by Thea Devine
Goddamn .. .
He would not be a slave to it, but goddamn, he couldn't stop wanting more of it. Couldn't stop thinking about it.
Even with the possibility that Jancie wanted someone else, something else, he couldn't quell his raging need to plant himself in her.
He knew the answer to that—head to the docks, get a tart's worth of pussy and shoot his wad. Except it wasn't the answer anymore.
There were no answers, either to who wished to harm him or why no woman's cunt would do for his penis but his wife's.
Now he was in London, he couldn't have her cunt. If he were back at Waybury, he'd have to watch his back.
He had to stay away. He needed the distance to sit down and figure out just what was going on, and who was really his enemy.
But more than that, he needed a drink and he needed a good humping, mindless fucking.
No—
He needed bis wife.
******************
Here now, in this strong, undiluted morning light of the bedroom window, with the magnifying glass, Jancie could see things in the photographs that she hadn't noticed before: the pattern on the carpet, the lace insets on Olivia's dress, the handkerchief tucked in her hand, the carved leather of the saddle on the pony, the pinstripe in Hugo's suit, the rose motif on the back rail of the sofa on which he was posed with his son.
Nothing nothing nothing . . .
But what had she thought, that something would jump out at
Satisfaction / 235
her? As if she were more aware of the nuances, the intricacies than Hugo or Olivia? As if they themselves hadn't pored over the pictures in the aftermath of Gaunt's disappearance?
And then buried them in the library?
Actually, when she thought about it, that seemed odd. Why hide the book rather than just throw it away, if the memories inside were so painful? And they must have been.
Nowhere in the house was there any sign, any memento, any other picture of Gaunt. Only this album, covertly placed among a hundred other books to look no different, raise no eyebrows, evoke no curiosity.
Olivia would not want to forget her missing son. Jancie was as certain of that as she was that it was daylight. It was entirely possible Olivia might hide a book of photographs in an inconspicuous place where she could surreptitiously take them out and look at them.
But Hugo wouldn't. He'd want to obliterate a had memory. Pretend it had never existed.
She turned back to the photographs.
Gaunt in his sailor suit, the sailor's hat cocked jauntily to one side, one hand in an insouciant salute. A scrape on his knee un-noticeable except in this bright light and with the magnifying glass. One untied shoelace. A slightly rumpled tie.
No clues.
Gaunt with Hugo. Hugo so stiff, unbending, years younger, as he must have looked when her father had known him. Handsome, though—she could see vestiges of both Kyger and Lujan in those youthful features. Gaunt's face, however, was as yet unformed. Baby cheeks. Mischievous eyes. Grubby hands clutching some small pebbles.
And Hugo almost at once removed from him, as if he didn't want to soil himself with the excesses of childhood. Hugo, who had groveled in the dirty diamond mines of Kaamberoo, now the picture of a pristine gentleman with a dirty, boisterous child.
Gaunt's christening photograph, Olivia holding him delicately in her lap. Gaunt at one year—holding someone's hand, as if he had just started walking.
Gaunt standing beside his pony, one hand holding the reins.
236 / Thea Devine
The family photograph. The boys standing behind the sofa on which Hugo had posed with Gaunt, and Gaunt between his seated parents. No hint here of any family emotion, either. The boys looked uncomfortable, and Olivia looked as if she were restraining Gaunt.
Only the look in her eyes gave away her affection. And Hugo was staring at her as if he disapproved altogether.
Nothing else.
She felt a keening disappointment that she had found nothing more, that the mystery would never be solved, not by her, not in this life.
It had been an unholy waste of time to try to pluck a clue from thin air. Gaunt was gone forever, and the only thing she could do was close the book on him, too.
Chapter Sixteen
She sat for a long time, she didn't know how long, her arms wound around the album, Emily curled at her feet.
She didn't know what to do. For some reason she was finding it hard to relinquish the album, even though it wasn't hers to keep. It had given up no secrets, and yet she couldn't bear to put it back up on that upmost library shelf where nobody would find it again, ever.
She would kill Gaunt all over again if she did that.. .
. . . why did she think of it as killing him?
It would be the same as if Hugo deemed it time to dismantle Olivia's bedroom. It would be like losing her all over again.
Yet—it might be time. Time to put all of that behind them, time for her to stop acting like a Gothic heroine and start being Lujan's wife.
Time to acknowledge that Hugo had not cheated her father, and that his good fortune was all due to luck and a fortuitous marriage. Had her father been that much more aggressive, he might have had Olivia as his wife and Waybury as his domain.
It was just fate, nothing more, that had put her father at the explosion site, and Hugo at the mercy of the kidnapping thieves.
238 / Thea Devine
She had to believe that. Truly, to close the book, she had to believe that.
It was time to stop all this skulking around and thinking there were plots and betrayals everywhere. And Gaunt had to have run away. Or been kidnapped. By the same thieves who'd almost killed Hugo? A fanciful idea, not out of the realm of possibility, but more likely to be a plot point in a penny-dreadful than to have any basis in reality.
And perhaps Gaunt was alive somewhere, if indeed he had been taken, and had no memory of Waybury, his parents, or his brothers.
