Carolyn stiffened, then looked up to see Abigail gazing down at her from the landing above. She managed a weak smile, and got once more to her feet. “I’m all right, Abigail. I just had a bad moment, that’s all.”
The old woman’s lips curved into a tight line of disapproval. “I thought I heard a scream. You didn’t fall, did you?”
Carolyn hesitated, then shook her head. “No. No, I’m really perfectly all right.”
“Perhaps you’re trying to do too much,” Abigail suggested, her voice taking on the slight purring quality that Carolyn had long since learned to recognize as a danger signal. “Why don’t you spend the rest of the day in your room? After all, you’d never forgive yourself if something happened to the baby, would you? And I hate to think how Phillip would feel.”
She heard! Carolyn suddenly knew. She heard every word we said! And she doesn’t care. She knows what happened, and what could have happened, and she won’t say a word to Tracy, or a word to Phillip. She feels the same way as Tracy. She hopes I lose my baby.
Her heart was thumping now, and when she spoke she had to make an effort to keep her voice from trembling. “But nothing’s going to happen to my baby, Abigail. It’s going to be perfectly all right.”
The two women gazed at each other for a moment; then, at last, Abigail turned away, and started slowly back down the corridor toward her rooms.
Only when she was gone did Carolyn gingerly touch her abdomen once more, hoping to feel a movement that would tell her the baby was all right.
But it was too early to expect any movement from the life within her, and finally she moved painfully across the wide entry hall to the telephone and called the hospital. Despite the fact of Tracy’s party that afternoon, she made an appointment to see Dr. Blanchard at two o’clock.
Phillip and Beth dismounted, and Beth carefully tied Patches’s reins to a low branch before flopping down onto the soft grass of the little meadow. Then she sat up, and looked around, remembering the last time she’d been here.
“This is where Mom fainted, Uncle Phillip. Right over there by that big rock.”
Phillip’s eyes followed Beth’s pointing arm, then he stood up and wandered over to the rock on which Carolyn had been sitting that morning a few days earlier. A moment later Beth was beside him. “Remember what Mom said that morning? About it looking like the mill was on fire?”
Phillip glanced down at Beth, nodding. “And she asked you if you’d seen the same thing.”
“And I did,” Beth said, her voice suddenly shy. “At least, I think I did.” Slowly, trying to reconstruct the memory, she told Phillip what she’d seen that day from up at the mausoleum. “I thought it was an optical illusion at first,” she said when she was finished. “But Mom saw the same thing.”
“Maybe you both saw an illusion,” Phillip replied. “From up here, the sun can play funny tricks on you. It reflects off the roof of one building and lights up another. And sometimes when it catches the windows just right, it looks as though the whole village is on fire.”
“But it wasn’t the whole village,” Beth protested. “It was just the mill. And it couldn’t have been refleclions, because all the windows at the mill are boarded up.”
Phillip nodded thoughtfully, and looked once more at the old building at the far side of the town. Already it had changed. The boards were torn away from the windows now, and scaffolding had been constructed around it. Already the sandblasting had begun, and here and there areas of bright red brick were beginning to show through the thick layers of grime that had built up over the decades. In his mind’s eye, Phillip began to picture the mill as it would be in a few more months, with shutters softening the stark rows of evenly spaced windows, a porte cochere extending from the front entrance out over the sidewalk, and wrought-iron tracery decorating the roof line.
“How come it was closed?” he suddenly heard Beth ask. He glanced down once more, and saw her looking back at him with earnest curiosity.
“Economics,” he replied. “The place just wasn’t making any money anymore.”
“But what about all the stories?” Beth pressed.
“What stories are those?” Phillip countered, though he was fairly certain he knew.
“About the children that used to work there. I thought something happened,