The Walker in Shadows

I

The brown cardboard carton was medium-sized- two feet square by about a foot and a half high. Pat stared blearily at it, wondering how her fogged brain had been able to produce even that approximation of dimensions. She turned an even less enthusiastic gaze on her son. He was at the stove. The smell of bacon, usually so appetizing, did not improve Pat's disposition that morning.

She had taken a sleeping pill the night before, the first time she had done so for over six months. It had left her groggy and cross. She would still be asleep, and glad of it, if Mark had not shaken her awake. He had given her time to put on a bathrobe, but she was groping under the bed for her slippers when Mark had snatched her up and carried her downstairs, showing off for Kathy, who followed them giggling and making admiring comments.

The bathrobe was an old green terrycloth garment, snagged by Albert's claws, and not very clean. It added at least fifteen pounds to Pat's apparent weight. She had not been able to find her good robe; probably it was still in Kathy's closet, or, if she knew teenagers, crumpled on the floor of Kathy's room. She had not had time to comb her hair or wash her face or put on makeup, and she hated Mark. Kathy too.

She added Josef to the list as he entered, neatly dressed, freshly shaved, every hair in place. If the lines on his face were perhaps a little deeper than they had been when she first met him, that didn't count for much when weighed against the snagged old bathrobe and the straggly hair.

"Good morning," he said brightly.

Pat lifted her lip in a silent snarl and snatched at the coffee Kathy put in front of her.

"Is that it?" Josef transferred his attention from Pat to the carton. Not that she blamed him. Even a worn, battered cardboard box looked better than she did this morning.

"That's it." Mark turned, waving his spatula. "I barely caught Jay; he was ready to take off when I got there, and I had to bribe him before he would let me have the material."

"What with?" Pat demanded. Even her voice sounded rusty and antique. She cleared her throat. "An invitation to dinner tonight?"

"I mentioned your name," Mark said innocently. "He really thinks you're a cool lady, Mom."

An eloquent, ancient Anglo-Saxon four-letter word leaped into Pat's mind. She managed not to say it.

"I hope you didn't give anything away," Josef said. He seated himself at the table. "You have asked this young man to violate the rules by loaning out such material; you must have given him a pressing reason."

"I just told him Mom wanted it," Mark said.

Pat, who was fairly familiar with the moral codes of the younger generation, knew that to Jay and to Mark this was a perfectly adequate reason. They were all so hostile to rules and regulations; they took a perverse delight in breaking the rules, especially for someone they liked.

She felt no need to explain this to Josef, even if she had been capable of rational conversation. She drank her coffee.

"We'll have breakfast and then open the carton," Mark went on. He flipped an egg. Grease spattered, followed by a horrible smell of burning oil.

"Can I help?" Kathy asked.

"You could set the table," Mark answered, turning. Their eyes met; for a long moment Mark stood still, his spatula poised, dripping grease onto the kitchen floor.

"The eggs," Pat said.

"Oh." Mark turned back to his cooking while Kathy set the table. Pat knew Josef was looking at her, but she refused to meet his gaze. She kept her eyes fixed on her coffee cup.

It wasn't only lack of sleep or the sleeping pill or even her awareness of how she looked that made her silent and sullen. Convinced, and yet unwilling to believe, her mind raged against the events of the previous night.

The two men had entered swaggering, as they had left; but Josef admitted he needed a drink, and Pat had observed that his hands were not completely steady when he poured it. All the same, he had insisted, he was not completely converted to Mark's theory of a sentient, conscious intelligence as the agent behind the manifestations.

"But it came and went without completely materializing," Mark had argued. "Damn it-excuse me-Mr. Friedrichs, you must have felt it. I was outside the room, and I felt it. Something came-realized you were not what it was after-and left."

"It was bad enough, even half formed," Friedrichs muttered.

"Compared to what Kathy and I encountered, that was nothing," Mark insisted. "We saw it, and felt it. It hit every sense."

Josef had the last word.

"If your ideas are correct, Mark, we'll see the proof of them tonight. Your hypothetical entity will come, dismiss you as it dismissed me-or it will have learned, from to-night's experience, that Kathy has left the house, and it will not return."

Remembering this conversation, Pat felt a surge of panic. Did they really intend to risk Mark tonight, as Josef had risked himself the night before? Both men insisted there had never been any danger; the manifestation had started to fade almost as soon as it began, leaving the victim sickened but unharmed.

Even if that was true, it was not proof that the thing wouldn't react as violently to Mark as it had to Kathy. Had not Josef said that poltergeists were activated by youth? Besides-Pat went on with her silent argument-even if Kathy was the sole catalyst, where did that leave them? It left them with the conclusion that Kathy could never again enter her father's house.

"A nice thing that would be," she said suddenly. The others, who had been tactfully ignoring her bad mood, looked at her in surprise.

