The Threshold Read online

  John O’Connell did not return until the next evening, and late enough that Callie and Bram had finished their studies. They were allowing Charles a little sniff around the kitchen, thinking it was safe enough because Luella had left long ago for Aunt Lilly’s house. When they heard the first footfall on the porch they thought she’d returned early. Callie grabbed for Charles and missed. Bram sat up from a reclining position on the floor so suddenly he hit his head on the undersurface of the spool table.

  But it was John and not Luella who stood in the doorway, staring back at them a little uncertainly. “Walked down to the Loop and took a tram bucket up,” he explained, and began to nod his head as if agreeing with himself. “Brought your Ma’am some of her tonic. S’pose she’ll be at Lillian’s again.” He set the wrapped bottle on the table rather hard. He smelled of cool mountain night, alcohol, and snouse. Soon the whole kitchen did. “And I brought a bag of something sweet for Callie and a bag of something sweet for Bram and I even brought a wee something for the kiddy. Whadaya think of that?”

  Charles was already rubbing one side of himself on John’s pants leg. Callie and Bram opened the waxed bags and selected a choice candy each. John stumbled the few steps across the kitchen to hang up his coat on a peg and didn’t notice when it promptly fell to the floor. He knelt, untied the string on a tiny package, and spread out a paper with bits of bloody meat on it.

  “Shopped liver,” John said with a conspiratorial wink and still nodding agreement with himself, “made me a special friend at the butcher’s, I did.” The four managed to take up all the available floor space in the kitchen and together they held the edges of the paper flat so the cat could lick up the last lingering flavors, and laughed at the silly creature who was usually so self-collected.

  That’s why they didn’t hear the footfalls on the front porch. Charles was the first to notice Luella standing above them. He backed into Callie with a hiss. She held him against his struggles and held her breath too. Luella stood for long uncomfortable moments staring at her family and at Charles, her hair hanging down on all sides, her face and eyes reddened. She had never looked so wild.

  “Ma’am?” This time Bram’s voice did break.

  Luella put her hand against the wall for support. “Mrs. Traub says she has some poison that’ll rid us of that filthy creature.” Her voice held no expression. “I turn my back and you bring it into my kitchen. Knowing full well how my feelings run about the animal. That’s the thanks I receive for all I do.”

  John O’Connell stretched his arms toward her. His head shook from side to side, this time in disagreement. “Oh now, Ma’am, you’ll not be thinking—”

  “And you, Mr. O’Connell, you with three sheets in the wind. And baby Henry.” Callie had never heard her mother’s voice go so low and so flat. “I came to fetch my sewing basket. The babe is dead.”

  When Callie tripped on her father’s coat on her way to the back door Charles scratched her throat but she held tight to him.

  “We gave him some tonic,” Luella was saying with a touch of disbelief. “Label said it was recommended for languorous infants, and he certainly was that. But even tonic did no good.” John was “tut-tut-tutting” and “now there, there-ing” and stroking the top of his head. But it was Bram who held Luella against his chest as finally she wept.

  Callie sat in the dark of the back porch and cried too while Charles perched on a stump and washed liver and blood from his whiskers with the side of a wet-licked paw. She cried for baby Henry and Aunt Lilly and Ma’am. But most of all she cried for Charles.

  8

  Aletha stepped through a gate rusted open and stoppered by vegetation. Miss Heisinger’s house sat on a large lot with trees along one border and three crumbling outbuildings lined up behind it. A low iron fence, elaborate with spikes and curlicues, surrounded the property. The fence sat black in patches, rusted in others against an exuberance of vibrant green and yellow weeds—many with blossoms gone to gauzy seed. The weeds pushed right up to the front door with just a hint of footpath worn between the door and the gate.

