Rose for Rose: Book Two in the Angels' Mirror Series (4 page)

Two

Wood Village, Oregon… August 11, 2013

Eugenie put the last of the salt and pepper shakers in their places, finished sweeping the floor, and double checked that the burners were off.

There was a storm coming in, and she didn’t want to be stuck at the restaurant if she didn’t have to be.

She’d have to let the birds fly quickly, instead of taking their time. She looked over at the row of cages; six holding individual parrots, and the middle one… the seventh, sitting on a shelf above the jukebox… had a pair of beautiful but cranky Madagascar Lovebirds. Below the individuals’ cages were bookshelves draped in ‘50s red handkerchief-style fabric.

Just the thought of being here alone with the birds in a storm made her belly do backflips. Maybe she should have taken a break to eat something, after all.

“Good night,” Noah called as he made his way toward the door. His dark eyes smiled in delight. “Looks like a storm brewing.”

How could the man always be so chipper? Then again, he only had about nine acres to go to reach his house… she had to get back to North Portland.

“Mhm,” Eugenie replied, distractedly hurrying.

She could hear the chickens making a ruckus through the wall that divided the little café from the small coop, and Cary was howling something fierce. Thankfully, Rhoda and the puppies were taking a rest from very much more than yipping.

She tried to avoid the mirror Edward and Paloma had gifted to her boss, having had nobody else who wanted it.

While it was exquisite, it didn’t fit in just anywhere. The fiery looking wooden outer panels and gilded cherub atop it made it look ghostly in the low lighting of the café after hours.

Who even knows how old the thing is,
she thought to herself.

She usually didn’t mind it, but when the storms came, she knew to steer clear whenever possible. Thankfully, it didn’t face the main part of the business; it faced the restrooms.

It hadn’t been until the mirror came into Noah’s possession that she’d learned the story behind it, and how Edward had arrived in 2010 to save Paloma from a would-be thief, traveling from the 1690s during a thunderstorm on his end, even though it was snowy here that long ago night.

She shivered at the thought.

“Clemy loves Leo, rrrawk” she heard Clementine, one of the Blue-Fronted Amazons, say from her cage.

She and Leopold were on the furthest sides from each other because of how talkative they were. The other two pair of parrots, one set of Macaws – a second generation Catalina female and a Hyacinth male, the other, Green Cheek Conures that were both on the turquoise side.

Her boss, Noah, and his wife, Carolinia, decided to place them Lovebirds centered, Conures next, Macaws, and then Amazons, separated with males to the left, females to the right. They were hoping that the birds would make for an interesting new twist on the ‘50s café.

As the birds began to get more chatty, and the dogs howled together, Eugenie thought back again to when she first heard Edward’s story.

She hadn’t believed what she was being told, and then, when Jason and Mark’s friend, Justice, had told her he indeed had needed to hack into the system to create a “backstory and identity” for Edward, complete with a new birth year, she had begun to believe.

Justice was the most down to earth man she’d ever met. Sometimes, she wished she’d met him before Mark. All things considered, though, she was glad to have met the man.

Driven by a passion to help people in his own bizarre way, Justice had listened intently to his friends’ plea for help with their then-roommate’s faring and had even believed Edward’s story within minutes, after seeing the attire and sword that had come through time with him.

Eugenie often wondered if it had anything to do with his friend Rosemary’s disappearance; or her death…. Whichever story one believed. It had apparently taken everything out of him for many months, and then, just as he was about to bounce back, all of a sudden, he…

A flash of lightning streaked across the sky, causing Eugenie to jump, losing track of her thoughts. She pushed the button for the tandem to close over the boothing area and walked over to the bird cages.

Maybe if she let them out a pair at a time for a few minutes, then it wouldn’t get as hectic as when all eight birds were out.

Thankfully, it was rarely her job to fly any of them.

“I really don’t want to deal with these birds right now, God,” she said, opening Leopold’s silvery cage with care, then walking over to Clementine’s. Once they’d flown, she could let loose Mancato and Sunset, Floy and Flo the Green-Cheek Conures, and finally Malagasy and Mia, the lovebirds.

