Cross My Heart
by Natalie Vivien
“Cross My Heart”
© Natalie Vivien 2015
Rose and Star Press
Smashwords Edition
First Edition
All rights reserved
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Synopsis:
Alexandra Dark lives a commitment-free life. In pursuit of lost treasure, she travels the world as an archaeologist, and it's her policy to never put down roots--and to never linger for long in any woman's bed.
But when her sister convinces her to flip a rundown house in Niagara Falls, Alex finds herself caught in the middle of a mystery, and she's too curious to leave town before the case is solved.
With sexy librarian--and amateur ghost hunter--Trudy Strange by her side, Alex attempts to unravel the clues hidden in the hundred-year-old house, and to restructure her long-held beliefs about life, love, and everything after.
In their quest to reveal the secrets haunting the old Victorian, Alex and Trudy uncover a long-buried romance--and succumb, mind, body and soul, to the intense feelings that they have for each other. But will their new-found trust be strong enough to protect them from the dark force lurking, lying in wait?
CROSS MY HEART is a sexy, funny, romantic romp, a tribute to the healing power of love.
Dedication:
B. Yours forever. Cross my heart. N.
Chapter One
“Welcome to Bean Power! Would you like to try our new Mega Mondo Mochaccino, ma’am?”
As I regard the barista with bleary, jet-lagged eyes and try to make sense of his alliteration, my sunglasses slip down a notch, causing the coffee shop to appear half sepia-toned and half bright, clashing Technicolor. The walls are tiled with green and orange glass squares, and there’s a pink paper bunting strung up behind the coffee bar area proclaiming BEAN POWER in die-cut turquoise letters. The staff is outfitted in tie-dye t-shirts and acid-washed jeans, and at the center of every table, lava lamps ooze glowy purple globs.
“Mega what?” I ask, squinting and shoving my shades back into place. I wobble on my legs a little, still queasy from the flight.
“Mondo Mochaccino! Quite the tongue-twister, I know.” The barista’s grin is sweeter, I’d wager, than that bottle of Sugar-Shock Syrup sitting on the shelf above his shoulder. “It’s infused with our brand-new Choco-Wow blend, six shots of espresso, topped off with shaved dark chocolate and a swirl of caramel. Best of all, it comes in a refillable—and recyclable—48-ounce cup. All you can drink!” He holds up a hand and begins ticking items off. “We’ve recently expanded our milk offerings, so I can make you the Mega Mondo Mochaccino with cow’s milk, non-fat cow’s milk, goat’s milk, soy milk, almond milk, rice milk, coconut milk, hemp milk—”
“No, no, thanks. No milk. No Mondo Choco…anything. Please.” I grimace and try to ignore the roiling feeling in my stomach. The scents of onion-and-cheese paninis on the grill, sickly sweet beverages, and patchouli incense waft heavily around me.
My stomach shudders, and I close my eyes, willing the nausea away.
And I promise myself, not for the first time, that I am never traveling by plane again.
There’s a reason I’ve dedicated my life to archaeology. Digging in the earth, I feel peaceful, grounded. Safe. The sky and I, on the other hand, don’t get along so well. My first plane ride, when I was three years old, resulted in a two-bucket mop-up of the center aisle of first class. And things got significantly worse for the unlucky attendants assigned to my flights as the years wore on.
When I was fourteen, I threw up on the bald head of the man seated in front of me—who just happened to be the field manager of my father’s dig site in Cairo. The guy had no patience for children and was, oddly enough, a little superstitious. He held a grudge against Dad for bringing me to Egypt for years, blaming my presence on the disappointing site excavation. Apparently my poetry-reading, black-clad teenage self scared the undiscovered relics away.
But I definitely broke my personal nausea record on this last flight: five bulging “courtesy bags” handed over to the flight attendant before the plane touched ground at Buffalo Niagara International Airport. I wince now, remembering the pained expression on the flight attendant’s face when I pressed the call button yet again to summon her to dispose of my sick. The woman seated next to me will probably have a permanent crick in her neck from leaning so hard away from my retching self.
