Serena Mckee's Back In Town

by Marie Ferrarella

  Sheffield, who was as old as he was and was built like a rock, would shake his head as he looked at him. “Or maybe just soft?”

  It would all be in fun, but Cameron didn’t want it at his expense. He wasn’t quite ready to admit that he wasn’t still a kid just yet. At least not when it came to being agile.

  He came away from the car and eyed the fence. It seemed taller to him now that he was older.

  Just his imagination again.

  He wrapped his hands around the wrought-iron stakes, debated the wisdom of this undertaking one last time, then started up.

  “I’ve got to be crazy,” he muttered under his breath as he climbed up and then over.

  There was a twinge in his shoulder blades, not to mention his back, as he jumped down on the other side. He could feel the jolt when he reached the ground all the way from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.

  Sheffield was right. He had to get down to the gym more often, Cameron admonished himself as he made his way up the winding paved path toward the house. He was too young to feel like this.

  Though he knew that a gardening service was supposed to come up here once a month to tend to the property, the weeds were reaching out hoary dark green fingers to obliterate the pavement. Someone wasn’t doing the job he was being paid to do.

  Cameron pressed his hand to the ache in his back. And he was doing too much. He was going to enjoy putting a scare into those kids for this, he thought.

  The door was locked when he tried it. That never stopped kids from getting in. They were getting more and more resourceful these days, he mused.

  Just listen to him—he was beginning to sound like his own father. Rachel was right. He needed to get out more. Tomorrow night, he would take Martinez up on his offer, aching body or no aching body.

  Maybe there was someone out there who could make him forget about the ache.

  Listening for any unusual noise, Cameron began to pick the lock. Whoever was inside was guilty of trespassing.

  What did that make him? he thought, amused, as he heard the click that told him the lock was open. An upholder of the law, he concluded.

  He’d always liked the sound of that. It beat the hell out of being caught on the other side.

  Easing the door open, Cameron slipped in quietly, determined to put the fear of God into whoever was here tonight.

  He felt for his service revolver, just in case the trespasser turned out to be not some teenager, but someone who had decided to use McKee Hill as a hiding place from the law.

  Serena McKee ran her hands along her arms and stifled the shiver that overtook her.

  It was colder here than she remembered. Even in August, it felt cold. Despite the fact that her mother saw to it that the house was constantly being renovated and upgraded, it had somehow always managed to absorb whatever drafts there were and take that chill into its walls.

  Or maybe it had just been the way she felt about growing up here, the chill being a by-product of the atmosphere her mother, Carolyn, with her cutting remarks and sharp tongue, had always generated.

  If it hadn’t been for her father...

  Her father.

  Serena felt moisture gather in her eyes and wiped it away with the back of her hand. She had thought she was years past crying by now.

  It had to do with being here again. That, and Aunt Helen’s request which throbbed in her mind like an endless migraine.

  Part of her had been afraid to return, to face this house again. To face the ghosts that she had managed ,to tuck away so neatly.

  But she couldn’t put it off any longer. Even if she hadn’t been having those dreams lately—the dreams that made her feel that there was something she had overlooked, something important—she had promised Aunt Helen that she would return. Return and find a way to absolve her father of the heinous crime that was attached to his name for all eternity.

  She couldn’t clear Jon McKee while she was in Dallas. She had to return to where it had all happened and hope that the passage of eleven years hadn’t made the task impossible.

  Being here was harder than she’d thought. An inexplicable fear hopscotched through her, ready to spring up at her from within each dark room.

  Serena forced herself to walk through them now, turning on lights. She had called ahead before leaving Dallas and had both the telephone and the electricity turned on. Serena had absolutely no desire to spend her first night back here in the dark.

  It wasn’t that she believed in things that went bump in the night, or in ghosts, for that matter. Her father’s daughter, she was far too logical for that.

  But the house was full of memories, most of them unpleasant. Especially those memories of the last night she had spent here. It was going to take every ounce of strength she had to lock them away and remain here. To do what she had promised to do.

  To do, she now knew, what she needed to do, if she was ever going to have any peace of mind. She had to find out the truth once and for all, in order to place not only her father’s restless spirit to rest, but her own, as well.

  The house had gone to Aunt Helen after her father’s death. Whether because Aunt Helen couldn’t or wouldn’t rent it out, there had never been any boarders here. The only people who had passed through the door downstairs after the police were through with it were the people from the cleaning service, who arrived once a month to keep the place from falling into complete ruin.

  Didn’t do a very good job of it, Serena thought as the pale light she turned on illuminated the small upstairs study. Granted, the house was large, but all the cleaning crew had to do was chase the dust away.

  It wasn’t as if someone were living here, making a mess for them to clean up.

  That hadn’t happened even while she was growing up here. Her mother had absolutely forbidden it. Everything had always had to be in its place, whether it was a book, a newspaper or clothing. Nothing was allowed to be left out or carelessly tossed aside. The house had always been pristine. A legion of housekeepers had been hired and then fired because they couldn’t live up to Carolyn McKee’s critical standards.

