by Greg Herren
Synopsis
“I shall always be in his shadow, unable to live up to the standard he set at Spindrift, hoping that someday Carlo might love me the way he loved his lost Timothy…”
The memory of Timothy haunts every corner of Spindrift, the beautiful mansion on the Atlantic shore. His face was flawless, his body breathtaking perfection. Everyone who saw him loved him, desired him, wanted him—whether they first laid eyes on him in a magazine ad, on a billboard, or on a box of underwear. No one ever forgot him, once they had passed through his orbit. They remember his wit, intelligence, and sense of style. He was the perfect match for wealthy Carlo Romaniello. Spindrift was the perfect backdrop for the glamorous couple, and the unforgettable, fabulous parties they hosted there. But then tragedy took Timothy, and darkness descended on the beautiful house on the beach. Carlo closed the house, and its secrets remained hidden within.
When Carlo reopens the house as a home for himself and his new young husband, those old secrets begin to creep out into the light. And those secrets might just prove deadly for his new spouse, a young man who has to compete with the memory of the unforgettable Timothy…
Timothy
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Timothy
© 2012 By Greg Herren. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-811-7
This Electronic Book is published by
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, New York 12185
First Edition: November 2012
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editor: Stacia Seaman
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])
By The Author
The Scotty Bradley Adventures
Bourbon Street Blues
Jackson Square Jazz
Mardi Gras Mambo
Vieux Carré Voodoo
Who Dat Whodunnit
The Chanse MacLeod Mysteries
Murder in the Rue Dauphine
Murder in the Rue St. Ann
Murder in the Rue Chartres
Murder in the Rue Ursulines
Murder in the Garden District
Murder in the Irish Channel
Sleeping Angel
Sara
Women of the Mean Streets
Men of the Mean Streets
Night Shadows
(edited with J. M. Redmann)
Acknowledgments
When I was growing up, I loved the novels of Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, and Daphne du Maurier. This book is an homage to those wonderful writers, and my own humble attempt to write a Gothic romantic suspense novel.
I need to thank Radclyffe for giving me the opportunity to finally write this book. I’ve been thinking about writing it for at least thirty years, and there is no more wonderful feeling for an author than to have the belief and support of your publisher. Being a writer is very daunting, and it is so much easier when you have a publisher who believes in you and your crazy ideas.
Everyone at Bold Strokes Books, from the cover designers to the proofreaders to the production staff to the copy editors to my fellow authors, are the most amazing people. You have all welcomed me into the Bold Strokes family with open arms from the very first, and it is an absolute pleasure being a part of all of this. I especially must give a huge shout out to my editor, Stacia Seaman, for everything she does. Cindy Cresap never makes me feel like an idiot for never knowing what book she’s talking about when she e-mails me for information. Sheri has given me the best covers I’ve ever had for any of my books from any of my publishers; I worship at your lotus feet, my dear. Sandy Lowe never ceases to impress me with her ruthless efficiency.
I worked on Timothy while I was in Palm Springs for a Bold Strokes Books author event, so I simply must shout out to my Salton Sea expedition buddies, Carsen Taite, Lainey Parker, Kim Baldwin, Xenia Alexiou, Nell Stark, Trinity Tam, Lisa Girolami, and Ruth Sternglantz. J. M. Redmann is a great travel companion, and it was an absolute delight to see Shelley Thrasher and Connie Ward again, and to meet Rebekah Weatherspoon and Ashley Bartlett for the first time, among many others whose names I am currently blanking on.
My coworkers at the NO/AIDS Task Force are wonderful people and make going to work every day a joy: Brandon Benson, Matt Valletta, Nick Parr, Josh Fegley, Mark Drake, Alex Leigh, Sarah Ramteke, and the always lovely Robin Pearce.
Julie Smith, Lee Pryor, Pat Brady, Michael Ledet, Bev and Butch Marshall, Patty Friedmann, Victoria A. Brownworth, Karissa Kary, Gillian Rodger, Stephan Driscoll, Stuart Wamsley, Nevada Barr, Al and Harriet Campbell Young, Konstantine Smorodnikov, Michael Carruth, and John Angelico are all wonderful people who enrich my life just by being in it. Thanks, all!
And of course, my wonderful, funny and brilliant partner, Paul, who makes every day a joy.
Dedication
This is for BECKY COCHRANE, who read and loved the same books when she was a teenager that I did.
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy”
“Sometimes despair is just being realistic, the only logical thing for certain persons to feel. Loss. Despair. I’ve faced them and actually they have—fortified and protected, not overcome me at all…”
—Tennessee Williams, A Lovely Sunday in the Creve Coeur
Prologue
You can never truly escape the past—no matter how hard you try.