It’ll be a long, long time before I consume solid food again…or anything thicker than coffee. I probably shouldn’t even drink the coffee, but I’ve got a hard day ahead of me, and I’m operating on Egyptian time and about six minutes of sleep.
“Gonna pass on the special, huh?” The barista’s smile dims from 1,000 watts to a muted 800, but it’s still wide enough that my own cheek muscles begin to ache in sympathy. “All right. No big. There’s always next time. Well, what can I get for you today, ma’am?”
I draw my wallet out of my bag—or I try to, but my sleepy hands produce my passport, a magnifying glass, a rolled-up gum wrapper, and a packet of tissues in slow succession. The barista continues to gaze at me with infinite, inhuman patience. When I finally locate my wallet—an old embroidered pouch that Dad bought for me in Peru—I unzip it and dig out a crinkled five-dollar bill. “I need coffee. Just coffee—”
“Of course! Just coffee. A good old cup of Joe. I’ll have that right up for you.” He taps a button on the cash register in front of him; then he lifts his eyes to meet mine, tilting his head of long bottle-green hair to one side. “So,” he smiles, “would you prefer the Sumatra blend, the Tuscan blend, the Parisian Crème, the Desert Siesta—”
“Sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. But, honestly, I don’t care what you put in my cup, as long as it’s as thin as water and as strong as hell. Okay?”
“Oh…” He looks startled for a moment, but then his shoulders relax, and his mouth slides into a more natural-looking smirk. “Ohhh-kay, the Desert Siesta it is.” He chuckles to himself and leans toward me conspiratorially. “Hey, don’t tell the boss, but my co-workers and I call this blend Puddle, because it looks and tastes like a mud puddle in a coffee cup. How’s that sound? Up your alley?”
“Yeah, perfect.” I sigh, but the sigh turns, of its own accord, into a yawn. I shake my head again, widening my eyes to try to force them to stay open.
“Want it black?”
“Please.” I accept my change and anxiously await the presentation of my scalding hot, mud-puddly beverage. It’s been twelve hours since I’ve consumed caffeine in any form, and my body—and brain—are staging an internal civil war. Tomorrow, I keep telling myself. Tomorrow I can sleep in.
Or, hey, maybe I’ll sleep all day long. The thought of sleep is so enticing that my muscles begin to sag; I lean against the order counter to help me stay on my feet.
Get it together, Alex. Today… Today there’s mortgage paperwork to sign, a dilapidated house to make superficially inhabitable, a life to start over from, more or less, square one.
Part of me is excited to begin again, to reinvent myself in a new place. But a deeper part of me is already missing the desert and the untethered lifestyle that I chose to leave behind.
There’s no need to feel trapped, though—or so I’ve been telling myself over and over again, ever since I made th
at fateful call to Rainbow Realty. This is only temporary. Everything in life—my life, anyway—is temporary, just another crazy venture before the next crazy venture.
“Are you on your way to the falls?” the barista asks over his shoulder, as he begins to fill my brown paper cup at the coffee station. “Where are you staying?”
God, I must look like a tourist. I’m wearing a neon pink Niagara Falls t-shirt, purchased hastily at the airport gift shop after I realized that the airline lost my luggage somewhere between Cairo and New York. I felt too grungy to face the world in my rumpled clothes, and this t-shirt was the only one in my size in the bargain bin at NY Souvenirs For You—and it still cost twenty-five bucks.
“Actually,” I say, smiling faintly, “I just bought a house here, over on Cascade Avenue.”
“Cascade?” The barista’s eyebrows raise—and it’s not a good kind of a raise, not a “Wow, that’s impressive! Way to go!” raise. It’s the sort of two-brow raise that people give you when you come out of the bathroom with your skirt tucked into your pantyhose waistband.
He lowers his gaze for a moment, as if he’s trying to think of something positive to say, but the best he can conjure up is, “You sure it’s Cascade? Not Carver or—I don’t know—Christenson? Cascade… Last I heard, that whole street was condemned.”
