And what did the Bektermann murders have to do with her? With Carol?
She thought of what Wainwright had told her: This damned, endless pursuit. It’s still going on, and it’s got to be stopped this time around. I’ve come to tell you that your Carol is in the middle of it.
You’ve got to help her. Get her out of the girl’s way.
She felt she was on the verge of understanding what he had meant. And she was scared.
Even though a number of impossible things had transpired within the past twenty-four hours, she no longer questioned either her sanity or her perceptions.
She was sane, perfectly sane, and in command of all her faculties. Senility was not even a remote possibility any longer. She sensed that the explanation for these events was far more frightening, more soul-shattering even than the prospect of senility, which had once terrified her.
She recalled something else that Palmer Wainwright had said yesterday in the garden: You aren’t only who you think you are. You aren’t only Grace Mitowski.
She knew the solution to the puzzle was within her grasp. She sensed a dark knowledge within her, long-forgotten memories waiting to be tapped. She was afraid to tap them, but she knew she must do precisely that, for Carol’s sake, and perhaps for her own sake as well.
Suddenly, the air in the kitchen, though still quite clear, reeked of wood and tar smoke. Grace could hear the crackle of fire, although there were no flames here, now, in this place and time.
Her heart pounded frantically, and her mouth turned dry and sour.
She closed her eyes and could see the burning house as vividly as she had seen it in the dream. She could see the cellar doors, and she could hear herself screaming, calling Laura.
She knew it hadn’t been only a dream. It had been a memory, lost for ages, surfacing now, reminding her that, indeed, she was not only Grace Mitowski.
She opened her eyes.
The kitchen was hot, stifling.
She felt herself being pulled along by forces she could not comprehend, and she thought: Is this what I want? Do I really want to flow with this and discover the truth and turn my little world upside down? Can I handle it?
The stench of nonexistent smoke grew stronger.
The roar of nonexistent flames grew louder.
I guess there’s no turning back now, she thought.
She held her hands up in front of her face and stared at them, amazed. Her flesh had been miraculously disfigured by stigmata. Her hands were bruised, abraded, bloody. There were splinters of wood embedded in her palms, splinters from the cellar doors on which she had pounded such a long, long time ago.
* * *
At ten o’clock, when the phone rang, Paul had been at his desk, writing, for almost an hour. The work had just begun to flow smoothly. He snatched up the receiver and said, a bit impatiently, “Yes?”
An unfamiliar female voice said, “Could I speak to Dr. Tracy, please?”
“Speaking.”
“Oh. Uh… no… the Dr. Tracy I’m looking for is a woman.”
“It’s my wife you want,” he said. “She’s out of town for a few days. Can I take a message?”
“Yes, please. Would you tell her that Polly called from Maugham & Crichton?”
He jotted the name down on a note pad. “And what’s this in reference to?”
“Dr. Tracy was here yesterday afternoon with a young girl who’s suffering from amnesia…”
“Yes,” Paul said, suddenly more interested than he had been. “I know the case.”
“Dr. Tracy was asking if we’d ever heard of anyone named Millicent Parker.”
“That’s right. She told me about it last evening. It was another dead end, I gather.”
“It seemed to be a dead end yesterday,” Polly said, “but now it turns out that one of our doctors is familiar with the name. Dr. Maugham himself, in fact.”
“Listen, rather than waiting for my wife to call you back, why don’t you just tell me what you’ve come up with, and I can pass the information along to her.”
“Well, sure, why not? See, Dr. Maugham is the senior partner in the practice. He bought this property eighteen years ago and personally oversaw the restoration of the outside and the renovation of the interior. He’s a history bug, so it was natural for him to want to know the history of the building he purchased. He says this place was built in 1902 by a man named Randolph Parker. Parker had a daughter named Millicent.”