Mattie tugged the book from Megan's nerveless fingers and placed it on the sofa beside her. With great care, she rose from the chair and crossed the room to the kitchen doorway.
"Megan and I are going outside now," she said. "We will return shortly."
It was probably the way she said it that kept Barbara from questioning her words. Megan knew it kept her from questioning.
Mattie returned to stand in front of her. "We will walk," she said. "And perhaps we will find answers. Or at least the right questions."
Megan sat, stunned.
"We will walk," Mattie repeated, and Megan realized through the haze that surrounded her that the woman would probably wait indefinitely for her to rise.
"Yes," she said, suddenly needing to move. "Yes."
Outside, Mattie turned toward the cluster of small buildings at the rear of the clearing. For someone whose hands bore such painful signs of arthritis, she walked remarkably unhampered by the disease. Though unhurried, her step seemed almost determined, as if she had made up her mind about something and now must see it through.
She stopped outside a large barnlike building with what appeared to be double-hung sliding doors as well as a smaller wooden door with a many-paned window. A whimsical wooden bench painted in Shaker green sat beneath a lattice and vine-covered arbor beside the people-sized door. Mattie sank onto the bench and patted the seat beside her.
Megan joined her on the bench. Her mind was full of the questions Mattie had suggested they might find, but she waited, silent, for the woman to speak.
Still, she did not expect the words Mattie spoke.
"Where have you seen them?"
"What?"
Mattie reached over and patted Megan's shoulder. "I suspected you had not told my daughter. That's one of the reasons I brought you out here. But it is time to speak of these things, child. Where have you seen Lydia?"
Oh, my God. She knew! But how?
Megan started to rise, but Mattie's hand restrained her. "Where, child?"
"It isn't my imagination?"
Mattie shook her head. "Where?"
Megan looked away, toward the wooded area stretching down to the creek. "In the house," she said finally. "With a woman she called Granny Rogers."
Mattie's voice filled with awe. "In Jacob's house. Imagine that. Did Jacob see them?"
Megan shook her head. "No. At least I don't think so." Surely if he had, he would have said something when she bared her tormented thoughts to him, wouldn't he? "No."
"And where else?" Mattie asked.
Megan caught her hand to her mouth to hold back an incriminating sob. "Are you so very sure there was somewhere else?"
Mattie nodded, smiled, and gave Megan's shoulder a gentle squeeze. "You recognized my grandfather."
Yes, she had. "At the creek," Megan admitted. She might as well; she was damned already. "At the place Jake calls—Peter called—Waterfall Canyon. He called his sister 'Liddy.' Both of them were so very young."
"Lydia was being sent away to school. Sam Hooker brought her a diary to take with her."
Megan twisted around to stare at Mattie. "How did you—"
"Oh, child. I was six, maybe seven, the first time I saw them," Mattie said. "I ran to my grandfather Peter, sure that I had seen ghosts. He questioned me and then asked how I could have seen ghosts when he still lived."
"But how—?"
Mattie released her shoulder and stood, flexing her hands to ease them, straightening her shoulders to ease them too. "In our religion, the old one, everything is vested with spirit. Everything is part of the whole. In our language, 'to go' is the same as 'to have gone.' There is no differentiation as to time.
"I went often to the creek and its natural dam. Even when I did not see grandfather or Lydia or Sam, I felt a peace there, a continuity too often lacking in my world, a harmony with all that had been, all that was, and all that would be."
"Even knowing what later happened?"
Mattie looked down at her. "Do you know what happened?"
Did she? Megan wasn't sure she knew much of anything after Mattie's startling revelation. But maybe she did. And maybe it was time to tell someone.
"I'm having her dreams," she said softly. "I'm having thoughts and memories that must belong to her. I'm—I'm writing her diary."
Mattie studied her silently before turning and looking toward the wooded hillside.
"Good," she said finally, surprising Megan even more. "Good." Her voice was little more than a whisper. "Now, perhaps, the mystery will be solved."
