Firebird (6 page)

She stops in the darkness and spins around, hugging herself tightly as if to hold close the tender, wondrous feeling of being loved.

I want to be your wife
, she whispers.  Everyone says I’m too young for you but they’re wrong.  We’ll prove them wrong together
.

She cups the small rise of her abdomen with gentle hands. 
And I have such a beautiful gift for you, my love.

The flames of the bonfire whirl in the air like twisted orange ribbons.  Sparks skitter across the beach and cast streaks of light into the sea.  As she slips into the crowd of well-wishers, she keeps her eyes on the wooden bridge over the dunes.

Any minute now.  There!

But it’s her sister Eve who emerges from the darkness.

Dressed in flowing red, eyes too bright, hair glinting gold in the light of the bonfire, Eve is, as always, the center of attention.  Someone hands her a glass of champagne and lifts her up onto the old wooden picnic table.

Eve takes a long drink, kicks off her impossibly high-heeled sandals and begins to dance, swaying seductively in the firelight.

Please don’t take this night from me, Eve
.

Beyond her sister’s shadow, she sees a man crossing the dunes.

She begins to run toward him.

“I have an announcement, everyone!”  Eve’s breathless voice trills across the beach, and Alexandra swings around.

Eve is raising her champagne glass high above her head.

”I’ve gotten married!”  She flings out her hand toward the shadows.  A diamond glitters in the firelight.  “Come, don’t be shy, darling!”

And Alexandra turns to look into the eyes of the man she loves as fireworks explode like jewels across the sky.

* * * *

Anger, as fierce and primal as the waves slamming against the beach, crashed over Alexandra, scattering the memories.  She took a deep breath, opened her eyes.  The fog was drifting out to sea.

Then from the distance, a muffled shout.  Alexandra spun around.  Juliet?

A huge black Labrador raced from the direction of the harbor across the wet sand, followed by a figure.  Hidden by the high sea grass, Alexandra waited, holding her breath as the figure approached, willing Juliet to appear.

Too tall, she registered.

Then the hood blew back, and she saw the face of a man.  He was angular, fast, with a navy windbreaker whipping about his torso and black hair lifting in the sea breeze.

He shouted again, but the breeze took the words and flung them out across the water.

The man watched the dog disappear into the cluster of small beach cottages.  Finally he turned to face the sea, and dropped his head.  He waited, still and alone on the darkening beach, while the clouds turned purple beyond the horizon.

The rigid silhouette hunched against the immense sky made a stark, disturbing image – lonely as an Edward Hopper painting.  I won’t intrude on your privacy any longer, she told the man silently.

As if he’d heard her, the man lifted his head.  For an instant, their eyes met.  Then he whistled to the Lab, and they ran down the beach and disappeared into the dunes.

The distant thunder of surf sounded like a drumbeat in her ears.   With a reluctant sigh, she turned her face north.  Now that the fog was blowing off, she could see the beach turn sharply, just as she remembered, and disappear into a swirl of foam.  The land rose in a jagged series of cedar-studded cliffs that jutted into the rough Atlantic like great stone steps.

There, one hundred feet above the ocean, was Cliff House.

Her childhood home clung precariously to the edge of the high black cliffs, its chimneys and gables only half visible beyond the tangled pines and dark cedars.  She gazed at the familiar sharp angles, huge windows and weathered wood, the terrace cantilevered out over the rocks.  Cliff House was like a great glass ship sailing forth over the foaming waters.

It always had been Eve’s house more than hers.  Too contemporary, too open to the wild elements for Alexandra, Cliff House had far better suited her sister’s bold, fearless spirit.  Eve, who loved those terrible heights, had been the one who walked the terrace railing high above the cliffs like a balance beam, who dared to climb out onto the steeply pitched roof late at night while their parents slept.

So high
... 

She took a cautious breath, squared her shoulders and raised the binoculars to her eyes.  The huge slate roof sprang into view.  Close, steeply angled and very high.  Mist swirled like a veiled woman across the shingles.

Without warning, a spinning vertigo washed over her.  Her legs turned to water as the sky swooped toward her.  She closed her eyes tightly, willing herself not to fall.   The binoculars dropped from her fingers as fragments of memories flew like wild black ravens into her head. 