We pretend, though, like it never happened—as though that summer on Long Island no longer matters, and the things we lived through and experienced have no bearing on our present life. But we never settle anywhere—it’s always hotels and rental villas, suitcases to unpack and later, to pack again once we decide on our next destination. It is a glamorous world of airports and limousines, trains and boats, of expensive restaurants with rich food and rare bottles of wine and champagne, of outrageously priced clothing in the most exclusive of stores.
Sometimes I long for New York City, and the beautifully decorated penthouse we might someday be able to return to, with its stunning views and marble floors. Sometimes it’s a little thing, like longing to hear someone speak English without an accent or being able to walk into a delicatessen for a hot pastrami sandwich and a small bag of greasy potato chips, or get that day’s issue of the New York Times.
But I don’t know if we will ever be able to go home again.
There’s nothing to keep us from going back, of course, other than having to endure looks and wagging tongues and gossip. He doesn’t want to deal with it anymore and I cannot say that I blame him. He has endured it for far longer than I, of course—and my own little taste of notoriety was not something I particularly enjoyed. Fame, notoriety, stardom—so many people long for it, crave it, and would do anything to achieve it. But I am not one of those people. I prefer to live quietly and peacefully, out of the limelight, a
way from the stares and the mean-spirited who always find it so much easier to believe the worst than to hope for the best.
I am often reminded that I am far too young to have such a cynical view of my fellow human beings. I look into the mirror and still see a young man’s face, still flush with the glow of youth. That is what most people see when they look at me—a young man with a golden life they envy. But they don’t look close enough to see the haunted eyes.
The bags that developed under my eyes from sleeplessness are long gone. I sleep quite well now, and most nights now I do not dream. I no longer need the pills.
I feel as though I have already lived a lifetime. I saw a very kind therapist—Dr. Caroline Weisbrook—during the time we stayed in London, when my sleep was constantly disturbed by the dreams. She was highly recommended by friends, widely considered to be one of the top therapists in the world, and had written multiple best-selling books about finding the path to happiness through forgiveness. I liked Dr. Weisbrook the very first time I sat down in her office. She firmly believed that as more time passed, that summer in the Hamptons would gradually fade into nothing more than blurred memories of an unhappy time—and with the coming of greater age and more life experience, a certain nostalgia would develop in my mind for those days—a nostalgia that might eventually make those bitter memories more sweet.
It is still quite impossible for me to imagine that I will ever look back and smile.
She urged me to find forgiveness in my heart—and most of all, to forgive myself for the role I played in the events of that summer.
But of course, Dr. Weisbrook never knew the whole story, the truth. There was simply no way I could share with her a truth I could not share with anyone else. As I sat there in her comfortably yet expensively decorated office, a copy of her latest bestseller strategically placed on her desk where I could see her smiling face on the cover while I nervously clenched and unclenched my sweating hands, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her—despite my overwhelming need to tell her—someone, anyone—everything and unburden myself completely.
So instead I fed her bits and pieces, little scenes I had already reviewed, dissected, and analyzed from every possible angle and consideration before finally deciding those memories were indeed safe enough to share with a woman I could never completely trust. I told her stories carefully calculated to elicit the advice I thought I needed to get on with my life and put that haunted past behind me once and for all.
Foolishly, I thought she would be able to help me move on.
The responsibility for the failure of our sessions lies entirely with me. She knew she wasn’t helping me, and it frustrated her. She somehow knew I wasn’t telling her everything. The sessions became a game, with her probing carefully, trying to provoke a response and me resisting her, putting up more walls to keep her outside. After a few weeks of this I finally gave up. It was an exercise in futility, a waste of my money and her time. There’s no point in seeking help when you cannot be completely honest about the things that haunt your dreams. If you cannot strip your soul bare and expose yourself entirely to your therapist, raw and naked, to be probed, questioned, evaluated, and prodded, the therapy is predestined to fail.
And since my secrets were not just my own to share, baring my soul—telling her the truth—was something I could never do.
I have never told anyone the whole truth of what happened that summer—the things that have shaped me into the person I am now. I will never be able to trust someone enough to know the secrets I carry with me now—the burden I shall undoubtedly carry to the grave.
Yet, with the passage of time, it has gotten somewhat easier. I sometimes can go for several days without remembering. I sleep better than I did, and no longer need the prescription drugs doctors prescribed for me without question or need of an explanation for so long. I can climb into bed every night without worrying that my dreams will take me back there again.
At some point—I didn’t mark the date—my dreams stopped being about the house on the shore, and began to be about other things, things that didn’t cause me to toss and turn in torment until I awoke, gasping and terrified, until I finally remembered I was not there anymore.