It didn't matter now. Olivia was dead and presumably with him in heaven, and Hugo had come to terms with it years ago.
Only she, prying into things that were none of her business, cared about any of this at all.
She'd have to write and tell her father—she was at the end of the road, and there was nothing more she could do.
Mrrrrowwww. You won't.
Emily was right, she wouldn't. She felt inside herself—she couldn't yet let go. Even Olivia . . .
She rose slowly and, with Emily following, went across the hall to Olivia's room.
The air inside was suffused with a stale odor compounded of illness, lavender, and disuse, something Jancie hadn't particularly noticed in her urgency to conceal the album.
It was shadowy in there—no lamps had been lit, no shrine had been erected. And dusty—the minuscule motes floating in the beam of sunlight that infiltrated between the curtain panels.
The carpet had gotten dirty, too—Emily, scrambling at her feet, raised little puffs as she leapt on a drift of dust and chased it under the bed.
And it was cold. No fires had been lit since Olivia's death, and Jancie could easily believe she had been the only one even to come into the room since the funeral.
Thus we die and we're forgotten, she thought. But she hadn't forgotten Olivia. She would never forget Olivia. She had never known her own mother, who had died in childbirth. How could she forget Olivia, who had been so kind?
Except to the cat. And yet she'd tacitly welcomed Emily's com-
Satisfaction / 239
fort in her last days. How strange that had been, and wonderful, in a way.
She heard Emily under the bed, scratching at something, and then a few minutes later she appeared from under the bed, puffs of dust on her whiskers.
Oooowww.
"I think you're right," Jancie said. "It's time to stop this."
Ow. A blunt assessment to say the least.
She'd keep the album, too. Tuck it right back under the footboard and l
eave it there for the time being.
"Emily?"
Emily had gone back under the bed. Scratch, scratch, scratch ...
"Emily!"
She darted out from the footboard, batting something with her paws.
Enough. If she left, Emily would follow.
She was just at the door when she heard it—the rolling sound, in the hallway, faint, hard—like a marble or a pebble rolling across the hallway floor.
She whirled back into the room. Slammed the door. Stepped on something as she impatiently scooped up Emily. Picked up the dust drift, tucked it in her pocket, and opened the door.
Her heart pounded, her hands went ice cold. The sound was there, constant, rolling, rolling, closer to her and closer.
Or it was in her mind. At that moment, she didn't know . .. she couldn't see the object. But she knew it wasn't big, it wasn't loud, it just was—elusive, illusory, phantasmic—a constant, ghostly sound—that followed her as she eased shakily out of Olivia's room, and crossed on tiptoes to her bedroom door.
******************
It took a half-hour for her to calm down. And she spent a part of that time brushing the dust off Emily's whiskers and fur.
Aarrrowww. Emily did not like to be handled like that. But lord, she was filthy with little picks of something that looked like sawdust under her claws. One scramble under the bed, and she had gotten this dirty?
It was good to have something mindless to do while she considered why that mysterious rolling sound so scared her.
She didn't believe in ghosts. It was conceivable a spiritualist
240 / Tbea Devine
might think it was Olivia trying to send her a message, but it had sounded too real to her.
And it wasn't Emily at play, either.
Some unseen hand, then. Which she couldn't believe, either. It wasn't any more an explanation than thinking it was ghosts.
MRRRRROOWWWW— Emily kicked off and twisted out of her arms and jumped onto the bed. Owww. She rubbed against Jancie's arm, and slanted a look at her. Scare you.
No. Who? Why? Forget that. Her own too-inventive imagination overreacting to everything.
She pulled at a puff on Emily's ear. So much dust. But then, the album had been covered every time she extracted it from under the footboard. The room hadn't been cleaned in months.
Maybe it was time to clear it out and clean it up.
Not her decision, though.
She broached Hugo about it at dinner, on a night that Kyger was absent and they were dining alone.
He stared at her coldly. "I'm sorry? You want to dismantle Olivia's room? Whyever would you? Have you been going in there?"
"I—" What to tell him? She didn't expect this reaction from him, this frostiness at what would be a common ritual two months after someone passed away. "Eve gone in several times just to—"
To what? Make certain everything was in order? What could be out of order? To pray? She wasn't a praying person. To feel closer to Olivia? A woman who was her employer? No reason for her to want that in the general course of things.
"—because I miss her," she said finally. "I miss her, and her presence still fills that room."
"That's all well and good, Jancie, but I would appreciate it if we left Olivia's room untouched and unvisited."
She took a deep breath. "All right, if that's your wish."
"It is, and I hope I don't have to lock the room."
She shook her head. "No. I'll respect your wishes." And Gaunt could repose there then, close to Olivia, with no one disturbing him. Maybe it was the best decision. "I apologize that I haven't been more sensitive."
Satisfaction / 241
He stared at her for another minute and then bent to his oxtail soup. "I appreciate the fact that you miss her, Jancie."
But he didn't say that he missed her, too. They finished the meal in silence, and she went, alone as always, to her room.
She was ready for bed; she had laid her dress on the bed to smooth it out before hanging it in the armoire. It was one of her mourning dresses, and everything showed on it, especially cat hair and dust.