  The house itself was far more worn. The paint on the wooden siding had weathered away long ago, the boards rippling or bulging or sagging. The bricks at the top of the chimney were blackened. Yellowing curtains drooped at high narrow windows under a peaked roof of metal gray and of more recent vintage. Broken gingerbread filigree traced the eaves. An odd cupola perched above the door, with one window in its center that faced the Pick and Gad. The house was small, almost dwarfed by its outbuildings. Their sides seemed to be sliding slowly into oblivion, as if a giant stood within and pushed outward. Their windows gaped, empty of glass and dark. All the buildings looked shabby-gray and cold amidst the brightness of sun and weeds and the spectacular backdrop of rearing mountainside.

  Easily spooky, if one were so inclined, but Aletha’s shiver was more that of expectancy. Doris Lowell answered her knock. “Are you from Renata? Oh yes, I met you yesterday … Alice?”

  “Aletha.” She stepped into a tiny entryway on linoleum so worn that small ovals of wooden flooring showed through. She saw pieces of herself and Mrs. Lowell in round mirrors, oval mirrors, rectangular mirrors that were small and beveled and grainy, all in ornate frames, some with knick-knack shelves attached, all crowded in on each other to make room. Doris motioned her into a narrow kitchen with more depression-era linoleum scrubbed almost clean of color and pattern.

  “Mildred, this is Aletha. She’s come to clean your house for you.” Doris raised her voice, spoke distinctly and slowly. “She’s from Renata.”

  A tiny, withered person sitting at a table turned to look at Aletha. “Renata’s a slut.” Her S’s sounded slushy because she had no teeth.

  “Now, Mildred, you don’t know anything about Renata Winslow.”

  Miss Heisinger walked with halting steps to stand almost under Aletha’s nose. And Aletha looked down into the palest of green eyes. They reminded her of those seedless grapes called white but really green. They were magnified out of proportion to the little face by eyeglasses with clear plastic rims. They studied Aletha until she squirmed.

  “You’re a snoop,” the old lady said, and walked out of the room.

  Aletha, brimming with questions about a possible connection to Callie, realized that’s just what she’d come to do—snoop. “Does she live alone?”

  “Some of us around town look in on her, take her to the beauty shop, bring in groceries, drive her to the doctor—that kind of thing. She has no family. But except for the noon meal brought in by Meals on Wheels, she does her own cooking and washing, even a few repairs. It’s amazing how well she manages.”

  “She’s lucky in her friends.”

  “I’m afraid she doesn’t think so. She resents our trying to get her to remember about the old days. Says we nag her. But so much history will be gone if we don’t urge these old ones to talk and remember before they’re gone too.” Doris Lowell showed Aletha a combination pantry-broom closet situated in a windowless lean-to on the back of the house. Two other rooms in the lean-to provided space for a furnace room and a bathroom. One bedroom opened off the bathroom, and off that a “parlor” where Mildred Heisinger sat in front of a color television that blared so loudly conversation was out of the question.

  After Doris left Aletha started in the kitchen, feeling like a rat because she couldn’t help but examine every item as she came to it even if she had to go out of her way to come to it. She found exactly what she’d expect to find in the home of someone this aged. One good set of china that looked as if it had never been used, a set of pottery made up of odds and ends that was well-used, lots of depression glass and canned soups. The hot-water heater sat in the bathroom next to the shortest, deepest bathtub Aletha had ever seen. It stood on its own feet, each shaped like the slender foot and ankle of a young woman. The bedroom had a dark four-poster that was all knobs. Aletha did not stoop to going through drawers but she did inspect each item she dusted. Porcelain figurines, pai
ntings of demure women with men in greased-down hair gazing adoringly—regular old-lady stuff. But no photographs of family, children, friends, houses once lived in.

  By the time Aletha worked her way to the parlor, Miss Heisinger’s meal arrived and she put her teeth in to eat it. That made a startling change in her appearance, filling out the wizened face to more recognizable proportions. Aletha had hoped to start the woman talking, but Mildred ate and then nodded off with the television still blasting. The parlor had a piano sporting yellowed keys, layers of wallpaper coming loose in the corners, a cut-glass chandelier, bookcases, more figurines, and dotty paintings. No photos of when life was young. The house smelled musty, almost vacant, as if Miss Heisinger couldn’t use up enough of it to make a difference.

