He drove around until he tired of aimless driving, then found a main avenue and headed north. It was getting on toward dinner time. Time to leave both the nineteenth century and the cloying streets of Old Charleston. Time to get back to his own time, his own house, his own wife and children.
Until, on his own block just two doors from his own house, he saw them.
Erskine and Ariel.
The bus heading back into the city was two-thirds empty. Ariel and Erskine sat all the way in the back. Erskine had his legs draped over the back of the seat in front of them.
“I almost ran,” he said.
“Why run?”
“No reason. Just blind panic. When he drove up and saw us I thought we were going to be in trouble.”
“We didn’t do anything.”
“I know. I’m not saying it makes any sense. I just figured he’d be pissed off. We looked at his house and talked to his kids.”
“Just one of his kids.”
“Just Debbie. Greta had to practice the piano. She’s only nine. Isn’t that young for piano lessons?”
“Some kids start taking when they’re seven. I wonder if she’s any good.”
“You could play duets, Jardell. Ladies and gentlemen, for your listening pleasure, the piano artistry of Miss Greta Channing and the flute wizardry of Miss Ariel Jardell. For their first selection, your ears will be treated to... to what?”
“Go Tell Aunt Rhody, I suppose. We used to live in a house like that one. Erskine, what if we’re moving back?”
“To the same house?”
“To one like it. To any other house. I really don’t want to move.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Right.”
They were silent for a moment. Erskine burped and Ariel clucked her tongue reprovingly. He took his feet down from the seat in front of him and yawned elaborately.
Then he said, “You were very cool. Just staring back at him when he stopped the car.”
“Well, it never occurred to me to run. I was surprised to see him, but after all it’s his house. I guess he has a right to go there.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
“No.”
“Not even when he stopped the car alongside us?”
“No.”
He glanced at her. “I get the feeling you sort of like him,” he said. “He can be your new boyfriend.”
“Well, he’s not bad-looking.”
“Huh?”
“He’s not. I think he’s handsome.”
“Oh, come on, Jardell. He’s like you said in the beginning, he looks like a television emcee. Remember the Funeral Game?”
“That doesn’t keep him from being good-looking. It bugs you, doesn’t it?”
“What bugs me?”
“That I think he’s handsome. It really bugs you.”
“You can think Dracula’s handsome if you want. I don’t give a fuck.”
“Really bugs you.”
“Just cut it out, Jardell. That lah-di-dah singsong teasing shit.”
“Hey, calm down.”
“You want to think he’s handsome, that’s fine with me. The big dumb shit’s old enough to be your father.”
“Two children,” Jeff explained. “A boy and a girl. About, oh, twelve or thirteen years old. The girl’s the taller of the two. A very long, pale face. The boy’s very small with thick eyeglasses.”
“What about them, darling?”
“I saw them out front,” he said. “Just as I was driving up. I hadn’t seen them before.”
“You know this neighborhood. The only constant is change. People move in and out all the time, and the number of children—”
“I thought they might have come here. To the house, I mean.”
“What made you think that?”
“I don’t know. The way they were walking. There was something sort of furtive about them, as if they’d just broken a window of ours or something like that.”
“You got this impression just watching them pass by?”
He shook his head, dismissing the thought. “If you didn’t notice them, there’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “Maybe Debbie or Greta saw them.”
“Jeff...”
“What?”
“Are you feeling all right, darling?”
“Of course. Why?”
“You seem under a strain. I wonder if you haven’t been working too hard.”
He nodded, seeming to weigh the thought, while inside him he fought to keep from laughing. Crying. Working too hard? He wasn’t working at all. If he was under a strain, it certainly had nothing to do with work.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. “I guess I’ve been pushing lately. I’ll have to try taking things a little easier.”
She nodded, moved closer to him, slid an arm around his waist and laid her head against his chest. Reflexively he put a protective arm around her. His wife, he thought, hearing the words in his mind. His wife, the mother of his children. “Elaine the fair, Elaine the beautiful, Elaine the Lily Maid of Astolat...”
He hugged his wife close, closed his eyes, and saw Bobbie’s face grinning mockingly at him, one eye squinched shut in a lewd wink, the inevitable cigarette drooping from the corner of her mouth — the face flashed and was gone, and then it was Ariel’s face, burning with an unholy knowledge... then melting into the face in the portrait, the face of Grace Molineaux...
He opened his eyes, and he was standing in his own house with his arm around his wife, inhaling the fragrance of her hair.
Easy, boy, he told himself sardonically. You’ve been working too hard. You must be under a strain.
That night Ariel went to her room directly after dinner. She tried to play the flute but the music didn’t want to come and she gave up on it. She did her homework, then sprawled on her bed with a book and tried to get lost in it. But her mind kept wandering away from the words on the page and after a while she closed the book and set it aside.
She looked up at the portrait.
“Old enough to be your father.”
She hadn’t reacted openly to Erskine’s words, even though the impact was like getting hit between the eyes with a fist.
Jeffrey Channing was old enough to be her father. And he’d come over to the house to talk to Roberta, and had turned up at Caleb’s funeral, and had then taken to lurking in his car, spying on her and... Suppose he was her father? Suppose thirteen years ago Jeffrey Channing had an affair with someone, maybe with a girl much younger than he was, for example. She got pregnant, but he was married and couldn’t marry her. The girl had the baby, and she put it up for adoption, or maybe she died in childbirth, but anyway, the baby wound up getting adopted by David and Roberta Jardell... And then years later Jeffrey Channing found out about it, he was a lawyer and he would know how to investigate that sort of thing... In between he’d had two children of his own, Greta and Debbie. And they didn’t know about Ariel, and neither did Mrs. Channing. What was her name, again? Erskine had found it out and she ought to be able to remember it, but it wouldn’t come to mind. Well, it didn’t matter. Anyway, they didn’t know about Ariel. (Elaine, that was Mrs. Channing’s name.) They didn’t know, and her fa — Jeffrey Channing wanted to take an interest in his... in her and learn a little about her without anybody finding out his secret. Maybe Roberta herself didn’t know who he really was. If he was a lawyer, he probably had some clever way or other to explain what he was doing.
Father.
She tested the word, let it echo in her mind. Part of her wanted to believe that this handsome well-dressed man was indeed her father. Another part couldn’t regard the notion as anything more than a seductive fantasy. At least it made for a harmless mind-game... Ariel Channing...