Beloved

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  He turned to her and smiled bleakly. "The story isn't finished. The man was lying in the hospital, heavily sedated and unaware that half a country away his wife had just slid off an icy highway into an embankment, when he had a sudden sense of almost euphoric joy. The room seemed to fill with a kind of whiteness ... a whitish light ... an awesome brightness ... and he was filled with just ... so much joy. Later, when he was clear of the sedation, he thought it must have been the drug. That's when he learned that his wife had died, and when."

  "Ah." It came out of Emily in a whisper, and there was nothing of triumph in it. But suddenly she understood the who, the what, the why, the where, the when. She understood it all perfectly. And in fairness, she couldn't blame the senator for trying to track down the source of that white light ever since. It was an extraordinary coincidence. Of course it was the sedative. But still.

  "So when you go to these sittings, you're" -- she was almost afraid to ask it -- "hoping to establish contact with your wife?"

  "Always, always hoping," he said with a sad shake of his head. "And always, always disappointed."

  Emily had to admit that wherever the voice that took over Kimberly had come from, it hadn't come from a beautiful concert pianist. "There'll be other sittings," she said softly, and amazed herself. So much for coming down hard on him. So much for the downtrodden taxpayer.

  She could see, even as she groped for the right thing to say, that he was forcing himself out of his condition of pain. He turned to her with that dazzling smile and those clear blue eyes, and ran his fingers through that shock of thick brown hair.

  "This is the part where you accuse me of having had a 'hypnagogic hallucination'," he suggested with a boyish grin.

  How did he do it? It was like turning on a charm spigot.

  "I didn't say that," she hedged, though she was thinking it.

  "You're supposed to tell me that ghosts are always spotted right after people go to bed or when they wake up."

  "Apparently you already know that," she said, still hedging.

  "Ah, what's the use?" he said suddenly, signaling for the check. "I've gone only to the best, and the best can't give me Nicole. I don't know why I continue to try."

  Because you loved her with a love that most women would kill for, thought Emily, and she was filled with a wistful envy for this Nicole, this fiercely determined wife and concert pianist. Emily had never loved that way, and she was absolutely certain she'd never be loved that way. She cared too much about her job, and her job demanded that she be clear-eyed and hard-edged. A clear-eyed woman saw all too many flaws in a man, and a hard-edged one turned most men off. If she wanted high romance in her life, she should've been a concert pianist. And, of course, rich.

  The senator had stood up to get Emily's chair for her. It was a charming -- or political -- bit of chivalry and it flustered her ever so slightly. She bobbed up suddenly, and her face ended up very near his.

  "Huh. Freckles," he said, focussing on the bridge of her nose. "For such dark eyes and hair, you have very fair skin."

  "I guess." Were freckles good or bad with these people? She suspected, bad.

  "--skin which I think is having an allergic reaction to the chain on your necklace." He traced a feather light but sizzling line across her collarbone, alongside the heavy chain. "There's a bit of a rash here."

  "Really?" she said, reaching up automatically to the spot. If there was a rash, it was impossible to separate it from the trail of heat he'd left behind. "I can't tell," she said with perfect honesty.

  "I'm not sure you want to keep on wearing that," he cautioned as he held the door open for her.

  "Keep up this kindness, and I'll be forced to vote for you after all," she teased. The fact was, she was feeling very vulnerable. Obviously the evening was taking some kind of emotional toll. The rational thing to do was to head home at all due speed.

  But still she dallied, there in the clear May night. "Senator--"

  "We've been through our first vocal trance together; call me Lee."

  "Senator," she persisted, ignoring the bantering request. "You didn't have to tell me all that you did tonight. I know that." She braced herself and threw out the next observation: "I guess I'm wondering why you did."

  "Why?" He sounded less puzzled than incredulous. "Is that the only word you know? 'Why'?"

  She'd never heard his how-dare-you tone before. Not that she wasn't familiar with it; most of the people she investigated eventually hauled it out and batted her over the head with it. But somehow she wanted Arthur Lee Alden III to be different. Somehow she was wrong.