  Aletha didn’t want to run the elderly vacuum on the parlor floor while Mildred dozed, so she dusted the multitude of mirror frames in the entry hall. They extended from above her head almost to the level of her knees. A porcelain doorknob protruded from between two of them and Aletha noticed a vertical crack between rows of mirrors. Well … any snoop exposed to a rip in the fabric of time could hardly be expected to … She had been asked to clean the whole house.…

  She turned the knob and a door full of cloudy mirrors opened toward her, exposing stairs as narrow as those in Callie’s shack in Alta. There was much dust but not many stairs, and at the top a window overlooking the Pick and Gad through the trees. The cupola had about enough room to stand in and turn around. It also had a door leading to a room full of boxes, stacks of aging books, various covered shapes, and a tiny round window. Against a wall under the peaked roof stood a painting in oil of a beautiful woman with blond hair piled on top of her head and a white blouse with a cameo pinned to a ribbon around her throat and the pale green eyes of Mildred Heisinger.

  “Done snooping yet?” Mildred asked when Aletha turned on the vacuum in the parlor to wake her up.

  “I’m almost done cleaning, Miss Heisinger,” Aletha shouted.

  “Good. I’ll make us some coffee.” When they sat at the kitchen table over weak coffee and a Sara Lee carrot cake, Mildred said, “None of it matters any longer, all that Doris Lowell wants to know. Why do they want to know so bad?” She jutted a trembly head forward, squinted. “Where have I seen you?”

  “We haven’t met, Miss Heisinger, but I did come here with some questions. I’ve sort of been … seeing this little girl, Callie. She mentioned you and I—”

  “Callie O’Connell? She’s no little girl.”

  “I saw her first in Alta and—”

  “Alta, yes … stinking place. Full of noise and stupid people. Taught school there. Stay away from Alta. Hard on young women. I should know.”

  “But Callie … she’s bugging me so.”

  “Now they’re messing in Alta’s history too? Not with my help they’re not.” Mildred took out her dentures and refused to speak again. The sunken face and faded eyes looked completely mad.

  “Cree, I want to go to Alta and spend the night.” Aletha stood at the door of his condo. She’d come straight from Mildred Heisinger’s.

  “I’m a real sucker for a subtle proposition.” He led her to the table, poured them both a cup of strong coffee. “But there’s an embarrassment of beds here.”

  “I don’t mean to sleep or to … I mean to camp. I’m afraid to go alone, and you’re the only one who knows what’s going on.”

  He slid some papers into a manila folder. “Just what is going on?”

  “I have to warn Callie not to come to Telluride. Or this part of it anyway.”

  “You mean the line. That’s what they used to call these streets of vice.” He took the folder into the bedroom and spoke from there. “I talked to Tracy at the Senate. She wouldn’t open up about the experience you two had until I told her about the vanishing roadblock.” He came back without the folder, put his hands on the table, and leaned over her. “If what she said is true, Callie has already visited the line. You can’t change history.”

  “How do you know? Would you have believed any of this could happen to begin with? That we could even be seeing this … history?” He was massive standing over her like that and she began to doubt the wisdom of all this trust she kept putting in him without thinking it through first. “Do you know who lives across the street from you? Callie’s old teacher. And I mean old.” She slid out of the chair and went to the window to point out Miss Heisinger’s cupola and to get away from him. “I’m sure it’s the Miss Heisinger Callie told me about at the Senate.”

  “Tracy and I have about decided you’re the catalyst that’s making all this happen. There aren’t even any old rumors of such a thing going on before Aletha Kingman came to town. Have to admit I’m curious.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you about tonight.” Now that he showed interest in going, she’d almost decided she didn’t want to be up there alone with him. On the other hand, she didn’t want to be up there with no one, either. “I was just excited and I didn’t know what I’d do if I met up with a bear or a ghost or two.” Her laugh sounded thin even to her.