"What mystery?"
Both women turned at the question. Mattie recovered first.
"Jacob." She extended her hand toward him long before he reached her side. "I should have known you'd be out here searching for this lovely young woman. Have you and that scoundrel son-in-law of mine finished your carpentering?"
"Yep." Jake glanced questioningly at Megan before focusing again on Mattie. "What mystery?"
"History, Jacob."
Megan quickly masked her shock at Mattie's statement. But the woman was so straightforward and seemed so innocent she began to doubt that she, too, had heard the word "mystery." Was Mattie hiding the contents of their conversation? Or was she merely attempting to define the mystery?
"I was telling Megan some of my family history," Mattie said, as she turned toward him for a kiss. "Have you shown this delightful child your workshop yet?"
Jake gave her the expected buss on the cheek. "Not yet."
"Well, yes. I suppose you have been busy. But why don't you open it up now? I want to see what progress you've made, and I'm sure Megan would be interested."
"You are, are you?" Smiling, but in such a way that he let Megan and Mattie both know he was only humoring them and not believing for a moment that Mattie wasn't trying to hide something from him, Jake walked to the corner of the building and ran his hand behind a trellis on which grew an ancient clematis, drooping with the weight of hundreds of huge purple blossoms.
He returned with a jailer's ring containing several keys and unlocked the door. Holding it open, he gave a mock bow and stepped back for them to enter. Mattie marched in determinedly. Megan followed a little more slowly. She felt the weight of Jake's hand on her shoulder.
"Mystery?" he whispered.
"I heard what you said, Jacob," Mattie said lightly. "Do you doubt my words?"
Jake grinned and flipped on a bank of switches, flooding the room with light from various overhead fluorescent fixtures. Megan looked around in amazement. Whatever she had expected from Jake's workshop, it wasn't this professional-looking room that looked to be a woodworker's dream.
Numerous hand tools hung neatly from pegboards on the wall, while workbenches and freestanding power tools occupied the concrete floor space. Against one wall, a set of shelves held sheets of plywood and banks of lumber, and against another stood various projects in different stages of completion.
Mattie walked to the wall with the projects and ran a loving hand over a mock-up of a doorway, complete with Victorian detailed facings in what appeared to be cherry.
"How soon?" she asked.
"Only a couple of days, once I get back in the shop."
Mattie nodded. "I can wait. For this, it will be worth it."
"Mattie's the one who really convinced me I might be able to make something out of my hobby," Jake said to Megan as he too touched the wood, with something approaching reverence. "Do you have any idea how many people are restoring old houses today, how many people are looking for millwork to match that of craftsmen of a hundred years ago?"
Mattie sighed and looked around the shop. "That sawmill contraption you bought from Tom Haney? Where is it?"
Jake nodded toward the second set of doors, those at the back of the workroom. "Under the shed out there."
Mattie nodded. "That's a good place for it. It's not far from where the other one was. I don't suppose there's much left now, what with the ravages of rain and time and the overgrowth, but when I was child I could still find traces of what had been huge piles of sawdust in what was a cleared area near—well, somewhere near here."
Megan shot a glance at Jake's face. She had an idea of what was coming, but did he?
"Sam Hooker was a lawman." Mattie walked to another delightful bench, a not-yet-painted twin of the one outside, and sat down. "Like you, Jacob."
Jacob lifted one questioning eyebrow before he nodded at her. "Oh, yes. The mysterious Sam Hooker that Sarah North has been telling Megan about."
Mattie glanced pointedly at Megan.
"I asked if she knew anything about him."
"Yes." Mattie nodded. "You would." She looked back at Jake. "His mother was Choctaw, but she died in Mississippi without ever coming west. His father was a white man who took his son to Texas and raised him as white as he could. Samuel became a Texas Ranger, fighting Indians as well as outlaws, until he discovered that he had to know about the half his father had kept hidden from him. He came to the territory in search of his mother's family. He married. He fathered a child. And since there was little need for his skills as an Indian fighter, or trust for this stranger as an enforcer of the law, he made his living with a sawmill, cutting lumber for the new towns going up, for the new homes being built. When war was forced upon us, he took up arms for the Confederacy to defend his new country for his wife and for his child.