But I am still not yet completely free of the spell cast over me by the great house called Spindrift, nor do I think I shall ever be.
There are still nights when I lie in bed staring at the shadows on the ceiling, hoping and waiting for sleep to come. Those are the nights when my mind will again hear the sound of the waves coming ashore at Spindrift. It all comes back to me then, like it all happened just yesterday, that it was only yesterday that I left the beautiful house on the Atlantic shore knowing I could never return.
The sound of the breaking waves was the only constant in my life during the brief months I lived there. You couldn’t go anywhere in the house or on the grounds where the sound couldn’t be heard. I eventually became so used to the sound that I didn’t hear it anymore—it was just background noise, always there.
When I first came to live there, the waves crashing against the white sand beach were a comfort, lulling me into a deep restful sleep every night when I went to bed, no matter what happened during the day. I would pull the covers up to my face, with both the balcony doors and all the windows wide open to catch that wonderful salty, cold breeze off the ocean. The music of the breaking waves inexorably worked its magic on my tired, stressed brain and I would drift away to a dreamless sleep that refreshed and revived me. Every morning I woke to their perpetual rhythm. That sound was always there, whenever I ate or walked the dog, it was there—cold water crashing against the land and sucking the sand back away as it receded in the age-old battle of land versus sea.
That battle is eternal, of course—it will continue on eternally, long after I have turned to dust in my own grave, long after the house itself has crumbled into nothing and been forgotten, that struggle will go on.
Long ago I ceased to wonder why I sometimes still hear the waves on certain nights while I lie in bed waiting for sleep to come. It is a reminder there can be no escaping the past for me.
And it is on those nights, those nights when my tired mind hears again those waves, that I have the recurring dream that drove me to see Dr. Weisbrook in her tasteful office near Trafalgar Square in the first place.
It was always the same dream, with no variation that I could detect.
In the dream, I am back at Spindrift, like I had never left. It is night, and I am standing at the front of the wide, lushly green lawn with the gorgeous marble fountain of Apollo and Daphne splashing water with the paved driveway circling it, the towering bushes still hiding the house and the grounds from the road and the prying eyes of neighbors on either side.
In the dream I start walking along the driveway, around the house and past the sparkling blue water of the swimming pool just behind it. Over to my right is the small building—the studio, with all of its windows dark and its door sensibly shut and locked.
Ahead of me I can see where the lawn ends and the sand begins, the white sand glowing in the soft moonlight, the waves at night much bigger than those of the day, and the white foam created when they break also incandescent.
I walk down, as I always do, to the cool, damp white sand, and just stand there unmoving, barefoot, feeling the wind blowing through my hair for what seems like almost an eternity before I walk to the water’s edge and feel the cold surf against my skin.
Then, and only then, do I turn and face the great house.
It draws me forward, away from the water, beckoning me to leave the peaceful beach behind.
As I walk across the beach, the waves continue to crash against the sands behind me. The sound is hypnotic, as it always was. I look to the windows of my rooms and they are dark, the French doors closed against the chill of the night air. White clouds dance across the dark bluish black velvet sky over my head, and the moon is full and a pale yellow, countless stars winking wherever they could be seen through the moving clouds
. The cold wind begins to blow more strongly, scented as always with the smell of fish and brine, off the dark water, enveloping me and making me shiver, raising gooseflesh on the bare skin of my arms. The sand beneath my bare feet becomes slippery blades of soft grass as I make my way toward the great house.
I pause there, shivering, on the edge of the meticulously manicured lawn and just stare at the magnificence of the house called Spindrift—the beautiful house that has graced the pages of design and architecture magazines almost from the time it was built—the famous house that never once felt like my home.
And as I stand there, shivering, I am overcome with an overwhelming sense of—of defeat. This is a place where I will never belong, that will never be my home, that will never welcome me.
It is a horrible feeling, and one experienced all too often that summer when I came there as a newlywed—awkward and insecure and unsure of myself.
The house never welcomed me, scorning me instead as a pretender.
I could never replace my predecessor—something I had always known but became acutely more aware of once I walked through the front doors of Spindrift.
I just stand there, staring at the dark house. Not a single light burns in any of the many windows, and there is no sense of any life anywhere inside the house. It just sits there, in my dream, in silence, brooding and watching like a hungry animal waiting for the right moment to pounce on its prey.
The house seems alive.
But it is only a house—a beautiful historic mansion where people have loved and hated and laughed and danced and died. Houses cannot have feelings, houses cannot reject humans. I berate myself for giving the house human emotions.
