EPILOGUE

By Tracy LeCates

The old house had a musty, disused smell to it that met their noses the instant the two walked in the front door.  Cait sneezed just once at the thought of all the dust that had accumulated since the house was last been entered.

Her twin could read those thoughts as clearly as if she had spoken them.  "Let's get some windows open," Paul suggested quietly. 

Brother and sister walked through the familiar house, opening doors and windows, their eyes taking in the well-remembered furniture and decorations, though it had been several years since their father had passed on, and the old Colonial closed up.

"Can't believe Dad stayed in this big old house by himself after we all moved out," Cait ventured softly.  Her gaze landed on the family portrait on the mantle in the living room, next to the antique clock, which had long ago wound down to a halt.

"This was his home."  Paul came to stand beside his sister, a fond smile on his face as he saw what she was looking at.  Peter and Nicole Caine looked back at them across the years, through the dusty glass of the frame, alive and young.  Nicole sat in the wingchair by the window, an infant in her arms, flanked by two fidgety toddlers.  The proud father of the children stood behind the chair, his arms wrapped around her neck, chin resting atop her head. "Uncle Kermit took this, I think."

"How can you possibly remember that?" Cait scowled, turning away from the photo.

"…I remember…" he said softly, wiping some of the dust from the glass.  "You look so much like her."

Cait glanced back at the photo for only an instant. "Like… Mom?" 

Paul nodded. "Like Mom." There was unconcealed affection in his voice. The young man turned a curious glance to his sister.  "You remember much about her?"

"Nope. Not really," she vaguely replied. "We were… what? Five? Six years old when she died?"

"About that," he answered. "But I have a lot of memories of her. The perfume she wore, the way she laughed, that gleam in her eyes when she was given' Dad hell about something," he laughed.

Cait's voice softened. "Would you mind if I took that home with me? The picture?"

The surprise showed in his eyes for a moment. "I don't mind. Everything in here belongs to the three of us. Just because Melanie and I are moving in doesn't mean that you and Samantha aren't still entitled to whatever you want here."

"We sold you our shares of the house, fair and square. Neither of us is married, or expecting twins, so we don't have any use for a place this big."

"It was only the house itself I bought from you two. Not all the stuff in it. You and Sammy are more than welcome to take out whatever you want."

"Well, you know what I really want," she said with a grin.

"Yeah, I do, and you know you're more than welcome to it. I don't think I could handle it anyway. The other old relic is more my style. C'mon, let's go see if that koi pond looks salvageable."

Passing quickly through the kitchen, with its memories of holiday meal preparations, and quiet nights spent studying at the table, Paul and Cait exited the house. The back yard was only slightly overgrown.  The three Caine children had made an arrangement with a neighborhood teenager to mow the lawns once a week, but the flowerbeds would have to be dug up and replanted.

The koi pond, which once had been a young father's pet project, and a little girl's cat's snack tank was now a breeding ground for mosquitoes.  Stagnant water filled the 1200 gallon, poured concrete pond.  "Well, at least we know it hasn't cracked and leaked," Paul said hopefully.

Cait's nose wrinkled in disgust. "Ewwww…"

"You say, 'Ewww' now, but just wait – I'll have this cleaned and full of fish in no time."

Several large rocks beneath the weeping willow tree bore silent testimony to pet mishap.  Cait stared at the rocks for a long moment, a few vague memories drifting through her mind.  "That's where we buried Mimsan," she reminded Paul. Minsan, the cat, had died at the age of ten, when Cait was a teen.

"Yeah, and that hamster you tossed out your bedroom window!" Paul said, bursting out in uncontrollable laughter.

"I did not!"

********

"Think Melanie is gonna like moving into this old place?" Cait asked her brother as they wandered the second floor.

"She's excited about it," he assured her. "We've always talked about getting a house, a real home, now that she's pregnant. We took a ride by here a couple of months back and she just fell in love with the place. I wonder if it was the same with Mom and Dad when they first bought it."

"Isn't Grandpa gonna give you shit about not moving to Chinatown?"

"Cait, a Shaolin priest is a Shaolin priest no matter where he lives. There's nothing in the rule book that says I have to actually reside in Chinatown."

Her gray eyes widened in surprise. "There's a rule book?"  The expression of surprise turned into a scowl as she caught the teasing look her twin shot her.  "Oh, you suck."

Cait stopped by her old bedroom and stared in. "I'll get this stuff outta here and put it in storage. I can't believe he didn't change anything after we moved out. Look at this shit!" she laughed. "My old bed, all my old books… he didn't even take down my old rock posters, and he hated those! I mean, how long has it been since we really lived here, anyway? Ten years?"

"Dad wasn't very big on change. I don't think he even so much as moved any of the furniture except to clean the carpets."