But she was a little shocked at what a nest of dust drifts were ruffled around the hem. From Olivia's room, she supposed. That dusty.
She started brushing it all off when she felt a little lump in the pocket. She extracted it and its puff of dust, remembering she had stepped on it as she had grabbed Emily when she left Olivia's room.
She brushed away the dust. It was a small stone, irregular in shape, and pointed on one end. It looked like a pebble or a piece of broken glass.
Like the object that might make that ghostly, rolling sound in the hallway.
She turned it over in her fingers. There was one way to find out.
She knelt on the floor and flicked it with her middle finger and thumb. It caromed across the floor for a second and wedged up on one of the irregular edges.
But perhaps that wasn't a fair test. Her room was carpeted, furnished, didn't have an echo.
She picked the object up and opened her bedroom door. Knelt again and flicked the stone toward Olivia's room. Again, it rolled crazily and stopped. Slight crickling, rolling sound. Nothing sustained. Nothing proved.
And then Emily came from nowhere to jump the stone.
She watched in fascination as Emily batted it all the way down the hallway and back.
Maybe the ghost sound. Maybe she shouldn't be chasing a piece of rock down the hallway at this hour. She swiped it up as krnily made another pass down the hallway.
242 / Thea Devine
Ooooowww. Emily didn't like that—she was having too much fun. She wasn't disappointed, Jancie thought. She hadn't been abandoned or threatened .. .
Was that a threat? What Hugo had said about locking the bedroom door if she continued to go in there?
She felt like going into Olivia's room right this minute. Instead, she climbed in bed, shoved the stone under her pillow, and sat considering her unexpected feeling that Hugo had issued her a warning.
Emily jumped up beside her. Owww. It was.
Was it? Had he taken it for granted that no one visited the room? Did he'i
She rubbed Emily's ears. She was imagining things. The room was dirty, and needed a thorough cleaning. Tf Hugo wanted it to molder into dust, fine.
But why would he lock it?
Eorget it—he was just irritated with her for taking the liberty of even entering Olivia's room. Although why—when he knew how fond she had been of Olivia—
. . . locking the room to keep her out?
She was making too much of it.
Mrrooww. Are you?
She didn't know what to make of it, actually.
Maybe Hugo's intensity about it seemed really overstated under the circumstances, even if he felt he wanted to keep Olivia's room sacrosanct for the foreseeable future.
No. No. It was perfectly understandable. Olivia hadn't been gone all that long. Of course he wouldn't want anything to change. Not for a while yet. No matter how much dust and dirt accumulated.
It was her own perception: she was still seeing plots everywhere just when she had decided it was time to stop pursuing this course.
Maybe she ought to take just one more look around Olivia's room . . . ?
Mrrroww. I'll come.
Penny-dreadful. Emily was such a loyal companion, perfectly willing to play the intelligent, perceptive shadow to the bumbling Gothic heroine.
Satisfaction / 243
What did she think she'd find in the dark, anyway?
Well, the one thing she could do was retrieve the album. If Hugo truly meant to keep the room closed up, the album would, in effect, be buried. And she wasn't sure she was finished with it yet.
So there was one reason to circumvent Hugo's request. And the other was that he conceivably could have a lock put on the room as early as tomorrow—if he truly believed that she would not respect his wishes.
Ah, it was only a bluff. It was just too odd th
at he'd want to lock up the room just because she went into it now and again.
And since he felt so strongly about it, of course she would do as he wished.
But only because she was going to pay her last visit, her last respects tonight.
******************
Silence so thick it felt like cotton wool. Deep in the night, when no one was about, and the hallway was lit with one low-burning kerosene sconce that threw long shadows like dust drifts across the floor, Jancie found it easy to believe there were ghosts afoot.
The clock had struck one, and sometime after that, she tiptoed out of the bedroom, a lamp in hand, and across the hallway to Olivia's room, with Emily trailing behind her.
The door was closed, as it always was. It could even be locked, a thought that only occurred to her as she was about to turn the knob.
Her hand froze.
Suddenly, out of the thick silence, she heard the rolling, marb-ley sound. Her heart stopped—she turned the knob convulsively and was stunned to find it moved and the door fell open.
She ducked inside the room, pulling Emily with her, her breath constricted, her heart pounding like a hammer.
Dear heaven. The sound. The everlasting sound of something rolling across a bare wood floor was more frightening than seeing a ghost.
She had to get hold of herself. She'd be useless in the very little time she had to canvas the room. She felt a paralyzing urgency to just get out and leave everything—her suspicions, her fears, her resistance—moldering in the dust.
244 / Thea Devine
The album first.
She set the lamp on a nearby table as Emily nosed around the bed, and got down on her hands and knees at the footboard. Yes, thank heaven, it was still there. And the magnifying glass, which she'd tucked into the cover.
Good. Now she should just get out.
There was something in the atmosphere of the room: a flat, black stillness, unnatural, chilling. Breath-catching. Go.
Owwww.
She jumped, almost dropping the album.
Emily darted out from under the bed, suddenly, chasing something with her paws.
