Barbara Michaels - The Walker in Shadows

"Go on, Mark," Josef snapped. "Turn the page."

Considerably subdued, Mark obeyed.

The next photo was a family group. The father stood, stern in muttonchop whiskers, his hand placed in a proprietary grasp on his wife's shoulder. She was seated- probably, Pat thought, because she was holding a baby. Otherwise she would have stood behind her seated lord and master. Five other children clustered around the mother's skirts. The youngest was a toddler. Held erect by his brother's ruthless grip on his collar, he looked as if he were choking.

"Good heavens," Pat said, half amused, half horrified. "Look at that lot! Six… Considering the infant mortality rate, even among the well-to-do, she must have had several other pregnancies. No wonder the poor woman looks exhausted. I wonder who she is."

"Don't you know?" Mark said. "Look at her again."

Perhaps she caught the truth from Mark's mind. She was almost ready to admit the feasibility of such a relatively sane idea as thought transference. Or perhaps it was some other sense that forced the knowledge into her mind.

"It can't be," she exclaimed.

"The man is Henry Morton," Mark said inexorably. "His picture is in the Morton genealogy, that's how I know. He was Susan's husband."

And the woman was Susan. There was no doubt about it when one looked closely. And yet it was no wonder Pat hadn't recognized her. Kathy had said Susan was stupid -looking. In truth the young girl's face had lacked character; it was unformed, as young faces often are. But instead of gaining distinction or hardness with maturity, Susan's face had lost what little identity it had ever possessed. The very outlines were curiously blurred.

"No," Kathy said. "Oh, no, Mark. She's… old."

The word was an epithet, a condemnation. Pat shivered.

"Not old," Josef said. "Beaten. That is the face of a woman who has given up hope. How old was she when this photograph was taken?"

"She died at the age of thirty," Mark said.

"Six children," Pat muttered. "Depending on when she married… A baby every eighteen months?"

"She died in childbirth," Mark said. "With number nine. Two had died in infancy. That's Henry, Junior, the man who wrote the genealogy."

His finger jabbed at the page, indicating the smug-looking lad in the sailor suit who had a stranglehold on his little brother.

The rest of the photographs were anticlimactic. There were no more pictures of Susan, although her children appeared now and then in pictures of family gatherings, as the century wound down toward 1900. By 1890 the stripling Lieutenant Edward Bates had become a portly patriarch, beaming paternally at his increasing progeny and their offspring. Not only had he survived the war, but he had prospered, if prosperity was measurable in inches of girth and increasing children. Pat felt some sympathy for Kathy's obvious disappointment and disgust; no doubt it was distressing to see slim youth buried in fat and complacency. But she had no difficulty in recognizing Edward Bates. His eyebrows whitened and thickened as time went on, but the eyes below them were his father's eyes-steady, dark, demanding, belying the easy geniality of his plump cheeks.

As Mark turned pages the costumes changed, from the hoop skirts and tight dark suits of the midnineteenth century, through bustles and frock coats, into the middy blouses and straw hats of the turn of the century. The only constant face was that of Edward Bates, who occupied the honored center of every family grouping. Pat found herself searching for Susan's features. Often resemblances reappeared in new generations. But the Bateses were all dark, like their father and the rather plain, sallow girl Edward had married.

"That's it," Mark said, closing the album.

"What a disappointment," Kathy said. "I hate seeing people get old. I mean, when it's a real person it happens gradually, so you get used to it."

The others eyed one another, for once in complete, if silent, accord. All were aching to comment on the resemblance, and what it implied; all were equally reluctant to mention it to Kathy.

"I'm going to get dressed," Pat said, rising. "I hope somebody is going to volunteer to do the dishes."

"I will," Kathy said. "Mark did the cooking, it's the least I can do."

She obviously expected that Mark would offer to help her. Instead he mumbled, "Be back in a minute, Kath. I've got to-got to-er-"

Josef followed Pat and Mark upstairs, into her room. He closed the door after them.

"There's your connection," Mark burst out, before either of the others could speak. "Susan. You saw-"

"A pretty blond young girl," Josef interrupted. "Not really like Kathy at all."

"It's not so much a physical resemblance, it's-uh- psychic," Mark argued. "You both saw it too. Don't tell me you didn't."

"Damn it, you're jumping to conclusions again!" Josef's fists clenched. "Stop trying to push ideas into my mind."

"I don't have to push hard, do I?"

"All right, Mark," Pat said. "You've made a point; don't belabor it. Now will you two get out of here so I can get dressed?"

They left, eyeing one another like two strange dogs. Pat shook her head. The antagonism between them was growing; sooner or later it might erupt into open violence. Mark must realize that any such action would end his hopes of friendship with the Friedrichs; so far he had done well, but he was young, and he had his father's quick temper…

Pat had planned to take a nice long hot bath. Instead she showered quickly and threw on the first clothes that came to hand-an old brown cotton skirt and matching print blouse. Somehow, against her conscious will, Mark had made a convert of her. The evidence was accumulating, slowly, inconclusively; and yet each new detail fit uncannily with the theory Mark had formulated at the very beginning. Knowing her son as she did, Pat would not have been willing to swear that Mark had told them everything he knew. He must have evidence beyond what he had shared with them, otherwise how could he have gotten the idea in the first place? At the start there had been nothing to indicate what Mark obviously believed: that Kathy was the object of a conscious attack, based on some spiritual identity between her and the long-dead Susan Bates.

Pat paused in the act of putting on makeup. Her face stared back at her from the mirror, her hazel eyes wide and shadowed with incredulity, her lips twisted in a wry grimace. Her hair needed cutting-or styling-or something; the dark locks had lost their usual luster, and surely she had more gray hairs than she had had a week ago.

Pat turned from the mirror. She didn't like what she had seen. The face of a blithering idiot, she told herself savagely.

When she started downstairs she heard the voices, raised in angry comment and counterretort. With a sigh she quickened her steps. How long she could keep those two from each other's throats was anybody's guess.

"What's the problem now?" she demanded, entering the kitchen.

Josef turned toward her, his face flushed.

"Your insane son wants to tear my house apart. I told him I won't have Kathy there-."

"It's perfectly safe in the daytime," Mark said.

"How the hell do you know that?"

"One a.m., on the dot, three nights running… Don't you see that points to a specific event?"

This was a new thought to Pat and, obviously, to Josef also. They considered the suggestion for a moment and Mark took advantage of their silence to make another point.

"See, Mom, it occurred to me that maybe Kathy isn't the only catalyst. Maybe it's the room itself. I'd like to know who slept in that bedroom in 1860."

"Your mind jumps around like a grasshopper," Pat said irritably. "I can't keep up with you. Are you suggesting that something happened at the witching hour of one in the morning, in that room? Murder and sudden death? It wasn't Susan's room, Mark. This was her home."