"When he returned, he found his wife and child both dead and his wife's mother struggling to keep this place going. Little remained but the cabin, which has become the house where you now live, and the smashed and broken remains of his mill."
Mattie sighed and settled more comfortably on the bench.
"I heard this from my grandfather when I was but a child, so some of the details are a little sketchy. Having proved his loyalties in the war, Samuel was rewarded by being taken into the Lighthorse, which must have been a mixed blessing for him. Whites were allowed into the territory to work only with the permission of the Choctaw government, but in order to enforce the laws against a white person, a member of our police had to seek out a U.S. marshal. I doubt that Samuel had been accustomed to seeking help or asking permission from anyone before that time."
"And the army payroll?" Jake asked. "When did that interesting bit of history evolve?"
"Jacob," Mattie chided. "Rumor is not history. Do you honestly believe, as poor as most of our family has always been, that if there were any basis to that rumor there would be anything left of those hills back there other than a big hole in the ground where my relatives had dug looking for what would be a fortune even today?"
Jake laughed. "That's a good point, Mattie. But according to Sarah, the rumor has persisted. How do you explain that?"
"Why should I?" she asked. "Fools who wish to follow rumors will be fools, no matter how much the truth is protested.
"Eventually, Samuel married my grandfather's sister," Mattie said, turning from the rumors of lost gold to her story—a story Megan knew was being told for her benefit. "Therein lies the true mystery. My grandfather would not speak of what occurred, other than to tell me that something very bad had happened to her.
"Like you, Megan?" Mattie asked. Not waiting for an answer, she shrugged. "Who can say? Except, perhaps, you. How bad, I can only imagine from looking at the two pictures we have of her.
"You would think that after the life of turmoil Samuel had already lived, he would find peace in a late marriage. Apparently not. Apparently Lydia, his new wife, had suffered beyond recovery from her own turmoil. From what my grandfather told me, she was terrified of everything, living in constant fear."
"But I don't—"
Mattie raised her hand to silence her. "No, Megan," she said gently. "You survive by denying that fear. Lydia survived by keeping to the cabin Samuel had built near here, not going into town, even to church, unless accompanied by him, or by her brother, eventually even proclaiming that someone was lurking around the clearing, attempting to approach her on those rare occasions when Samuel would leave her alone.
"Agoraphobia? Perhaps. Depression? Surely. Paranoia? Who can say without having known her and what was really happening? All of them treatable today. All of them devastating then."
Megan swallowed a lump in her throat. Her denial had been automatic; Mattie's response too uncomfortably clear-sighted; and her story, almost too painful to bear. "What happened?"
Mattie shook her head and rose from the bench. "I think that must keep for a later time," she said.
"Come on, Mattie." Jake said, hurrying to her side as she stumbled slightly. "You can't just leave it like that. You and Sarah have Megan half in love with Sam Hooker."
"As she should be, Jacob. He was certainly someone worthy of love." Mattie patted Jake's cheek. "As are you."
Mattie turned and rested her hand on Megan's shoulder. "And you also, child. Even though I think you have spent a great deal of your life denying that too."
Megan was operating on overload. That was the only reason she could think of to explain why she didn't run screaming into the woods. Instead, she accompanied Jake and Mattie back to the house. Instead, she sat at the table with the others and ate the picnic lunch Mattie had packed. Instead, she helped with the dishes, not even challenging Barbara because of the professional secrets she must have shared with her mother.
And after the dishes were put away, she accompanied Barbara into the living room to join the others. She sank onto the hearth, draped her arm over Deacon's back as he crowded next to her, looked unerringly at Jake who was watching her, not quite but almost in his hovering mode, and said, "I think I must tell you about the telephone call I received this morning."
