Dreamscape

by Rose Anderson

  “Certainly.”

  When she smiled he felt as though his heart had turned over in his chest.

  Lanie’s nose met a delicious scent floating up the long curving staircase. Her stomach rumbled. Mortified, she pressed a hand to her belly. “My goodness, my stomach sounds like I haven’t eaten in days. That’s near the truth. To save time today, I’m afraid I neglected to eat.”

  He chuckled. “Mrs. Boatwright is an excellent cook.” He patted his belly. “I swear there’re times I sound like I have a bear buttoned up in my weskit.”

  She laughed. “If the aroma is this delicious, I can only imagine the taste.”

  “Mrs. Boatwright always outdoes herself. I’m sure my wife wanted this evening’s fare to be extra special.” Having more than one hundred years to think about this introduction to his wife’s lover, he remembered this particular meal very well. His mood took a turn. Changing topics to one far more enjoyable, he suggested, “Perhaps after dinner we might adjourn to my study and discuss what it is you came to see me about.”

  “I would like that. Hopefully we can wrap up our discussion quickly. I feel an imposition given you have guests.”

  “Nonsense, Lanie, I knew your father. In fact, I recall hearing how he and my father were good friends. They served together at Vicksburg and became friends in the surgery.”

  “Yes, my father’s arm.” Her father had lost the use of his arm, but as useless as the appendage was, he was still whole. He’d said more than once that he owed his life to Jackson Bowen.

  He asked, “Do you have plans for the holiday?”

  She shook her head. “No, my father would march in the parade and we’d picnic after but…” The words stuck in the back of her throat. When she could speak again, she said, “I’m sorry.”

  Patting the arm he held, he said gently, “Then please stay here with me. Perhaps with more time at our leisure we can find solutions to any issue your father’s estate may have.”

  “Dr. Bowen, I…”

  “Jason.”

  “Jason, I’m certain Mrs. Bowen would desire to see to her guests without a complete stranger underfoot.”

  “Exactly my meaning.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “My wife will be occupied catching up with her dear cousins. I would be no more than a third wheel.” He pulled her arm close in his, leaned his head toward her, and whispered, “Say yes, Lanie. You’ll be saving me from the shadows of their childhood remembrances.”

  Her mouth twitched. “If Mrs. Bowen should object…”

  “My wife has already been informed of the possibility.” He paused at the second landing.

  Lanie turned to him noticing how his pleasant eyes had darkened to a rich whiskey brown.

  Those very eyes lit when he coaxed, “Say yes.”

  “If you’re certain it’s no imposition, then yes, I’ll stay through the weekend. I could so use your counsel.”

  He gave her a breathtaking smile. Again the rush of familiarity filled her, along with something else, something far more disconcerting—an image of those handsome lips pressed to hers in a kiss. Her cheeks felt warm again.

  Jason could see the telltale blush as she returned her attention to the stairs and wondered what that enchanting flush of color was about.

  Feminine laugher coming from the parlor followed by the deeper timbre of a man’s voice met them on the bottom stair. Curiously, the man at Lanie’s side suddenly stiffened, the muscles in the arm she held grew taut. She looked up at his face but saw nothing to account for it.

  “Miss O’Keefe, it would appear our party has already begun,” Jason told her loudly enough for the revelers to hear as they rounded the corner to the parlor.

  Cathy whirled around, her obvious enjoyment noticeably diminishing at the sound of her husband’s approach. She recovered quickly, and soon replaced the frown with the bright, beautiful smile Jason now knew to be a treacherous lie. “Darling, Bertha has arrived and brought her brother, Richard.”

  Bertha rushed forward and pulled him into an exaggerated embrace. “So wonderful to see you, Jason!” Obviously happy, she kissed his cheek and held onto him slightly longer than a proper Southern woman might. Bertha couldn’t help herself. She’d fancied this man since his father first brought him to Atlanta.

  Extracting himself, Jason forced a smile. “And good to see you again, Bertha. My wife has eagerly awaited your visit. She speaks of nothing else but her ‘dear Bertha and her brother Richard whom she’d love to know better.’”

