Maidenstone Lighthouse (10 page)

My mouth fell open and I stared at him.

“That's what I figured,” he said.

I
lay suspended among the surging bubbles in the Jacuzzi tub, trying to sort out everything that had happened during the day. It was very late and Dan had left only minutes before, after making me promise to call him if I wanted to talk further.

I feared I had already talked too much.

After my initial shocked reaction to his strange question about Aimee Marks, it had taken Dan nearly an hour to get me to admit that I had indeed seen her. But I had finally broken down and told him the whole story, hastening to qualify my ghostly sightings by explaining, somewhat tearfully, I'm afraid, about Bobby's death and the persistent dreams I had been having ever since.

Dan had listened quietly and attentively without commenting until I finished.

“So,” I had finally concluded, sniffling miserably, “I guess you could say there's a very distinct possibility that I'm slightly crazy and I only imagined that Aimee Marks's spirit comes to my room at night. At least I'm sure that's what my shrink would tell you.”

His response had not been what I was expecting.

“Your shrink,” Dan had replied gently, “sounds to me like one of those smug, unpleasant people who revel in labeling themselves hard-nosed skeptics, and who feel unduly threatened by anything that can't be neatly wrapped in plastic.”

I'd managed to laugh a little then, despite my tears, grateful that he at least didn't think I was totally nuts. “That's definitely Laura,” I said. “But how can you be sure she's not right? Don't tell me you've seen Aimee's ghost, too?”

Dan shook his head. Then he dropped another bombshell. “Unfortunately, no,” he replied. “But I'm pretty sure that many other people have. An apparition fitting your description of Aimee Marks has been seen many times on the road out to the point and up in the old lighthouse tower. In fact,” he continued, “she was a famous attraction around Freedman's Cove for years. Most people had no idea who she was. But since she was young and seen so frequently around the Maidenstone Lighthouse, they took to calling her The Lightkeeper's Daughter.”

Now it was my turn to be skeptical. “Dan, I practically grew up in this house,” I countered. “If there's been a famous ghost wandering around here for all these years, how come I never heard anything about her?”

That was when he showed me the other journals that he had insisted on bringing along, journals written by lightkeepers who had held the job after Amos Carter's death.

As it turned out, The Lightkeeper's Daughter had been seen and described numerous times in the official lighthouse logs throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

So regular in fact were her appearances that several noted psychics and mediums had been attracted to Freedman's Cove from as far away as New York and Philadelphia, hoping to glimpse her.

Then, sometime in the early 1940s—around the same time the stone causeway was built—the apparitions had abruptly stopped and the ghost had been all but forgotten. Until now.

Considering that astonishing information, I reasoned, perhaps I wasn't really losing my mind after all. At least not to the extent of seeing things that weren't really there.

But the mere fact that others had witnessed my ghost in earlier times didn't completely let me off the hook. I was still worried that I might not be fully in control of my faculties. How could I be? Not only had I let Dan Freedman kiss me, I had wanted him to do it. In fact I had kissed him back and had enjoyed it, thoroughly.

The waters of the Jacuzzi swirled sensually about my body, conjuring up another quick, steamy remembrance of that long-ago summer night when I had laid naked before my open windows, fantasizing about Danny Freedman.

I pushed the carnal image from my mind, attempting to bring my thoughts back to an orderly assessment of my mental state. Still, if I truly wasn't crazy, I fretted, how could I have reveled so in the kiss of another man when I was so profoundly grief-stricken over losing Bobby?

I could not come up with a satisfactory explanation.

 

I stood at the casement window and watched the foam on the edges of the waves; it was almost fluorescent in the moonlight. As the beacon of Maidenstone Lighthouse cut through the night I thought of horrible Amos Carter spying on Aimee. My ire was replaced by an embarrassed blush at the thought that someone could have been watching me, too. I shuddered to think as the light fell across me.

Shaking it off, I went to bed and slept, anticipating more baleful dreams of Bobby's handsome face.

But instead of another melancholy rendezvous with my lost love, I experienced a comical and perplexing encounter with Damon.

Funny even when he was at his most serious, my dear partner proved to be a howl that night. So much so that I could actually hear myself giggling at his antics in my sleep.

 

“Sue, darling, there's something we have simply got to discuss.”

Damon was sitting behind his perpetually cluttered desk in our Manhattan offices. Gone were his flamboyant silk shirt and tight leather pants. In their place he wore a conservatively striped business suit, complete with a tastefully patterned silk tie. And his flyaway hair had actually been combed.