"Ah, she is showing signs of life," Mark said. "Eat your eggs like a good girl. As soon as you finish we'll open the carton."

"That fails to inspire me," Pat said. "What do you expect to find, Mark? A magic formula for exorcising demons?"

"Facts," Mark said.

After all, he was too impatient to wait for her to finish a meal for which she had little appetite. Kathy helped him clear away the dishes. Then he began to unload the box.

It was a motley and rather unsavory collection that appeared. The books and papers were spotted with damp and smelled sour, as if they had been permeated with mold.

"Jay figured Miss Betsy must have kept this stuff in the basement," Mark explained as his mother withdrew, her nose wrinkling fastidiously. "Some of it is in bad shape."

"And of the wrong period," Josef said, examining a long thin volume whose covers were held in place only by tatters of cloth. "This is someone's book of recipes-some handwritten, some cut out of newspapers and magazines. The type is too modern to be nineteenth century."

Kathy pounced on a packet of letters.

"These are dated 1934," she said, disappointed.

"I never promised you guys a rose garden," Mark said. "Did you think we'd find a document entitled 'The Family Ghost and what it wants out of life'?"

"Empty the carton," Josef suggested. "We'll put the irrelevant materials back into it."

The kitchen table was heaped with miscellany by the time Mark reached the bottom of the box. The last thing he took out was an elaborately bound book some eighteen inches long and several inches thick. Its padded covers, banded in brass, were of velvet turned green with age.

"Here we go," Mark said, his face brightening. "This must be the family photograph album."

The others discarded the unproductive documents they were investigating. By returning most of these to the car-ton they cleared enough space for the album, and Mark opened it to the first page.

It was like meeting, if not an old friend, at the least a familiar acquaintance. They had seen a reproduction of John Bates's photograph in the Morton genealogy; here was the original, and its impact was just as strong on the second viewing-even stronger, perhaps, because the reproduction had been slightly blurred. John Bates's dark eyes looked straight out at the viewer, as if demanding an answer to some vital, if unexpressed, question.

Mark turned the page. Again familiar faces-those of Louisa and Lavinia, nee Peters, caught for posterity, so long as paper and chemicals would survive. The stilted, simpering smiles seemed unbearably poignant to Pat. Could they have manufactured even a pretense at happiness if they had known what the next few years would bring?

"Mr. Morton must have had this album," she said.

"Or copies of the same photos," Mark said. "Louisa was his grandmother, and Mr. Bates was his grandfather. He didn't go farther back with the Bateses; I guess they weren't distinguished enough. No Revolutionary War heroes, or anything."

They were clustered close around Mark, who had taken upon himself the position of master of ceremonies and official turner of pages. Kathy, too polite to elbow her elders aside, stood on tiptoe to see over Mark's shoulder. Mark lifted his arm and pulled her close to the table, so that she was in front of him instead of behind him. His arm remained draped casually around her shoulders. Pat glanced at Josef. His lips had tightened, but Mark's gesture had been made so smoothly and so naturally that he could hardly complain without sounding foolish.

Mark turned the page.

There were two photographs, one facing the other. The first was that of a young man standing straight and proud in the dark of a Union uniform, his face stiff under the unbecoming short-brimmed forage cap. But the audience paid that photograph little heed. Three pairs of eyes focused, aghast and unbelieving, on the picture on the opposite page.

The girl wore her prettiest party dress, dotted with tiny flowers, ruffles framing her white shoulders, billowing skirts reducing her waist to ridiculous proportions. Ringlets tied with ribbon framed a smiling girlish face… Kathy's face.

Pat's eyes moved from the yellowing photograph to the living features of the girl who stood sheltered by Mark's arm.

Kathy had heard the gasps of surprise, but she alone, of them all, seemed unaware of what she saw. Naturally, Pat thought, her mind reeling; people don't really know how they look to others, they see only a mirror image, reversed…

Kathy let out a yelp of pain. Mark's fingers, which had been resting lightly on her arm, crooked like claws.

"What's the matter?" she demanded shrilly. Her eyes moved from Pat to her father.

"They aren't the same," Pat said. Her own voice sounded strange in her ears.

It was true, though; the pictured face was not identical with Kathy's. It was plumper, fuller of cheek. Kathy's exquisite coloring was not reproduced by the brownish tints of the old daguerreotype. Indeed, as Pat continued to stare, she found less and less to marvel at. The face in the photograph was that of a girl about Kathy's age, her inexperienced charm the same; the clustered curls were obviously blond. But the resemblance ended there.

Mark's taut hand relaxed its hold, but he was still in-capable of speech, an almost unheard-of situation.

"Who is she?" Pat asked. "The pictures aren't labeled. I don't know why people assume their descendants will know Great-Aunt Mabel and Cousin George…"

"That's not Cousin George," Mark said. "That's Susan Bates. Don't deny it, Mom; who else could it be? The costume is right for the period, the age is right… And that must be her brother Edward, opposite. He was a Union officer, we know that."

