Pretend I’m not here, Jordan remembered answering. I want a picture of you in the workshop.
These were some of the last pictures of her dad she’d taken. Jordan felt a tear slide down her chin, wiped it away. She’d been crying on and off for the last hour, since she’d come banging down into the darkroom at eleven at night to develop the prints. Why not? She couldn’t stand the thought of lying in bed staring at the ceiling. Couldn’t bear to think about tomorrow, another day working in the shop now that it was open again, helping train the new clerk and coming home to one of the funeral casseroles Anneliese had pulled out for them to eat in total silence. Just three of them around the table, not four . . . Jordan blinked hard, standing back from her row of prints.
“That one.” A low-angle shot of her father peering down at a tarnished card tray. “That’s the real you.” Daniel Sean McBride at work, the essential Daniel Sean McBride. It was him. It was good.
Jordan realized the tears were coming fast now. She let them fall, going on to the roll of shots she’d taken at the tiny airfield the day Garrett took her flying. She knew she should call Garrett; he’d been leaving messages. So had his mother, gentle hints about springtime dates for the rescheduled wedding. The thought of plunging back into wedding plans made Jordan want to shriek.
“I’ll call you tomorrow.” She sighed as she cleaned up her chemicals and trays.
As Jordan let herself back into the house, a slim pale figure moved out of the darkness at the foot of the hall stairs. “You couldn’t sleep either?”
Jordan started violently at Anneliese’s voice. “You scared me!”
“I’m sorry.” Anneliese pulled the sash tighter on her pale blue dressing gown. “I was going to make some cocoa. Would you like some?”
“Sure. Did Ruth wake you up again?”
“Her night frights are getting worse.” Anneliese moved into the kitchen on those soundless feet, pulling down two mugs. Taro padded in, keeping a watchful eye for any food that might hit the floor; Anneliese scratched her black ears fondly. “I don’t know how to deal with Ruth when she’s in such a state. She’s always been so biddable, I don’t know what to do with her when she’s not.”
“She just misses Dad.” Jordan sighed. “Is she asleep now?”
“Yes, finally. Now I’m the one tossing and turning.” Jordan’s stepmother looked fragile in the bright kitchen light, dark hair loose for once, face naked without its smoothing of powder and lipstick. “No, sit down,” she said as Jordan began to help with the stove. “You must be so tired, all those shifts you’ve been working at the shop.”
“The new clerk will be ready to manage on his own soon. That will be a help.” Jordan managed a smile, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table. “He told me he could sell ice to Eskimos, and he can.”
“What’s his name again?”
“Tony Rodomovsky.” Jordan had thought she’d find it embarrassing, working with a man after he’d first encountered her sobbing into a lemon meringue pie, but it hadn’t been. The new clerk had taken his handkerchief back the following week with light good humor, made no reference to her fit of weeping, and treated Jordan exactly as he treated everything else female he encountered in the shop—namely, he flirted with her. The kind of meaningless undemanding flirtation that was soothing. How pretty you are, his smile said. Please, let me take care of the customers. In fact, let me take care of everything. The female customers certainly responded to that smile. He knew next to nothing about antiques but he was so rueful about his own ignorance, it didn’t seem to matter. “You know he actually got Mrs. Wills to buy something, not just spend an hour criticizing every piece?”
“That is a charmer. Have I met him?” Anneliese massaged her forehead. “It’s all been such a whirl, I can’t remember.”
“Not yet. His references were excellent. Do you want to meet him before his trial period is up?”
“I’ll look in soon.” Anneliese sighed. “I don’t even want to set foot in the shop. I had my little ideas here and there to help sales, but your father was so proud that his wife didn’t have to work . . . Going there now seems like going against his wishes.”
“I can take care of the shop, truly. You have Dad’s other things to sort out.” What to do with his clothes, his shoes, his belongings. Whether to move his shaving brush and razor in the bathroom. All the things to be decided after a death.
“He was very organized, thank goodness.” Anneliese began warming the milk. “I don’t want you to think we have to worry about money. There was insurance; we won’t have to scrimp to make ends meet. I’m meeting with the lawyer about the will.”
Jordan couldn’t even begin to contemplate the official details. “If I can help . . .”
“Between the two of us, we can handle everything.” Anneliese smiled over her shoulder, stirring the milk. “I’m so lucky you’re such a capable girl, Jordan. More than a girl, really—I shouldn’t keep calling you that. Having a grown woman at my side is a great comfort at a time like this.”
The compliment warmed Jordan more than the cup of cocoa Anneliese placed in her hands. “Thank you.” Anneliese sat in the chair opposite, pushing her hair back over her shoulders, and Jordan saw a faint pink line of a scar disappearing around the back of her neck below her collar. “Did you hurt yourself?” Jordan indicated the scar; she didn’t think she’d seen it before.
“Childhood accident.” Anneliese made a face. “I always thought it looked ugly, so I cover it up first thing in the morning. American makeup is a wonder!”
“It’s not ugly. It’s hardly noticeable.”
“That’s what your father said.” Anneliese touched her mug to Jordan’s. “To Dan.”
“To Dad.” Jordan savored the chocolaty warmth—Anneliese’s cocoa was better than anyone’s; something extra she put in it—and found herself appraising her stepmother across the table. “How are you, Anna? How are you really, I mean? You put on a very good face for the neighbors, but you’re also drinking cocoa at one in the morning.”
Anneliese massaged her temples. “There’s a dream I’ve been having for years, since the war. It mostly went away when I came to live in this house, but now it’s come back. Your father was a good antidote to bad dreams, very—” She paused, said a German word, tried to find its equivalent in English. “Very of this earth? I could wake up next to him, reassured. He was solid. Nothing could follow me out of a dream with him there.”
Jordan felt her throat tighten, but it was a good tightness. “I remember him sitting on the edge of my bed when I was little, telling me the bats couldn’t come out of the dream and get me.”
“Is that what you dreamed of?” Anneliese smoothed a lock of hair back. “Bats aren’t so bad.”
“I was only Ruth’s age, bats were bad enough. What’s your nightmare?” Anneliese hesitated. “It can’t hurt to tell me.”
Her stepmother looked as if she wasn’t going to speak, but her hand drifted up under the dark fall of her hair, rubbing the back of her neck, and the words started seemingly despite herself. “The dream always starts beside a lake. A woman is running, straight for me. She’s small and ragged, and I see her hair flashing through the shadows, and I know she wants to kill me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. You know dreams, they don’t make sense. But she’s filled with hatred.” Anneliese shivered. “I chase the woman toward the lake, it’s open there, she can’t hide . . . But she does. She disappears into the lake—it swallows her up, pulls her in like it’s helping her hide. I stand there on the edge, waiting for her to come for me.”
Jordan shivered, herself. Anneliese’s voice was slow, dreamy, as though she were half asleep.
“I wait for a long time, and finally I know it’s all right. She’s gone. I’m safe.” Anneliese lifted her eyes. “And that’s when she rises out of the lake, streaked with blood, and drifts across the water toward me. Her teeth are so sharp, and her nails glint like razors . . . And that’s when I wake up. Before the night witch cuts my throat.”
“That is ghastly,” Jordan couldn’t help saying.
“It is.” Her stepmother lifted her cup, trying to smile. “Hence cocoa at one in the morning.”
“Who’s the woman in the nightmare?”
“No one I ever knew.” Taro laid her long nose on Anneliese’s knee; Anneliese stroked her and said something loving in German. “I think she comes from one of those gruesome fairy tales I heard too young. A rusalka.”
“You said that word before.” Jordan hunted for the memory. “When we first went to Selkie Lake.”