There and Now
Page 3
Trista smoothed the colorful patchwork quilt that covered her. “Which are you?” she demanded bluntly. “My guardian angel, or just a regular ghost?”
Now Elisabeth did laugh. “Is there such a thing as a ‘regular ghost’?” she asked, venturing farther into the room and sitting down on the end of Trista’s bed. At the moment, she didn’t trust her knees to hold her up. “I’m neither one of those things, Trista. You’re looking at an ordinary, flesh-and-blood woman.”
Trista assessed Elisabeth’s football jersey with a puzzled expression. “Is that your nightdress? I’ve never seen one quite like it.”
“Yes, this is my—nightdress.” Elisabeth felt light-headed and wondered if she would wake up with her face in the rain gutter that lined the sun-porch roof. She ran one hand over the high-quality workmanship of the quilt. If this was an hallucination, she reflected, it was a remarkably vivid one. “Go to sleep now, Trista. I’m sure it’s very late.”
Thunder shook the room and Trista shivered visibly. “I won’t be able to sleep unless I get some hot milk,” she said, watching Elisabeth with wide, hopeful eyes.
Elisabeth fought an urge to enfold the child in her arms, to beg her to run away from this strange house and never, ever return. She stood, the fingers of her right hand fidgeting with the necklace. “I’ll go and make some for you.” She started back toward the door, but Trista stopped her.
“It’s that way, Elisabeth,” she said, pointing toward the inner door. “I have my own special stairway.”
“This is getting weirder and weirder,” Elisabeth muttered, careful not to stub her toe on the massive dollhouse as she crossed to the other door and opened it. “Let’s see just how far this delusion goes,” she added, finding herself at the top of a rear stairway. Her heart pounded so hard, she thought she’d faint as she made her way carefully down to the lower floor.
She wouldn’t have recognized the kitchen, it was so much bigger than the one she knew. A single kerosene lantern burned in the center of the oak table, sending up a quivering trail of sooty smoke. There were built-in cabinets and bins along one wall, and the refrigerator and the stove were gone. In their places were an old-fashioned wooden icebox and an enormous iron-and-chrome monster designed to burn wood. The only thing that looked familiar was the back stairway leading into the main hallway upstairs.
Elisabeth stood in the middle of the floor, holding herself together by sheer force of will. “This is a dream, Beth,” she told herself aloud, grasping the brass latch on the door of the icebox and giving it a cautious wrench. “Relax. This is only a dream.”
The door opened and she bent, squinting, to peer inside. Fortunately, the milk was at the front, in a heavy crockery pitcher.
Elisabeth took the pitcher out of the icebox, closed the door with a distracted motion of one heel and scanned the dimly lit room again. “Wait till you tell Rue about this,” she chattered on, mostly in an effort to comfort herself. “She’ll want to do a documentary about you. You’ll make the cover of the Enquirer, and tabloid TV will have a heyday—”
“Who the hell are you?”
The question came from behind her, blown in on a wet-and-frigid wind. Elisabeth whirled, still clutching the pitcher of cream-streaked milk to her bosom, and stared into the furious gray eyes of a man she had never seen before.
A strange sensation of being wrenched toward him spiritually compounded Elisabeth’s shock.
He was tall, close to six feet, with rain-dampened dark hair and shoulders that strained the fabric of his suitcoat. He wore a vest with a gold watch chain dangling from one pocket, and his odd, stiff collar was open.
For some confounding reason, Elisabeth found herself wanting to touch him—tenderly at first, and then with the sweet, dizzying fury of passion.
She gave herself an inward shake. “This is really authentic,” Elisabeth said. “I hope I’ll be able to remember it all.”
The stranger approached and took the endangered pitcher from Elisabeth’s hands, setting it aside on the table. His eyes raked her figure, taking in every fiber of the long football jersey that served as her favorite nightgown, leaving gentle fire in their wake.
“I asked you a question,” he snapped. “Who the devil are you?”