Now Pat was able to wrench her eyes away from Susan (Mark was right, it had to be Susan) to look at her brother. The cool, direct dark gaze was his father's, but the resemblance between Edward and his sister was just as plain.

"He's so proud of that uniform," Kathy murmured. "You can see it in his face. Actually, he's kind of cute."

Pat realized that the girl was still unaware of the resemblance that had struck the others. Looking up, she saw that Mark and Josef were both staring at her, radiating the same silent, imperative message. As if I would tell the child, she thought indignantly. The whole thing is moonshine anyway; pure imagination and nerves.

"They were a handsome family," she said, in response to Kathy's comment.

"The men were," Kathy said. "I don't know; I think Susan is stupid-looking."

"Oh, yeah?" Mark had recovered himself. "I think she's foxy. Cute figure."

"How can you tell?" Kathy demanded. "All those skirts…"

Mark put on a convincing leer.

"What shows is very nice, very nice indeed. Girls in those days used to brag about having waists so small a man could span it with his two hands. I'll bet yours isn't-"

Kathy giggled and wriggled as he put his hands around her waist. With only a little squeezing, his fingers met. The gesture, meant-in part, at least-as an attempt to amuse and distract, was not such a bright idea. It only reinforced an identity the others were struggling to deny.

"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."

"I'd like to know whose room it was," Mark insisted.

"And how do you propose to find out?" Josef demanded.

Mark's eyelids dropped. He had long, thick lashes, and with his bright eyes concealed, his face took on a look of youthful charm that seldom failed to melt his mother.

"I've got an idea," he said sweetly.

II

After two days of unoccupancy Kathy's bedroom had acquired a hotel-room feeling. Pat went to the windows and threw them open.

Mark prowled, peering behind bookcases and bureaus, mounting a chair to stare at a corner of the ceiling.

"You really did a job on this place," he said to Josef, who was standing with his hands on his hips, watching. "Stripped off all the old paper, repainted, scraped woodwork-"

"I didn't do it; Joe Bilkins, contractor, did. At least I trust he did, that was what I paid him for."

"You shouldn't have," Mark said.

"I suppose we should have lived with the rotted wallpaper and flaking plaster."

"I mean, you should have kept records of what you found," Mark said. "Mom, remember when Dad was working on our house? Remember, he had a scrapbook, describing the color of the original paint, and structural details? He even pasted in pieces of old wallpaper."

"I remember," Pat said.

"See, Dad always said that every little bit of the past should be preserved," Mark explained, turning to Kathy; she was a much more appreciative audience than the others. "He said that the history of mankind is a long story of destruction, and he didn't want to be one of the destroyers."

Pat had packed the scrapbook away. Its reminder of frustrated enthusiasm and unfulfilled plans had been too much to bear.

"He said that if we ever got enough money he'd like to have someone duplicate the old wallpaper," she said. "Of course we never did have enough…"

After one quick glance Josef had turned away and was pretending to watch birds outside the window. She appreciated his tact.

"That is interesting, Mark," he said, over his shoulder. "But I don't see its relevance here. And perhaps your mother-"

"No, that's okay," Pat said. Mark was speaking of his father freely, fondly, without hurt. That was the way she wanted it.

"But it is relevant," Mark said. "Mom, remember the day we were working in the closet of my room? I was helping Dad strip off the paper in there. Remember when we found the name written on the wall?"

"Good heavens, I had forgotten," Pat exclaimed. "I'm surprised you remember, Mark, it was so long ago. You weren't more than-"

"I was twelve," Mark said indignantly. "And I had good reasons to remember it. It struck me as a neat idea, so I wrote my name on the walls too. When Dad found out he made me spend all day Saturday scrubbing."

"What else did you write, Mark?" Kathy asked, smiling. "Just your name?"

"And the date. That was what we found-'Edward Bates, aged twelve, 1857.' It seemed so funny to me then, that some kid, just about my age, had written that, over a hundred years ago. I thought, wow, it would be cool if a hundred years from now some other kid would find my name." Mark grinned. "Dad never did find them all. I put one in the back of my closet, next to Edward's."

"So you concluded your room was once Edward's." Josef's quick intelligence was learning to follow the curious leaps and twists of Mark's mind. "But perhaps he wrote his name elsewhere, just as you did."

"He wouldn't write it in anybody else's closet," Mark argued.

"Hmmm. Possibly. And you think the Turnbull boy did the same here? That's pretty farfetched, Mark."