  Bertha laughed, the braying sound aptly accompanying her equine face. “Well, that’s why Richard accompanied me. You know, we ran in…”

  “Different circles. Yes, so I’ve heard,” Jason finished. Then, acknowledging the grinning man who gave the unfortunate family countenance to his great-great-granddaughter Margaret, he extended his hand. “And you must be Richard.”

  “Jason.” Richard took it, his smile lingering. And all the while Jason kept his resolve not to beat the man within an inch of his life.

  “My sister has pestered me for the last few months to come see her dear friend Cathy. So good of you to invite us for the holiday.” His eyes fell on Lanie with obvious appreciation. “And who might this pretty Miss be? Not your sister, surely?” Richard held out his hand, his earlier smile now lighting his eyes.

  Cathy rushed forward and, hooking her arm in Lanie’s, promptly pulled her before Bertha. “Please forgive the lapse of manners. In all the excitement of seeing my dear, dear friends I have forgotten further introductions are necessary. Bertha, Richard, this is Miss…uh…”

  “O’Keefe, Elaine O’Keefe,” Lanie filled in. Cathy’s hold on her eased a bit.

  “Charmed, Miss O’Keefe. May I call you Elaine?” Bertha asked, eyeing her from head to toe. Obviously whoever you are you do not know how to dress appropriately for dinner.

  “She’s come on business and will be staying for dinner,” Cathy informed her guests. “I’m sure their commerce won’t take long.”

  His earlier reminder coming to the fore, Jason told them, “Actually, Miss O’Keefe’s business is better not rushed through, as we’ve much to discuss. She’ll be staying until all is said that needs saying. I’m sure our business will not impact your plans in the least.”

  Cathy smoothly recovered her composure. She smiled prettily at Lanie. “Then you simply must make yourself at home. I’m sure Addy can aptly see to any need you may have. Should there be time, do join us for the holiday festivities.”

  Bertha made sound similar to the heehaw of a jackass when she laughed. “Yes, do. The more the merrier!”

  Richard came forward and held out his arm. “May I escort you to the table, Lanie?” A noticeable few seconds passed before Cathy let her go that she might take it.

  Jason laughed. His wife and her friend turned around to look at him curiously. Richard, his attentions fully on the lovely, raven-haired houseguest, failed to notice. Jason held out both elbows. “Ladies, that leaves me to escort you both.”

  Bertha gave a long-faced grin. “I’d never refuse a charming man’s arm.”

  Cathy eyes followed Richard and shot daggers at Lanie’s back.

  “I’m very much looking forward to dinner, my dear.” Jason chuckled.

  Jason was behaving oddly. The O’Keefe woman’s business no doubt. Cathy’s fake smile returned. “As am I.”

  No sooner had he uttered the words when he was pulled into the waking world by Lanie’s ringing telephone.

  Sparing a glance at the clock, Lanie read a quarter past five. She asked sleepily, “Hello?”

  It was Lexie. “Hey, did I wake you?”

  “Yeah, no biggie. I’d be getting up soon anyway. Give me a minute, I’ll be right back.” After seeing to her need to use the bathroom, she quickly returned and set the phone to speaker so she could dress. “What’s up?”

  “I shouldn’t have had that second cup of coffee. I couldn’t sleep at all. I don’t know how you handle coffee at nig
ht.”

  Having survived her residency completely fueled by coffee, she said, “Med school. Caffeine is part of my DNA now. You were saying?”

  “So anyway, I couldn’t sleep, so I went the through the rest of the stuff I had on the Bowen mystery. I found a society page in the May fifth Gazetteer. Jason Bowen’s wife was a Southern belle who was apparently orphaned sometime late in the war. She lived with distant cousins.”

  “And?” Lanie yawned.

  “And those cousins happened to be the Masons. She might have had something going with Richard Mason years before she met Jason. Maybe that’s why she married him so quickly. They already had a history.”

  “A cousin?”