Elisabeth gave an hysterical little burst of laughter. The guy was a spirit—or more likely a delusion—and she felt a staggering attraction to him. She must be ‘round the bend. “Who I am isn’t the question at all,” she answered intractably. “The question is, are you a ghost or am I a ghost?” She paused and spread her hands, reasoning that there was no sense in fighting the dream. “I mean, who ya gonna call?”
The man standing before her—Elisabeth could only assume he was the “Papa” Trista had been screaming for—puckered his brow in consternation. Then he felt her forehead with the backs of four cool fingers.
His touch heated Elisabeth’s skin and sent a new shock splintering through her, and Elisabeth fairly leapt backward. Hoping it would carry her home to the waking world, like some talisman, she brought the pendant from beneath her shirt and traced its outline with her fingers.
“What is your name?” the man repeated patiently, as though speaking to an imbecile.
Elisabeth resisted an impulse to make a suitable noise with a finger and her lower lip and smiled instead. She had a drunken feeling, but she assured herself that she was bound to wake up any minute now. “Elisabeth McCartney. What’s yours?”
“Dr. Jonathan Fortner,” was the pensive answer. His steely eyes dropped to the pendant she was fiddling with and went wide. In the next instant, before Elisabeth had had a chance even to brace herself, he’d gripped the necklace and ripped it from her throat. “Where did you get this?” he demanded, his voice a terrifying rasp.
Elisabeth stepped back again. Dream or no dream, she’d felt the pull of the chain against her nape, and she was afraid of the suppressed violence she sensed in this man. “It—it belonged to my aunt—and now it belongs to my cousin and me.” She gathered every shred of courage she possessed just to keep from cowering before this man. “If you’ll just give it back, please….”
“You’re a liar,” Dr. Fortner spat out, dropping the necklace into the pocket of his coat. “This pendant was my wife’s—it’s been in her family for generations.”
Elisabeth wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. This whole experience, whatever it was, was getting totally out of hand. “Perhaps it belonged to your—your wife at one time,” she managed nervously, “but it’s mine now. Mine and my cousin’s.” She held out one palm. “I want it back.”
He looked at her hand as though he might spit in it, then pressed her into a chair. Her knees were like jelly, and she couldn’t be sure whether this was caused by her situation or the primitive, elemental tug she felt toward this man.
“Papa?” Trista called from upstairs.
Dr. Fortner’s lethal glance followed the sound. He stood stock still for a long moment, then shrugged out of his coat and hung it from a peg beside the door. “Everything is all right,” he called back. “Go to sleep.”
Elisabeth swallowed the growing lump in her throat and started to rise from the chair. At one quelling glance from Dr. Fortner, however, she thought better of it and sank back to her seat. She watched with rounded eyes as her reluctant host sat down across from her.
“Who are you?” he asked sternly.
He was a remarkable man, ruggedly handsome and yet polished, in a Victorian sort of way. The sort Elisabeth had fantasized about since puberty.
She tried to keep her voice even and her manner calm. “I told you. I’m Elisabeth McCartney.”
“All right, Elisabeth McCartney—what are you doing here, dressed in that crazy getup, and why were you wearing my wife’s necklace?”
“I was—well, I don’t know what I’m doing here, actually. Maybe I’m dreaming, maybe I’m a hologram or an astral projection….”
His dark eyebrows drew together for a moment. “A what?”
“Then it looks like you won’t be going anywhere for a while. And I, for one, am not dreaming.”
Elisabeth gazed into his hard, autocratic face. Doubtless, the pop-psychology gurus would have something disturbing to say about the irrefutable appeal this man held for her. “You’re probably right. I don’t see how you could possibly have the sensitivity to dream. Alan Alda, you definitely aren’t. It must be me.”
“Papa, is Elisabeth still here?”
The doctor’s eyes scoured Elisabeth, then softened slightly. “Yes, Punkin, she’s still here.”
“She was going to bring me some warm milk,” Trista persisted.
Jonathan glowered at Elisabeth for a moment, then gestured toward the pitcher. She stumbled out of her chair and proceeded to the wall of cupboards where, with some effort, she located a store of mugs and a small pan.