Oh, how she hated being the one to fly the lovebirds!

Why the Torrances insisted on the least sociable and captivity-known lovebirds, she’d never know. Did being discriminating animal lovers mean getting the ones that weren’t as popular simply to do it?

Thunder drummed around her and the rain poured more heavily as she dialed Mark. Keeping her eyes on Leo and Clem, she waited for him to answer.

“Hey; when you comin’ home?”

Eugenie stifled a sigh.

Mark had been around Morton again; she could tell. He only used slang after visits with him for a few hours, but it annoyed her, all the same.

“We’ve got a thunder storm, Mark. I have to stay. I’m flying the birds, and…I know the storm is here and not somewhere else, but… it still frightens me. What if someone, or something, comes through the mirror again? The reflection isn’t black, but it isn’t me, either. I’m not sure what I’m seeing. Can they see me, too?”

“Of course they can’t see you, Dear! Remember, Paloma didn’t see Edward, only he had seen her, because the storm was on his end!”

Mark didn’t sound as reassured as his words suggested, and Eugenie panicked a little bit more.

“What if I trip and fall through the mirror? What then? What will happen to me, and to our baby?”

She turned the cell onto speaker and set it down on the green Formica countertop.

A sigh of exasperation met her ears.

“Stay clear of the mirror and you can’t fall through it. Is anyone else still there? I know they have no idea the reason behind the mirror’s odd behavior,” Mark finally said. “Besides, how many times do you really need to… be over in that area? I know you have to… well… but can’t you just…”

“It’s just me. Noah left three minutes before the storm really got going,” she replied. “And no, Mark, I can’t just hold it until I get home! I know what you’re thinking. Anyway, I better go. I want to put Leo and Clem away and fly the Macaws. Besides…. I don’t want lightning to hit the tower and electrocute us.”

As it was, her stomach was in knots just being on the phone when lightning was around.

What if they got zapped?

Before her husband could reply, she hung up and set the phone away from her. She realized she was quite hungry all of a sudden, and was glad she still had some of the lunch she’d ordered earlier in the day so she didn’t have to add to the till and prepare something for herself.

“Come on, Clem, Leo… time to go back in your cages,” she called over the storm.

The chickens had quieted down, since the sun set, but the dogs were still upset, howling like mad.

“Beat it, Buster,” she heard Leopold screech.

With a chuckle, she opened his cage and urged him inside. Not for the first time, Clementine tried to follow.

“Now, now… you have a cage of your own.” Eugenie walked to the far cage; opened it. After a few more minutes, she felt the wind underneath Clem’s wings as she landed on top of her cage. “In you go,” she urged.

“What time is it, anyway,” Clementine asked as she gathered her wings up again, and went inside. “Huh, Grandma?”

Exhausted, Eugenie went into the kitchen, washed her hands, and grabbed her lunch out of the refrigerator. Cary, Rhoda, and their puppies had continued to bark and yowl, and she heard them more loudly through the back wall of the café’s kitchen.

After eating, she let Mancato the Hyacinth and his partner, Sunset the Catalina, out of their cages as the storm roiled on.

With a weak sigh, she turned all the excess lights off and retained only the one in the main area of the restaurant.
If something happens with that mirror
, she thought,
I want to at least see it.

Then, she sat on a stool, put her elbow on the counter, and watched the hallway leading to the chicken coop and barn.

Mancato swooped close in, and she shooed him away.

Silly bird.

Three

Gloucester, Massachusetts… August 11, 1930

Rose stood frozen to the spot as she watched lightening fall over Gloucester Harbor, the boats rocking in no rhythm at all as the storm quickly continued to develop.

She shuddered. Father was on one of those boats, and they looked like dice being rolled by the wind.

Absentmindedly fingering the St. Peter’s medal on her necklace, she backed herself into the corner of the room, away from the windows, as Mother always taught her, God rest her soul. Now that it was only she, her siblings and their father, she did what she could about the house to help out. Quickly performing the sign of the cross as she thought of her poor mother, Rose felt tears pricking at her eyes, threatening to fall.