"Will she be all right?" Patrick asked still again as Jake walked with his friends to their vehicles.
Jake glanced at Barbara, who only shrugged as she helped her mother into the car.
"Jacob?"
"Yes, Mattie," he said, bending to lean toward the open car window.
"Parallels, Jacob. There are many parallels. Don't forget that, don't discount them, and don't assume that you have seen all of them yet."
He patted Mattie's hand and nodded at Barbara, signaling for her to leave.
"What was that all about?" Patrick asked.
Jake grimaced. "Sam Hooker, stolen army gold, and her great-aunt Lydia."
"I repeat," Patrick said. "What was that all about?"
Jake scrubbed his hands across his face. "I don't know," he said. "I'm not sure I know much of anything anymore. Except this." He pulled his wallet from his pocket and extracted a slip of paper which he handed to Patrick. "You were right about getting outside help; the threatening call only proves it. Here's the name and number of my agency contact. I'd appreciate it if you'd make the call from a discreet telephone."
Patrick took the paper silently and tucked it into his shirt pocket.
"And you, Jake. Will you be all right?"
Jake nodded and slapped his friend on the shoulder. "Yeah. Now you'd better get on down the hill. Help Barbara with the gate. Spend some time with your wife."
"And you?"
Jake laughed without humor. "I'm going to see about circling the wagons. And I guess I'm going to have to ask Megan what she knows about Sam Hooker, stolen army gold, and Mattie's great-aunt Lydia."
Jake waited in the yard until Patrick's truck dropped out of sight on its way down the wooded hillside. Then he turned and faced his house. Parallels. If Mattie said there were parallels, there must be parallels, superficial ones anyway. Don't discount them, and don't assume that you have seen all of them yet.
Megan waited for him in the living room. At least she had relinquished her hold on his dog, Jake thought, as he stopped beside the couch and looked across the room at her standing in front of the mantel. But she still looked damned defenseless. And, he realized with a start of surprise, guilty. What in the hell did she have to look guilty about?
"Do you know what Mattie was talking about in the workshop?"
Megan nodded. "Come in the kitchen, Jake. I want to show you something."
Jake noted how serious the topic must be for her when he saw that she had started to make coffee in his stove-top percolator. He adjusted the gas flame beneath the pot before he saw the two books on the table at his usual place. One was the ornate photograph album he had seen that day but not examined. The other was the brown leather notebook Megan had brought with her.
"Please," Megan said, pulling out a chair and sinking onto it, leaving him the chair in front of the books.
He nodded and sat down. Megan placed her hand on the old album. "Mattie brought this to show to me. I think you ought to see it too. Obviously, so does she, or she would have taken it with her."
"Megan—"
She shook her head. "I told you some strange things were happening. You admitted as much yourself. I just didn't know how strange."
Carefully she opened the book to a picture of an intense young man dressed in the clothing of over a century before.
"This is Mattie's grandfather, Peter Tanner," she said. "Have you ever seen him?"
She turned the page, and the face of an innocent young girl looked up at him. "Or her?"
Jake frowned as something familiar about the young woman teased at his memory. "No," he said. "Of course not. These people have been dead for decades."
"I have."
He thought he must have misunderstood her, but before he could question her, Megan drew another photograph from the album, an unmounted one, and handed it to him.
"Peter Tanner," she said, pointing to the young man whose portrait Jake had just seen, "the woman they called Granny Rogers, Sam Hooker, and Lydia Tanner, probably Hooker by then, in what is most likely their wedding picture."
"My God," Jake said in a whisper, unable to stop the words as he relived the moment he had seen this woman—or Megan?—sitting in front of the fire brushing her hair. "It's her."
The coffeepot boiled over then, and Jake jumped up to rescue it, to rescue himself from admitting more than he already had.
Megan got cups and set them on the table and waited quietly while Jake filled them.
"That was my reaction too," she said when he sat down again. "At first."
"What kind of reaction?"
