by Mary Bowers
“Dead to the world,” Poppy said, not needing to explain that she was still talking about Claire Ford.
“And with looks like hers, what a waste!”
“If I looked like Kim Novak, I’d know what to do with my assets. I wouldn’t walk around all day looking hypnotized.”
“Well,” Rosie said grudgingly, “she is a widow. And the husband popped off not too long ago, right?”
Her sister nodded, chewing. “Right after they closed on the house. They were supposed to move into it together and he didn’t make it. Heart attack. Sad. Still, she’s not getting any younger. Fifty if she’s a day.”
“Forty-eight.”
Poppy didn’t even ask how Rosie knew. Between them, the twins knew a lot.
“Forty-eight ain’t young. Technically, it’d make her a cougar, in the right situation, which she’d never get into, because she’s not looking for it, but if she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life alone, she’d better get back in the game.”
“And the hell of it is, I think Mr. Ryder is really interested in her.”
“He is. Oh, he is.”
They both paused to ravish Daniel Ryder in feverish images. They had seen him taking off for his run on the beach many times, naked to the waist and glistening, the corded muscles of his legs working powerfully, the chiseled line of his jaw tense with raw determination, his face nakedly expressing the tortures of his soul. Not much chest hair, just enough to tickle, and no back hair at all. Unbeknownst to one another, they had both endowed him with streaming, waist-length hair instead of the white crew cut he really wore, along with a Scottish warrior’s kilt instead of beach baggies. Out of the crimson mists of imagination, his turquoise eyes blazed at them in secret agony.
“Hot,” Rosie said.
“Oh yeah,” Poppy agreed, and she didn’t mean the weather.
They drank Coke with synchronized precision, then reached into the potato chip bag at the same time, managing not to get their hands tangled. They’d been doing it all their lives.
“He’s sympathetic, at least. He seems distant, but you can see that he cares.”
“Yes. Yes he does. A real gentleman. A hero,” she added, not knowing why, because she really knew nothing about him. Though they’d been cleaning his house the entire five years he’d lived in Santorini, he’d hardly spoken twenty words to them. “You can see he’s retired military. Special forces.”
“Definitely.”
“Not one for a lot of words, but when we told him about The Missus last week, he was concerned. You could see it.”
“Yes you could.”
He lived directly across the street from Edson Darby-Deaver, and they’d be cleaning his house the next morning. It always made Tuesday mornings just a little bit magical, and made up a little for the creepiness of Tuesday afternoons, when they had to go into Miss Frieda’s house.
They bit into their sandwiches in tandem.
Chapter 4
Edson was troubled the rest of the day. He liked the Brinkers, in the dispassionate way you like neighbors you don’t know intimately. He’d been secretly happy for them when Frieda had finally released them and gone her way to whatever awaits, and finding that she wouldn’t go away after all was disappointing – but exciting. A lot of wild stories came his way, but legitimate hauntings were rare.
But that was selfish. He wasn’t doing this for himself. He was doing it for Ben and Dolores. And assuming her soul had bound itself to this plane for the wrong reasons, he was doing it for Frieda, too. He’d send her on her way, whether she wanted to go or not.
He had resources. He had contacts. If he couldn’t handle it alone, he knew where to go for help. Not Teddy. He was just a showman, and as for Porter . . . Ed smiled evilly, thinking of Porter confronted with the smoldering ghost of Frieda. The dog was basically a hyperactive, slap-happy creature who didn’t know his own strength. As for sniffing out ghosts, there was only one occasion when Ed suspected he actually had, and his reaction had been to try to play with it.
Edson thought harder, narrowing his eyes to slits. The Pendragons were always willing. Then he frowned. The husband-and-wife pair of physical mediums would do anything if they could get a book out of it, and then they’d try to muscle him out of the contract. No, not the Pendragons. They had a high profile in the paranormal community and were slick when it came to getting media attention, which was exactly why Ed didn’t like them. He suspected several of their biggest “gets” to be deliberate hoaxes, yet they’d gone ahead and produced documentaries anyway, claiming to have gotten real results. They would bring too much attention to the project, and he just didn’t trust them.