  “I’m no protection against ghosts.” He pulled a couple of rolled sleeping bags off the shelf of the coat closet. “Not a real hotshot when it comes to bears either, but I’m a great camp cook. You choose the menu. Any flavor you want.” Cree separated packets of freeze-dried food from a cardboard box into different piles. Stroganoff, spaghetti and meatballs, pork chops, stew, peas, and more. “Now, this group tastes like glue. This bunch tastes like old tires. And these all taste like kitty litter.” Cree had noticed the thinness in Aletha’s laugh too. “But once the sun goes down and the chill comes up and there’s not a thing to do but eat, even dirty rocks taste good.”

  “We could just sit in the car all night and talk and keep watch.”

  “Anybody who works as hard as you do needs her rest. But first …” He took her by the shoulders and marched her over to one of the couches. He tried not to notice the instant alarm in her eyes at his touch, the smooth little rear which was about cut in half by her jeans. One minute she looked like everybody’s kid sister—vulnerable and luscious—and the next, hard and bitter. He didn’t know much about schizophrenia but her behavior certainly called that word to mind. “I want to know all about this prison business you keep spicing up the conversation with. You haven’t really spent time in a prison.”

  She put the vulnerable and luscious face on, which made it hard to concentrate, but he held on to her arm because the rest of her looked poised for escape. Her eyes grew wider, as if ready to fill with tears. “Do you know one of the worst things was the smell? Even when I got used to it, it smelled bad. Like old urine and disinfectants, steam-table food, and that vomitlike smell you get when locked in with slowly evaporating plastics.…”

  9

  Aletha paced the condo with her arms folded as if she were cold. She’d been in a jail in New Orleans for three months before her trial came up and then in a federal penitentiary in Fort Worth. And all because, she claimed, she’d grown tired of attending the University in Albuquerque and had gone to work for a man there named Harry Sloane. Harry ran a dive shop and training center for scuba divers. Aletha took the training, received her certification, and helped arrange group tours to the island of Roatan off the coast of Honduras, where Harry had another dive shop and an understanding with a resort.

  “People could get group airline rates, a Caribbean vacation, scuba training and certification, and glorious underwater reefs all in one package from good old Harry. And for his staff it was work that was more fun than work. It was kind of like postponing adulthood.”

  Cree could see what was coming and wished he couldn’t, wished this slight, bouncy girl weren’t involved in the same nasty game that had ruined him and Dutch.

  “And then one day after about three years of all this fun I was coming back through customs in New Orleans with Bobby, another of Harry’s dupes. We were bringing back some tanks for repair from the Roatan sh
op. I’d done it dozens of times. But this time my whole life changed in just one minute.”

  “They found drugs in your scuba tanks.”

  “Cocaine. Several million dollars’ worth.” She turned on him with a movement that made the hair tucked behind her ears fall forward across her face, leaving one intense, accusing eye staring at him. “Are you a narc? Renata says you’re a narc.”

  “No, I’m not a narc. But I’ve read enough to know that scuba tanks are about the worst bet there is for smuggling. They’ve been used so often they practically flag suspicion on sight.”

  “Apparently Harry had been getting away with it for years. When Bobby and I got caught, he disappeared. But somehow they found Harry. And when they did he bragged that he’d used his staff as mules from the beginning and not a one knew about it until Bobby and I were caught.”

  “Lots of killing goes on in Harry’s trade. You were lucky he wasn’t murdered before he cleared you.”

  “I didn’t believe it when they let me out of Fort Worth. I thought it was a trick. And then it took more months to get the conviction reversed. My mother and Bertie did all they could to help me, but I’ll always feel guilty and dirty. Because I was in prison for something I didn’t even know I’d done.” Her eyes remained empty. “The sentence was thirty years. If I’d served the whole time I’d have been older than my mother is now when I got out. I wanted you to ask me about it. That’s why I kept dropping dumb hints. If I’d just keep my mouth shut no one would know. I’m an ex-convict.”

  As she drove up the grumpy road to Alta, Aletha imagined that he looked at her differently now. “Maybe I can change history. Maybe I can keep Callie from that one awful moment that could change her life forever.”

  “Slow down, will ya? In case we meet another roadblock.” He braced against the dashboard as he had the last time they’d traversed this road. “Were you … abused in prison? Sexually?”