"No, he never did. The house always looked exactly the same. I always thought that was kind of strange, didn't you?" she asked, moving to sit on her old bed.

Paul remained in the open doorway, out of habit. Cait had always been crazy about her privacy, and he'd seldom been invited into her sanctuary.  "He kept everything just the way it was when Mom died. Like he didn't want to disturb any memories. He never got over losing her."

"He dated," she reminded him.

Paul shrugged. "Once in a while, but he hardly ever went out with the same woman twice, and he was just about always in before 10:00. His friends practically twisted his arm to go at all. He just didn't want anyone else. He swore she was waiting for him."

Cait turned her head to look out her bedroom window, a million memories of childhood and adolescence coming rushing back to her. "Maybe she was."

"What do you mean?" her twin asked, finally crossing the threshold to the room.

There was a long silence before she answered. "I remember waking up crying one night… I'd had a really bad nightmare… and Mom was here. She came over and sat on the bed, and she held me until I stopped crying… then she checked under the bed for monsters… and in the closet… and stayed with me until I fell asleep again."

A smile formed on Paul's face. "So? She was always doing that when one of us had a nightmare."

Cait rose from the bed and slipped passed him out into the hall. "Yeah, but this was about a month after she died."

* * * * * * * * *

"God, what a mess…" Paul sighed as he and his sister stood looking around the attic. "If it's all the same to you, I'll let you and Sammy go through all this junk, take what you want and just leave the rest where it is. Melanie and I are going to have a big enough job to tackle moving out of our apartment and into this place without messing around up here too much."

"Yeah, well she shouldn't be messing around too much at all anyway. Not in her condition. She's huge."

"She's having twins," Paul reminded her with a laugh. "But, no, she won't be doing much more than supervising the move. The first thing we need to tackle is making one of those bedrooms back into a nursery."

Cait moved cautiously through the attic, ever watchful for spiders as she eyed the old boxes and bags, which had long ago been stowed away. "Yeah, well, if you need any help, you can always call me," she offered, stopping near the back of the attic and staring. "Hey, check out the cool old trunk!"

Paul shook his head, smiling at his sister's enthusiasm. She rarely showed, but when she did, it was total and complete. He made his way through the castoff articles to where his twin knelt on the floor, dusting off an enormous old wooden trunk.

"I never saw that before. Open it up." He sank to his knees to give her a hand with the old latches. "I wonder whose it was."

The trunk opened with a groan of rusted hinges.  Cait's eyes widened as she reached inside and pulled out a black leather jacket. The leather was scuffed and worn and soft to the touch.  "Oh, hey… I have to have this," she said, standing to try it on. "Whose do you think it was? It's way too small to have been Dad's." Slipping on the old jacket she was pleased to find it was a perfect fit. Her long dark hair spilled down her back as she pulled it free of the garment and modeled her new treasure.

"Must have been Mom's." Paul dug into the trunk again and nodded. "I think all this stuff was hers. But, from a long time ago. Maybe from before she and Dad moved in here, that's why we never saw it. Check this out…" The young man pulled out a handful of old file folders, the contents within yellowed with age. "Mom and Dad's marriage certificate… the title to the Mustang… certificate of graduation from the academy…"

Cait knelt down next to him again, taking the papers from him as they sorted through them. "I can't believe Mom was a cop," she said, shaking her head.

"Why not? You're a cop."

"Yeah, but… she was… you know… Mom."

"Dad said that she'd quit when they got married, so technically she wasn't Mom and a cop at the same time."

"Still…"

Paul laughed softly. "You know, Mom and Dad weren't always just parents. They did have lives before we came along."

Placing the papers in a small stack beside her, Cait dug into the trunk alongside her brother and came up with a small leather pouch.  "You're right, this is all her stuff. There's a driver's license…" Her voice trailed off as confusion settled onto her face. "This is her picture, but the name says Erin Taylor. And here's another one, with the name Elizabeth Reynolds. What the hell…? Here's another one with the name Rachel Courtland…. Paul, there's a dozen different ID's here, all with her picture and every one of them has a different name… Mom wasn't some kind of criminal, was she?"

"Criminal, no… " Paul said distractedly as he sorted through a few of the other packets in the trunk. "I think she was CIA."

"Like Grandpa Paul and Kermit?" Cait asked in disbelief.

Paul began to laugh softly in amazement. "I think so. Cait, I think our mom was a spook!"

"No way…"

"Way.  Damn, you and I owe Kermit a visit this weekend."

"You're right," she agreed, adding more papers to her pile. "It's been too long since we've been over to bother him anyway. Damn, wait til I tell Samantha about this."

"Well, between my sister the cop, and my sister the PI, I'm sure I can be expecting an answer by the end of the week, even if Uncle Kermit doesn't want to give. What was Samantha doing today that was so important she couldn't have come with us?"

