The sun had sunk below the trees, and the evening breeze felt cool.
"I saw you were reading Mrs. Greenhow's book, Mom," Mark said. "Truth is stranger than fiction, right?"
"Well-bred lady spies, complete with hoop skirts and smelling salts, do sound like bad fiction," Pat agreed. "But some of the so-called historical romances I've read lately have had even more unbelievable plots."
"And even more sex," Mark said, grinning. "I can't believe Mrs. Greenhow ever writhed in the arms of her lover as his hands moved softly over-"
"Did you read that trashy book?" Pat demanded in outraged tones.
"Slave of Passion," Mark said. He rolled his eyes. "You shouldn't leave stuff like that lying around, my dear."
"Shame on you, Mrs. Robbins, contaminating an innocent mind like Mark's," Kathy added.
It was her first contribution to the silly little exchanges Pat shared with her son, and her tentative smile showed that she wasn't quite sure how it would be taken. Feeling that she had been given some insight into the girl's relationship with her mother, Pat exaggerated her reaction.
"Innocent, she says. You should see the books he hides under his mattress."
Kathy giggled appreciatively. Her father muttered, as if to himself, "In my day it was Esquire. My mother found a copy in one of my drawers, open to the centerfold…"
"Well, back in those days people were uptight about sex," Mark said tolerantly. "I mean, you hadn't really advanced much since the Civil War period."
"I wouldn't say that," Josef objected. "Some of Petty's centerfolds were-"
Foreseeing another digression, Pat interrupted.
"Let's get back to Mrs. Greenhow. And no more writhings, please. I didn't finish the book, but the Turnbulls weren't mentioned in the part I read."
With his brows drawn together in the scowl that gave him such an uncanny resemblance to his father, Mark picked up a pencil and began doodling on the paper in front of him.
"It's so damned frustrating," he muttered. "All this blank paper, and nothing to put on it."
"Mrs. Greenhow was only one of many," Josef said, ignoring this outburst of petulance. "There was a regular espionage network in and around Washington during the war. With the enemy just across the river, it was easy to pass on news of troop dispositions and strategy; a man could paddle his boat across on a dark night-"
"Women did it too," Pat said, resenting the implicit chauvinism in Josef's speech. "One of Mrs. Greenhow's messengers was a girl, Betty Duvall. She drove a cart straight across Chain Bridge to Fairfax Courthouse, where the Confederates were, carrying the message in her hair. Nobody thought of challenging a simple little country girl."
"That's right," Kathy said. "I was reading a book at the library the other day, written by a woman who was ten years old at the time of the war. She lived in a town on the main road to Richmond, and she remembered a lot of Marylanders passing through on their way south. One of them was a sweet little old lady from Baltimore -I think her name was Alexander-whose son was in prison at Fort McHenry. She went to Richmond to get him a commission in the Confederate army so he would be considered a prisoner of war instead of an enemy agent. I mean, they hanged spies."
Pat shivered. Long blue shadows lay across the table. Mark, his eyes lowered, continued to doodle. Kathy glanced at him uneasily and went on, as if hoping to rouse him from his fit of the sulks.
"She got the commission, too. She carried it back in the lining of her bonnet, can you imagine? But her son escaped. He jumped off the parapet of the fort and broke his leg, and managed to crawl to a nearby house, where the people helped him. They smuggled him to another Southern sympathizer, who passed him on, and so forth. It just shows you how many people in Maryland really believed in-"
"Mark," Pat said suddenly. Her son's eyes were now fixed vacantly on the lilac bushes; but his hand continued to move.
"What the devil…" Josef began.
The chill that ran through Pat had nothing to do with the temperature of the evening air. Mark's face no longer resembled his father's. The features were Mark's, but they did not look like his; an alien, unfamiliar expression overlay them like a thin mask. And his hand continued to move.
"Mark!" Pat leaned across the table and caught that horribly moving arm.
Mark let out a yell. It was as if her touch had been a knife that slashed his arm to the bone.
"Damn it! What the hell do you think you're doing?"
His tone was offensive, and so was his dark frown; but Pat didn't mind, because both the voice and the frown were Mark's. The alien cast had left his features. He was nursing his right hand against his body, as if it pained him.
"What's wrong with your hand?" she asked.
"It hurts. You didn't have to hit me."
"I didn't. I barely touched you. What happened?"
"Nothing happened. We were talking about your lady spy, Mrs. Greenhow, and then you leaned over and-"
"You lost about ninety seconds of time," Josef said. "Let me see that paper, Mark."
"I was just doodling," Mark began. He glanced at the paper. His eyes dilated until they looked black.
Josef picked up the sheet of paper and glanced at it. Without comment, he handed it to Pat.
The top of the page was covered with Mark's scribbling. A psychiatrist would not have found it particularly interesting, for the symbols were overt expressions of Mark's feelings-question marks, spirals that went on and on without resolution. Then, abruptly, halfway down the sheet of paper, the penciled tracings became words.
"Tell her I came back. I want her to know. It was hard oh God it was hard, so hard, but I came I want her to know I came I want her I want her I…"
The last word trailed off in a black scrawl, where Pat had joggled Mark's arm.
Pat dug her nails into the palms of her hands. The pain helped her control herself.
"You wouldn't do this for a joke, Mark." She made it a statement, not a question. "You wouldn't do this to me."
"Bite your tongue," Mark said. He was as white as the sheet of paper, but the insatiable curiosity he had inherited from his father was rearing its head. "Did I really write that?"
"No," Pat said. "You didn't. It's not your handwriting."
"Then who…?"
No one answered. They all knew the truth. They had seen the handwriting before. Spiky, bold, unmistakably distinctive… The handwriting of Peter Turnbull.
Eight
I
Moved by a single impulse, they fled for the house, snatching up their belongings more or less at random. The gracious blue dusk had become an enemy, inhabited by shadows.
Pat went around the kitchen switching on every light she could find. Mark, who had grabbed the ominous paper, dropped into a chair at the kitchen table and studied the writing, his chin propped on his hands.
"Amazing," he muttered. "I never knew I had the talent."
"I could kill you," said his mother in a choked voice. "How you have the nerve to joke about it…"
"I'm not joking. This is the most fantastic piece of luck! You know what it means."
"What it probably means," Josef said coldly, "is that your uncontrolled subconscious has expressed itself. You've had this idea in mind all along, haven't you?"
Mark looked injured.
"I didn't do it on purpose. That was automatic writ-ing."
"One of the favorite tricks of the fake mediums," Josef said. "They claim the spirits are directing their muscles."
"Honest to God, Mr. Friedrichs-"
"Oh, I'm not accusing you of fraud. In some cases a medium honestly believes he or she has been taken over by some external force. But that force can be the subconscious, just as the spirit guides who speak through the medium can be a secondary personality."
"What are you talking about?" Pat demanded shrilly. Her nerves had been badly shaken, and she was in no mood for generalizations. "What idea?"