"No, it's not. Look, you keep thinking about these people as grown-ups. Soldiers, mothers, like that. I think of them as kids. I mean, they grew up together-Peter Turnbull and his cousins, right next door. They must have played together, they were only a year apart in age. There were no other houses close by. Peter was the oldest. He was also an only child; I bet he was spoiled rotten, not only by his parents but by his big sister-"

"It's much more likely that she detested him," Pat said drily, remembering youthful battles with her own elder siblings.

"Boy, are you a cynic," Mark said. "I don't agree. Mary Jane was ten years older than Peter, just the age to appreciate a nice live baby doll. Girls in those days were trained to be motherly. I mean, all this Women's Lib-"

"Get on with it," Josef interrupted. "What are you driving at, Mark? As if I didn't know…"

"Well, it's obvious, isn't it? Peter would be the leader of the gang. Edward would imitate him, not the other way around. I suspect this was his room, as the corresponding room in the other house belonged to Edward, because it's the best bedroom next to the master bedroom in the front. And I'm hoping to find written proof."

His shining enthusiasm and unconsciously arrogant voice carried conviction. Kathy was an immediate convert.

"Of course! It would be in the closet, wouldn't it?"

She dropped to her hands and knees and began throwing out shoes, clearing the closet floor. Josef, contemplating his daughter's shapely bottom with dismay, exclaimed, "That is the wildest idea you've come up with yet, Mark. I gave orders that this place was to be stripped down to the bare plaster. Nothing like that would survive, even if-"

"We need a flashlight," Kathy's muffled voice remarked from the depths of the closet.

"It's worth a look, isn't it?" Mark said. "The Edward Bates name was written in indelible ink, in the corner near the door. That's the kind of place a painter won't concentrate on-not these days, anyhow."

With a muttered imprecation Josef left the room, returning almost at once with a flashlight.

"I keep one in my bureau drawer, in case of a power failure," he explained. "But I would like to go on record as stating-"

"I know, I know," Mark said. "Get out of the way, Kath, and let me in there."

Pat sat down on the bed. Her conscious mind agreed with Josef; this was the craziest idea Mark had advanced yet. But somehow another part of her brain twitched with surprise when, after a prolonged search, Kathy said, "I don't see anything, Mark."

"It doesn't seem to be down here," Mark admitted. He stood up and, with one grand sweep, shoved Kathy's wardrobe into a mashed confusion at one end of the rod.

"Here it is," he said.

Pat was the last to get a look. The others crowded in before her. And there it was, just as Mark had predicted-faded, barely visible under the shrouding paint, but unmistakable. No modest, secret scrawl, this one; inscribed in the very center of the wall, the bold, spiky letters were over two inches high: "Peter Turnbull, aged thirteen, 1857."

Pat knew the suspicion that had crossed Josef's mind. Yet he must have dismissed it immediately, for the thing was impossible. The name had been painted over, and the paint was uniform. There was no way Mark could have written the name himself, at least not within the last few days.

Yet the survival of the name for over a century seemed almost equally incredible. Patches of the old plaster had fallen and had been replaced; by a strange trick of time (or was it merely a trick?) this particular section had remained firm. The twentieth-century workmen had patched only where necessary and had slapped a quick coat of paint over the whole. It was only a closet, after all. No one wasted time on a closet.

Mark was the least excited of them all. It was as if he had known what he would find.

"He was tall for his age," was his first comment.

Pat started to ask how he knew, and then refrained. People had a tendency to write at their own eye level, she had read that somewhere. No doubt Mark, who thought he knew everything, had calculated the average size of thirteen-year-olds, and could deduce Peter's height to the inch.

"A big, arrogant guy," Mark continued. "A bully."

"Now, really, Mark," his exasperated mother exclaimed.

"No, look where he wrote his name. Edward's was stuck away in a corner."

"Like he was shy," Kathy contributed, getting into the spirit of the thing.

"Not necessarily." Mark frowned thoughtfully. "He figured like I did-he wanted his name to survive, so he put it in a place where people wouldn't be so apt to notice it. He was more… calculating. Sensible. But Turnbull stood straight up and splashed his name for the world to see-daring them to obliterate it."

"Mark, what are you trying to say?" Pat demanded.

"It's clear enough, I think," Josef replied, before Mark could speak. "Mark thinks he has identified the ghost."

His voice was rich with sarcasm.

"Yes, I do," Mark said defiantly. "It was his room. He probably died in battle, fighting for a losing cause-a cause his cousins despised. Cocky, arrogant, still hating… Peter Turnbull has come back."

III

For the sake of peace Pat concluded it would be best to separate Josef and Mark for a few hours. She had intended to go to New Market to look for the secondhand bookstore the antique dealer had mentioned, and she managed to persuade Josef to go with her.

It was a gray, cloudy day; the close, muggy air was a foretaste of a Washington summer. Like everything else in her aged Volkswagen, the air-conditioning was functioning erratically. Slumped in the seat beside her, his long legs bent at an uncomfortable angle, Josef was silent for the first few miles. Pat let him sulk.