She poured milk into the kettle, shaking so hard, it was a wonder she didn’t spill the stuff all over the floor, and set it on the stove to heat. She glanced toward the doctor’s coat, hanging nearby on a peg, and gauged her chances of getting the necklace without his noticing.
They didn’t seem good.
“If you want that milk to heat, you’ll have to stoke up the fire,” he said.
Elisabeth stiffened. The stove had all kinds of lids and doors, but she had no idea how to reach in and “stoke” the flames to life. And she really didn’t want to bend over in her nightshirt. “Maybe you could do that,” she said.
He took a chunk of wood from a crude box beside the stove, opened a little door in the front and shoved it inside. Then he reached for a poker that rested against the wall and jabbed at the embers and the wood until a snapping blaze flared up.
Elisabeth, feeling as stirred and warm as the coals at the base of the rejuvenated fire, lifted her chin to let him know she wasn’t impressed and waited for the milk to heat.
Dr. Fortner regarded Elisabeth steadily. “I’m sure you’re some kind of lunatic,” he said reasonably, “though I’ll be damned if I can figure out how you ended up in Pine River. In any case, you’ll have to spend the night. I’ll turn you over to the marshal in the morning.”
Elisabeth was past wondering when this nightmare was going to end. “You’d actually keep me here all night? I’m a lunatic, remember? I could take an ax and chop you to bits while you sleep. Or put lye down your well.”
By way of an answer, he strode across the room, snatched the pan from the stove and poured the milk into a mug. Then, after setting the kettle in the sink, he grasped Elisabeth’s elbow in one hand and the cup in the other and started toward the stairs, stopping only to blow out the lamp.
The suitcoat, Elisabeth noticed, was left behind, on its peg next to the door.
He hustled Elisabeth through the darkness and up the steep, narrow, enclosed staircase ahead of him. Her knees trembled with a weird sort of excitement as she hustled along. “I’m not crazy, you know,” she insisted, sounding a little breathless.
He opened the door to Trista’s room and carried the milk inside, only to find his daughter sleeping soundly, a big, yellow-haired rag doll clutched in her arms.
A fond smile touched Jonathan Fortner’s sensual mouth, and he bent to kiss the child lightly on the forehead. Then, after setting the unneeded milk on the bedstand, he motioned for Elisabeth to precede him into the hallway.
The fact that she’d originally entered the Twilight Zone from that door was not lost on Elisabeth. She rushed eagerly through it, certain she’d awaken on the other side in her own bed.
Instead, she found herself in a hallway that was familiar and yet startlingly different from the one she knew. There was a painted china lamp burning on a table, and grim photographs stuck out from the walls, their wire hangers visible. The patterned runner on the floor was one Elisabeth had never seen before.
“It must have been the beef casserole,” she said.
Dr. Fortner gave her a look and propelled her down the hall to the room next to the one she was supposed to be sleeping in. “Get some rest, Miss McCartney. And remember—if you get up and start wandering around, I’ll hear you.”
“And do what?” Elisabeth said as she pushed open the door and stepped into a shadowy room. In the real world, it would be the one she and Rue had always shared during their visits.
“And lock you in the pantry for the rest of the night,” he replied flatly.
Even though the room was almost totally dark, Elisabeth knew the doctor wasn’t kidding. He would lock her in the pantry, like a prisoner. But then, all of this was only happening in her imagination anyway.
He pulled back some covers on a bed and guided her into it, and Elisabeth went without a struggle, pursued by odd and erotic thoughts of him joining her. None of this was like her at all; Ian had always complained that she wasn’t passionate enough. She decided to simply close her eyes and put the whole crazy episode out of her mind. In the morning, she would wake up in her own bed.
“Good night,” Dr. Fortner said. The timbre of his voice was rich and deep, and he smelled of rain and horses and pipe tobacco.
Elisabeth felt a deep physical stirring, but she knew nothing was going to come of it because, unfortunately, this wasn’t that kind of dream. “Good night,” she responded in a dutiful tone.
She lay wide awake for a long time, listening. Somewhere in the room, a clock was ticking, and rain pattered against the window. She heard a door open and close, and she imagined Dr. Fortner taking off his clothes. He’d do it methodically, with a certain rough, masculine grace.