I remarked on his odd appearance, and Damon spluttered angrily and pointed a stubby finger at me. “I'm trying to be serious, so you'd better listen to me now, girl,” he warned in his syrupy Southern accent. “'Cause I'm telling you this for your own good…”

I waited, giggling like a schoolgirl. Because, like Aunt Ellen before him, Damon was forever giving me practical advice and telling me things for my own good.

In my dream, Damon opened his mouth to speak and a cartoon bubble appeared over his head. The word
BOBBY
was printed there in shaky cartoon letters surrounded by little
POW!
marks and exclamation points.

My giggles turned to laughter. “I know, I know,” I retorted, anticipating his next line. “If I'd had better locks on the apartment door, the junkies wouldn't have stolen Bobby's stuff. It's okay, I don't blame you, Damon. It was my own fault…”

Damon's round, moonlike features twisted angrily. He shook his head in frustration and rolled his eyes skyward to look at the silly cartoon balloon floating above him. “Sue, listen to me!” he demanded, his voice rising to a frantic squeal.

I bit my tongue, put on a straight face and listened.

“It makes me very sad to have to be the one…” he began. Big blue comic-book tears suddenly began to roll down Damon's fat, shiny cheeks.

I clutched my sides and howled at him, the sound of my laughter drowning out his feeble attempt to tell me whatever it was.

In the background, someone began tapping out a funny little tune on a jangling brass bell.

 

I awoke to the loud, persistent ring of the old-fashioned black telephone on my bedside table.

Struggling to come awake, I sat up and glanced sleepily at the travel clock beside the phone.

It was six-fifteen in the morning.

Gray light filtered in through the windows from a dull sky filled with threatening storm clouds.

The phone chimed again.

“Hello?”

The stranger's voice on the other end of the line was indistinct over the background clatter of a high-speed computer printer and I had to ask him to repeat his question.

“Yes,” I replied when he finally made himself heard over the noise, “this is Susan Marks speaking.”

I listened with growing bewilderment as he identified himself and rattled off a dispassionate message, followed by several disturbing questions that I could not answer. He then gave me a set of directions and asked if I had understood.

I nodded dumbly at the phone in my hand. “Yes,” I replied dully. “I'll get there as soon as I can.”

The line went dead and I sat there holding the receiver until it started to bleep annoyingly, prodding me to hang up. I replaced it in its cradle and listened to the silence closing in around me.

I didn't begin to cry immediately, that would come later. But I knew that I did not want to go through this alone.

A
fter I hung up from the early-morning phone call I hurriedly dressed and went outside in the rain to the Volvo. But one look at my trembling hands as I fumbled to get the key into the ignition convinced me that I was in no condition to drive. So, picking up my cell phone, I impulsively dialed Dan's number to ask if he could possibly go with me.

He asked me to give him twenty minutes to make a few calls—calls I suspected, that had involved scraping whatever other plans he might have had for the day. Feeling miserably inadequate, I waited for him in the Volvo, assuming it would be more reliable and comfortable on the long drive than his battered old truck.

In my agitated state I completely forgot that my unassuming new friend was the famous and successful artist Freedan. So I was momentarily surprised when he pulled into my driveway a short time later in a large and luxuriously appointed Mercedes sedan. Typical of Dan's low-key demeanor, he had casually described the Mercedes as his “other car.” The old Toyota pickup, it seemed, was strictly for hauling around paint and the other frequently messy trappings of his work.

After I briefly explained the situation to him, we immediately started for Boston, pausing only long enough to pull into a nearby truck stop to fill the Mercedes' gas tank and pick up coffee and doughnuts.

Now we were speeding north, with Dan skillfully guiding the powerful car through clouds of blinding mist thrown up by lumbering tractor trailer rigs and around lines of slower traffic.

“So this guy who called you was from the FAA?” Dan Freedman took his eyes from the rain-swept interstate access ramp and glanced across the car at me.

“No.” I wearily shook my head. “He said he was from the National Transportation Safety Board…NTSB. That's the branch of the FAA that investigates all crashes of U.S.-registered aircraft.”

I had learned the distinction between the federal aviation authorities the hard way, following the disappearance of Bobby's plane. After all fatal aviation accidents the NTSB routinely interviews the friends and families of flight crews, in order to determine whether the pilots may have been under any undue physical or emotional stress.

Accordingly, several weeks after the oil company's jet was lost, an NTSB agent had come up from Washington to ask me whether Bobby had ever had a problem with drugs or alcohol, or if I thought he had been having an affair, had gambling debts, suffered from mental illness, etc.

Biting my tongue in order to keep from screaming at the cold, bureaucratic insensitivity of the questions, I had somehow managed to remain dry-eyed throughout the distressing interview.

But even as I calmly denied that some unsavory secret might have caused his jet to crash into the sea I was uncomfortably aware of how little I really knew about Bobby's life before we met.