Cait sat back, quiet for a moment. "She didn't really say. I think she just didn't want to deal with all this. She's just like Dad in a lot of ways. And one of those ways is her objection to change. I think she'd really rather just let this place crumble than disturb anything. She has even fewer memories of Mom than we do, but she still misses Dad a lot."

"So do I," Paul confessed.  "I know it's been almost two years, but sometimes I still pick up the phone to call and tell him something."

"He was too young to die," Cait insisted softly, the stubborn set to her jaw familiar.

Paul shook his head in disagreement. "I think he wanted to go. I think he wanted to be with Mom. If it hadn't been for the fact that he had three kids to raise, I think he would have gone a long time ago."

"I was there… in the hospital room with him… when he died," she whispered. 

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The mist swirled thickly around his feet, drifting upward to form the wall that separated him from the living world, and the presence of his eldest child.  One hand still tingled with the life-force of his daughter who sat by his bedside, holding his physical hand, crying softly as it went limp in her grasp. "This is it," he whispered, his voice curiously loud in the vacuum in which he stood.  "It's time. Goodbye, Caitlyn… take care of your brother and sister… and never forget that I love you."

Peter turned away from the dense wall of mist and faced the bridge which stretched out before him, fully formed over a silently flowing river.  Fear of the unknown swept through him as he stood alone. "I've been here before…" he realized in wonder.

A lone figure appeared on the bridge, slowly walking towards him and his heart ached in recognition. Though Nicole stopped halfway across the bridge, Peter could see her clearly. Looking no older than she had more than twenty years ago, the last morning he'd seen her alive, she was the most beautiful sight he'd ever seen. Peter swallowed hard, feeling suddenly self-conscious of his own age, of the tiny wrinkles that lined his face and the gray streaks in his hair. "…Nick…" he called softly.

Nicole's smile was as bright and warm as sunshine on a spring day.  "Peter Caine, you are a sight for sore eyes. I've been waiting a long time for you, and I'll keep waiting if you're not ready to come over."

Tears stung his eyes his eyes as he took his first step onto the bridge. "I'm ready, Nick. I want to be with you."

The wall of mist closed off the world behind him completely, following his path along the bridge as he closed the gap between himself and the woman who stood waiting with open arms. The years receded, relinquishing their hold on him as the gray disappeared from his hair, and his skin regained its youth with every step.  He felt the tears, wetting his cheeks as he reached the midpoint of the bridge and the warmth of his wife's body in his arms again. "I missed you so much."

"Missed you, too," she whispered, tightening her hold on him. "But I've never been very far away. You did a hell of job, raising those kids by yourself."

Peter began to laugh softly as he pulled back a few inches to look into those familiar gray eyes. "Not gonna take my hide for all those little screw-ups along the way?"

Tears glistened in her eyes as she shook her head. "No one could have done better. You and I have a lot of catching up to do."

"And we've got an eternity to do it." Peter drew her back into his arms, letting the warmth and feeling of completion permeate his soul. "What's on the other side of this bridge?"

"Nothing. This is it. Welcome to the afterlife."

"You're kidding. Right?"

"Yeah… There's a big set of gates just on the other side of the bridge."

"And what's on the other side of the gates?"

"How should I know?" She laughed, pulling back to look at him with a gleam in her eyes. "I've been waiting for you."

"You're sure they're even gonna let you in?" Peter teased.

"Oh, bite me…"

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

"I was there, in the hospital room with him when he died. I could feel him kind of fading out on me as I sat there… Just before the monitors went flatline, he said her name…"

Paul reached out to pull his sister into his arms. "I'm sorry I wasn't there…" he apologized. "But you know that he's happy now… at peace… right?"

Cait nodded against her brother's shoulder, then pulled away, wiping at her eyes.  "I know. I just miss him. I miss them both."

"So do I. Every day. But they left us with an incredible legacy… maybe we're just scratching the surface of it here today."

"Is that invitation to have dinner with you and Melanie still good?" she asked as she tried to pull herself together again. Much like her mother, Cait's least favorite thing was to look vulnerable in front of anyone.

"You bet it is," Paul assured her, tapping her under the chin gently. "C'mon. Let's make our last stop and head home."

********

Windows closed and locked once again, Paul and Cait exited the house through the garage. "Well, there they are," Paul said with a fond smile. "Yours and mine. You sure you can handle that old relic? No power brakes, no power steering and more power than you've ever had under the hood…"

Cait went straight for the old Mustang convertible, running an affectionate hand over the dusty car. "This old relic will outlast 'that' old relic," she asserted, pointing at the Stealth.

Paul laughed softly. "We'll see."

FIN