Sparky Fritz, a technical genius from Savannah, was a serious investigator, like Ed himself, but he was too rock-and-roll. Too zany. Too cool for school. At the last paranormal convention, a passing psychic had told Ed that his aura was the color of anguish; outsized personalities like Sparky’s were the reason why.
“Have all the normal people taken a rocket ship to another planet?” he fretted aloud as he got up from his desk chair and began to wander around his house. When his steps brought him to the kitchen, he stopped and looked around as if he’d never seen it before.
“I’m hungry,” he said, surprised.
He made a note of a sudden inspiration on one of the twenty pads of paper he kept scattered around his house so he would always have something to write on. Descartes’ concept of the “ghost in the machine” had, naturally, always made sense to him. A ghost hunter would have to believe that the body-machine was separate from the entity within, which drove it along like a really complicated car, and that at some point the entity could step out, slam the door and go off on its own. But was the ghost sometimes overruled by the machine? Was the machine capable of taking the ghost forcibly to the place it was used to being fed if the ghost forgot to eat? Like a car hijacking its owner at a red light and making a break for the gas station?
Too distracted to make detailed notes, he scribbled “The will of the machine,” and shoved the slip of paper into his pocket.
Then, as if he had the gift of automatic writing (which he didn’t – he had no paranormal gifts and he knew it), he wrote the name, “Taylor Verone.”
Below that, slowly and precisely, he wrote, “Bastet?”
Taylor was a normal person. The fact that she was so very normal had Ed even more convinced that she did, in fact, have a paranormal connection, one she found very hard to accept. Ed, a sharp observer, always on the lookout for paranormal manifestations, believed that through a concatenation of circumstances, his friend Taylor had acquired a “familiar.”
The concept of the “familiar,” as taken from folklore – animal embodiments of elemental spirits, ancient seers, or even gods and goddesses – had never interested Ed. He was aware that witches frequently had them, but witches were outside of Ed’s field. His particular area of study was ghosts, so he tried to rigidly confine himself to hauntings. When one entered the paranormal community, one needed to exercise discipline, or one would be constantly distracted by alien encounters, chupacabra attacks, sea monster sightings, secret government agencies, etc. etc. etc. Walk from one end of the convention hall to the other and count the number of topics under discussion. Even if you consider only the groups that are about to come to blows, you will find yourself losing count and heading straight for the bar before you can reach the other end.
However.
If, for instance, an alien landed in Ed’s back yard, he would be forced to investigate. Over the past year, he had become convinced that a familiar had landed in his back yard, or at least in Taylor’s house, and he felt called upon to study the phenomenon. This particular familiar was a gorgeous green-eyed black cat named Bastet which had taken possession of Taylor immediately before she, Taylor, had begun to demonstrate strange behavior.
“Bastet” happened to be the name of the Egyptian mother goddess, one who came forth to protect her own when they were in trouble. B
astet icons were usually in the form of a cat, but there seemed to be more to Taylor’s pet than just the exotic name. Ed was intrigued. He kept track of the situation, to Taylor’s annoyance, and his file of random notes had a very thick section on the cat. This could be an opportunity to study the phenomenon of the familiar at first hand. Taylor would be interested, because she had actually met Frieda Strawbridge in person, when the old woman had been alive.
She and Frieda had understood one another somehow, perhaps even liked one another. With women it was hard to tell. From the time that Ed’s female contemporaries had been little girls, he had been stunned at the loose talk about BFFs who did not happen to be present. But in his sessions with Frieda and Taylor, the two women had displayed an unspoken, bemused concordance which he himself had been unable to fathom. It was one of those intensely womanish things that would always befuddle Ed, but he never made the mistake of thinking that they were trivial.
And Taylor would have no interest in promoting the investigation in any way, like the Pendragons. If Ed decided to write a book, she wouldn’t even read it.