  No one could.

  A noise from downstairs made Serena jerk her head toward the stairs. She strained, listening carefully. Nothing.

  Just her nerves, she thought, nothing more.

  Small wonder, being here again. She’d been the first one on the scene that night. The first one to see her mother sprawled out on the floor, a victim of her father’s heated anger. The first one to see her father, a crumpled heap by the bedroom door. Serena had spent the past eleven years trying to wipe that memory from her mind. Anyone would be jumpy under those circumstances.

  But just when she’d convinced herself that she was imagining it, Serena thought she heard the sound again. It was a noise she couldn’t quite describe. Something scraping against the hardwood floors?

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  There was definitely someone downstairs. No one had a right to be, but at the moment she wasn’t exactly in the position to argue the finer points of trespassing.

  She had to protect herself.

  Looking around for a weapon, Serena saw the rusted old poker leaning against the fireplace. She grabbed it quickly. The feel of the metal, made rough by time and inactivity, evoked a memory. If she closed her eyes, Serena could see her father poking at the embers with it, trying to keep a fire going as he told her yet another story. He’d always been so good with her....

  For a second, she thought of calling the police, then decided against it. What if it was just some stray animal that had somehow managed to get into the house? She didn’t want to announce her return by having the police come out on a wild-goose chase. It would take very little for someone to interpret the call as being hysterical. Above all else, she wanted to avoid that label, especially in light of what she was setting out to do.

  There was going to be enough opportunity for ridicule as it was.

  Besides, she had no desire to see anyone f
rom the police department right now, even if Uncle Dan turned out to be still on the force. She’d seen enough of them here that night.

  Serena wondered if Dan Olson, her father’s best friend, was still active on the police force as she made her way slowly to the stairs. She kept her back against the wall, her right hand wrapped tightly around the poker. The sound was coming from the front of the house, near the formal living room. At least she thought it was coming from there. The house was over six thousand square feet, an overly large white elephant that had suited the pretentiousness of her mother. It had never lent itself to being a home.

  Especially not in the six months that her father lived away from them, when her parents had been separated. They had been the most awful months of her life.

  Except for one night, she amended.

  She felt along the wall for the light switch. Maybe she had been crazy to return like this. The chairman of the English department had certainly thought so when she announced she was taking a six month sabbatical to come here. But then, Alan still thought he could convince her to marry him.

  He didn’t understand that something within her was dead, and had been for a very long time. Maybe it would always remain that way.

  But maybe, if she fulfilled her promise to Aunt Helen, if she found evidence to clear her father’s name, that would change.

  At least she could hope that it would.

  After an eternity, her fingers finally came into contact with the switch. She flipped it. The chandelier in the foyer came to life, casting pale, yellowed illumination about the surrounding area.

  “Whoever you are,” Serena called out, raising her voice and hoping it wouldn’t crack or shake, “you’re trespassing. This is my house. You’ve got exactly two minutes to get out of here before the police arrive. I’ve already called them.”

  The voice echoed in the next room, coming to him in a wave.

  It couldn’t be, Cameron thought, stepping out from the living room.

  And yet, although he hadn’t heard the sound of her voice in eleven years, he knew it was Serena. He wondered if it was possible to have a dream while wide awake.

  He looked up as he came to the foot of the stairs and saw her, frozen in midstep, halfway up. His heart forgot how to beat.

  “Serena?”

  The sound of his voice startled her. His appearance did even more so. All these years, she had refused to think, refused to remember. It had seemed better that way.

  She had no choice now.

  Chapter 2

  It took a moment for her heart to stop hammering. It was pounding so loud, she thought she wouldn’t be able to hear her own voice. Not that she had the power of speech. Seeing him standing there seemed to have knocked the air out of her lungs.

  Trying to regain her composure, Serena remained where she stood, her hand gripping the once sleek wooden banister for support. Her knees weren’t quite up to the job at the moment.

  When she arrived in Bedford this afternoon expecting to confront ghosts from her past, Cameron hadn’t been among them. Over the years, she’d made a monumental effort to remove all traces of him from her life, the way he had so obviously removed all traces of her from his.

  But the way her heart was racing now, no longer from anticipation or from fear, but just from the very sight of him, Serena knew that not numbering him among the specters from her past had been a lie.

  How many more lies were there here?

  She took a breath, smothering the gasp that clawed at her throat. “Cameron?” It came out a breathless whisper.

  The sound of his name on her lips wafted in the air. Cameron nodded slowly, feeling like someone trapped within the invisible walls of a dream.

  Was it a dream?

  She’d haunted enough of his in the beginning, and she haunted a few even now, on occasion. And he’d been tired tonight, bone-tired. But Cameron didn’t remember falling asleep. Had he?

  Not a single muscle flinched as he said her name, the word still framed in disbelief. “Serena.”