Finally he sighed deeply and straightened up, with a sudden movement that brought his head into abrupt contact with the roof.

"I'm sorry," Pat said. "This car isn't built for tall people. That's why I bought it; to keep Mark from driving it."

"I should have offered to take my car." Josef rubbed his head and tried to find a place to put his feet. "I was preoccupied. Your son has gotten me to a point where I'm forgetting my manners."

"I guess we'd better have it out," Pat said.

"Wasn't that the purpose of this expedition?"

"Partly. But I really do want to see what we can find in that bookstore."

"You don't mean you really believe all this-this-"

"Well, at least I'm not dismissing it out of hand because of my personal prejudices."

"What prejudices are those?" Josef asked, his voice chill.

"Against Mark. What did you think I meant?" He started to answer, but Pat, aghast at the direction in which they were going, cut him off. She had no more desire than he to go into the other emotional problems that distorted their friendship. "I don't blame you for being skeptical. You can slap Mark down as often as you like when his theories get out of hand; he's young, and he gets carried away. But if you think he's inventing all this in order to-well, to get closer to Kathy-"

" 'Invent' is not the word. I do think he is capitalizing on a most unpleasant situation."

"That's honest." Pat kept her eyes on the road. For a moment they were silent. She could have left it there, and she was tempted to do so. But things rankled in her mind, and she had learned that this was not a healthy situation. "One thing you said," she went on. "About Mark going to the local college-"

"I think I understand that now. I was unjust, and I apologize."

"Schools like that fill a need, and fill it well. Just because a boy or girl goes to a junior college doesn't mean they aren't-"

"I said I was sorry."

"Did you say that to Mark?"

"Damn it, Pat, there is a limit!"

"To what? Justice?" Pat gave him a sidelong look. His profile resembled the stony contours of a Toltec statue- lower lip protruding, brows lowering. "All I'm saying is that Mark is no monster. He isn't trying to-er-"

"Seduce my daughter?" Unexpectedly, Josef's rigid features relaxed. "I'd think he was abnormal if he didn't."

"Then it must be Kathy you don't trust," Pat said.

Immediately she knew she had made a grave misstep. His whole body went rigid.

Oh, damn, Pat thought wretchedly. So that's it. I guess I should have known. Why would a woman leave a man like him-attractive, intelligent, comfortably well off- unless she fell in love with someone else? Well, but there are other reasons, lots of them. He's also arrogant, dogmatic, something of a snob-not easy to live with. Damn, why did I have to say that? Shall I drop the subject, or try to explain?…

"What is it you hope to find in New Market?" Josef asked.

He had raised the No Trespassing sign; and there was no way she could bypass it. Her own position was too vulnerable.

"Nothing in particular," she answered. "I thought we might find some books on local history."

"It's worth a try. I confess I'm becoming curious about the Turnbulls. The people I bought the house from were named Stanton. Does that imply, perhaps, that the Turnbull family died out?"

"Maybe they just sold the house. Or… Wasn't there an older sister? She could have married a man named Stanton."

They continued to speculate-fruitless speculation, since they had so little evidence, but it got them over the bad moment. By the time they reached New Market they were conversing without strain. However, Pat had not forgotten her faux pas.

New Market, advertised as the antiques capital of Maryland, has a single street lined with lovely old houses. The majority of them have been converted into antique shops. Since this particular trade caters to the weekend shopper, the town was crowded, and Pat had to go some distance before she found a parking space. They walked back toward the center of town and the bookstore.

The building was constructed of pale, rough stone. The front door stood open; from the interior came the musty smell of old paper and worn leather bindings.

Josef went immediately to the nearest shelf and began browsing. His absorbed expression told Pat that he belonged to the same breed as Jerry-the book fanatics. Not being of that breed herself, she looked around the dusty room. Shelves lined the walls, stretching all the way to the ceiling. Books filled the shelves and overflowed into untidy heaps on the floor. A desk in the middle of the room was also piled high. The shop was very quiet. A few other browsers stood like statues, pouring over one esoteric volume or another.

Then a head appeared behind the heaped-up desk in the center of the room. Pat stared, amazed, as it rose, and rose, and rose. The man must have been over six and a half feet tall. Drooping white cavalry-style mustache, long white hair, and an old-fashioned string tie and high collar converted him into an image out of the past: a gentleman of the Old South. She was not at all surprised when he addressed her in courtly terms.

"May Ah be of some assistance, ma'am?"

"Uh-thank you. I'm looking for books about the Civil War."

The mustache quivered.

"You refer, ma'am, to the War Between the States?"

Josef, who was behind the irate Confederate, turned to stare. His mouth curved into a grin. Pat resisted the impulse to shake a fist at him.

"Yes," she said meekly.