Black flapping wings that pulled her back into a hot summer night, and a flowing white dress covered with blood
.  She felt herself spinning into space.

After a long moment the dizziness stopped.  She opened her eyes cautiously, found herself on her knees in the sand.  The sand was cold, damp, rocks sharp against her skin.  She raised her head, listening.  Only the surf, and the soft shush of the pines.  The terrible roar of flapping wings was gone, thank God.  She took a deep, hurting breath. 
Don’t think about that night
!  It had all happened so long ago.  The memories would have to wait.   It was time to find her niece. 

Alexandra rose to her feet, steadied herself, then checked her watch as she hurried across the sand to the Jeep.  After four.  Already the sun was dropping behind the tall pines.  It grew dark very quickly on the island in autumn, she remembered suddenly.

At the car she forced her eyes once more toward the cliffs.  Just for a moment, she saw twin bright flashes wink from the depths of the cedars.  Was it the glint of the setting sun on binoculars?

Watchful blue eyes slid into her mind.  But that was impossible.  No, she reassured herself, no one knows I’m here.  It had to be Juliet, watching from the shadows.

Or perhaps it was just a shifting of the light.

* * * *

“Liv, it’s me.  Yes, I’m here.  No sign of Juliet, but I’ve just arrived at the house.  How’s my girl?  Ice cream?  Go for it!  Tell her I’m missing her like crazy.  Of course, I’ll call you just as soon as I  -”  The cell phone died.

“Damn.”  Alexandra clicked off her phone.  God, she loved that child.  The sooner she found Juliet, the sooner she could go home.

In the gathering darkness she looked up at the house that loomed above her.  Just do it.  Cedars rustled restlessly against the porch as Alexandra climbed the steps with a building sense of dread.

The key, as always, was beneath the chipped blue flower pot.  The alarm code was Eve’s birthday.  No problem at all for Juliet...

The huge creaking door swung open, and Alexandra peered into the cold dark foyer.

“Juliet?” she called.  “Jules, it’s Aunt Alexandra.”

She stood on the threshold, her heart thumping with apprehension as fog brushed ghostly fingers against her cheek.  The sound of roaring waves rolled across the porch as the towering firs seemed to close in around her.

She exhaled sharply and forced her feet across the threshold.

* * * *

One by one, the lights came on in the ground floor rooms of Cliff House.   The watcher saw Alexandra’s shadow move across a curtained window.  Then she appeared at the front door and hurried down the steps into the misted night.

The yellow hood of her jacket fell to her shoulders as she unlocked the trunk of the Jeep, then struggled up the porch steps with her overnight bag and groceries.

The wind whispered through the black cedars and her head came up, like a doe sensing danger.

“Juliet?”

She swung around, facing the black wall of cedars.

“Is someone there?”

He stayed very still.

“Show your face, you damned coward!  I’m not afraid of you!”

The door slammed, the porch light blinked out.

The navy sleeve of his windbreaker glinted with beads of mist as he lowered the powerful night glasses from his eyes.

CHAPTER 6

“The girl of beautiful face...”

F. G. Lorca

Standing at the foot of the stairs, Alexandra lifted her duffle bag with a deliberate motion.  Her quick search of the first floor had yielded nothing but memories, and the unnaturally loud ticking of the grandfather clock.  No groceries in the kitchen, no half-burned candles, no forgotten piece of clothing or blanket.  If Juliet was here, she didn’t want to be found.

“Okay, Eve, let’s find that runaway daughter of yours,” she muttered as she climbed the stairs to the upper floors. 

Room by room, the old house murmured with voices from long-ago summers.  On a small round table in her parents’ bedroom, a grouping of dusty silver frames told the story of her childhood.  Her mother playing the piano, Eve climbing on the cliffs.  The two young sisters, holding hands while gathering shells on the beach.  Alexandra stopped for a moment, her finger brushing a decades old photograph.  She was looking up at Eve, with her arm protectively around her older sister…  And there was her father, jaunty cap in hand, staring out to sea.  Always the dreamer.  She blinked, suddenly ambushed in the quiet room by the last words he’d spoken to her before he died.

Eve needs you, Alexandra.  You need each other.  We’re family.