  They sounded so civilized, he thought, so polite, like two distant acquaintances meeting by chance in the street, instead of the people they really were. our, he amended silently, the people they had once been.

  Slowly, who and what he was nudged forward in his consciousness. He had a right, a duty, to be here that transcended anything he might or might not be feeling personally.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked firmly.

  His eyes were cold, hard, dissecting. She remembered other eyes, eyes filled with love, with tenderness. Had he really looked at her like that once, or was that, too, something she had just imagined? Serena honestly didn’t know.

  The steel-like determination that had begun to take form the day after she left town in a flurry of heartache and shame had Serena raising her chin. “I could ask you the same thing.”

  He heard the hint of antagonism in her voice and wondered at it. He knew what might have changed her, what had changed her, but he still didn’t understand how it had managed to come between them, when he didn’t want it to.

  Unable to trust his own response, Cameron answered her like a policeman. “I was driving by the house, I saw lights on. I thought maybe some teenagers had broken in again.”

  “Again?”

  Cameron’s words took her aback. Though the house had remained empty all these years, she’d never thought of someone breaking in, perhaps even defiling what had once been her house. When she thought of it at all, she’d always imagined it isolated, shrouded, as if some invisible force were overseeing the house, keeping it just the way it had once been. Before everything changed. She didn’t like thinking of it as being vulnerable. As vulnerable as she had once been.

  Serena pressed her lips together, slowly looking around as she descended the stairs. “Do they break in often?”

  “Often enough.” Cameron studied her face as she drew closer, looking for traces of the girl within the woman. He thought, just for a second, that he caught a glimpse of her, but then she was gone. Probably just wishful thinking on his part. “Some of the kids think it’s a test of manhood, to spend the night in the haunted house.”

  Haunted. By the spirits of her mother and father? Serena just couldn’t picture it, couldn’t think of her parents that way. They’d been flesh and blood people to her, not spirits that others wove ghosts stories around.

  Distancing herself even more, Serena moved past Cameron, looking around the vaulted living room, trying to see the house through someone else’s eyes. Someone who only knew the story second- or third-hand.

  “They think it’s haunted?” she whispered, more to herself than to him. She set the poker aside, by the fireplace. “That’s so awful.”

  For a moment, he had to struggle against the urge to reach out to her. Even after years of hurt, he still wanted to touch her, to comfort her. Some people, he supposed, just never learned.

  “The younger ones do,” he answered matter-of-factly. “It adds color to the town.”

  For an unguarded moment, as she took his words in, emotions washed over her face. And then it hardened. Cameron watched in silent fascination. She’d changed, he thought. The innocence that he’d once loved was gone. Not the flower of innocence she’d given him—which despite everything, he would always treasure—but the innocence that had shone in her eyes even after their night together.

  That had been ripped away from her by the two people who were entrusted with protecting it, with protecting her. They had placed themselves above the daughter they had brought into the world together and given no thought to what they were destroying with their selfish, thoughtless actions.

  The intensity with which the old anger flared up within his chest took him by surprise. Cameron snuffed it out immediately.

  There was no point in going over that now. For years he had blamed them for what had been stolen from him by that gross dual act. But you couldn’t have stolen from you something you never really had to begin with. If Se
rena had loved him the way he loved her, she would have answered the letters he sent her through her family’s lawyer. She would have found a way to reach him.

  He hadn’t gone anywhere.

  Serena turned around suddenly, her eyes searching Cameron’s face. Why did he have to turn up her first night back, she thought. If he couldn’t have been there for her then, why was he here now, intruding in her life, in her mind?

  “Why would you come back here?” she asked, her tone challenging. “Why would you come by to investigate?”

  Did he still drive by here? she couldn’t help wondering. Often? Did he think of her? Was there still some part of him who was that boy she had once loved so dearly?

  No, she couldn’t think like that again. She’d made up her mind eleven years ago never to lean on anyone, never to trust anyone, never to love anyone to that degree again. Her father, the man she had all but worshiped, had abandoned her by killing her mother and then himself. And then Cameron had abandoned her, never calling, never getting in contact with her, even though she wrote to him.

  For a long time, she’d thought she would die from the pain. She had wanted to.

  But she hadn’t. She’d lived. And become stronger, learning from the lesson that had been so cruelly taught her: Never allow yourself to be vulnerable. Never relinquish power over yourself to anyone. If she had control of her life, no one could ever shatter it again.

  She’d never been able to reconstruct it the way it had once been, but she had made something of her life, of herself, and she intended to keep that life intact. That meant keeping people out. Especially Cameron.

  Serena stood waiting for his answer.

  He gave it as if he were conducting a press conference. “It’s part of my job.”

  At first, she didn’t comprehend, and then the meaning of Cameron’s words registered. “You’re on the police force?”

  Even as she asked it, Serena expected him to say no. A policeman was the very last thing she would ever have thought Cameron Reed would become. He’d been branded wild as a teenager. Almost as wild as his darkly brooding friend, Kirk Callaghan. They’d both come from a world far different from hers.