Miss Practical had snidely asked, “Before you met? You don't know that much about him now.” That's ridiculous, I countered, I know everything about him.

But as the hours passed and the investigator asked questions like, When was he to arrive wherever he was going? I didn't know. Which hotel? I didn't know. I realized then that while he had given me his cell phone number I had no other way to contact him. When was he due back? All he'd said was a week or two and that he was going to the South Pacific. I had no idea what he did or where he went when we were not together.

I rationalized that it was because I never talked about work so he didn't, either. But the seeds of doubt had been planted.

After the man from the NTSB had gone away I had tried to put the unsettling incident behind me. Now the same agency had called me again, this time with an urgent summons.

Dan was silent as we reached the top of the curving interstate ramp and accelerated into a line of swiftly moving morning traffic. “Even with the rain we should be there in a couple of hours,” he advised. “Maybe you should close your eyes and try to get a little rest. There's a button on the side of the seat if you want it to recline.”

“I don't think I can sleep,” I said, lifting a Styrofoam cup from a holder between the seats and sipping bitter 7-Eleven coffee. “I can't tell you how much I appreciate this, Dan. But I feel terrible about ruining your whole day…”

He waved off my apology without taking his eyes from the road. “I'm just damn glad you called me,” he said. “You shouldn't have to go through something like this alone.”

I leaned back with my coffee, trying not to think too much about what awaited me at the end of our journey, and grateful for Dan's strong, reassuring presence at my side.

I closed my eyes and leaned back against the butter-soft tan leather of the headrest, relaxing slightly in the warmth from the heater vents.

Occasionally during the two-hour drive I stole glances at Dan's strong, assured profile behind the wheel, thankful, too, that he was not peppering me with more questions, but seemed content to leave me alone to prepare myself for what was sure to be a soul-wrenching experience.

T
he motionless body lying beneath the sheets in the stark, dimly lit confines of a fourth-floor Boston Medical Center ICU suite might already have been dead. Except for a flashing monitor screen above the bed that registered a faint but steady heartbeat, there was no sign of life.

I stood for several moments looking down at the familiar face, now drained of all expression, its skin as ashen and lifeless as that of a corpse. When finally I worked up the courage to move closer and reach out for him I was shocked to find his hand warm to the touch.

Grasping the hand softly—as if by exerting too much pressure I might somehow further compound his grievous injuries—I whispered his name.

“Damon, can you hear me?”

There was no faint fluttering of the eyelids, no weak but unmistakable squeezing of my hand to show that he had heard and recognized my voice, or any similar reaction, such as television has conditioned us to expect in the third acts of weepy medical dramas.

Damon St. Claire lay deathly still in his maze of electronic probes and plastic tubes, looking for all the world like a small, badly broken doll.

I stayed there, holding his hand, for the five minutes ICU allotted visitors. Then I stepped outside and crossed a sterile corridor to the adjacent waiting area. Dan was standing inside, conversing with an attractive blonde female dressed in wrinkled surgical greens. They both turned as I came into the room and the woman extended her hand to me.

“I'm Alice Cahill, Mr. St. Claire's attending physician,” she said. “I'm so glad they finally managed to locate you.”

I let her shake my hand, not quite sure where to begin. “What happened?” I asked. “The NTSB simply told me that Damon had been in a plane crash and asked if he had any next of kin—which, aside from an invalid mother in a New Orleans nursing home, he doesn't. They gave me the address of the hospital and said I should come right away.”

Alice Cahill looked annoyed. “Leave it to the feds to handle things with tact and discretion,” she snorted angrily. Then she gently took my arm and propelled me toward the door. “I'm off duty until this evening,” she said. “Let's all go downstairs to the cafeteria and get some breakfast. And I'll tell you everything I know about the crash and your friend's prognosis.”

As we passed by the ICU corridor I looked through a window. Damon had not moved a muscle. “He is going to be all right,” I said hopefully.

“Over breakfast,” Alice answered. “It's a long story and I haven't eaten since last night.” She gave me an appraising once-over. “And from the looks of you, I'd say that a little nourishment wouldn't do you any harm, either.”

Five minutes later I sat gazing down at the plate of scrambled eggs that Dan had insisted on getting for me from the cafeteria line, as Alice Cahill began to explain about Damon. “Three days ago an evening commuter flight from New York to Newport crashed into Narragansett Bay…”

“The night of the big storm,” I interrupted, recalling the TV news story about a plane crash that I'd turned off on my second night back in Freedman's Cove.

Alice nodded. “The commuter pilot reported he was experiencing heavy icing and severe turbulence just before he went into the bay,” she confirmed. “The Coast Guard began an immediate search and initially reported no survivors. All seventeen crew and passengers aboard the flight were presumed dead.”