"Two of the rooms of this h'yere house, ma'am, are filled with volumes on that subject. Mah more rare and expensive volumes repose behind glass on shelves in the regions above stairs. May Ah ask what partic'lar aspect of that epic struggle interests you?"

Josef had abandoned all pretense of interest in his book. Pat felt sure that without his malicious enjoyment of her discomfiture she would never have been able to reply.

" Maryland," she said. "The Poolesville area in particular."

"Not much goin' on there," said the relic of the Old South. "Unless it's Captain 'Lige White…"

"The Turnbulls," Pat said. "And the Bateses. I live in the old Bates house."

The white mustache vibrated, and a spark of interest lit the faded blue eyes.

"Most interesting ma'am. If you-all will wait a moment, till Ah deal with this gentleman…"

With lordly condescension he accepted a ten-dollar bill from a waiting customer and retreated into the back regions, presumably to get change. The buyer, a middle-aged man wearing a sports shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, grinned at Pat and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "Don't let Bill get to you, lady. He was born in Hartford, Connecticut. It's all an act. He-"

He broke off as Bill returned with a few limp dollar bills. With a last, amused wink at Pat, he departed with his book.

"Now, then," said Bill. "What was it you were sayin', ma'am?"

The mystique, alas, was gone; the accent was palpably false.

"I said, 'I live in the old Bates house,' " Pat said.

"And I," said Josef, advancing, "have purchased the Turnbull house. We are interested in the history of the families."

"Nat'chrally." Bill stroked his mustache and eyed them speculatively. "But o' course you wouldn't hope to find any personal memoirs or reminiscences, now would you? That would be too great a stroke of luck."

"Well," Josef began.

"Aha." Bill leaned forward. "And what would you-all say if Ah told you that Ah happen to possess one o' the few remainin' copies of Miss Mary Jane Turnbull's memoirs? Privately printed in Richmond after war"-he pronounced it "wo-ah"-"in an edition of only two hundred copies, excellent condition, pages uncut…"

"Mary Jane?" Pat turned to Josef. "Peter's older sister? Do you suppose-"

Josef jabbed her in the ribs; she took the hint, and stopped speaking. She had sounded far too eager. Bill's blue eyes had taken on the gleam of a good businessman encountering a prospective buyer.

"We might be interested," Josef said. "Could we have a look at the book, please?"

"Certainly, mah dear sir." Bill trotted off. The memoirs were obviously one of his choicer volumes, kept under glass in the chambers above.

"How much is this book worth to us?" Josef asked softly.

"Why-a few dollars, I suppose."

"It won't be a few dollars. I know this routine; it always means large sums of money. Let me handle it, will you? You are obviously lousy at bargaining."

When Bill returned he carried the book balanced on both hands. It lacked only a silver salver. Its appearance did not justify Bill's tender care. Bound in faded green cloth, the gilt-lettered title equally faded, it was not an imposing object.

Pat's intention of skimming through the pages was frustrated from the start by the fact that there were no separate pages, only the thick bundles of the uncut fascicles. Opening the book at random, she came upon the following paragraph:

The more we learn of the victory last Sunday the greater it seems to be. They say the Yankee dead lay upon the field like a blue blanket. The arrogant ladies and gentlemen of Washington had anticipated triumph; coming in carriages to view the annihilation of our hopes, they carried picnic baskets and bottles of French champagne, all of which they were forced to abandon in their precipitate flight when their army was overwhelmed. Hurrah! We expect momentarily to hear of the arrival of our men in the enemy capital.

"Wednesday, July 24, 1861." Pat read the date aloud.

" Bull Run," said Josef, who had been reading over her shoulder. "First Manassas, as the Confederates called it. They might indeed have taken Washington then, if they had pressed on."

"It's all so impersonal," Pat complained. "Nothing about the family."

"An invaluable record, suh and ma'am." Bill saw a prospective customer losing interest, and increased the pressure. "There is considerable information there, as you will discover when you cut the pages. Naturally Ah would not do so until the book is sold. It is in mint condition and therefore much more valuable uncut."

Josef closed the book.

"How much?" he asked.

IV

"You didn't buy it?" Mark's voice rose to a squeal of outrage.

"For two hundred and fifty dollars?" Pat imitated his tone. Yet she felt defensive, and that angered her. "You act as if we had all the money in the world," she exclaimed. "From what we could see the book didn't have any personal material; it was written for publication, after all, so it must have been edited-"

"All right, I'm sorry," Mark muttered. He ran his fingers through his hair.

"I bought these," Pat said, proffering them like a propitiatory offering to an outraged deity. "This ragged little pamphlet cost me fifteen bucks. I mean, really, Mark-"

"I said I was sorry." Mark took the stack of books, like Jehovah accepting a less-than-perfect lamb. He tossed most of them aside with contempt, but the sight of the expensive pamphlet made his face brighten. "Hey, this looks good. ' Montgomery County Families of Distinction, and the War Between the States.' Maybe it mentions the Turnbulls."

