The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)

The Family of Heather Dow

Previously: "The Metamorphosis of Heather Dow" 

"Don's friend seems nice," you tell Susanna. "Cameron? Was that his name?"

It's Sunday morning, the day after your flight back. Garson is making his usual, early-morning trip to the bookstore to get a weekend Wall Street Journal, and Susanna has come over for coffee, and to nosh.

She looks a lot like you when you were her age: slender and blonde, with long hair draping past her shoulders. She has begun to put weight on her hips, and the lines have started to show at the corners of her eyes, but with a little light make up she could still pass for under thirty.

Well, under thirty-five, and that's not bad for a woman whose son is a college freshman.

"Yeah," she says. "I think they were doing something with Don, and tagged along when I asked him to come with me." Her smile is warm but a little tight. "I think they all originally had plans to do something together on a Saturday night."

You cast her a knowing glance. Don isn't married, hasn't got a steady girlfriend, and is very good-looking, if a grandmother is allowed to notice.

Susanna changes the subject, returning it to the matter of your vacation, and you answer her even as your mind races off along other rails ...

* * * * *

"What's wrong with Anne?" Garson asked. It was after your second fuck, which he wanted in preference to talking about the new body you were going to get. I'm gonna call my folks, tell them I'm gonna be home late, he'd said as he devoured your breasts and throat with ardent, unrestrained kisses. God, I could do it all night with you! You know, we haven't since—! And now I can—! Jesus! he'd exclaimed as he rolled on top of you and slid his hot, iron-hard cock against your inner thigh.

But you'd insisted it had to be done. I don't want to be away from you one minute more than I have to be, so tell them we have to do it tomorrow! you'd said. So now you were cuddling up against his hairy chest, inside his hairy arm, his hairy cheek scratching yours as he rubbed his hairy, muscular calf against yours, looking through his phone at the various girls you could choose from.

Of course he would propose this girl Anne Starkey first. She was Cameron's girlfriend, so you'd be instantly together. But you reminded him that his friends at the school could get anyone, anytime they wanted, the way they got Cameron: by summoning them to the nurse's office where Emily Shaffer, who was in on it all, would hit them with a mask in the outer office while you waited in the inner office.

As for what's wrong with Anne—

"There's nothing wrong with her," you said.

"Is it because she's a red-head?"

"No!" You slapped at his chest.

"Then why—?"

"Rachel Burton," you finally declared after you'd been through a dozen photos of various girls, from cheerleaders to AP-track-country-club girls (many of whom you vaguely knew from the country club, to which you and Garson both belong). It seemed less and less likely he would bring Rachel name and photo up himself, so you finally just declared your interest.

He actually jerked a little in surprise when you barked out the name.

"Is something wrong with Rachel Burton?" you demanded. "You don't like her? Cameron doesn't like her?"

"No, she's fine—"

"She's not sexy?"

Garson wriggled down into the bed, pulled you close, and mauled the side of your head with his mouth.

"You are sexy!" he growled. "You'd be sexy as anyone. When I fuck you in your new body, I'm going to be fantasizing about—"

You shut him up with a squeal and again said, "Rachel Burton."

He relented with a sigh. "Okay, why Rachel? How do you even know about Rachel?"

"You've met her! At some of Doris's things."

"Doris?"

"Doris Grissom. At her historical shindigs."

Garson blinked hard. "What was Rachel doing at—?"

"Don't you remember?"

"No I don't. What was she doing there?"

"Volunteer work. Or— I don't know. Doris seems to dote on her."

Garson reared back. "Then why do you want to—? Her?"

Suddenly, you were tired of him, and despite his whining you got out of bed and got dressed and kicked him out of the house, telling him you'd him call later that night.

You thought about it all after he'd gone—you remember most everything that Heather Dow thought about, or would remember thinking about, before she woke up again in the nurse's office at Westside; it's only after the change that you don't remember any of her thoughts—and you thought of all the reasons you should pick Anne or some other girl over Rachel. But you still settled firmly on Rachel.

It has to do with Doris Grissom and your own family. Only by somehow getting close to Doris—and maybe by getting one of Garson's colleagues to help, with a magical contraption or other—could you discover the truth about what happened to your grandmother—and in that way at least give your own late mother some peace of mind.

