by Jane Godman
Looking at him made her feel as if she was about to fall.
His irises were that dark, that limitless.
Her stomach anticipated the drop. Her lungs hitched in a breath to prepare.
“Three years to be exact. I moved in shortly after you moved out. They advertised for a boarder. You didn’t know?” he asked. His voice was even more intimate than the flash of skin at his collar. They might have been talking about something as mundane as renting rooms, but the deep timbre of his tone said that that wasn’t what they were talking about at all.
“No. They never mentioned you,” Trinity said. They might have tried. She’d never given them the chance. Her calls were always brief. The better to forget that she dreaded coming home even as she planned and prepared for it day by day by day.
“And no visits,” Creed pointed out.
Trinity nodded. She also closed her eyes. It was weak, but inevitable, akin to catching herself before she could fall.
“When I first moved in, I thought that you would be back on occasion. I imagined sleeping under the same roof and then I was glad you didn’t come home,” he said.
Her eyes opened in spite of her best intentions. His handsome face was tilted down toward her and its angular lines were shadowed even in the morning light.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Creed said.
“Neither should you,” Trinity replied. She leaned back against the desk to put some distance between them. Six inches was hardly a reprieve.
The whole town had thought him most likely to crash and burn like some rebel teen, not become an historian with his books and memorabilia, and certainly not an author, although his fascination with the occult appeared obvious enough to make her quiver.
“No. You’re right. I shouldn’t be here at all,” Creed agreed. His face tightened. Her attention was drawn by the tension in his jaw. The width of his shoulders. The way his hair brushed his cheeks. Anything and anywhere but his deep, dark eyes.
“Do you remember that day by the lake?” he asked.
And suddenly her gaze went back to his. His eyes were brown. If she looked long enough, if she allowed herself to look long enough…you could see the streaks of dark chocolate in the double shot of near black espresso.
Yes. She could.
And when she did, she realized how much heat it took to melt and blend all those rich colors to create his midnight gleam.
“I remember,” Trinity said.
Her focus dropped to his lips. They had been cold and blue against hers that day, but they had heated, hadn’t they? Once he’d coughed and gasped and came back to life, they had been as warm and wicked and alive as any girl could ask for in her first kiss.
But then she’d spent the next four years of high school and three years in Boston avoiding him and his watchful eyes.
“You tasted like hot chocolate and mint,” Creed said.
He had reached for the end of her shiny scarf and he toyed with it. For some reason, the casual gesture caused heat to rise beneath her skin. Or maybe it was his talk about her taste.
“I saved you,” Trinity said. It hadn’t been about flavorful kisses. It had been about life and death.
“Did you?” Creed asked.
He tugged on the edge of her scarf, firmly but gently. It slid against her skin until the knot caught and then the fabric grew taut against her neck. And still he tugged. Not hard, but insistent. Inexorably. She could resist. She could pull back and away.
She didn’t.
Instead, she let him pull her forward using the gentle tug on her soft scarf as leverage.
He began to wind its length around his fingers—once, twice, again. That was all it took to bring her body flush to his.
He was tall and muscular like a wall of solid masculine flesh. His pull had brought her much softer, but much tenser form against his. She was braving the fall by looking into his eyes again and he quirked one brow and paused, waiting—for what she couldn’t be sure.
Did he expect her to run away?
This close, she could see the damp under layers of his hair and she could detect the scent of soap on his skin. He’d taken a morning shower while she disposed of matches and snooped in his rooms. She could also breathe in the faint mellow bite of the whiskey he’d had before breakfast.
“I shouldn’t be here, but I am. You brought me back from a cold consuming darkness I’d never even known existed. There’s damnation and decadence in that, Trinity, in case you didn’t know,” Creed said. She thought she knew. Somehow. All about darkness and damnation, but not decadence….
Crystalline seconds froze the world around them in that iced November memory, but they weren’t cold now. Not at all.
He dropped his lips to hers in a predatory swoop that had been in the making for seven long years, but he didn’t need the hold he had on her scarf. She held herself still for his descending mouth. She tilted her chin to meet it.
It was a mistake. She accepted the inevitable kiss with the courage she should save to face other things.
His lips were soft, but firm. His tongue, with a hungry flick, brought a hint of expensive Scotch and heat as far removed from November chill as could be. She reached for him, her arms around his neck and one hand burrowed into his hair, but he continued to hold only her scarf as if it was a lifeline.
To save him from what, she couldn’t be sure.
Not Scarlet Falls. He chose to be here. He chose to dive deep into the history of the town.
She was the one who was falling. She could feel the dark hungry maw at her feet. But holding on to Creed only made the fall more imminent.
When she moved her hands to wrap them around the knot he’d made of her scarf, he pulled his lips from hers. Their mouths clung as if in protest for several seconds, but he gave them no mercy. He tilted his chin up to break the contact, but he didn’t let her go. Maybe because her hands were twined around his fist in her scarf and he didn’t want to jar her bandage. Or maybe because he was too busy looking into her eyes.