"It does," Josef said. "We wouldn't have bought it otherwise. Your friend Peter…"

Mark wasn't listening. He had subsided onto the floor, cross-legged, his head bent over the little book. Kathy knelt beside him, her fair hair brushing his shoulder.

"Here it is," he said. " 'The Extinction of an old and honored family…' The old man was killed in 1863. In a cavalry skirmish, 'somewhere in Maryland.' His body was returned to his grieving family and interred with military honors in… Hey. Did you know you had a family graveyard, Mr. Friedrichs?"

"Forget it," Josef said promptly. "You are not going to excavate my backyard."

"Would you object if I just looked around for tombstones or-"

"Yes."

"Oh. Well, okay. The old man isn't the problem, anyway. It's Peter we… Oh, wow. Here it is. He was killed too."

Pat felt the same shock she would have felt at the news of the death of a personal acquaintance. In spite of Mark's conviction that Peter Turnbull was an arrogant, unpleasant young man who had become an even more unpleasant ghost, she found his death, at nineteen, tragic and disturbing.

Josef's reaction was less sentimental.

"So he did die violently in battle," he said. "Mark, how do you know these things, before we find written evidence? Are you holding out on us?"

Mark pretended not to hear the question. Perhaps it was not all pretense; he appeared to be genuinely puzzled as he read on.

"One of his men saw him fall. He was shot… It doesn't say where. But he fell over his horse's neck, and there was a lot of blood, and… That's it. The trooper who saw it was wounded too, he lost track of what was going on. He-the trooper-was picked up when reinforcements arrived and drove the Federal troops away." Mark stared raptly at the ceiling. "I wonder if his bones are still lying there, in the underbrush near White's Ferry…"

Pat let out an exclamation of disgust, but Kathy obviously found the idea more romantic than repulsive.

"Maybe that's what he wants," she suggested. "Burial in sanctified ground, with the rites of the church."

"You've been reading too many horror stories," her father said disagreeably. "I refuse to dig up half of Montgomery County looking for the remains of Peter Turnbull."

Rain pattered against the window. Pat reached up to turn on a lamp. It was already dark outside. An involuntary shiver ran through her. What would happen at one o'clock? Was Mark really determined to go through with the insane plan they had formulated earlier? She didn't want to ask. She was afraid of the answer.

"Food, anyone?" she asked.

"I made spaghetti sauce," Mark answered, his eyes still fixed on outer space, his expression remote.

"It smells as if it were burning," Josef said maliciously.

With an exclamation of distress Kathy leaped to her feet and ran out.

"What about a drink?" Josef asked.

Pat bit her lip. She had been about to suggest that this was no time for alcohol. But Josef's habits were none of her business. She revised her comment.

"What about some wine? I think there is some Chianti downstairs, in the wine bin-"

Mark snapped to attention.

"Wait, Mom, don't go down there. I mean-I'll get the wine. I mean-"

"I knew you were up to something," Pat said wearily. "What did you do this afternoon, Mark?"

Mark tried to look innocent.

"Now, Mom, what makes you think-"

"You're too clean," Pat said, inspecting his unspotted T-shirt and neatly creased jeans. "You changed your clothes before we got home. You wouldn't do that unless-"

"Ah, so that's your secret." Mark smiled at her, and her treacherous heart softened. "I'll know better after this."

Kathy came running back.

"It's all right," she announced cheerfully. "I turned it down and added some water. Was that all right, Mark?"

"Never mind the damned spaghetti sauce," Josef snapped. "What did you two do this afternoon? You've changed your clothes too, Kathy. What-"

Mark caught the implication and-to the surprise of his mother, who had thought him impervious to innuendos of that nature-turned bright red.

"It isn't what you think," he said angrily. "We got dirty, that's all. Cobwebs and mud and… We opened up the tunnel."

"Tunnel," Pat repeated blankly. "What tunnel?"

"The doorway Dad uncovered in the basement," Mark answered. His angry color had not subsided, and he avoided Josef's gaze. "He walled it up again, remember? The ceiling looked as if it were about to collapse, and you said it was dangerous, and-"

"That wasn't a tunnel, it was a room, a root cellar or-"

"It was a tunnel. The ceiling had fallen in, that's why we couldn't see how far it extended. Don't you get it, Mom? This house was a station on the Underground Railway. 'Freedom Hall,' Mr. Bates's abolitionist sympathies…"

"Show me," Josef said.

Pat never went into the cellar if she could help it. Unlike modern structures bearing the same name, or the more euphonious appellation of basement, the substructure of her house had never been designed for conversion into family rooms or game rooms. It was almost wholly subterranean, dank-smelling and dismal. The whitewashed stone walls had smears of green lichen, and water often oozed from the floor. Jerry had converted an old enclosed porch off the kitchen into a laundry room, so there was seldom any reason for Pat to go belowstairs. Though she was barely conscious of the fact, her dislike of the area was not based solely on its physical unattractiveness. Its unpleasant atmosphere went beyond damp and darkness.