I’m sorry, dad. 

Alexandra shook her head, forced herself to keep moving through the house.  Her sister was everywhere, like Rebecca in du Maurier’s novel, and fragments of memory surged knife-sharp through her head.  Eve arranging roses in the dining room;  whirling in a long crimson dress before a floor length mirror;  standing posed at the top of the stairs, camera in hand.  When she came to Eve’s room, with its dramatic wall of windows facing the cliffs and pounding surf, her stomach tightened.  The crystal lamp still cast prisms of light across faded flowered wallpaper, and for just a moment she remembered a slender hand lifting a glass to scarlet lips.

She closed the door and hurried to the nursery.

“Juliet?”

Books, stuffed animals piled on two small beds, her first sketch pad, Eve’s beautiful old doll house in a shadowed corner, like forgotten treasures waiting for a curator.  Gazing at their shell collection, still shining on the window ledge, she lifted her sister’s first camera.  Looking through the dusty lens of the Leica, she heard her sister’s voice whisper in her head. 
Stand there, Zandy, in the light
. 
By our shells
.  Inhaling the scents of her childhood, musty now, she checked the closet and under the beds and then closed the door behind her with a firm click. 

She’d never seen Juliet’s room, which was papered floor to ceiling with music and dance posters and gave the only hint of the room’s most recent occupant.  The bed, carefully made, had a simple ivory coverlet.  But where were the family photographs, the beloved dolls, the diaries and mementos that told the story of a young girl’s life?  This was the impersonal room of a temporary visitor, a boarding school child. 

Sadness and anger welled sharply in Alexandra’s chest. 
Oh, Jules, what did we do to you
?  She moved to the wall of windows.  Outside, she heard the hollow cry of the wind as it skimmed over the rocks.

You know where you have to go
.

She forced her legs to move down the dim hallway.  Narrow stairs led up to the dark attic under the eaves.  At the top was the closed blue door she remembered so vividly.  She began to climb.

Ignoring the frantic thumping of her heart, she twisted the knob and the blue door swung open slowly.

She held her breath, listening, then stepped into the room.

You always hid here when there was trouble, Eve.

Her eyes locked on the dormer window that opened onto the steeply pitched roof, and for a sickening moment she saw Eve, alone on the dark rain-slick shingles. 
So high
... 

Just breathe.  Fighting off another wave of dizziness, she turned from the window and walked toward the far corner.  There, in a hidden nook shielded by a tall armoire, Juliet Marik lay sleeping, cocooned in her mother’s quilt.

“Thank you, God,” whispered Alexandra. 

She bent to push aside the empty plastic water bottles, fast food containers and dance magazines that littered the floor around her niece.  Then she saw the half-full pack of cigarettes, scissors and hair dye, the iPhone and two cans of light beer.

Placing a gentle hand on Juliet’s shoulder, she whispered, “Jules, wake up.”

Eyes flew open.  Deep green, so like Eve’s.  

“Mother?” the girl gasped.  “Mother?”

“No, honey, it’s me.  Aunt Alexandra.”

The girl stared at her blindly.  Then recognition, swift and devastating. “You!”  She grabbed a heavy boot and flung it at her aunt.

“Whoa!  Oh, Jules...”

“Go away.”  Juliet pulled back, and the coverlet fell away from her face.

Alexandra caught her breath.  Juliet was all elbows and legs, tear-filled eyes huge in the too-thin face.  The once-waist-length golden hair was shorn, now dirty-brown with streaks of orange and spiked raggedly short.

“Jules!  My God, what are you doing here?”

“If you want answers, check your iPhone.”

Alexandra reached out to stroke a shaking shoulder.  “Talk to me.”

“Get your damned effing hands off of me!”

Alexandra dropped her hands.  “Glaringly uncreative,” she murmured.  “Surely the nuns have taught you to try more adventurous adjectives.”

The girl turned away, her back as eloquent as a brick wall.

“Don’t shut me out, Juliet.”

“How did you find me?”

“Your mother used to hide up here.”

“Fine.  But why would you care?  Just leave me alone, Aunt Zan.  Get away from me!”  The desolation in Juliet’s voice was heart-breaking.  “I’m not going back to St. Terribles.”