Trinity shuttered them as fast as she could. She thought of puppy dogs and taxes and how far she would be behind when or if she was ever able to return to school. But somewhere in that mix, erotic thoughts mingled. Like how intoxicating the taste of Scotch was on his tongue even at 9:00 a.m. and how well its rich flavor fit with the shadows in his eyes. And more desperate and wicked thoughts, too. Like maybe, just maybe if she had to face constant threats, she would like to do it with the afterglow of his lovemaking on her lips and on her skin.
“I can’t leave Hillhaven. I have to be here for my work. This is the oldest structure in town. Did you know that?” Creed asked.
He still held her scarf and his eyes still burned. His lips were masculine and firm and also swollen from their kiss. They were only separated from hers by inches. She wanted to narrow that margin, but she held herself very, very still instead.
“The lake is older,” Trinity reminded him, her heartbeat pulsing in her ears.
“I know,” Creed said and she thought she saw the memory of breathing those bleak waters in his face.
His fist loosened in her scarf and she released her hold so he could pull his hand free. But their bodies were still too close for comfort, if comfort didn’t involve increased body heat and an elevated pulse.
Trinity backed away as casually as her instinct to either run or kiss Creed again would allow. Every muscle in her body responded to her inner turmoil with tension. She was coiled inside and out, prepared to spring into his arms or flee. His tense face watched her careful movements with predatory stillness.
He was no more relaxed than she.
When a child’s girlish laughter skittered its eerie tones up Trinity’s spine, she gasped and turned toward the door. Creed reacted, too, but to her sudden movement not to the sound. He put his hand out to her shoulder as if to steady her, but his touch wasn’t comforting. Not when the laughter sounded again in the air all around them.
None of the windows were
open. There was no draft from the hallway, but suddenly an old photograph fluttered loose from one of the nearby piles of memorabilia. Maybe she’d dislodged it during her earlier snoop. Or maybe not.
Creed bent down to retrieve the sepia-toned photo before she could reach for it herself. She didn’t have to hold it in her hands to see the brown and black around the edges where the paper had curled and turned to ash after being damaged by some long ago flames.
The Girl in Blue.
Trinity could see the pretty pastel pinafore of robin’s egg blue in the photograph. She’d seen that dress so many times before, disappearing around a corner or lurking in the dark. She could see the corkscrew curls that framed a cherubic face and lips made red by the photo processes of yesteryear. The Girl in Blue had been about eight or nine when the picture was taken. With a start, Trinity looked from the photograph to the rag doll she’d noticed earlier with its creepy button eyes and back again.
The girl in the photo held the doll to her chest.
“Why do you have all these mementos?” Trinity asked.
Creed glanced at the photo as if he was so familiar with it that he didn’t need to look closely before he placed it back in the pile it had come from.
“Since that day by the lake, Scarlet Falls whispers to me. Whiskey helps. Quiets the noise. But sometimes I look and listen and find and keep,” Creed said.
Whispers.
So Samuel Creed was plagued by whispers. No wonder he seemed to watch her while she braced for screams.
Chapter Four
She had waited for Creed to leave the house before slipping back to his rooms. They’d parted awkwardly, like two boxers retreating to neutral corners of the ring. She told herself discretion was the better part of valor, but in reality a little time in his presence went a long way…especially since she was determined not to eat him alive. He was indelibly entwined with Scarlet Falls. It was almost impossible to tell where Creed began and the town ended. He was fascinated by its darkness. She feared the lake hadn’t really let him go that day, no matter that she had saved him. Giving in to her attraction to him felt like tempting Scarlet Falls to reach out to claim her, as well.
She found the photograph where he had placed it back among the eclectic clutter of his collection which seemed to hold everything from the mundane to the macabre. The crow “watched” her when she picked up the old photo and turned it over in her palm. Worse, the button-eyed doll sat—its creepiness magnified by the evidence of its longevity Trinity held in her hands.
On the back of the brittle paper, “Clara Chadwick” was written in old-fashioned script, the kind children used to practice painstakingly on slates and women used to use in treasured correspondence on precious paper. Beautiful and slanted, such writing was a lost means of communication gone the way of smoke signals and hieroglyphs. It seemed as exotic to her and strange as she deciphered the name.
She turned the photograph over again, avoiding the doll’s stare in order to examine the other clues to The Girl in Blue’s identity. The dress was a sailor suit style. The curls slightly frizzed, probably from the kind of permanent wave machine that relied on heat instead of chemicals. Her shoes were shiny and black. Her tights white.
Trinity glanced up at the doll. It was moth-eaten and shabby, but its stitching was fine and the yarn on its head still a vivid red. She shivered as she met its blank button stare. Then she forced herself to move forward to lean down and pick the doll up.
It was heavier than she expected. Something had been sewn into its hands, feet, head and torso to make them more solid than mere batting would have done. An aged, musty smell rose from its dress made from sewn-together pieces of various sizes and patterns in a patchwork style. Would Creed know its age and where it had been found? Did he know Clara Chadwick’s history or had he collected the doll and photo to silence some whisper without thought to their provenance?
A shimmer of movement caused Trinity to turn toward the hall. Nothing. Nothing at all. But she was left with the impression that she’d seen a glimpse of blue. She looked back at the rag doll in her hands. It was grim and silent as the grave, divulging none of its former owner’s secrets.
