Maybe This Time Read online

  “Alice, who is that woman over there?”

  “There’s nobody,” Alice said, and sat down with her book.

  Andie looked back at the woman, thick-waisted and clumsy as she moved closer to the edge of the trees. “Alice?”

  “I don’t see anybody.” Alice stared at her book, and for the next minute the pages didn’t turn while she stared down. Then she stole another look across the pond and closed her book. “Tell me the Princess Alice story again.”

  Andie looked back at the woman. Maybe just a neighbor. Alice wasn’t the neighborly sort, maybe she didn’t like people watching her. Andie didn’t like people watching her, either.

  “Princess Alice,” Alice said. “Tell me.”

  “Right.” Andie started the never-ending Princess Alice story again, beginning with how brave the princess was and how her brother was the best artist in the kingdom, and how the mean witch was defeated once again—

  “And Princess Alice got all the cookies she wanted,” Alice said, evidently still brooding on her lack of a fourth cookie.

  —and how the dancing princess danced through the halls with her curly hair flying—

  “And the Bad Uncle did not come because he was afraid of Princess Alice,” Alice said for the umpteenth time.

  “No, he didn’t come because he was busy working. The dancing princess has curly hair?”

  “She dances,” Alice said impatiently. “And Bad Uncle is so afraid—”

  “Bad Uncle isn’t afraid of anything. He just forgets people. Alice, who is the dancing princess?”

  “She dances. She has a glittery skirt like yours and she dances. And Princess Alice isn’t afraid of anything, either. Now tell me new stuff.”

  “Alice, did you know the dancing princess?”

  Alice looked at her warily. “It’s just a story, Andie.” She stole a glance across the pond.

  Andie looked, too. The woman was still there, watching. “Who is she, Alice?”

  “Princess Alice goes to the shopping center,” Alice said, “and she buys beautiful material and makes a beautiful cover for her bed, and then she goes to the bookstore and gets a book on butterflies because butterflies never die.” Alice stopped and looked back out over the pond quickly. “And then she comes home,” she said, jerking her face back to Andie. “To the Bad Witch. The Bad Witch is not so bad but she should let Princess Alice have many cookies.”

  “Are there neighbors back there?” Andie said, shading her eyes to see the woman better.

  “No,” Alice said. “And then what does Princess Alice do?”

  The woman stepped out of the trees onto the shore, clumsy in her long, heavy clothes. She was wearing a long three-tiered skirt, and her hair was pulled back tightly in a bun. She moved stiffly, no grace at all, and she looked oddly old-fashioned, almost sepia toned.

  Andie said, “There, do you see her now?”

  “No. I want my story!”

  “Okay,” Andie said, still watching across the pond. “After Princess Alice went shopping, she went to the Dairy Queen and she met a friend there.”

  “Okay,” Alice said, keeping her head turned away from the pond.

  There was something very wrong about that woman, wrong enough that Alice had forgotten her dead frog to pretend she wanted a story instead of yelling her head off at being thwarted. “Are you afraid of her, Alice?”

  “Who?”

  “The woman on the other side of the pond.”

  “I don’t see anybody.”

  “Alice,” Andie said, staring at her. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “I don’t see anybody. I want my STORY!”

  Alice stared back, wild-eyed and, Andie realized, afraid. “Okay,” she said soothingly. “The friend told Princess Alice about the school she went to, and Princess Alice said she wanted to go to that school, too, even though she’d have to leave the castle and go to Columbus—”

  “I’m tired of that story,” Alice said, and picked up her headphones again.

  Andie looked back at the woman who still stood there staring at them. Whoever she was, she was creepy. “Let’s go in.”

  Alice shoved her book into Andie’s hands without a word of protest, stood up, and headed for the house at a good clip even for her. Andie got up and shook the quilt out, and then picked up their things and turned to go and caught sight of somebody up on the tower of the house. She shaded her eyes again but the sun was behind him so all she could see was a tall man up there, his shoulders oddly boxlike, as if he were wearing an old-fashioned coat, standing very straight, both hands on the ledge as if he owned the place.

  It might be Bruce the contractor. If Bruce had started dressing funny and dyed his hair red and grown a beard and started showing up for work.

  “I want a snack now,” Alice said from twenty feet away, and Andie pointed up to the tower.

  “Who’s that?” she said, and Alice jerked her head up to the tower.

  “I don’t see anybody,” she said, and kept moving toward the door, yelling back, “We have to mulch the butterfly garden today!” and Andie watched the figure on the tower watching her, and then looked back to see the woman in the trees, also watching her.

  Okay, now I’m getting some answers, she thought, and followed Alice in to find Mrs. Crumb.

  When Alice was curled up in the library with her book on butterflies, her Jessica doll, a cup of milk, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and two cookies, Andie went back to the kitchen to find Mrs. Crumb sitting at the table in another of her faded flowered aprons, hunched over a cup of heavily pepperminted tea, holding a hand of cards and facing the card rack across the table.

  “There was a woman out by the pond,” Andie said to her.

  “Woman?” Mrs. Crumb said, suddenly cautious.

  “In a long, old-fashioned dress. Alice saw her. I think she knew her.”

  Crumb looked startled. “Alice told you that?”

  “No. She pretended not to see her, but Alice is not that good an actress.”

  “On the other side of the pond?”

  “Are there neighbors over there?”

  Mrs. Crumb shrugged and went back to studying her gin hand.

  Andie sat down across from her and shoved the card holder to one side, and Mrs. Crumb looked up, startled.

  “You know, I’m getting really tired of mysteries,” Andie said. “Is there some weird-ass neighbor wandering around?”

  “Language.” Mrs. Crumb looked more offended by the “weird-ass” than she was alarmed at the idea of a stranger wandering the grounds.

  “Who was that woman? Because Alice doesn’t want me to know so it’s no good asking her.”

  “You won’t believe me.”

  “Try me.”

  Crumb hesitated and then put down her cards and leaned closer. “It’s her. She watches Alice. She wants a child to look after. She won’t hurt Alice. She protects her.”

  “Tell me you’re talking about a fired nanny. I’ll get a restraining order—”

  “She was the governess in this house once,” Crumb said, warming to her tale. “A long time ago. A hundred years ago. More. In England. Miss J, Alice calls her. She was a lady, but a bad man dragged her down. Peter. She died. And now she walks.”

  Andie looked at the light in the old woman’s eyes and thought, She really believes that. Or maybe she just wanted Andie to believe so she’d run away screaming. Maybe she’d hired somebody to stand on the other side of the pond. The woman in the dream would be harder to fake, but—

  “It was that Peter’s fault.” Mrs. Crumb was positively animated now. “He was a hound, an evil man. There were lots of women. She was just the last. And the poor woman paid for it!”

  “Mrs. Crumb—”

  “Pregnant, you know.” Crumb shook her head sadly, playing to the balcony. “I’m not sure how she died. She doesn’t speak of it.”

  “She talks to you.”

  “No, but she’d sit with me. Before Alice came. Alice’s m