  "What I mean is, you can't have told any but your most trusted friends and associates about your -- your vision, or I would've read about it somewhere. Why did you tell me, of all people?" Simple question; she thought it deserved a simple answer.

  He just stared at her, so she answered the question for him. "It's not just because tonight is off the record. I think it's becausee you were hoping to make me so sympathetic to your plight, so moved by it, that I'd back off investigating this side of your character. After all, I'm a woman; that's what women do -- sympathize. You took a big risk, Senator. You'd never have tried this with a man."

  "Geez, you're paranoid," he said at last.

  "Nosir. Not paranoid," she countered, throwing an index finger up in the air. "I just want to know why you told me."

  "Fine," he said angrily, his hand on the door of his BMW. "You want to know why?" He threw the door open. "I'll tell you why." He got in and slammed the door. He rolled down the window. "I don't know why. That's why."

  He turned the key, the engine jumped to life, and he roared off, leaving Emily alone with the strength of her convictions. Her chin was set, her breathing coming hard and fast. She'd just reduced a United States Senator to gibberish; it should've been a moment of triumph.

  But it wasn't, and all the way home she tried to fathom why. Eventually it all came down to this: she thought more of him for having the courage to face her laughter than she thought of herself for having the courage to laugh at him.

  It wasn't fair. Lee Alden had it all, including a good-old-boy understanding with the press not to expose his fanciful side. Even Stan Cooper left him alone. And yet not all politicians were immune to scrutiny. She thought of Gary Hart; she thought of John Tower. Somewhere someone had stood up and said, "Enough is enough." So why was there this reluctance to go after Lee Alden? Was it because when you did go up against him, you felt rotten about it? The way she was feeling now?

  Too bad, kiddo, she told herself with grim determination. Learn to live with it.

  By the time she squeezed her car into the lone space left on her street, Emily was bleary-eyed with exhaustion. It was well after midnight, but that wasn't the reason she was having to force one foot up the stairs past the other. She'd just spent a most unconventional evening, and she considered herself a very conventional girl. This kind of thing was more of a strain on her system than it was for Shirley MacLaine.

  She was weak with longing for her bed by the time she slipped her key into the dead bolt of her door. Muddled and impatient for sleep as she was, after she turned the key to the left and right she wasn't sure whether she'd even locked the door before dashing out that morning. Most likely not; it wouldn't have been the first time. She threw a switch on the living room wall. As always, her little condo looked perfectly happy to be what it was: a little condo. Everything was neat and tidy, because everything had no choice.

  Emily ran the place like a ship, which is why she noticed, even half-asleep, that one of the silver candlesticks on a small writing table was knocked over. Automatically she stood it back up; she must've hit it when she dumped her book-bag on the table that morning. She pulled open a louvered door to a tiny hall closet to hang her jacket inside, and wrinkled her nose. Tobacco. She stuck her face in the sleeve of her jacket, but now the smell eluded her. The Harvard professor, she remembered. A pipe smoker. The two were practically synonymous.

&
nbsp; Still, somewhere in the deepest part of her brain she was toting up the irregularities as she found them. She had long ago decided that messy people lacked a certain gene, which is what enabled them to live long and happy lives. Neat people, on the other hand, were always noticing things and worrying about them, just as she was doing now.

  When Emily went into her bathroom, she suddenly got a lot more worried.

  She was reaching for her nightgown behind the bathroom door when she saw that the jewelry box she kept on the top of a small bureau -- the little inlaid wooden jewelry box her brother had sent her from Korea -- had been thrown open and its three drawers pulled out and left that way. Short of fleeing an earthquake, Emily was incapable of having left that kind of mess behind. Shocked, she went through the box quickly and inventoried the few things she kept there. Coins, earrings, broken watches, her mother's wedding rings, an old charm bracelet-- all present. Frightened and relieved and very much awake, she thought: They took one look and decided it wasn't worth it.

