Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil Love and Hope Read online

  Smiling, shaking his head at her, Adam looked down to see Darci staring with intense concentration at the older couple in the booth where she and Adam had always sat.

  “There!” she said after a moment, and Adam looked up to see the couple leaving. But of course they’d probably finished their coffee, so maybe that had something to do with their leaving, he thought, chuckling at her. But he wasn’t going to say that and risk making her angry again.

  “Good job,” he said, smiling at the top of her head; then they waited until the busboy had cleared the booth so they could sit down.

  “So tell me everything about this mirror,” she said as soon as they were seated.

  “You two want the specials, or should I just bring everything on the menu?” Sally, the waitress, said in her usual smirking way.

  “We’ll take whatever you recommend,” Adam answered, then smiled at her in a way that made her stop smacking her gum for a moment.

  Sally leaned toward Darci and said conspiratorially, “You got your hands full with this one, honey. Maybe you oughta stare at him like you did that old couple. Make him behave better.” With that, she went away laughing.

  “That woman is just too nosy!” Adam said after she left. “Small town,” Darci said in dismissal. “So now tell me everything.”

  “If Putnam is so rich and you’re marrying him, why do you need to count every penny?”

  “I already know about Putnam,” Darci said impatiently. “I want to know about this mirror. How did you find out about it?”

  “Long story,” he said as he looked down at the cuff of his shirt sticking out from under his sweater. “Did I tell you that the sweater you have on is a good color for you? It matches your eyes.”

  She glared at him. “This sweater is purple, and unless you’re color-blind, you’re trying to change the subject.”

  Adam took a while before he spoke, and when he did, it was so softly that she could barely hear him. She leaned forward, as he did, until their heads were almost touching. “I told you that the mirror tells the past. It shows what has happened, and something happened in the past that I want to know about.”

  When Adam said no more, Darci leaned against the back of the booth and thought about what he’d said, and thought about what she knew about him. “Your parents,” she said softly. “That’s what this is about, isn’t it? You said they died, but how did they die?”

  “I don’t know,” Adam said so softly that again she could barely hear him. “Look, the truth is that this whole thing about the mirror is a legend. It could be a lie. Maybe the thing doesn’t really exist. Maybe—” He looked down again and seemed to consider whether or not he should tell her more. “It’s Nostradamus’s mirror,” he said in one breath.

  At that Darci’s mouth fell open. “This mirror is....”“Yes,” Adam said. “That one. He looked into it, saw the future, and wrote about it.”

  Darci’s eyes had a faraway look when she spoke. “But predicting the future was illegal in France in the sixteenth century, so he scrambled what he wrote so thoroughly that even today people don’t know what he predicted. During the Kennedy administration, half a dozen books came out saying that many of Nostradamus’s quatrains were about that family. But, of course, twenty years later, the writings were interpreted completely differently, no Kennedys at all. But then Dolores Cannon says— What?!” she snapped because Adam was staring at her as though she’d just sprouted a third head.

  “How in the world do you know so much about this mirror?!”

  Darci shrugged. “I’m interested in a great many things, and I read a lot. There’s not a lot to do in Putnam, and, believe it or not, the town does have a public library.”

  “Who owns it?” Adam asked quickly.

  “Putnam, of course. Senior, not junior, although Putnam does give his father lists of books that he thinks the library should buy.”

  “I see,” Adam said thoughtfully. “And who chooses the books that go onto those lists? Junior or senior?”

  “C’est moi,” Darci said happily, making Adam laugh.

  “I might have guessed,” he said. “So you get your fiancé to buy any books you want and put them in the library for you. Tell me, if he’s so rich, why aren’t you wearing an engagement ring?”

  “Don’t want one,” Darci said quickly and in a way that said she didn’t want to talk about that subject. “So you found the mirror,” she said, her voice full of wonder. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered what happened to it. In fact, I’ve wondered what happened to all the magic objects. Aladdin’s magic lamp probably had a basis in truth. And what about the magic carpet? And what happened to the mirror that used to tell the queen she was the fairest of them all?”

  “What are you talking about?” Adam asked.

  “You know, in ‘Snow White’? The queen?”

  “Snow White. Is that the one who fell down the rabbit hole? No, that was a white rabbit. Or was it? So what does this have to do with a mirror? Did—”

  He stopped because Sally set platters full of food in front of them. There were slices of turkey with cranberry dressing, pureed squash, roast potatoes, succotash, and a basket full of tiny muffins with pieces of zucchini sticking out of them. “That should hold her for a while,” Sally said to Adam. “But I’ll go get the pumpkin pie ready anyway.”

  “Odd sense of humor that woman has,” Adam said, frowning.

  “She reminds me of the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ when she was fattening up the children.”

  “For what?”Adam asked as he reached for a muffin. He thought he’d better get one now before Darci ate the lot of them.

  “‘For what?’”

  “What was the witch fattening the children up for?”

  Darci looked at him is disbelief. “To eat them, of course. Where did you grow up that you don’t know fairy tales? You don’t know ‘Snow White’ or ‘Hansel and Gretel’?”

  Adam opened his mouth to speak, then closed it and looked down at his food.

  “Instead of thinking up a lie, why don’t you just tell me the truth?” she suggested.

  “I will as soon as you tell me about you and money and Putnam,” he shot back at her.

  Darci started to speak, but, instead, she put a large bite of turkey and dressing in her mouth, then waved her hand that she couldn’t talk.

  “I thought so,” Adam said. “And as for your fairy tales, if they’re about witches fattening up children so they can be eaten, I’m glad I never heard them. They sound horrible.”

  “Quite bad, really. I once wrote a paper on the origin of fairy tales and found out that they’ve been toned down considerably since they were first told. Did you know that most of the Mother Goose rhymes started out as political jingles?”

  “No, tell me,” Adam said, as he handed her the basket of muffins. Two nights ago he had been the lecturer about foods and wines, but tonight it was her turn to tell him what she knew. At first Adam’s only intent in asking her to tell him about some ridiculous nursery rhymes was to keep her from asking more questions about the mirror and how he knew what he knew. But as he listened, Adam found that he was interested in what she was saying.

  All in all, he had to admit that his conversations with her beat what usually went on when he had dinner with a woman. Most of the time, he felt as though he’d been put under a spotlight and was being interrogated. “Where did you grow up?” “What schools did you attend?” they’d ask. “Oh? Are you any relation to those Montgomerys?” This last was said with what his cousin Michael called The Money Look.

  But today Darci had found out about his family and, except for being pleased that she’d found out something he hadn’t wanted her to know, he couldn’t see that her attitude toward him was any different. Smiling, he asked her to tell him more about the nursery rhymes. Meanwhile, in the back of his mind, he was formulating a Plan. Maybe they couldn’t find out anything in the library or on the Internet, but there was someone who knew a great deal