“Stop!” Ruthie yelled, gesturing wildly. “Pull in there, next driveway on the left.”
Buzz turned left, pulling into the strip mall parking lot too fast—Ruthie bumped against Fawn, and Fawn leaned into Buzz. Ruthie’s coffee spilled all over her lap.
“What the hell?” Buzz said once he’d stopped the truck, but Ruthie was already hopping out of the cab, heading for the closed shop, the faded red sign drawing her in:FITZGERALD’S BAKERY.
She held her breath as she approached it, walking in slow motion, suddenly unsure if she really wanted to do this. She shuffled like a sleepwalker, half of her brain lost in a dream-state, the other half scrambling to make sense of what she was seeing: could this place really be here, existing in the waking world?
She approached cautiously, heart thumping in her ears. Plywood covered the windows, and newspaper was taped to the inside of the glass front door. But a square had fallen away, and Ruthie pressed her face against the glass, hands cupped around her eyes to keep out the glare.
There it was: the long glass-fronted display case that had held rows of cupcakes, cookies, and pies, now empty except for a broken lightbulb and a few forgotten doilies. Even the black-and-white-checked floor was the same. She could practically smell the yeasty warm fragrance of fresh-baked bread, taste the sugar on her tongue, feel her mother’s hand wrapped around hers.
What do you choose, Dove?
“No way!” Buzz had come up behind her and caught her enough by surprise that she jumped in alarm. “Is this the bakery you keep dreaming about?”
Ruthie shook her head. “It can’t be,” she stammered. “Maybe it’s just a coincidence?” The words felt hollow. But some part of her brain, the part that held dearly to all that was rational and made sense, couldn’t let her accept the truth.
“Coincidence, hell! How many Fitzgerald’s Bakeries can there be? Does it look the same inside?”
“I don’t know,” she said, turning away, the lie making her throat tight, the truth making her dizzy and disoriented. “Come on, let’s go check out those addresses.”
As they pulled out of the parking lot, Ruthie’s eyes stayed on the boarded-up bakery. She grasped for some kind of explanation, but all that came to mind were the sort of crazy theories Buzz might conjure up—a dream from a past life, a psychic link to some other girl—things there was no way she could ever make herself believe in.
She rested her head against the cool glass of the truck window and closed her eyes, thinking.
How was it possible to dream about an actual, physical place you’d never been to?
And if the bakery was real, did that mean the woman with the cat’s-eye glasses was, too?
Katherine
Katherine hurried along the slushy sidewalks, realizing how completely inadequate her uninsulated, smooth-soled city boots were. She should have taken the car. But it hadn’t seemed like a long walk, and she’d thought the exercise and fresh air would do her good.
She was on her way to the bookstore. After finishingVisitors from the Other Sidelast night, she’d looked up Sara Harrison Shea on her laptop and learned almost nothing. Her hope was that the local bookstore might have something else by or about her.
Surely it wasn’t just a coincidence that Gary had a copy of this book hidden away in his things, or that Sara was from West Hall, the same place he visited the day he died.
And then there was the ring: Auntie’s ring. When Katherine read Sara’s description of Auntie’s bone ring as she sat on the couch yesterday, her heart jackhammered. She looked past the book in her hand to the ring she wore on her own finger, the ring Gary had given her. She turned it around, touched the strange, indiscernible carvings. Auntie’s ring. Was it even possible?
First the hidden book, then the ring—she wasn’t sure what any of this meant, but she hoped to find some answers at the bookstore.
Katherine’s apartment was at the north end of Main Street, just before the juncture with Route 6. Her neighborhood consisted of stately old Victorian homes that had been converted to apartments and offices. She passed a dentist, several lawyers, an environmental consulting company, a bed-and-breakfast, and a funeral home.
Farther down Main Street, she walked by a sporting-goods shop with snowshoes, skis, and parkas in the window. There was an old, faded painted sign on the side of the building, just above a window with bicycles hanging in it:JAMESON’S TACK AND FEED.
Next she came to the old junk shop. No doubt it was full of the kind of sepia-toned portraits of strangers long dead that Gary had loved. It was an obsession she’d never understood.
“Each photo is like a novel I can never open,” Gary had explained once. “I can hold it in my hand and only begin to imagine what’s inside—the lives these people might have led.”
Sometimes, if there was a little clue on the photo—a name, date, or place—he’d try to research it, and when they sat down for dinner at night, he’d tell her and Austin excitedly about Zachary Turner, a cooper in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, who was killed in the Civil War. Austin would listen intently, asking his father questions as if these were people Gary actually once knew:Did he have a dog, Papa? What color was his horse?Gary would make up answers, and by the time dinner was finished, they’d created a whole life for this long-dead stranger: a happy life full of horses and dogs and a wife and children he loved very much.
Feet thoroughly soaked now, Katherine paused to look in the junk-shop window: an antique gramophone, a Flexible Flyer sled, a silver trumpet. A fox stole was wrapped around the shoulders of a battered-looking mannequin. The fox had a sunken face, small, pointed teeth, and two scratched glass eyes that stared out at Katherine and seemed, at once, to know all of her secrets.
The bookstore couldn’t be more than half a mile away, but it seemed impossibly far. The cold bit at her face and at her hands in their thin gloves. Her eyes teared up, crusting her lashes with ice. She felt like an Antarctic explorer: Ernest Shackleton, trudging across a bleak frozen landscape.
She got to the bridge over the river and stopped to rest along the sidewalk, hands on the rail, staring down into the brown water, half frozen at the edges. Something moved along the right bank, just below the bridge, a sleek dark shape pulling itself along. A beaver or muskrat, maybe—she didn’t know the difference. It humped its way across the ice and dove into the water, then was gone.
Katherine turned from the half-frozen river and forced herself to move forward, shuffling across the bridge, continuing down Main Street, her hands and feet numb now, her whole body hollowed out. She thought of the little brown creature, how surely and smoothly it had entered the water, how it had barely made any ripples. It was perfectly adapted to its environment. She, too, would have to find a way to adapt. To move through this new landscape with smooth ease. It would start, she decided, with a trip to the sporting-goods store for proper boots, coat, hat, and gloves.
