“Your kids?” he asked, stopping her cold.
“I don’t have kids of my own.”
“Then what’s your interest?”
“Other than having a responsibility to the community in which I live? A nephew. Jason. He’s fourteen.”
“So you’re what? A teacher at the local high school? A counselor?”
“A shop owner. Echoes. You passed it when you came through town.”
“Echoes. That New Age store?” Suddenly frowning at her, he pulled back and stood. “Now I get it.”
“Get what?”
“The connection. The reason you want to be so chummy with Aunt Addy.”
“I barely know your aunt.”
“But you want to get to know her better, right?”
“Sure, I wouldn’t mind. She’s a sweet person.” If a little dingy. But that certainly wouldn’t prejudice Echo, not with her family background.
“And gullible.”
She didn’t like the way that sounded. “Excuse me?”
“I hope I can.”
“Now look, Mr. Vanmatre, I don’t know what you’re accusing me of.”
”Nothing yet. But I know all about the pap you sell in your store.”
“How dare you!”
His eyes were like chips of flint. “Crystals with hidden powers. Cards that tell the future. Books on mystical healing. Well there is no such thing as magic in this world, no inner superpowers to be harnessed. Only pathetic trusting people who are willing to pay and pay and pay until they are bled dry, and all because they want to obtain something beyond their reach.”
Insulted, furious and compelled to defend herself and her customers, Echo jumped up to face him. Though she was five-eight, she had to tilt her head to look him square in the eye.
“I sell things that make people feel good about themselves and this universe,” she said, her heart pounding. “Things that give people hope when sometimes there is none. Ideas to better the world. I believe we humans have unlimited human potential to be tapped. What do you believe in Mr. Vanmatre? Making big bucks in your Chicago law practice by overcharging people in desperate circumstances?” Wound up, she passionately demanded, “Don’t you believe in the possibility that there might be something beyond what you can see and touch and prove?”
She could swear his face darkened further. He appeared almost apoplectic. The fine scar decorating his forehead that had seemed so faint now stood out in stark relief. And his hands were clenched into tight, threatening fists. She’d touched a nerve. A deep one.
“So help me,” he warned her in a voice that throbbed with conviction, “if I hear one word about your scamming my aunt... one word about your reading her runes or channeling spirits for her, you’ll have me to answer to!”
That he managed to frighten her made Echo as angry with herself as with him. “Mr. Vanmatre, I am an open-minded person with a predilection for the positive. I appreciate the spiritual tools people have created for themselves through the ages. And yes, I know how to use some of them. And I do. For my own enrichment and pleasure. I am not a professional spiritualist. Not a fake. Not a con artist. What you see is what you get.”
She could tell that whatever he was seeing about her did not impress him. Echo’s stomach sank and she blamed herself for the loss of Dunescape Cottage as the youth group’s Haunted Mansion. She should have handled this differently. Should not have lost her temper.
Blast her temper.
Blast him for riling her like no one had in years.
What now? All the supplies and costumes. All the hopes the kids had. All lost. All because of her. Of who she was. About to storm out of the place and never come back, she was stopped cold when Bram grabbed her arm.
“I thought you came here to get an answer from me.” Her pulse was shooting through her like a bullet. “Didn’t you already give it to me?”
“No. Just because I might not like who you are doesn’t mean I would punish a bunch of kids who are trying to do something constructive.”
She wasn’t certain she understood him. “You’re saying we can have the fundraiser here?”
“On one condition.”
“Which is?”
“That I supervise the transformation of Dunescape Cottage.”
Echo’s mouth dropped open. The last thing in the world she needed was some closed-minded stuffed shirt looking over her shoulder every step of the way. No, she amended, the last thing was for him to cancel.
“All right,” she agreed. “Expect a work party to arrive tomorrow after school.”
She pulled her arm free and stalked toward the door, but was stopped again, this time by his saying, “Miss St. Clair, I believe you forgot something.”