  “It happened in the South, even between first cousins though that seemed to be a rarer thing. All those plantation families intermarried. In a lot of respects they were the American version of European gentry. The classes tended to stay within their own societal circles and kept the wealth and resources in the family so to speak.”

  “That is interesting.”

  “But get this, Jackson Bowen was a major stockholder in the Mason textile mill.”

  “Yeah, you read where Jackson was involved in the Restoration.”

  “Jason must have gone down there with his dad and met her.” There was silence on the other end of the phone. Lexie said, “Don’t you see?”

  Lanie shook her head. Having just woken up she wasn’t readily following her friend’s line of thought. “See what?”

  “Arghh. I forget you don’t watch detective shows like I do. The south was beaten into submission in the war and beaten into the ground financially after. There were a lot of northern investors coming in. A lot of Southerners chafed at that, but there was nothing else to do, they needed northern money because their own was worthless and they had to rebuild. Lanie, what if Jason didn’t abandon his wife as she initially stated?”

  Lanie zipped up her cut-off denim shorts and sat on the bed to put on her socks and shoes. “She had him declared dead.”

  “After his good friend the sheriff and Aunt Celia denounced the idea of abandonment as ridiculous. But what if there’s more to the story? Cathy remarried awfully fast, even by today’s standards.”

  “Well, you just read Cathy and Richard grew up together…”

  “Exactly! Lanie, what if Cathy and Richard Mason planned this all along? What if they bumped off Jason Bowen for his money?”

  Chapter 12

  “Wow, what a difference a little paint makes! Squint your eyes and imagine the electrical wires and phone line gone and…” Zack snapped his fingers. “You’re transported back in time. I gotta bring Dad over here. He’ll love it.”

  Ben agreed with his older brother. “Gordy and Lenny and their guys did a really nice job, didn’t they?” He adjusted the large sprinkler head to soak and took another pass over the foxgloves before drenching the roots of the yews. He’d have to untangle the hose before he could reach the hollyhocks on either side of the newly sandblasted and refurbished iron gate. “Dad asked me about the progress when Janice and I had dinner over there the other night. He said your house is one fine example of Victorian opulence.”

  Ben added, “He wanted to know when your crew was starting.”

  “Yeah, I talked to him this morning. I was hoping for Monday, but we should start the carriage house Wednesday once it dries out.”

  “Bad weather coming?”

  “Oh yeah, there’s a hell of a storm coming in Sunday, maybe hail. Benny, don’t you ever watch the news?”

  Hail. Ben frowned. All those new atrium windows. “Is that what you call that babble? Nope, Janice and I never had a TV when it was just us, and we’re not gonna get one now with the kids. They don’t need to be exposed to all that crap.”

  “Well at least get a weather radio…”

  “Got one.”

  “Then turn the damn thing on!” Zack laughed.

  Ben chuckled. “Yeah, yeah.” Redirecting, he said, “Hey, I don’t know if Lanie talked to you about the cellar floor yet.”

  “Yeah, we talked the other day. Kenny’s still hauling shit out of there, cut himself good, too, I hear.”

  “Yeah, Lanie stitched him up—seven stitches on his calf. Good thing she was home to do it and he didn’t have to go to the ER and no accident report. Have you talked to him yet?”

  “No. Bonnie told me. She was going to send the twins to help their dad, but Kenny said no, it’s too dangerous down there.”

  “That’s wise. What else did sis say?”

  “That Ken’s just blown away by the pile of shit in the cellar and that both Jimmy and Al are helping now because it’s like a fucking clown car down there. The more he takes out, the more there is. They’ve got one area’s pile low enough now they can at least see how big the room is. They can’t get to the end, but they can see the far wall. He says he’s guessing it runs the entire length of the footprint.”

  “Wow, that’s big. I think I convinced Lanie about the benefit of a cement floor.”

  “So she said.” Zack nodded. “I asked Dad about that. He says it would be worth her while to do it. Less mice for sure.”

  “I’m more worried about moisture. The fuse box is down there. I’d hate to think she’d get zapped trying to change a fuse.”

  “I agree.”