But Trinity still placed it back where she’d found it and backed away.
She hadn’t come home in search of answers. She’d been looking for refuge, as impossible to hope for as that would be. But the matches in her room and the grim possibility that the fire in Boston hadn’t been an accident forced her to act.
As she left the rooms filled with Samuel Creed’s assortment of history and mystery, she wondered if she might find refuge in answers she’d never thought to seek.
* * *
The lake glittered distantly on the horizon reflecting the weak October sun. For as long as Trinity could remember, it had been a black gleam in the distance above town. Unlike other places, where bodies of water became a tourist attraction or a local draw, High Lake was small, cold and uninviting. Fed by a mineral spring with high iron content, it wasn’t home to fish or fowl, and it often sent a biting breeze down from across its surface to rime Scarlet Falls with a metallic fog.
Trinity walked through such a fog that afternoon after a midmorning rain shower with nothing but a name to guide her steps.
The Historical Society of Scarlet Falls was housed in the basement of a large Victorian on Elm Street that also was home to Scarlet Falls’ community library in its upper rooms. The trees that lined the rolling sidewalk were already dropping their spotted yellow leaves so that some branches were bare and skeletal reaching into the fog above her head.
Trinity hugged her coat close, glad for the scarf around her neck as the damp fingers of mist trailed moistly against her cheeks and heavy on her hair. The town was quiet, though within the next hour or so the streets would be filled with traffic as buses and cars and trucks sought to finish their commutes before night fell. Schools in Scarlet Falls traditionally ended their day a full two hours before other schools in the surrounding area. It was never talked about. It just was. The people of Scarlet Falls kept their own hours and their own council, and it was rare to find anyone who balked at obeying the setting sun.
And yet the early afternoon bustle amid unpleasant fog wasn’t grim. She heard laughter and cheery calls of conversation between neighbors. Many people nodded or waved as she walked by.
Trinity had her own hands deep in the pockets of her coat because of the chill, but she took care not to crush the photograph as she approached her destination. She slowed, but not because she was putting off her search. Rather, the picturesque building and grounds took her by surprise. She remembered a neglected air the last time she’d seen the place. Crooked shingles, peeling paint and overgrown shrubbery. She found a different view as she drew closer and the fog dispersed.
The house glistened with freshness—paint, landscaping, shingles—even the pale purple trim had been painstakingly restored, each artistically turned piece of gingerbread softly highlighted in the mist.
In the midst of a tidy riot of planter boxes and hanging baskets that had probably been changed out from summer impatiens to autumn pansies and mums in the last month or so, a young woman stood at the top of a ladder tending the flowers.
Trinity came up short and held her breath.
She hated ladders.
But the woman was busy and didn’t seem to mind her distance from the ground or that she was presenting the perfect opportunity for something unfortunate to happen.
People work on ladders every day. Trinity told herself. Even in Scarlet Falls.
Nevertheless, she moved forward with urgency to survey the scene with a gaze that rapidly catalogued. The ladder was a new aluminum contraption with shiny fittings and sturdy appearance.
But…
Trinity saw as she came close that the edge of a rubber gardener’s mat was curled under one foot of the ladder in an unlikely arrangement to have happened on its own unless the young woman had a death wish.
A startled “oh” a
bove her head caused Trinity to look up just as the ladder wobbled dangerously to the side with a jangle of aluminum against the porch roof. Trinity stepped quickly over the short hedge that bordered the walk to the front door. She grabbed for the tilted ladder and was almost pulled off her feet when its weight overcame her own. Her burned arm stung as its skin pulled taut, but Trinity didn’t let go. She strained against gravity and held on tight.
“Careful,” she called through gritted teeth.
The woman was thin, but still too much weight when combined with the ladder to allow Trinity to smooth the mat. Luckily, the woman was decisive and quick. She came down rung by slanted rung of the ladder as soon as Trinity gripped its sides to stop it mid-fall.
“I could have sworn I left that mat by the zinnia bed,” the woman said in the slightly breathless, slightly disgruntled voice of a person who has avoided a careless accident. Trinity didn’t assure her that she probably had. For all she knew, the woman was absentminded, but something about her neat denim jumpsuit and the pretty gardening gloves on her hands told a different story.
“The flowers are lovely,” she said instead, smiling. No one had been hurt. She had swiftly run her gaze over the woman’s appearance and it didn’t look like she’d suffered so much as a scrape, though a fall from that height would have resulted in serious injury.
The woman pulled off her gloves, returning Trinity’s smile as she pushed tendrils of auburn hair back from a lightly freckled face. She was startlingly beautiful with alabaster skin beneath the freckles and bone structure you’d normally see on the pages of a magazine.
“It’s work I enjoy,” she replied. Then she thrust one of her hands forward. “I’m Maddy Clark.”
Trinity was surprised to find the other woman’s hand perfectly smooth and manicured, her nails a lavender shellac. No wonder she wore gloves.
“I’m Trinity Chadwick,” she replied. Maddy didn’t mention the bandages peeking out from Trinity’s coat, but her clasp gentled when she saw them. Trinity appreciated the consideration and the tact.