“Really?” I blink; then I frown, doubtful. “Can a street be condemned?”
“When it’s Cascade Avenue, it can,” he replies dryly. In one practiced motion, he fills my cup to the rim without spilling a drop and reaches for a biodegradable lid. “Man, the stories I’ve heard about that road—”
“What kind of stories?”
He stares at me uncertainly, a lopsided grin playing over his lips. “Well, you've got the news reports—about drug deals and gangs. But then there's the weird stuff. Buddy of mine tried squatting in one of the abandoned houses there, this big Victorian with a purple door—”
“A purple door?” Eyes widening, I clear my throat and lean in a little closer, fingers gripping the edge of the countertop. “Yeah? So, what happened?”
“He didn’t make it through the night. Around eleven, Mike showed up at my apartment, white as a freaking ghost. Said he saw a ghost floating down the staircase.”
“He saw a—what?” I take a step back from the counter and reflexively cross my arms over my chest, covering up the blaring Niagara Falls logo. “Wait. You mean… He claims the house is haunted?”
“Hey, I don’t know. Mike’s a pretty straight-up guy, and he was genuinely scared, so...” The barista pauses and stares at me, green hair dangling in front of his eyes. “Hold on. Oh, no way. Don’t tell me you bought the Victorian with the purple door?”
I bite my lip and, reluctantly, nod my head. “Afraid so.” I force a smile, shrugging my shoulders slightly, and then I uncross my arms, positioning my hands on my hips. “But I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Ah, the Scully type.”
“Hmm?”
“You’re a skeptic, huh?”
I draw in a slow breath, considering. “I’m a scientist. And I’ve never experienced convincing evidence of anything paranormal—”
The barista laughs. “Definitely a Scully type. Well, for your sake, I hope you can remain a nonbeliever. Because seriously? I’ve never seen anyone so scared in my life. Poor guy. He’s still afraid to sleep with the lights off. Bought him a Snoopy nightlight for his birthday as a gag gift. All right, here’s your Puddle.”
I yawn again as the barista hands me my coffee in a cardboard sleeve illustrated with an anthropomorphized coffee bean proclaiming, “Try our new Mega Mondo Mochaccino! It’s Mega Mondo delicious!” The coffee bean’s wearing a tie-dyed t-shirt, like the ones the coffee shop employees wear, with stick-figure arms popping out of his short sleeves. I vaguely recall having seen his likeness on one of the billboards the cab drove me past on the trip here from the airport. With that sort of a publicity campaign, this café must be part of a chain. Starbucks has a mermaid logo; Bean Power has a hippie coffee bean. Makes sense, I guess.
“Enjoy your Desert Siesta.”
“I’ve had my fill of the desert for a while,” I say, offering the barista a watery smile. “But thanks for the coffee.”
My tired feet shuffle me out of the café and into the warm, bright afternoon air. It’s early autumn, and the trees lining the street have just begun to lose their green; their veins and tips are smudged with scarlet and gold. I’ve been overseas, bound in every direction by desert dunes for so long, that I’d forgotten about autumn, about seasons.
I’d forgotten about a lot of things.
Shaking my head again—to wake myself up as much as to chase away unwelcome thoughts—I start walking along the narrow, unkempt sidewalk. The house is within walking distance of the café. I’d asked the taxi driver to drop me off in this shopping plaza, about half a mile from my final destination, because I wanted to come upon my new residence slowly, not suddenly. I wanted to be able to take it in inch by inch, as if I were unearthing a potsherd or a little statue from the dirt.
Corny as it sounds, I want to discover it, like the proverbial diamond in the rough. As much as I protest that I’m a scientist, that I am, heart and soul, my practical-minded father’s daughter, I’d be lying if I denied inheriting some of my mother’s romanticism. Over the years, I’ve published hundreds of articles and contributed dozens of artifacts to worldwide museums, but part of me is still hoping to find it—that big, huge discovery, an undeniable treasure, tantamount to King Tut’s tomb or Mary Anning’s prehistoric revelations on the English seacoast.
