The Summerhouse Read online

  “I want to take your pictures. I keep a scrapbook of all my clients before and after. It helps me to remember.”

  “Could we see your scrapbook?” Ellie asked instantly.

  “You’re the writer, aren’t you, dear?” Madame Zoya said, smiling. “You can always tell writers. They’re always trying to turn every word into pages, which of course turns into money for them, doesn’t it?”

  The way she stated it made it sound as though Ellie’s whole life were about money. As Ellie gave a weak smile, she could feel her face redden.

  “I’ll be back in a jiff, and I’ll expect you three to have made up your minds by then.”

  The second Madame Zoya left the room, all three of them let out their pent-up breath.

  “What the hell have you got us into?” Madison exploded.

  “Ellie or me?” Leslie asked calmly.

  “What does it matter?” Madison asked. “This whole thing is absurd. I’m leaving right—”

  “If she’s a charlatan, I’m out three hundred bucks, but if she’s for real—not that I believe she is,” Ellie said, her voice low, her eyes on the doorway. “But if she can do what she says, you can find Thomas.”

  “Before you miscarried,” Leslie said so softly that they could barely hear her.

  At that Madison sat back on her chair and looked straight ahead at the greenery outside the window. There was a look of shock on her face.

  “What about you?” Leslie said to Ellie. “You want to go back to the day the three of us met? Before you met your ex-husband?”

  “No!” Ellie said firmly. “Who knows what would have happened to me? Maybe I would have met some nice, normal guy and had five kids by now. If I did that, I never would’ve had enough time alone to find out that I could write. No, for all that he was a jerk—or maybe because he was a jerk and I wanted to escape him—I wrote. I wouldn’t want to mess up that balance. No, I’d just like to change what was done to me in the divorce. He went into that fiasco prepared; I was caught off guard by the ruthless way he handled it. What about you?”

  Smiling, Leslie started to answer, but Madame Zoya returned to the room holding a cheap Polaroid camera. “Now smile, dearies,” she said, then snapped them one after another.

  She didn’t show them the photos that came out of the camera. In fact, she didn’t look at them herself but set the camera and the photos on the windowsill, then looked back at the windows. “Have you made up your minds?” she asked as though they were trying to decide about lunch.

  “Yes,” Leslie answered, while Ellie and Madison merely nodded.

  Madame Zoya looked at Madison. “You first, dear. I feel that you have lost the most.”

  “I thought you didn’t read palms,” Madison said before she thought. She’d already had one encounter with the woman’s sharp tongue and didn’t fancy another one.

  But Madame Zoya kept smiling. “I don’t. But I’ve lived long enough to see pain in a person’s eyes when it’s there. Now, where do you want to go?”

  “To the day the three of us met,” Madison said firmly. “The ninth of October, 1981.”

  Madame Zoya didn’t reply to that but looked at Ellie. “And you?”

  “To three years, seven months, and two weeks ago,” she said. “To three weeks before the court date for my divorce.” She would have liked to return earlier so she’d have more time to gather evidence, but she had to return to a time after she’d already filed for divorce.

  Madame Zoya looked at Leslie.

  “I don’t know the exact date,” Leslie said, “but it would have been April of 1980, the year before I graduated from college.” She lowered her voice. “Spring break,” she said softly. It was embarrassing that the others should hear this, as she thought it was a foolish wish to want to meet a boy she hadn’t seen in twenty years. But how could she explain the ties that love put on her? No matter how she tried to explain, she knew that, by comparison, her problems wouldn’t sound as serious as theirs. How did one faithless husband hold up against what Madison and Ellie had been through? If—she refused to think “when”—she and Alan divorced, she was sure that Alan would be fair and honest and . . . “A cheat,” she heard her mother’s voice say.

  “Are you sure, dear?” Madame Zoya asked Leslie. “Absolutely sure?”

  “Yes!” Leslie said firmly. “Yes, I am. Very sure.”

  “All right then, girls, lean your heads back and close your eyes and think about the time where you want to go.”

  Obediently, with mixed feelings about the absurdity of what they were doing, the women leaned their heads back against the chairs and closed their eyes.

  Instantly, the three of them felt as though they were floating. It was a lovely sensation, and they each smiled as they experienced it. After a moment, the floating stopped and they seemed to be moving toward something, as though they were being rushed through a tunnel.

  Just before she reached the end of the tunnel, Madison remembered that they had been on the road when she was talking about the show she’d seen on TV, not standing on the porch. So how had Madame Zoya heard what she’d said? She didn’t come up with an answer before she opened her eyes and saw that she was sitting on a bench in the DMV in New York. And Ellie, a very young, very thin, Ellie, was walking toward her.

  Eighteen

  MAY 1997

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  Ellie put down her pen and glanced at the door again. The sign on the private detective’s door said, “Be back in ten minutes,” but she’d been waiting for thirty-two minutes and he still hadn’t returned. She looked down at her notebook again. She was making notes on a story about three women who go back in time and change their lives. The book would be a departure from her usual stories about the life and adventures of Jordan Neale, but if it was good, the readers would like it.

  She looked down at her watch again, then her glance traveled up her arm, and from there she looked down at her legs showing beneath her short denim skirt. Putting her notebook down on the seat beside her, she put her hands around her waist. She’d measured it every one of the three days since she’d returned, and each time she felt a thrill when she saw that her waist was once again a teeny, tiny twenty-four inches. And every morning, she’d weighed herself. The first time she’d stepped on the scales and seen the needle stop at one hundred and one pounds, she’d burst into tears.

  Three days ago had been the day before her fortieth birthday, but three days ago she’d been sent back to her old life, back into her former, slimmer body. But, more important, she’d been sent back to her own mind. For the first time in years, Ellie once again had stories running through her head. She had energy. She had a feeling that good things were going to happen to her, that they could happen to her. This happy feeling was odd because she knew of the horror that was going to happen very soon in the coming divorce, but since it hadn’t actually happened yet, she didn’t have the depression that she knew would come after the divorce.

  “How much time is wasted in depression,” she whispered aloud.

  She was sitting on a wooden bench outside the office of Joe Montoya, the private eye she’d hired to investigate her soon-to-be ex-husband. She’d gone to the detective the first day she’d returned, and she’d had a lot to tell him. Most of the things she told him were what she’d found out after the divorce, but now, this time around, she knew what her ex was up to.

  On her first visit to the detective, she’d sat on the other side of his desk, opened her notebook and started on her list of things that she knew were going to be important in the divorce. “He’s going to say that he coauthored my books, so I need for you to document his daily activities to show that he was too busy socializing at my expense to have time to help me write. And you said you know a forensic accountant? I need help in finding out what my husband has done with all my money over the years,” she told the private eye.

  He was writing quickly, only now and then looking up at Ellie in speculation. She knew what he wa