“Rosie,” her little brother, Steven called from the living room. “I’m scared!”

There was a round of “Me, too”s from Warren, Michael, and Peter. With effort, she turned around to go see what she could to do help alleviate their fears.

Maybe
, she thought,
it will help me with mine, too.

A sigh escaped her lips as she waited a moment more for her nerves to calm, then decided
maybe
they could be distracted by the gramophone. It worked for her, and its effectiveness with them had been hit and miss through the storms over the years.

“Want to listen to some music,” she asked, walking toward it, passing the mirror on the way.

She shivered.

Settling in to music was their usual routine, but somehow, this moment felt different. This felt life-changing, and she hoped to God it was for the better; prayed to the Virgin Mother that all would be well.

It was difficult to ignore the eerie feeling that came over her as thunder announced itself again. With a quick hand and thoughtful heart, she looked through their sparse musical collection.

Cole Porter,
she thought
. No… maybe Cow Cow Davenport? Hmmm…no. Bing Crosby? Helen Kane? Cliff Edwards? No…Gertrude Lawrence… there we go. Someone to Watch over Me. That should help settle them. Or at least…

She caught a glimpse of the mirror again, out of the side of her eye.
What is it about that mirror that creeps me out so?

It had always bothered her.

It had been her mother’s, and before that, her grandfather’s. But who knew where it had been before that? It was certainly old when he’d bought it.

After they’d traveled through the Champagne-Ardennes from Bazeilles, down the Chiers tributary of the Meuse River and over to Nantes, France, where they were able to board a ship for Boston, Massachusetts, Nanama and Gram-Papa Wishart were reunited with their “précieux, unique et extraordinairement superbe miroir,” as Gram-Papa called it. He had polished it twice a week, rain or shine, so long as there was no storm.

Nanama had whispered to her once that they’d even crossed into Belgium under cover of night to kiss the Rock Bayard of Dinant, then say a prayer for their safe travels, before traveling to Nantes for their ship. They had met there the summer she turned eleven, and it had held a special place in their hearts ever since.

Of course, Gram-Papa would never admit the crossing and kiss, which had always made everyone hearing the story laugh.

The story was that Gram-Papa – whose given name was Angus – had found it in an antique shop in the Pyrenees Mountains when he’d been passing through from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland after the Franco-Prussian War when the Bavarian army released him from duty. They’d lived not too far from Bazeilles before the war, he’d said, in some obscure little commune called
Escombres-et-le-Chesnois
, but due to the battles in the area, many had scattered.

It took until three weeks after arriving back in the area – mirror preciously wrapped in woolens - before he’d been able to locate Nanama Evelyn and they’d decided it was safer to move the mirror out of the country than to keep it on their persons, should the warring continue.

He used to tell them stories about his travels, and especially about the precious mirror he’d carefully shipped overseas to his youngest son, Peter, since he was the first to immigrate to America. Three years later, Gram-Papa and Nanama Evelyn, Mother and Father had set sail after them to join in this new world across the ocean.

Just thinking of their stories made Rose want to weep, and she sniffed her tears away as she tried to figure out what to do.

She could play the record, but what then? Keep the songs coming? Or suggest some sort of game?

She glanced at the mirror again as she slid the record from its casing and checked it for scratches. A tremble went through her as the storm outside grew to an almost deafening volume.

I don’t care if that mirror really is an antique; and I don’t care that it was Gram-Papa’s even. I just know…. Ew, it’s just…creepy! Just plain… spooky! How could he and Uncle Peter keep it, and then give it to Mother? And why would she even want it? I just… I don’t understand…
she thought, her heart thumping loudly within her.
Why didn’t they give it to Aunt Una and Uncle Lochlann? They’re strange enough, they might have really enjoyed having it around.

She looked at the mirror again: it looked like fire, with angels heralding the news above in gold… yet in a storm, you could never see your reflection; only something otherworldly she didn’t understand… something strange that gave rise to butterflies in her tummy and sent her heart thrumming wildly.