"Denial."
"Megan, what's going on?"
She smiled wanly and pushed the other book toward him. "Read this. And then, if you still want to, we'll talk."
Reluctantly, Jake reached for the notebook. Reluctantly, he opened it. The first page was familiar to him; he'd seen at least part of it the night he first brought Megan to his house. Now, feeling like the worst kind of voyeur, he read the entry.
June 3. Just days ago. Jake read of her anxiety about the noises in the night. He read of her curiosity about him, the unknown neighbor at whom she had almost waved. He read of her doubts and questions about her marriage, her hopes for her new home, her innocent plans for the green bedroom. And then he read the words that had lost none of their impact since the first time he saw them:— help me oh God somebody please please help me—
He glanced up and found her watching him with dread and hope clouding her eyes. "Go on," she urged softly. "There's more. Much more."
June 4. The next night. The night he had been compelled to run to her side and she had launched herself off the porch and into his arms the moment she saw him.
She wrote of avoidance and attempting to face the truth. She wrote of her lack of understanding of what had happened in her new home. She wrote of him; she wrote of seeing someone else when she looked at him. And then, in the same handwriting as before, different from the rest of the entry:—No, please no. Oh, God, no, no, NO!
Jake felt the terror in her words, felt the panic that must have propelled her off the porch and into his arms. But at what? A flashback of Villa Castellano? Or of something, if at all possible, even worse? Whatever it was, it hadn't been a nightmare, not one experienced during sleep. Her written thoughts, though troubled, had been far too lucid up to that point to have been written in sleep.
He looked up, toward Megan—for what? For and assurance he wasn't sure she could give? For a comfort she needed as much as he did? She wasn't there. Sometime while he read her hidden thoughts, she had slipped away from the table, leaving him to plunder her deepest secrets in privacy.
Though not thick, the book did contain more pages. Was he supposed to read them? Could he bear to read them? The answer to both questions had to be yes.
He realized that his body had assumed the tension he welcomed just before going into danger. And perhaps that was where he was headed. Steeling himself for what he might find, Jake turned the page.
August 3, 1870. He read words written in the same handwriting as the incoherent cries for help but contained, now, without the panic to mar its ornate penmanship.
"What the hell?" he muttered.
Lydia Tanner—her book.
Standing at uneasy attention facing the mantel over the wood stove, Megan eventually heard noises from the kitchen. She rubbed her hands over her chilled arms and thought for the first time in almost an hour of her coffee, cold now, forgotten almost as soon as she had left the kitchen.
She heard the scrape of a chair and the weight of a booted foot on the wooden floor, but Jake did not call her name, and he did not come into the living room to find her.
"He's probably trying to figure out how to call the men with the butterfly nets to come after me," she muttered.
But no, he wouldn't do that. He'd have to send them after his beloved Mattie too.
He came so quietly she didn't hear him, didn't know he was in the room with her, until she felt his hands drop onto her shoulders and draw her back against her chest.
"She loved him very much, didn't she?" he asked softly.
It wasn't what she had expected. She let herself relax into his warmth. "Yes."
"Do you suppose she did know what happened to the gold?"
Megan shook her head. "At least one person thought so. But wouldn't she have admitted something like that in her diary? Especially if she was trying to heal herself?"
"I don't know." Jake rested his chin on her head and wrapped his arms securely around her. "Do you suppose she finally let herself hate him afterward, that in spite of her efforts not to, she let herself blame him for what had happened?"
"I don't know," Megan told him. "I don't know much more than you do. Except that she cried in her sleep. For him. For what they wouldn't have together."
"And Sam?" he asked. "Do you supposed he blamed himself? Do you suppose that guilt for what happened to her ate at him for the rest of his life?"
"I don't know, Jake. I wish I did, but I don't"
"Damn!" he whispered, rocking her slightly in his embrace. She felt him draw in a deep breath, felt him brace himself as though to say something, but all she heard was another regretful whisper. "Oh, damn."