But when I turn left onto Cascade Avenue—taking in the hollowed-out factories and vacant lots littered with trash—and come upon the two-story Victorian a few minutes later, its angular shape set back several feet from the road and shadowed by pines with untamed, shaggy branches, the word treasure doesn’t immediately—or even eventually—come to mind. I’m so stunned by the sight that the coffee cup slips out of my grasp; muddy brown coffee pours from the lid, staining the broken sidewalk and splashing on my boots. No great loss there: my boots were already filthy. I should toss them, I know, but they’ve crossed the globe with me, my only consistent traveling companions, and I’ve grown a little sentimental about the smelly old things.
“Welcome…home?” I whisper, my voice gravelly with disbelief and more than a little alarm.
I haven’t drunk enough caffeine to deal with this. Part of me wants to just turn away, hail another cab, and high-tail it back to the airport, buy a plane ticket for anywhere—anywhere else—and to hell with my airsickness. But my curiosity gets the better of me, and I take a step closer, tilting my head back to peer up at the odd, rusty weathervane on the shingled roof. It almost looks like…a dinosaur?
I’d only seen three photos of the property before purchasing it—all of them faraway, aerial views, taken by helicopter, I guess—and none of those photos prepared me for this brittle, toppling-over reality. Frankly, I’m shocked that the place hasn’t surrendered to entropy yet.
The house looks sad, sagging at every window frame. The windows themselves are boarded up, and the black shutters are hanging loose, like dangling teeth. The purple paint on the door is peeling, revealing old, grim-looking bloodred stains. I’m not even sure what color the siding is supposed to be—pink? Purple? A sort of rust-tinged mauve?
I knew I was buying a money pit—and buying is, honestly, a wild exaggeration, because the sum total of my new mortgage amounts to a single dollar bill. One dollar… And it’s a steal for a dollar, considering the lush half-acre backyard, with a vacant overgrown lot behind it. My sister, who lives with her husband over the border in Toronto, told me about the Home-for-a-Dollar program about a year ago. It’s an initiative of Niagara County to encourage homebuyers to fix up houses in depressed areas, thus increasing the overall neighborhood appeal. I’d laughed about the idea—at first. I’ve never been a domestic, put-down-roots sort of person, and I’ve taken pride
in the fact that, despite my thirty-six years on the planet, I’ve yet to possess my own permanent address.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this housing program could be my next grand adventure. After years in the field, I craved a pause, a break—and it had to be a working break, because I can’t stand sitting still, sipping margaritas on a beach or watching television marathons. I really wish I could relax like a normal person, but my brain’s too frenetic: I’m hoping to fix up this place and flip it for a big profit within a couple of weeks. Or, given my utter lack of carpentry and electric and plumbing skills…maybe it’ll take a few months. Six months, tops. And after that… Well, I’ll worry about after that later. It’s my personal policy to put off worrying until the last possible moment—or, hell, just avoid it altogether.
“Ms. Dark?”
“Hmm?” Startled from my thoughts, I turn around, brows narrowed, to face a harried-looking woman wearing an ankle-length skirt and a wrinkled blouse beneath a long knitted sweater. A battered briefcase swings in her grasp as she walks toward me, taking long, quick steps. Her gray hair is drawn up into a messy topknot, and there’s a ketchup-colored stain on her collar. But her smile is effortlessly warm and genuine. I return it, reaching out to take her hand.
“Hi. I’m guessing you’re from Rainbow Realty—”
“Yes, yes, Ms. Dark. My name is Marie Rosenfeld—please, call me Marie—and I’m so sorry that I’m late. There was a pileup on Robert Moses, and it took ages to sort it all out. I counted six police cars and two fire trucks, but no ambulances, thank the Goddess. I always try to be early to my appointments, I promise you, but sometimes, well, fate intervenes.” She pauses to shove a loose gray lock behind her ear, clear blue eyes shining above the rim of her wire-frame glasses. “So, how was your flight?”
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