Not that he was already thinking about a book, he reminded himself. That wasn’t what this was about. It was about the Brinkers, pure and simple. And Willa. Gentle, sad, sweet Willa.
Ed quickly went back to the office and sat down at the desk. Absentmindedly he filed away his note on the ghost-in-the-machine thing, (months later he would find it and have no idea what it was about), while his eyes reflected the turmoil within. Ed was not an impulsive man, yet the urge to grab the phone and call Taylor right now was overwhelming. He decided to wait five minutes to consider the pros and cons. At the end of five minutes, he stretched out his hand for the phone and nearly screamed when it began to ring the split-second before he touched it. He gazed at it in astonishment, then picked it up.
“Hello?” he said breathlessly.
“Ed?”
“Taylor!” he said, shocked. He hadn’t spoken to her in months, and their relationship, though friendly, had been mainly professional. She had never just called him out of the blue. “How nice to hear from you,” he said desperately, his voice anything but natural.
“Yeah, I thought so. Something’s up, isn’t it?” She sounded weary. “A couple of hours ago I got this urge to call you, and then something happened here at Orphans, and I took care of that instead.” Orphans of the Storm was her animal shelter. “Then about five minutes ago, it hit me again. This thing, this voice in my head kept at me, and I finally got tired of fighting it. So you tell me, Ed. Why am I calling you?”
“Truly fascinating,” he said, scribbling “Clairaudience,” on the little pad by his phone.
“Ed! Start talking, or I hang up. Am I going crazy, or do I just have a really weird cat.”
“Your cat? Bastet?” He leaned forward and hunkered over the desk as if the whole world was rocking. “What’s she doing?”
“Oh, I don’t know. She’s just been really restless today. We had an emergency case show up earlier today – some guy grazed a stray dog with his Jeep out on A1A and brought him in for medical treatment. Fortunately the dog isn’t badly hurt, and the guy that hit him really fell for him and is keeping him. I thought that might be what Bastet was on about, but when the guy left, she was still . . . oh, what am I trying to say? Then I started thinking about you . . . oh, hell, I don’t know what I’m talking about. Do you?”
Ed carefully adjusted his glasses and arranged his thoughts. “Perhaps. Perhaps. We have a situation here at Santorini. Are you busy tonight?”
Ms. Taylor Verone got out of her car in Edson’s driveway and retrieved a carry-out bag from The Shack from the passenger seat. The foodie smell from the bag tempted her to do a quick quality control check on the French fries, and the first one was so hot and salty and good that she groaned and grabbed another one. Then she rolled the bag closed.
Ed lived in a really nice little gated community, she thought, leaning against her SUV and taking a long look. Without thinking, she re-opened the bag and took another French fry, and this time she didn’t bother to close it again. She was standing there gazing down the block and eating one fry after another when Ed came out of his house. Tired and hungry, she was tripping out on carbs, putting her brain into a pleasurable haze. What with the emergency at the animal shelter and the strange way Bastet had been acting all day, she had completely forgotten to have lunch; she was starving.
“Hey, Ed,” she said by way of greeting. “Still haven’t changed the code, huh?”
The gate code to Santorini was #-1-2-3-4, because for some time now, Dolores Brinker hadn’t been able to remember anything else.
“What?” he asked, distracted from an intense train of thought.
“Just taking a look around out here. Nice night, huh? Want to eat on the beach?”
“What?” He still hadn’t processed her first question, and now she was changing the subject. Then it struck him that she smelled really good. In another moment, he realized it was the open bag in her hands that smelled really good, not her. He refocused on the bag, while Taylor relaxed and quietly ate in front of him.
“Really nice, night,” she murmured, gazing down the drive toward the beach.
The Santorini houses looked like soft blocks of vanilla ice cream, randomly cut and piled together in creamy white chunks. Sharp, bluish shadows edged the angles, and red tile roofs capped multiple levels, including little shaded balconies. The coming sunset filled the air with liquid tones of gold.