  Mere bravado. Exactly four seconds after that thought, Emily had another: that they -- or he -- didn't actually finish the burglary. She ran back to her living room. The VCR was still there. The TV. The stereo. Oh, God. Oh, no. If they hadn't finished, where were they now? Had they been scared off by a neighbor in the hall? Were they trying to find a closer parking place for their van? Oh, God. They weren't in the kitchen. The kitchen opened out into the living room. She could see the kitchen. They weren't in the kitchen.

  She looked across to the bedroom, the dark, unlit bedroom. The bedroom with no wall switch, where the nearest light was a lamp on a dresser located exactly six and a half steps to the left of the door. The bedroom where to date the only phone was plugged into the only jack. She cursed the lamp, the phone, the darkness. She would not go in there.

  She would go to a neighbor instead -- Mr. Olafson, who had to get up at 5:30 for the commute to New Hampshire -- and bang on his door, and beg him to come to her apartment to find the burglar for her. He would ask if her door had been open. She would not be sure. He would ask what they took. She would say, "Nothing." He would ask why he, Mr. Olafson, was standing in the hall instead of lying in his bed.

  No, she could not go to Mr. Olafson.

  If this were a boarding house we'd have a pay phone at the end of the hall and I could call the police, she realized, furious with the management. But would she call the police?

  Mace! I have mace! Her brother the policeman had given it to her, a big, unwieldy can that she kept next to the Raid under the bathroom sink. She crept back into the bathroom, her heart hammering wildly and erratically in her breast, and took out the can of mace. She had practiced it a thousand times, grabbing the can so that the button fired away from her. But she grabbed it backwards anyway, and dropped it in her panic, and picked it up again, backwards again, and finally got it right side out, and marched out of the bathroom with it at arm's length, just in case she hadn't got it right after all.

  She stood in the lighted living room at the threshold to the bedroom, clutching her mace, her eyes failing completely to adjust to the darkness within. She took one step inside, then another. The air flowing from the bedroom was ocean-cold and damp; it wrapped itself around her like a Nantucket fog. A new and utterly horrifying sensation took hold of her. Inside her bedroom there was no burglar lying in wait. There wasn't even someone so comforting as a Boston Strangler. There was something else. Something more. Something worse. Her heart became absolutely still in her breast. She took one step back.

  The lamp was six and a half feet to the left, but she saw -- she was certain she saw -- a shadow move in the emerging dimness to the right. She aimed recklessly and fired; the wet hiss of mace managed to go somewhere other than her face. She saw someone leap away, heard his startled oath. Petrified, she fired again, this time sweeping the area. Again the figure leapt away, unaffected by it.

  "Jesus, woman! Put that thing away!"

  She knew the voice. Oh God, she knew the voice.

  "Kimberly," she whispered, frozen in terror.

  "Kimberly, my ass! I'm Fergus. Fergus O'Malley."

  Buy Emily's Ghost

  Embers Sample Chapter 1

  Antoinette Stockenberg

  "A deft blend of mystery and romance … sure to win more kudos."

  --Publishers Weekly

  To Meg Hazard, it seemed like a good idea at the time: squeezing her extended family into the back rooms of their rambling Victorian home and converting the rest of the house into a Bed and Breakfast in the coastal town of Bar Harbor, Maine. Paying guests are most welcome, but the arrival of a Chicago cop on medical leave turns out to be both good news and bad news for Meg and the Inn Between.

  Chapter 1

  Meg Hazard, shivering in the predawn chill, pulled the blanket up around her shoulders and said, "Money isn't everything, Allie."

  Her sister laughed derisively. "Oh, come on." She threw her head back in a way that profiled her long neck and thick black hair to perfection. "The only ones who say that are those who have it and those who don't. And I say, both sides are lying through their teeth." She pulled her knees up closer to her chest. "God, it's cold up here. Was it this cold when we were kids?"

  "Of course. We're on top of a mountain. In Maine. In June. You know the saying: In Maine there are two seasons —"

  "— winter and August. Mmm. I do know. Which is another reason I'll take a job anywhere but here. You can't make any real money in Maine, and meanwhile you freeze your buns off trying."

