The Mask

“You probably won’t believe what I’ve got to tell you, and that would be understandable.”
    “After what’s happened to me today,” Paul said, “I’m ready to believe anything.”
    And maybe that’s what the poltergeist meant to do, he thought. Maybe it meant to prepare me for whatever story Grace has to tell. In fact, if I hadn’t been delayed by the poltergeist, I would have left the house before Grace arrived.
    “I’ll keep it as simple and straightforward as I can,” Grace said. “But it’s not a simple and straightforward matter.” She cradled her torn left hand in her right hand; the bleeding had stopped, and the cuts were all crusty, clotted. “It starts in 1865, in Shippensburg. The family was named Havenswood.”
    Paul glanced her, startled by the name.
    She looked straight ahead, at the rain-sodden land through which they were rushing. “The mother was Willa Havenswood, and the daughter’s name was Laura. Those two didn’t get along well. Not well at all. The fault was on both sides, and the reasons for their constant bickering aren’t really important here. What’s important is that one day in the spring of 1865, Willa sent Laura into the cellar to do some spring cleaning, even though she knew perfectly well that the girl was deathly afraid of the cellar. It was punishment, you see. And while Laura was down there in the cellar, a fire broke out upstairs. She was trapped and burned to death. She must have died blaming her mother for putting her in that trap in the first place. Maybe she even blamed Willa for starting the fire—which she didn’t. It was accidentally started by Rachael Adams, Laura’s aunt. It’s even possible that Laura wondered if her mother had started the fire on purpose, just to get rid of her. The child had emotional problems; she was capable of melodramatic notions of that sort. The mother had emotional problems, too; she was capable of inspiring paranoia, for sure. Anyway, Laura died a gruesome death, and we can be pretty certain that her last thought was an ardent wish for revenge. There was no way she could have known that her mother perished in that fire, too!”
    So that’s why the Havenswood identity didn’t check out when Carol put the police on to it, Paul thought. They’d have had to go all the way back to the 1800s in order to find the Havenswood family.
    County records for that period probably don’t even exist any more.
    A slow-moving truck appeared out of the mists ahead, and Paul passed it. For a moment the filthy spray from the truck’s big tires drummed on the side of the Pontiac, and the noise was too loud for Grace to speak above it.
    When they had passed the truck, she said, “Since 1865, Laura has been pursuing revenge through at least two and probably three other lives. Reincarnation, Paul. Can you believe in that? Can you believe that in 1943, Laura Havenswood was a fifteen-year-old girl named Linda Bektermann and that the night before her sixteenth birthday she tried to kill her mother, who was Willa Havenswood reincarnated? It’s a true case. Linda Bektermann went berserk and tried to ax her mother to death, but her mother turned the tables and killed the girl instead. Laura didn’t get her revenge. And can you believe that Willa is now alive again and that she’s our Carol this time? And that Laura is alive again, too?”
    “Jane?”
    “Yes.”
     
    Together, Carol and Jane cleaned the cabin in an hour and fifteen minutes. Carol was delighted to see that the girl was an industrious worker who took great pleasure in doing even a menial job well.
    When they were finished, they poured two glasses of Pepsi to reward themselves, and they sat in the two big easy chairs that faced the mammoth fireplace.
    “It’s too early to start cooking dinner,” Jane said.
    “And it’s too wet out there to go for a walk, so what game do you want to play?”
    “Anything that looks good to you is fine with me. You can look over all the stuff in our game closet and take your pick. But first, I think we really should get the therapy session out of the way.”
    “Are we going to keep that up even on vacation?” the girl asked. She was clearly uneasy about it, though she had not been noticeably uneasy before, even on the occasion of the first session, the day before yesterday.
    “Of course we’ve got to keep on with it,” Carol said. “Now that we’ve made a start, it’s best to continue working at it, pushing and probing a little bit every day.”
    “Well… all right.”
    “Good. Let’s turn