang of relief that she was
already checked into the Marriott. The small suburban tract house was the very
antithesis of
Greyangels
Farm, and Winter did not
think she could have borne to accept Janelle's hospitality overnight.

 
          
"Oh,
that's too bad," Janelle said when she answered. "We've got the
cutest little guest room—you'll see—it used to be my studio—but no one ever
uses it now except Denny's mother. I wish you'd called earlier— you could have
stayed with us."

 
          
Oh no I couldn't have.

 
          
The
guest room Janelle conducted her to was very much like the living room. All the
furniture seemed to have been purchased by someone less concerned with their own
taste than with satisfying some arbitrary external standard. There was a prim
single bed and a chest of drawers, and a couple of tired-looking prints of
flowers on the wall.

 
          
"I
used to have my own stuff up, but Mama Raymond said it made her head hurt to
look at it, and then she gave us these," Janelle said, talking over her
shoulder as she opened the closet and hung Winter's coat inside.

           
"Just toss your bag
anywhere—how do you ever manage that thing; it looks big enough to smuggle
babies in!"

 
          
Winter
smothered a laugh and felt a pang of wistful tenderness for her friend. Janelle
had always been a clown, hiding her shyness behind a flurry of one-liners.
Winter threw her
briefbag
on the bed.

 
          
"So
how have you been, really?" Winter said awkwardly. "It's been a long
time."

 
          
"You
never call, you never write. . . ." Janelle teased impishly, "but
then, I didn't ever get around to thanking you for the wedding present, and
it's been—what?—eight years now?"

 
          
Winter
wondered what she'd sent.

 
          
"And
it's so great to see you again—you look really terrific." Janelle stood in
front of the closet door, regarding Winter with frank envy.

 
          
"Thanks,"
Winter said, "so do you."

 
          
"Hah!"
Janelle laughed dismissively. "We can't all keep our girlish figures. But
come on; let me get you some coffee, and try to spoil yours."

 
          
The
eat-in kitchen was decorated country style, in French blue and beige with
pictures of geese everywhere. Janelle had always had a penchant for things the
other members of the group considered unbearably corny, Winter thought, with a
surmise that owed more to intuition than memory.

 
          
"Do
you still collect teddy bears?" she asked.

 
          
Janelle
beamed, her gray eyes disappearing into smile-crinkles. "Yeah. Sometimes.
Remember the Lost Bears?"

 
          
"And
you were Wendy," Winter said, only half-guessing now.

 
          
"And
Tiger-Lily Bear, and Cub-
tain
Hook. I sure do miss
them," Janelle sighed. "But sit down," she urged, changing the
subject quickly. "I'll put up the coffee."