Now, as she descended the wooden steps, she saw a gaping hole in the wall behind the furnace. The floor was littered with bits of mortar.

"What a mess!" she exclaimed angrily. "Mark, how could you?"

"I'll clean it up," Mark said. His voice sounded distant, muffled.

"What were you looking for?" Josef demanded, ducking to avoid braining himself on the pipes that traversed the low ceiling.

"I don't know. I just thought maybe…"

Pat started forward, picking her way delicately through the debris. A low, eerie moan made her stop and turn. She saw Jud squatting on the top step. His bulbous eyes were fixed on the dark hole in the wall. He looked perturbed. But then, Pat thought, he often did.

"He sat there and whined all the time we were working," Mark said, indicating the dog. "That must mean something."

"It means he doesn't like damp, cool places," Pat said. "He's always hated the cellar."

Yet as she approached the gap in the wall she was conscious of a chill that transcended the normal dampness of the place. Cool, wet air wafted out of the darkness, like a draft. But there could be no passage of air through the earth that filled the far end of the hole…

Mark had brought a flashlight. He switched it on and turned the beam into the darkness.

Brick walls, green with mold, framed a narrow rectangle barely two feet wide. The floor was of beaten earth, shiny with damp. The low ceiling was supported by planks now gray and cellular, like elongated wasps' nests: the evidence of industrious termite colonies. Beyond the gap in the wall the open space was barely six feet long. It ended in a sloping wall of dirt.

"I remember this," Pat said. "Jerry found it the first year we lived here. We assumed it was just another room. What makes you think it was a tunnel?"

"I'm afraid he's right," Josef said, before Mark could answer. "It's too narrow to have been a room. Given Mr. Bates's abolitionist sentiments…"

For a moment no one spoke. The only sound was the heavy panting of the dog, so magnified and distorted by the low ceiling that it seemed to come, not from the stairs behind, but out of the darkness of the collapsed tunnel. Pat's scalp prickled. Surely more than one pair of lungs were emitting that agonized breathing. She seemed to hear gasps, low moans of effort and distress… How many weary, frightened men and women had crawled through that dark space, laboring toward freedom?

"Mark, you don't think…" Kathy began. She did not finish her sentence, but her gesture, toward the fallen earth, expressed the horrified surmise they all shared.

"No, no," Mark said reassuringly. "They would have dug the dirt out if the tunnel had collapsed while it was still in use. I think it gave way later, long after there was any reason for its existence."

"No ghosts here, then," Pat said. "You didn't find anything, did you, Mark?"

"No."

"Then let's go."

Their retreat was not dignified. If there were no ghosts in the buried tunnel, there was the memory of old cruelty and injustice. Pat recalled a friend of hers, an Army wife who had spent several years in Germany, describing a visit she had made to the former concentration camp at Dachau, now a memorial to the tortured victims. "I stalled at the gate," her friend had admitted. "I couldn't go in. I was sick at my stomach, unable to breathe." There was nothing supernatural or psychic about such impressions; they were simply a physical expression of the impact of tragedy on a sensitive mind.

All the same, she breathed more easily when they were upstairs, with the cellar door closed. Darkness was complete outside, and the rain hissed drearily against the windowpanes. After searching, Pat found a bottle of wine in the kitchen cabinet. No one volunteered to go downstairs again.

Josef drank most of the wine. He had had two drinks before dinner, and when they returned to the parlor, after eating, he went straight to the liquor cabinet. When he asked Pat to join him she shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. She could not see that he was visibly affected by what he had drunk. But she didn't like it. Her feelings must have shown on her face; Josef returned her unconsciously critical glance with a look of sullen defiance, and poured a sizable jolt of Scotch into his glass.

Mark settled down on the floor with the photograph album.

"I promised Jay we'd return this tomorrow," he said. "Mom, you better come with me."

"I have to work tomorrow," Pat protested.

"How can you think of work at a time like this? I'll call in for you, tell them you're sick."

"I can't do that!"

"Well, you can't sit up half the night and expect to work."

It had been expressed, the thought she had dreaded. Pat let her breath out in a long sigh.

"Mark, are you really going to go over there tonight?"

"We agreed," Mark said. "Nothing's going to happen, Mom. I promise."

Pat turned away with a helpless gesture, and met Josef's gaze. She knew what he was thinking as clearly as if he had spoken aloud. Mark was so sure. He had been un-nervingly accurate so far, in all his guesses and hypotheses. What source of information was he tapping? A possible answer occurred to her, and the very idea turned her cold with apprehension.