The Link Read Online Free PDF Page A

there. Several moments pass.
    Abruptly then, Home is standing
upright
outside the window of the room in which the group is sitting.
    “Oh, my,” says Mrs. Jenckens as Home “walks” into the room quite calmly, sits and laughs. “If a policeman had been passing, imagine his astonishment if he had looked up to see Dan turning round and round along the outside wall of the house,” he says. He thanks them for not having moved.
    Lord Adare walks into the other room and finds the window raised scarcely a foot. Returning to the sitters, he comments on this and Home rises. “Come and see,” he says.
    Adare accompanies him and Home re-opens the window the same amount of space.
    Then, before Adare’s eyes, in the clearest of illumination, Home is suddenly lying on his side
in the air
. His body almost shoots out through the window opening, apparently rigid. For several moments, it hovers outside, then comes back in, still entirely horizontal. Home resumes his footing.
    “Shall we return to the others?” he inquires casually.

    Robert drives to the house where his ex-wife lives with her new lawyer husband. Ann is in school, Barbara tells him irritably.
    “I’m sorry,” he apologizes. “I wasn’t thinking. I should have called ahead.”
    Barbara is a lovely woman but it only takes moments to see the disparity between her personality and Robert’s; clearly, their mutual good looks was responsible for their early marriage more than any kind of intellectual or emotional rapport.
    Robert says he’ll leave and come back later but Barbara keeps him there. Sitting over coffee in the kitchen of the attractive Long Island home, she tells him, once again, of her concern for Ann.
    It emerges more as aggravation. “She is
saying
things,” she tells him. “The kind of things I associate with your family background.”
    Robert tenses. “Barbara, please don’t
do
this to her,” he says. “Don’t associate her with the past.”
    “It’s not the past,” she says. “This is
happening.”
    He restrains his anger. “Look,” he tells her. “She’s in a new environment: a new father, two new sisters, her mother’s attention dispersed by them. Not to mention the period of our separation and divorce. Good God, isn’t that enough motivation for her to be acting a little strangely? Have you considered some counseling? I’ll be glad to pay for it.”
    “That’s very logical, very precise, as always,” Barbara says tightly. “But it doesn’t explain her crying about a neighborhood girl being hit by a car—
a week before it happened
. It doesn’t explain her…
looking
at things that aren’t there! That’s
your family
, Robert!”
    “Well, it isn’t me!” he snaps.
    He lowers his eyes. “It isn’t Ann,” he says.
    He stares into his cup of coffee, trying to repress the tangled feelings he has kept below the surface since he was a boy.

TWO
    D ecember, 1862. A closed carriage rattles through the dark streets of Washington, D.C. Robert’s voice narrates.
    “Nettie Colburn was in Washington in answer to a letter from her youngest brother, a Union soldier desperately ill in a hospital in nearby Alexandria. Knowing that her brother would die if he were not furloughed home, Nettie had come to the capitol to plead for him.”
    The carriage’s interior reveals NETTIE COLBURN, 20, and a MR. LAURIE. Nettie’s eyes are red and swollen from crying. Mr. Laurie pats her hand in reassurance.
    “That night,” continues Robert’s voice, “a friend named Mr. Laurie was taking her to where she could seek help for her brother.
    “A place where the young Spiritualist medium was to have an effect on the course of American history.”
    The carriage stops; they enter a building through a guarded doorway. Led through shadowed hallways, they are ushered into a parlor.
    Present there, to Nettie’s startlement, are Mrs. Miller (Mr. Laurie’s daughter), Mr. Newton, the Secretary of the Interior and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln.
    Nettie