“Now what?”
She whipped around to see him picking up an object from the floor. A Tarot card, one Sibyl must have dropped.
Triumph darkened his expression once more as he held the card out to her, face up. She glanced at it. The Lovers. How ludicrous.
“No thanks, I don’t take what isn’t mine.” Tempted to tell him where he could stick the damn card, Echo instead said, “Put it under your pillow and maybe you’ll have something to smile about in the morning.”
CHAPTER THREE
BUT BRAM wasn’t smiling the next morning. He’d dreamed not of lovers as in the tarot card, but of something much darker. Something he had to force himself to face.
Something he’d managed not to face for thirty years.
His father’s death.
An accidental drowning was the listed cause of death in the official report. His mother Katherine had accepted the story. But not Bram. Never him. Deep in his heart he knew differently. Something terrible had happened that fateful Halloween night. He felt it in his soul. If he had one, which Echo St. Clair seemed to doubt.
No matter how hard he tried, he just couldn’t make the pertinent memories surface.
Slipping into the library where a fire already crackled, Bram thought back...
He’d escaped the annual Vanmatre Fancy Dress Ball for his favorite hiding place. The attic. That memory was clear. Clear, too, was the pain he’d experienced when he’d awakened in Aunt Addy’s arms.
She’d been holding him tight, sobbing, “Not you, too. Not Donahue and Bram, please God!”
And when she’d realized he was staring at her and at the blood on her flowing white costume— his blood— a smile had wreathed her face so like his father’s and her piteous weeping had turned to tears of joy.
“Thank God,” she’d whispered fervently, stroking his cheek. “Thank God. My precious Bram. At least I won’t have your death on my conscience.”
Her words first of anguish and then of joy had echoed through his head hundreds of times over the years.
Other words... muddled... confusing... had once echoed, too.
He’d heard voices that night. Only every time he tried to concentrate on them, to bring them into focus, his forehead pounded where he’d split it open on the attic dresser. And the scar would grow white and angry and throb until he stopped.
It was throbbing now. And the flesh across the back of his neck was crawling as if someone were staring at him. A glance around the library assured him he was alone. He swiped at the gooseflesh but didn’t manage to make the sensation dissipate totally. Maybe he’d spooked himself thinking about the past.
Long ago, when he was still a child, he’d let his mother convince him it was best to avoid trying.
But he’d never forgotten.
And now it was time to remember. He had to make it happen, no matter the consequences.
“YOU’RE GOING TO make it happen,” Isolde St. Clair Medlock insisted, straightening out a display of smudge sticks. “The Haunted Mansion is going to be the hottest, most successful fundraiser this town has ever seen.”
“Right.” Leaning on the counter next to the cash register, Echo gave her sister a sardonic smile. “If Bram Vanmatre doesn’t make me crazy first.”
Izzy
’s eyes widened in shock. “He doesn’t stand a chance. You are the most stubborn if lovable person I’ve ever known. Except maybe for Jason.”
Jason was Izzy’s oldest and the reason for Echo’s involvement in the fundraiser. He was also the reason Echo had run away from her grandparents’ home only months before high school graduation. When they’d learned eighteen year old Izzy had become pregnant, they’d kicked her out. Only seventeen herself at the time, Echo had come flying after her sister without a thought for herself. All she’d known was that they had to stick together, for Mama’s sake, as well as their own.
“You think we can talk Mama into coming out for Christmas this year?” Echo asked, thinking their mother had seen Jason and his younger sister Gussy only a few times.
Izzy’s expression grew sad. “I think she’s still afraid to leave Portland and come back.”
Though their grandparents had been dead for several years, and their former home in South Bend, Indiana, was fifty miles from Water’s Edge, Michigan, Mama insisted on staying in Oregon.
“Maybe she’ll change her mind this year.”
“Maybe.” But Izzy didn’t sound convinced.
