A Question Of Time, Fred Saberhagen [best fiction books to read .TXT] 📗

      “Oh, I can show you easily enough. When I was a little girl, I came down this way more times than I can remember—than I could remember. But now I’m here again, it’s all coming back.”

* * *

      Now the two were alone, cut off on all sides by the falling snow that had driven other visitors to cover. Cathy as she descended the trail pondered yet again the questions of her own origins: Who had her real mother been? Somehow she was almost entirely certain that her real mother, whatever her identity, had been dead for a long time. And who, really, was the man that she remembered as the father of her childhood?

      Gradually, in the course of growing up as Brainard’s adopted daughter, Cathy had come to realize that her adoption had made her a relative of old Edgar Tyrrell, an important but vastly eccentric artist who in the dim past of the thirties had built the Tyrrell House, among his other achievements. But until very recently Tyrrell and his ancient affairs had never loomed large in Cathy Brainard’s thoughts. She had never had any cause to connect the half-famous artist, whose name appeared on statues, in books, and in museums, with the vague memory she nursed of her ‘real’ father. The dates were just hopelessly wrong, to begin with.

      Nor, until Cathy arrived by chance at the Canyon this year, at the age of seventeen, had she ever had any reason, or any desire, to visit the house on the South Rim.

      Cathy was vaguely aware that her adoptive father sometimes visited the Canyon on business trips—though Brainard seldom discussed business in front of her. But people at home almost never talked about the Tyrrell House in her presence, and she had had no idea that she had ever been there before.

      Until she saw the place. Then, at first glance, she was certain that it had once been her home.

* * *

      Cathy, absorbed in thought, almost passed up the turning when they reached it, almost missed the proper place to work the trick. But she did recognize the place in time, despite the snow. The two young women turned off Bright Angel, following what looked a deer trail, leading nowhere. But Cathy made the turnoff without hesitation.

* * *

      In Cathy’s awareness there had been floating the memory of certain old photographs of Edgar Tyrrell, pictures she had come across from time to time, in magazines or books. She was certain of having seen at least one such photo, framed, in the Rim House, and it seemed to her there had been another in one of the Canyon guidebooks she and her girl friends had seen in the early stage of her Thanksgiving visit, in their room at one of the lodges.

      And at Aunt Sarah’s home on Long Island, Cathy knew, the old lady still kept one or two such photos, black and white, taken with a boxy old thirties camera. On rainy childhood afternoons young Cathy, browsing through a past in which she had never thought to find herself a native, had come across those pictures more than once. Somehow those pictures had become confused—or so she had long thought—with her real memories, of a real man she once had called her father.

* * *

      The snow inside the Canyon stopped falling, and the air warmed. The sky remained cloudy, but the quality of light changed, suggesting dusk in the Deep Canyon, but no longer suggesting winter. Visibility increased.

      “Yes, this is the place,” said Cathy quietly. They were in some kind of a side canyon now, vastly smaller than the big one. A creek, narrow enough to step across, came gurgling down the middle. The narrow trail, or path, generally following the creek, took the young women in single file around some dwarfish cottonwoods. They had  arrived in sight of the cottage, which stood only fifty yards or so ahead. Its windows were lightless, and the whole place looked uninhabited and uninviting.

      Cathy stopped in her tracks, gazing at the little structure. Maria halted uncertainly beside her.

      “I lived in that house once,” Cathy said. “Not for very long, I think. But I did live there.”

      She glanced at Maria, who, silent and dreamy-eyed, was obviously thinking her own thoughts, not paying much attention to her companion or to the cottage.

      A strange way for a detective to act, Cathy thought. But Cathy was concentrating on her own thoughts too. She added aloud: “I bet my father still lives here, maybe not in the house but somewhere nearby. I have that feeling.”

      That caught Maria’s interest at least faintly. “Your father? Gerald Brainard?”

      “Not him.” Now Cathy sounded contemptuous. “My real father. The one I remember from when I was a little girl.”

* * *

      Slowly the two young women approached the silent cottage. A faint steady roar in the background, half-smothered by the noise of the stream, suggested some kind of machinery at work.

      “How long since you’ve seen him?” Maria asked. She appeared to be trying to pull herself out of her apathy, struggling against the half-awake feeling and behavior that had claimed her all the way down.

      “It must be about twelve years,” said Cathy. She frowned, having made an unsatisfactory mental calculation. “And my great-aunt Sarah might have lived here too—but that would have been more like fifty years ago. No, maybe even sixty.”

      Lately Cathy had found it almost impossible to make anything satisfactory regarding time. Two days of her Thanksgiving trip had turned somehow into a month; at least, everyone else agreed that she had been gone a month, though on her personal time scale the camping trip could have lasted no more than a couple of days.

      Nearing the cottage, Cathy and Maria were briefly accosted by a large calico cat, looking no more than half domesticated. The creature sat in the narrow path before them, mewing as if demanding something; then it darted away into the sparse shrubbery