A weary smile touched the corners of the doctor's full lips. “But miracles sometimes do happen. And your friend upstairs in ICU,” she said, raising her gentle eyes toward the ceiling, “is one very tough customer. After floating around all night in a life jacket he was picked up by a fishing boat more than eleven hours after the crash. The Coast Guard flew him directly here by helicopter because Boston Med has the best facilities in the region for treating cases of advanced hypothermia.”

She paused to take a sip of orange juice and nibbled at her toast. “I was on duty when they first brought him in. He had the usual assortment of broken bones and internal injuries that we expect to see in plane-crash victims, and he was in the final stages of hypothermia. Actually, when he arrived here his core body temperature was down to around eighty degrees and his heart had stopped during the helicopter ride.”

Alice shook her head in wonderment. “That we were able to get his heart going again was nothing short of a miracle all by itself. Anyway,” she continued after a moment, “we immediately went to work warming him up—thankfully we have the latest equipment here, which allows us to actually remove and reheat the patient's blood, otherwise he wouldn't have survived. Fortunately, the procedure worked like a charm and his temperature stabilized. So next we took him into surgery and attended to the more serious internal injuries, primarily a ruptured spleen and a punctured lung. He's also suffering from the effects of a severe concussion to the brain.”

“You also mentioned broken bones,” I said, “but he doesn't seem to be wearing any casts or anything.”

The doctor paused and looked directly into my eyes. “His fractures are simply immobilized at the moment,” she said frankly. “We'll do further surgery to permanently repair that damage…if he makes it through this present stage.”

“What are Damon's chances of pulling through…this stage?” I persisted.

The soft-spoken surgeon exchanged a worried glance with Dan, who reached over and took my hand. “It's really much too soon to say,” she answered. “Your friend is incredibly strong, but he's been through an awful lot. Now it's up to his body to heal the worst of the trauma. As often happens in such cases, especially after a severe concussion, he's withdrawn into coma. Hopefully, he'll come out of it within the next twenty-four hours.”

I could feel the all-too-familiar sting of tears welling up in the corners of my eyes. And I was struck by a sudden horrible thought. “The brain injury. If he lives, he won't be…mentally impaired?”

I tried to push away a nightmare image of sweet, brilliant Damon propped up in a hospital bed somewhere gazing out a window, his sparkling brown eyes devoid of all comprehension and intelligence.

For the first time since we'd met, Alice Cahill actually smiled at me. “You mean will he have any permanent brain damage? No, I don't think so,” she replied. “Hell, I'm sorry. I should have mentioned that right away. Your friend…Damon…actually regained consciousness for a short time after we reestablished his body temperature. He and I held a brief but coherent conversation.” The smile broadened. “He was naturally quite confused and it was a very strange conversation.” She laughed and said, “But basically coherent all the same.”

“Thank God for that,” I breathed. “What did he say?”

Alice grinned. “Well, after I told him where he was and explained that he'd be staying with us a while, he looked around the ICU and said if I expected him to stay I might add some drapes and a few throw pillows. He also suggested I get a more flattering haircut and consider wearing a little makeup.”

“That's definitely the Damon I know and love.” I giggled, nearly giddy with relief.

Alice's expression turned serious again. “He was also asking for you,” she said. “I assume you know he was on his way to see you when his plane crashed.”

I stared at her in amazement. Because, in my agitated state, until that very moment I hadn't given any serious thought to the reason Damon had been on a commuter flight bound for Newport, Rhode Island, especially since he detested flying.

“Did Damon say why he was coming to see me?” I asked, remembering with chagrin our last agitated telephone conversation and the way I had screamed at him over the cell phone. Though I had been almost certain then that he had not heard my final stupid accusation about his having always hated Bobby, I must have been wrong.

The doctor shook her head. “He didn't give any reason,” she answered. “He just kept repeating that it was extremely important that he see you right away. Then he lost consciousness again before I could get any information on next of kin. So I listed you on the admission forms as the person to be contacted.”

I felt my tears returning. The only explanation I could think of was that Damon must have decided he had to come and personally put things right between us, face-to-face. “We had argued,” I whispered. “If it hadn't been for the terrible things I said to him, he would never have gotten on that airplane.”

Dan's hand was squeezing my shoulder. “Sue, you don't really know why he was on that plane,” he said. “You can't blame yourself for what happened.”

“Take a look around you,” Alice interjected. She made a broad gesture, indicating the dozens of somber visitors and staff members sitting at tables scattered around the huge hospital cafeteria. “You can see a thousand tragedies a day in this or any other big-city trauma center. That's just life, Susan.” She smiled. “It's a risky business, living.”