While warm and understanding, Izzy was far more down-to-earth, practical and conservative in her opinions and actions than Echo ever would be. Echo believed that anything was possible if you were willing to fight for what you wanted and believed in.
If she hadn’t believed in herself and in the willingness of a small town to support an oddity of a business, she would never have opened Echoes. Not that she’d done it alone. Both Izzy and her husband Roger had spent numerous nights and weekends helping her convert a gloomy antique shop into a warm and inviting space filled with objects of optimism. But it had been her vision and her drive that had turned a dream into reality.
Windchimes tinkled as the front door opened and Jason came bounding inside, his best friend Frankie right behind him. “Ready to go, Auntie E?”
“If your mom’s ready to take over here.”
“Ready.”
“C’mon, brats.”
“Hey!” Jason complained good-naturedly, wrinkling his freckled face. “We teenagers are sensitive, ya know.”
“Okay. C’mon, darlings.”
“I like brat better,” Frankie grumbled, punching at his glasses to push them back up his long nose.
“Save something for me to do,” Izzy ordered. Though she’d already helped make several ghoul and monster costumes and was on the refreshment committee, as well.
“Don’t worry.” Echo set the windchimes tinkling as she opened the shop door. “We’ll be lucky to have everything finished on Halloween day as it is.”
She and the boys went out to her beat-up station wagon, which they’d helped her load with decorating materials that morning before school.
“Do we pick up anyone on the way?” Echo asked. More than a dozen kids were on the decorating committee.
“A couple of ‘em can’t come today. Mrs. Ahern said she and one of the other parents are driving the rest.”
So the librarian was participating after predicting the event wouldn’t come off. Echo wondered if Mrs. Ahern hadn’t volunteered to transport the kids, not only because she was Mark’s mother, but so she could get inside Dunescape Cottage and see what it looked like before its transformation. Something of the town historian as well as librarian, Mrs. Ahern had hinted at the mansion’s various incarnations. The private home built with monies made in nineteenth century Great Lakes shipping had become a bootlegging operation during prohibition and an exclusive small resort after World War II.
The Vanmatre twins had been responsible for the latter, and after Donahue’s death, Addy had literally closed the doors to outsiders.
Until now.
The town library’s van arrived directly before they did. Reminded of the private library that would be closed to them, Echo glanced out at the house, which she fancifully thought loomed over the area like a predatory animal, its power only heightened by the growing dusk.
Sure enough, as she had the day before, she spotted the dark silhouette in the window. Maybe the lawyer would have the good taste to stay put. She goosed the accelerator and smoothly took the curve toward the front of the property. Mrs. Ahern and half a dozen kids were spilling out of the official vehicle as Echo’s hatchback lumbered up the drive to the front veranda where Bram Vanmatre stood waiting for them in the deepening shadows.
Echo started. He was certainly capable of speed when the occasion moved him. She would have sworn he hadn’t had enough time to get from the library to the front porch, but there he was, looking as if he’d been waiting for a while.
Under his eagle-eyed gaze, Echo self-consciously organized the teenagers into unloading the boxes of decoration materials from the back of her wagon and setting them in the west front parlor and dining room.
“You can take this,” she said, shoving a heavy box into Bram’s arms. “You are going to help, right?” She ignored the raised brow. “Not much sense in your standing around watching.”
Score one for her. The stuffed shirt actually hid something of a smile as he turned to carry the box inside.
Pounding noises drew her attention across the west terrace pool area where workmen busy with repairs were being supervised by Uriah Hawkes.
Back at the hatchback, Echo dragged out brooms and dust pans and garbage bags. She’d brought the simple cleaning tools since most of the lower level had been closed off from use. They would turn several rooms into a dark, spooky maze, so the clean-up didn’t need to be intense.
By the time the hatchback was empty, the third vehicle pulled up with Mrs. Zankowski at the wheel, and four more teenagers in tow. Waiting until the whole crew was reassembled, Echo divided the kids into three teams with an adult in charge of each.