Taylor sighed contentedly. “I like your neighborhood.” For the first time, she looked directly at him. He was gazing owlishly at the sack. “You haven’t eaten today, have you?”
“I’ve been at the computer all afternoon, doing research,” he told her, suddenly coming to life. “About the haunting. The search parameters are simply exponential in their growth-rate. Ghosts that dance. Beach hauntings. Scene-of-death hauntings. The mother-daughter bond. So many aspects to explore. Oh, wait. I haven’t told you about it yet. Or have I?”
“Ed, honey,” she said kindly, “you’re delirious. Let’s go to the beach and eat.”
“Okay,” he said without resentment. “I’ll get some folding chairs out of the garage and we’ll watch the sunset.”
“Lovely. Got any beer?”
He did.
“How is Michael?” Ed asked in his best formal manner, once they were settled in their beach chairs. Michael was Taylor’s live-in lover.
“Fine, I guess. He’s wandering around Europe with a bunch of other lawyers.”
Ed blinked. “As a committee of some sort? International negotiations?”
“Oh, heck no. He’s in a retired lawyers’ association, and they organized a Grand Tour. They just left. He wanted me to go, too.”
“And you didn’t want to?”
She gave him a look. “Would you go dragging around Europe in a tour bus with thirty-three lawyers for five weeks? Some of them are actually husband-and-wife lawyers,” she added, as if that were mind-boggling. “I can just hear them all now, correcting one anothers’ facts about Ancient Rome and debating the local tour guides. Besides, I’ve got the animal shelter to run, and the tour costs $20,000. Michael would’ve paid it for me, but I couldn’t let him do that, and I’ve got a lot better things to spend that kind of money on. So tell me what’s been going on here.”
He gave her the full gist of what Poppy and Rosie had told him, then lowered his voice and added, “I’m particularly worried about Willa Garden.”
“I thought they said it was Dolores who was in trouble.”
They had settled down facing the ocean, snugged their beer cans into the cup holders of the folding chairs and were getting the grouper sandwiches out of the Styrofoam boxes. They had finished the French fries while they were still on the walkover to the beach.
“No one ever considers Willa,” Ed fretted. “She and Dolores were both slaves to Frieda, but Willa’s position has always been the more delicate. She had no standing
in Frieda Strawbridge’s life, and yet through no fault of her own she was completely dependent upon her. She and Dolores nursed her through to the end. Willa is the one who found her dead one morning, you know.”
Taylor took careful hold of her sandwich and said, “You’ve always liked Willa, haven’t you?”
The way he suddenly bridled, blushed and stuttered convinced her she was right: Edson Darby-Deaver had a crush. Taylor had met Willa one time and the woman was colorless, shy and forgettable. Ah, but love was blind.
Ed counter-attacked, “I was rather hoping you would bring your cat with you. Bastet. She has been useful in investigations . . . .”
“Let’s just leave her out of this for now,” Taylor said shortly.
Ed suppressed the “Ah-ha!” that sprang to his lips. Confused as his feelings were about Willa, he knew that Taylor was even more confused about the cat.
“Not many tourists on the beach tonight,” Taylor said, gazing around.
“No. The snowbirds have flown away. We never have many this far south on Crescent Beach anyway. Most of the rental condos are further north. You’re not nervous, are you – being alone on the beach at night?”
She smiled at him. “No. If any humans try to attack us, I’ll protect you, and if any ghosts attack, you can protect me. Deal?”
“Now you’re mocking me,” he said, biting into the fish sandwich.
“Not at all. I enjoyed the sunset and all, but you do realize we’ve got our backs to the lair of the restless dead, don’t you? Kind of makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, doesn’t it?”
He gave her a sideways glance, not knowing whether or not she was still teasing him.
Suddenly, the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. “Let’s turn around,” he said.
Ed woke up alone in the dark. He had a vague memory of Taylor waking him to say she was leaving. He’d told her he was fine where he was, that he just wanted to stay a while longer in case Dolores and Frieda came out to dance.