  Meg smiled and held one end of her blanket open. "Park your buns under the blanket with me, then. I told you to bring something warm."

  She glanced around at the dozens of tourists sharing the rocky summit with them. Some were murmuring; some were silent. All were waiting. "The sun will be up in precisely — four minutes," Meg said, peering at her watch.

  The two sisters huddled together under the pale pink sky, their breaths mingling, their minds in tune.

  "Tell me why, exactly, I let you talk me into this again?" Allie asked.

  Meg laughed softly and said, "I was just thinking about that. You were five and I was seventeen when I brought you up here the first time. You were so excited, you forgot your Thermos of hot chocolate. I had to drive us back for it —"

  "— and Dad woke up and said we were crazy and if Mom were alive she'd give us what for —"

  "— and then, when we finally got up here, you were mad because we weren't the only ones on Cadillac Mountain, so how could we possibly be the first ones in the whole U.S. to see the sun that day?"

  "You told me we would be, Meg. I distinctly remember."

  "So you stood up and told all the other tourists to please close their eyes because you wanted to be first."

  Allegra Atwells looked away with the same roguish smile that had melted every single male heart that had ever come within fifty feet of it.

  And then she threw off her blanket, stood up, and shouted at the top of her lungs: "Would everyone please close their eyes so that I can finally be the first one to see the sun rise in the United States? I'm from Bar Harbor, folks. I live here."

  Virtually every tourist there turned in surprise to gape at her. Meg groaned and buried her face in her hands, and when she looked up again, a thin sliver of bright gold had popped up into the now blood-red sky, casting the first of its rays across Frenchman's Bay below.

  Allie Atwells had probably got her wish.

  "Twenty-five, and still the same," Meg said, leaning back on the palms of her hands and looking up at her sister with a kind of rueful admiration.

  Allie stood defiantly on the rocky outcrop with her hands on her hips. The rising wind whipped her long black hair across her face and pressed the white shirt she wore against her shapely breasts. Her face — even in the early morning sun, even without makeup, even after an all-nighter spent deep in gossip — was cover-girl gorgeous, the kind that modeling agencies would kill to represent.

  "Of course
I'm still the same! How can I be anything else?" Allie said, throwing her arms up melodramatically. "I've been stuck in this god- forsaken corner of the country all my life. I haven't been anywhere, done anything, met anyone ... Thanks to your nagging, I've done nothing but work and study, work and study, work and study."

  Meg laughed. "And now here you are, six years, four apartments, two majors, and eleven part-time —"

  "Twelve," Allie said with a wry look. "You forget -- I worked for a week at the front desk of the Budgetel before you talked me into coming home for the summer."

  "I did that because finding a full-time job is a full-time job. Anyway, twelve part-time jobs later, and you have a degree. Think of it, Allie," Meg said, motioning to her to sit back down beside her. "A degree." She threw one arm around her sister and pressed her forehead to Allie's temple.

  "The first one in the family; we're all so proud of you."

  "Oh, Meg," the younger girl said modestly. "It's not as if it's from Cornell's hotel school. It's no big deal. I still have to start at a pathetic wage in an entry-level job. A degree doesn't make me any better than you or Lloyd. It only means I didn't marry young the way you two did."

  "Yeah, and I know why," Meg said with an ironic smile. "Because the minute you say yes to someone, ninety-nine other men are sure to cut their throats, and you can't bear the thought of all that blood on your hands."

  Allie's violet eyes turned a deeper shade of perfection. "That isn't why I've never married, Meg, you know that," she said in a soft voice. "I just haven't found the right one."

  Meg sighed heavily and said, "Whereas I, on the other hand, married my one and only suitor — and then lost him."

  Allie shook her head. "Paul wasn't the right one for you, Meg. You know he wasn't."

  Meg's brow twitched in a frown, but then suddenly she smiled and said: "Was too."