Obviously unhappy about being on her clean-up detail, Jason complained, “Hey, how come I get stuck doing the gross stuff when I know the boss?”
Echo laughed and ruffled his hair that was as red as her own. “That’s why. You can’t say no to me.”
Echo waited until everyone disappeared into the house. Everyone but Bram, who was back at his post on the veranda. Leaning against a support, he didn’t take his intent gaze off her as she ascended.
“Keeping an eye on everything at once should keep you busy,” she told him. Nothing would make her happier, especially if he kept his attention on the kids rather than on her.
“I’ll pace myself.”
As would she. “Will Miss Addy be joining us?”
“Isn’t it enough that my aunt gave you permission to use her home?”
Echo flushed. “I didn’t mean I wanted her to roll up her sleeves and pitch in moving furniture. She was so enthusiastic, I thought she would enjoy watching the kids at work.”
“I suggested she get some rest this afternoon.”
And Miss Addy had undoubtedly complied rather than put herself under more stress. Echo clenched her jaw and walked by him, not uttering a word of what she was thinking. That his aunt was an adult who could make her own decisions. That Miss Addy didn’t need someone taking over “for her own good.” While Miss Addy might be eccentric, she was harmless.
As harmless as Echo’s own mother had been.
Inside, she realized the two mothers present were having difficulty keeping a dozen energetic teens standing still.
“Mark, I told you not to touch anything,” Mrs. Ahern insisted.
The librarian took a fancy silver picture frame from her son’s hands, but stared at the photos herself before setting it down on the mantle. Then, her expression weird, she stared at something beyond Echo’s shoulder.
Bram again.
Cautioning the teens to be extra careful with the mansion’s furnishings, she instructed them to pack anything with breakage potential into empty boxes that they would store out of the way. Mrs. Ahern took over in the parlor, Mrs. Zankowski in the dining room. Herding her own workers to the lower floor, Echo was held up
by Bram.
“So what’s the theme to be in here?” he asked.
The teens were disappearing around the back of the staircase— the lower level was reached through a door there— and glanced back in at the parlor.
“We’re not doing anything special in this room. Mostly adding atmosphere. We’ll sell tickets at the parlor door. I believe your aunt expects to be a ticket taker.” Though she waited for him to object, he didn’t. “In costume.” Noting both of Bram’s eyebrows shot up this time, she added, “It’s for a good cause.” Luckily for him, he didn’t argue the point. “We have a portrait of Poe with eyes that move, a trick mirror with a hologram of a ‘Mr. Hyde’ type character, a cobra that weaves out of a basket to spooky music. And body parts— manikins— will be in some creative places.”
Bram crossed his arms in front of his chest. “It doesn’t sound all that scary to me... unless you’re about five.”
What a spoiler. Or maybe he was trying to get her goat. From the challenge in his eyes, Echo could believe the latter. Why in the world was he being so difficult? He seemed to be holding the tarot card he’d found the night before against her even though she’d denied it was hers.
“Everything about a Haunted Mansion doesn’t have to be real scary. It can just be fun.” Laughter drifting from the parlor told her the teens in there were having a great time now. “You know what fun is, don’t you, Mr. Vanmatre?” she asked deliberately, taking delight in the tightening of his mouth. “We’re starting with the small stuff and working up to the real scare. Rather up to the second floor and then back down to the lower level and the maze.”
“Sounds like a potential accident waiting to happen,” Bram said, his gaze narrowing. “The stairs, especially. You have bought extra insurance for the event, haven’t you? In case someone gets hurt and sues?”
A lawyer would think of that. And no, they hadn’t. They probably couldn’t afford it, either. Why hadn’t it occurred to her before? Not knowing how she was going to handle this situation now that she was aware of it, she avoided answering directly.
“The stairs will be well lit with red light. Besides which, a costumed adult will supervise all stairwells and halls in addition to each room on the tour.”
DANGEROUS, Collection #1 Page 22