“Who wants to listen to
Someone to Watch over Me
,” she asked cheerfully, putting the record on before there was a reply.

Warren smiled, Michael and Steven groaned, and Peter began to grumble, “Gertrude Lawrence, again?”

“Well, it’s not like you’ll hear the whole thing, anyway, if this storm keeps up,” she replied, trying to sound cheerful. She smiled at the boys, who sat together in a huddle on the couch.

They managed to grumble their way through that first song before moving on to one of the Bing Crosby songs the boys so loved. As it began to play, she backed away, not realizing how close she was to the mirror again. She glanced back to make sure she didn’t bump it, moving a few inches further away.

Unless she was dusting it, she tried not to even touch it. Her mother had been the same way.

And during storms, Mother, Nanama Evelyn, and even Uncle Peter and Aunt Angela had covered the main of it with a long black cloth. But when Mother had died, Father decided to bury that cloth with her.

Tears sprung to Rose’s eyes as she tried to push the thoughts away. Poor Mother, and poor little Sarah Jene!

“We want to wrestle,” Steven, ever the first to speak, told her with pleading eyes. “This isn’t helping much. We can still hear the storm.”

The rest of the boys nodded, Peter giving her a shy little smile, despite his obvious fright.

At fifteen and not always able to keep a good handle on her younger siblings, at times like these, Rose just gave in.

It was the third set of storms since Mother had died, and she missed her very much.

“Fine, but be careful not to knock into me,” she said, trying not to chide them before they were due it.

She kept changing the records and stepping out of the way, thinking all the time about Father: the one man who ever called her plainly, Rose.

Almost everyone else called her Rosie – her brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles, and even Gram-Papa and Nanama Wishart had – it just seemed the name everyone liked best. But then, there were a few who called her Rose Angela, like her mother, God rest her soul, had. She much preferred Rose on its own, as she was close to her father from the time she had been born here, in this very house. Maybe it was because it was Father who had kept her alive when her mother had gotten ill for the first three days after her birth. It was Father who refused to make her share a room with the boys, and Father who had insisted she learn to read early in life.

For a long time, he had been her everything, save God….

At times, when she was younger, she would pray that her father would really, truly come to know God because she had idolized him so much. But that was before he began to drink in front of her and her brothers. It was before Mother and the baby had died and the drinking and anger got worse. But even with all of that, her father had been as close as she’d had to a rock.

Oh, Father, please be safe. Dear God, please watch over my Father and help him ride out the storm alright.
The St. St. Peter’s medal felt heavy around her neck, and all of a sudden, she was hot. She thought of her father’s big burly shoulders, and his head full of dark hair, the fullness of his laughter, and weathered face.

Father had grown old before his time since his wife had passed away in childbirth, losing Rose’s only sister, to boot.

With a shattered sigh, she took another step back as Michael’s foot flung into the air toward her.

“Watch out,” she said, even as she felt herself falling backward.

The last thing she heard as she fell into the mirror was a bleak apology, and a gasp.

Then, bright lights, and then… for a long, limitless moment… there was nothing before she heard music again. But this time, it was very different…. It was strangely mesmerizing and very much something she’d never heard before.

Rose fell hard in this unfamiliar place; she could hear what sounded like birds mixing with the music, and hoped they weren’t nearby.

After a few moments, she heard another voice asking who she was. But what she wanted to know was where she was. Absolutely nothing looked or sounded familiar, and the smell in the air was even different than what she was used to.

Besides all that, what happened to her brothers? Where was her house?

Oh, why didn’t she stand on the other side of the room? Then she wouldn’t have fallen through the mirror, anyway. That crazy, weird, and beautiful mirror; spooky mirror.
And how could it be here and at my house at the same time
, she wondered as she glanced carefully around.

“Hello, Darling,” she heard someone else say.

The voice didn’t sound quite human, so what was it?

Tentatively standing, she stepped out into the light to answer the voice she’d heard. Before she spoke, she noticed a blonde woman standing not too far from her, close to what appeared to be a window.

“It’s me,” she said. “But where am I… and who are you?”