Elisabeth closed her eyes firmly, but the intriguing images remained and her body began to throb. “Good grief, woman,” she muttered, “this is a dream. Do you realize what Rue will say when she hears about this—and I know you’ll be fool enough to tell her, too—she’ll say, ‘Get a life Bethie. Better yet, get a shrink.’”
She waited for a long time, then crept out of bed, grimacing as she opened the door. Fortunately, it didn’t squeak on its hinges nor did the floorboards creak. Holding her breath, Elisabeth groped her way down the hall in the direction of the main staircase.
So much for your threats, Dr. Fortner, she thought smugly as she hurried through the large parlor and the dining room.
In the kitchen, she stubbed her toe trying to find the matches on the table and cried out in pain before she could stop herself. The fire was out in the stove and the room was cold.
Elisabeth snatched the coat from the peg and pulled it on, cowering in the shadows by the cabinets as she waited for Jonathan Fortner to storm in and follow up on his threat to lock her in the pantry.
When an estimated ten minutes had ticked past and he still hadn’t shown up, Elisabeth came out of hiding, her fingers curved around the broken necklace in the coat’s pocket. Slowly, carefully, she crept up the smaller of the two stairways and into Trista’s room.
There she stood beside the bed for a moment, seeing quite clearly now that her eyes had adjusted again, looking down at the sleeping child. Trista was beautiful and so very much alive. Tears lined Elisabeth’s lashes as she thought of all this little girl would miss by dying young.
She bent and kissed Trista’s pale forehead, then crossed the room to the other door, the one she’d unwittingly stumbled through hours before. Eyes closed tightly, fingers clutching the necklace, she turned the knob and stepped over the threshold.
For almost a full minute she just stood there in the hallway, trembling, afraid to open her eyes. It was the feel of plush carpeting under her bare feet that finally alerted her to the fact that the dream was over and she was back in the real world.
Elisabeth began to sob softly for joy and relief. And maybe because she missed a man who didn’t exist. When she’d regained some of her composure, she opened the door of her own room, stepped inside and flipped the switch. Light flooded
the chamber, revealing the four-poster, the fireplace, the vanity, the Queen Anne chairs.
Suddenly, Elisabeth was desperately tired. She switched off the lights, stumbled to the bed and fell onto it face first.
When she awakened, the room was flooded with sunlight and her nose itched. Elisabeth sat up, pushing back her hair with one hand and trying to focus her eyes.
The storm was over, and she smiled. Maybe she’d take a long walk after breakfast and clear her head. That crazy dream she’d had the night before had left her with a sort of emotional hangover, and she needed fresh air.
She was passing the vanity table on her way to the bathroom when her image in the mirror stopped her where she stood. Shock washed over her as she stared, her eyes enormous, her mouth wide open.
She was wearing a man’s suitcoat.
Her knees began to quiver and for a moment, she thought she’d be sick right where she stood. She collapsed onto the vanity bench and covered her face with both hands, peeking through her fingers at her reflection.
“It wasn’t a dream,” she whispered, hardly able to believe the words. She ran one hand down the rough woolen sleeve of the old-fashioned coat. “I was really there.”
For a moment, the room dipped and swayed, and Elisabeth was sure she was going to faint. She pushed the bench back from the table and bent to put her head between her knees. “Don’t swoon, Beth,” she lectured herself. “There’s a perfectly logical explanation for this. Okay, it beats the hell out of me what it could be, but there is an answer!”
Once she was sure she wasn’t going to pass out, Elisabeth sat up again and drew measured breaths until she had achieved a reasonable sense of calm. She stared at her pale face in the mirror and at her startled blue eyes. But mostly she stared at Dr. Jonathan Fortner’s coat.
She put her hand into the right pocket and found the necklace. Slowly lifting it out, she spread it gently on the vanity table. The necklace was broken near the catch, but the pendant was unharmed.
Elisabeth pulled in a deep breath, let it out slowly. Then, calmly, she stood up, removed Dr. Fortner’s coat and proceeded into the bathroom.