  “Cleaning it out though. I’ve been down there for the last two mornings. I’m tellin’ ya, it’s a hazard.” Ben shook his head. He’d been down there as far as the stairway. Aside from the boiler area, which was basically clear to begin with, the cellar was stacked like Dr. Seuss himself piled it. “It’s good Kenny said no to the boys helping.”

  “I wouldn’t want the nephews getting cut up either, but I don’t have a problem with them hauling the crap from the yard. We have to work with the weather from here on out and the cement comes when it comes. I told sis that.”

  “What did Bonnie say?”

  Zack chuckled. “She said just because you and I were working since we were nine and ten didn’t mean her boys had to.”

  “The kids are fifteen and seventeen for Christ’s sake. We ran our own crews at their age!” He shook his head. They all worked from an early age and they all had houses with mortgages paid off. If there was one thing they all got from Dad, it was a sound work ethic.

  “Oh, they’re coming to work all right. They told their mother they want to. Go figure.”

  Ben laughed. “I think that has more to do with them wanting to get inside the haunted Bowen mansion than making money.” An odd thought came to him the other day. Having seen chair legs unnecessarily entwined and crates and boxes stacked in such a way so that in order to get to one piece you had to move several others first, it seemed to him like the junk had been deliberately set that way to deter anyone from venturing further inside. Though he couldn’t say exactly why, the cellar really creeped him out.

  Chapter 13

  “Hey, Lanie.” Ben’s voice came through the cell phone. Lanie precariously propped her phone on her shoulder so she could finish rinsing the frying pan she’d just washed. “Hi, Ben, what’s up?”

  “Two things. First off have you seen the weather report today?”

  “No I haven’t seen anything. My TV still isn’t working.”

  “You should really dump that old thing, Lanie.”

  “I gave up trying to watch the ancient one Margaret Mason left behind. My friend took it the other night. She said the old cabinet would make a great litter box.”

  He laughed. “What?”

  His laughter made her laugh. The smile lingered in her voice when she explained how you take out the electronic parts, put a pan of litter inside. “Creative camouflage she called it.”

  “I never would have thought of that.” He was still chuckling when he asked, “So your flat screen isn’t working now?”

  “No, it’s not and it’s new! Barely out of the box. Do you think it’s the wiring in the study?”

  “I don’t think so. The w
iring isn’t all that old.”

  Thinking of a house full of small appliances with cloth-wrapped cords, she found it hard to believe the electrical wires in the house weren’t old. “They’re not?”

  He explained, “It was Janice’s and my turn to have dinner out at my dad’s, all of us kids try to do that at least once or twice a week since our mom passed away.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.”

  “Yeah, we’ve always been a really close family that way, even before mom passed. So anyway, he’s telling us how he knew the electrician who worked on the house back in ’66 after an electrical storm blew the transformer down the road. It actually started a fire on the porch…you know where that clapboard was replaced and didn’t quite match? That spot Kenny fixed?” He paused waiting for her to picture what he was talking about. “Well George and his two sons were hired to rewire the whole place, so it’s sound.”

  “I had no idea.”

  That Lanie had bought this place sight unseen without looking into the basics still surprised Ben. He said, “Given the rest is sound, I think it would be wise to replace the fuse box with a circuit breaker. They’re safer, and if you ever get an overload, the circuits flip off. That’ll save your appliances from power surges, too.”

  “The fuse box is in the cellar?” She remembered Mom and Pop had a fuse box in their basement and using any small appliance in combination with her blow dryer would regularly blow a fuse. She’d gone to school with wet hair more than once because of that.

  “It is, near the stairs on the right. You’re wise to pour concrete down there. You wouldn’t want to be standing on packed dirt with its varying degrees of moisture when you have your hand on the fuse box.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. Would you set that up for me, please?”

  “Sure, and I’ll have my brother-in-law Bob take a look at your flat screen, too. He’s a whiz with electronics. It might be a simple settings issue.”

  The wind chimes hanging above the back door began making a racket. Lanie looked out the screen door, the wind had picked up. She told Ben, “I think we’re getting rain today.”