* * * * *

When she was not yet thirty, your grandmother Patricia lost her husband in World War II. Nearly destitute, with a four-year-old daughter to support, she had been taken in by her parents and her sister-in-law, Sarah Coarsewood Stuart. Not long after, Sarah's daughter, Doris (your mother's cousin; your first cousin, once removed) was born.

There was always some mystery about her birth, some hint of something not right. It had been a difficult pregnancy, one that had hardly started when Sarah was suddenly whisked away to a sanitarium to. She was confined there for a year after Doris's birth, with her daughter, and that daughter was small and sickly when they finally came home.

Relations between Sarah and Patricia had never been good—Sarah and her husband disapproved of Patricia's marriage—and relations worsened. Indeed, they got so bad that only three years later Patricia herself disappeared, abandoning her own child, leaving only a note behind. Madeline—your mother; at the time, Patricia's six-year-old daughter—never saw her mother again.

Madeline found her aunt Sarah and cousin Doris intolerable: cold and hateful even when not actually abusive, and in 1955 she herself, though only sixteen, ran away from Saratoga Falls to marry your father, who himself was fleeing a bad home life. They fetched up in Memphis eventually, and made a stable, happy life there. But ten years later they returned to Saratoga Falls to take care of Peter's mother. Madeline tentatively reached out to her own family, and was shocked at what she found: her aunt Sarah, her mental poise broken now in some way, had been institutionalized at Hochstetter Hospital. And Doris, as cold and viciously unfriendly as ever, had moved in to care for her and Madeline's grandparents. Madeline visited them once, and came away with the impression that they were not so much being cared for by Doris as being imprisoned.

By 1972, when her grandmother died, an unbridgeable chasm had opened between Madeline and Doris, who inherited the entirety of their grandparents' considerable estate. And so embittered did Madeline become that, in her cups, she would confide to Heather that she suspected Doris of poisoning her own husband, Michael Grissom, when he died suddenly in 1980.

But whatever family tragedies had scarred Madeline, she did not pass those scars on to Heather, who grew up happy and loved in a family whose fortunes steadily increased. By the time Heather was in high school, her father had struck up a lucrative partnership with Philip Carlson, Sr., the most successful commercial real estate developer in town. Heather married Garson, and she and he worked at Eastman High, she as a librarian, he as a teacher, until her mother's death, when the family trust devolved onto her. It held so much money, and so much guaranteed income, that she and Garson retired; she stayed retired, but Garson, restlessly at his wits' end, took a job as associate principal at Westside—a dead-end job, but something that would keep him busy.

And Doris? She is one of the grand dames of Saratoga Falls, the chairwoman of the local Historical Society, and the decider of who is and is not a proper descendant of the city's "Four Families": the founders of Saratoga Falls. Heather, as the daughter of the daughter of a grandson of a founder, apparently does not count. (Doris herself is the daughter of a grandson.) But Heather sticks it in Doris's eye anyway by doing volunteer work with the Historical Society. Doris gets her revenge by never speaking to Heather unless she has too, and by being brutally cold when she does.

As for Rachel Burton, and why she should be the apple of Doris's eye?

It was Rachel's mother, while researching her own family tree, who dropped what might have been a vital clue into Heather's lap: Did you know, she casually mentioned while discussing her husband, that Sanford can trace his own roots back to three of the Four Families? She'd made a face, and added, No wonder Doris dotes on him but treats me like dirt on her shoe. I'm nobody, and she wanted Sanford to marry a "cousin"!

And Rachel has the same lineage as her father. Through her, you could get close to Doris.

* * * * *

It's the middle of the afternoon, and Garson has fallen asleep in his chair while watching the History Channel. You are working on a Sudoko puzzle, and wondering when you'll work up the nerve to confront Mr. Gelding and his friends—or if you'll just funk it and hide from them, like nothing went wrong with their magic—when there's a rap at the door. Garson starts from his sleep, but you hush him as you quickly make your way to the front door.

The smile falls off your face when you see who it is.

He has seen your reaction, too, and you see the wry amusement in his eyes.

"Yeah, hey there, Prescott," James Lamont drawls. "We need to talk."

That's all for now.

*
"Table of Contents (Vol. 5)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 5)"