Maidenstone Lighthouse (13 page)

“Why not?” I demanded. “Damon is my dearest friend. You were the one who said he wanted me to be here.”

Alice nodded patiently. “I know I did, my dear,” she admitted. “But I'm beginning to think that your devotion to him might actually be at the heart of the problem right now. Because seeing you obviously placed a great emotional strain on Damon, perhaps because you two had argued just before his accident and he was feeling guilty.”

Alice paused for a moment to sip her coffee. “He may also be feeling guilty over his dislike of Bobby, now that Bobby's gone. Anyway, Damon is still obviously quite disoriented and I'm afraid that seeing you was just more than he could handle.”

“I see,” I murmured, hurt by the implication that the mere sight of me could have triggered my friend's emotional crisis.

Alice suddenly reached out and put her arms around me. “I want you to trust me on this, Sue,” she said gently. “Let's give Damon a few days to adjust to being back among the living before we risk upsetting him again for any reason.”

“If you really think that's best,” I very reluctantly agreed, pulling free of her embrace. “Of course, I only want him to get better.”

I swiped at a tear forming in the corner of my eye. “But you must know that I love him like a brother.”

“I know you do,” Alice whispered. “I will personally call you every day to tell you how he's doing. And I promise that you can come back the minute I think he's strong enough. Okay?”

“Okay,” I murmured.

“But first I've got to dispel this dangerous delusion of his,” she said worriedly.

“If it really is a delusion,” I murmured resentfully.

“Go home,” she ordered. “I'll call you.”

L
ife seldom wraps things up in tidy packages with neat endings, happy or otherwise. I know that sounds like another one of those insipid truisms that I'm convinced Laura makes up just to kill time during her twice-weekly sessions at Elizabeth Arden. So laugh if you must, but that particular piece of homespun philosophy happens to be one that I concocted all by myself.

First Bobby had disappeared without a trace, leaving me hopelessly suspended between the unbearable extremes of bitter grief and unreasonable hope. Then Dan Freedman had suddenly exploded into the shambles of my life and, within days, claimed to be falling in love with me, a painful situation for us both that, under any other circumstances, I could have found deliciously reciprocal.

Now, in the midst of that already impossibly emotional tangle of guilt and self-recrimination, Damon, dear, sweet Damon, had nearly died in a plane crash and was lying doped up in a Boston hospital room, terrified out of his poor battered skull by an otherworldly encounter with my dead lover.

The situation was beyond all rational analysis or explanation. But because of it, sick with worry, half in love and steeped in my own guilt, I felt as though I was literally coming apart at the seams.

If there was any solace at all to be drawn from the confused emotional triangle in which I now found myself trapped it was only my slowly growing conviction that I probably wasn't crazy after all. Or at least no crazier than poor Damon, who thought he'd taken a meeting with Bobby at the Pearly gates, or Dan, who actually believed that Damon had seen Bobby in Heaven, and, bless him, who had also believed me when I said that I'd seen the ghost of Aimee Marks.

When the bizarre becomes commonplace it's time to stop dwelling on the absolute strangeness of life and get on with living it, otherwise you'll probably never sleep again.

No. Laura didn't make up that one, either. It was simply how I decided I would have to personally cope if I was going to avoid a future filled with rubber rooms and heavy trancs. In effect, I had made up my mind to stop questioning
what
was happening all around me and try instead to figure out
why
it was happening.

First and foremost I wanted to know why Damon had encountered such a seemingly frightening visage of Bobby during those lost moments as he hovered between life and death. Because I was thoroughly convinced that what Damon had experienced when his heart had stopped and his vital signs flat-lined was no delusion but an actual event.

And, no matter what Alice Cahill thought, I also knew that when Damon again regained consciousness his physical wounds could not really begin healing until his terrifying otherworldly experience could somehow be explained.

Since I was temporarily powerless to do anything else for Damon I decided to find that explanation for him. And I was convinced that the best place to start was right back in Freedman's Cove, where I happened to have a unique source that just might have some of the answers I so desperately needed.

Who could better explain the odd circumstances of Damon's near-death experience than Aimee Marks? I truly believed that Aimee was real. And, further, I believed that she had attempted to communicate with me, on the night I had awakened to find her sitting beside my bed, easing me out of my own terrible dream of Bobby.

Perhaps, I thought, it would be possible for me to expand that first halting communication into a dialogue with Aimee's gentle spirit.

Though I did not share these thoughts with Dan—mostly because I was afraid he would try to prevent me from exposing myself to any further emotional shocks—they were the ones running through my mind as he and I drove back to Freedman's Cove late on the afternoon of the day Damon first awakened from his coma.

 

After leaving the hospital we had returned to the Hyatt, where, after a few hours of rest, I had spent the remainder of the day phoning friends and clients in New York, to explain why St. Claire & Marks would be closed for an indefinite period of time.

Fortunately, Damon's name had finally been released to the press the previous evening. So a fairly large news report about the lone survivor of the Narragansett Bay commuter-plane crash had already appeared in the Manhattan morning papers, greatly easing the difficulty of my explanations.

Of course, everyone with whom I spoke had expressed nothing but concern for Damon's condition. And our largest clients had all assured me that St. Claire & Marks would remain on retainers until we were back in operation again.

Still, I was genuinely worried about the survival of our business, and wondering how I could possibly manage without my brilliant partner. I am enough of a realist to know that events move with blinding speed in the high-stakes world of antiques. And the fact that Damon and I were out of action would not stop the next big auction from going ahead without us.

As it turned out I need not have worried. For when I finally got around to calling Sir Edward North at Christie's, the scholarly old curator who'd started Damon and me in the business staggered me by announcing that he was taking a long-overdue holiday from his duties at the auction house. Until Damon and I were back on our feet, Sir Edward informed me, he was applying for a temporary position as St. Claire & Marks's chief appraiser.

I was so relieved and grateful that I blubbered my thanks into the phone for five minutes before Sir Edward managed to convince me that he was actually looking forward to abandoning his stuffy uptown offices and getting “back into the trenches again.” Brushing aside my tearful professions of gratitude, the old darling had gruffly ordered me off the line, after making me promise to fax him a list of our clients, so he could begin calling to advise them of the new arrangement.

A
unt Ellen's grand old Victorian house loomed cold and forbidding in the heavy mist that was rolling in from the sea as Dan pulled his Mercedes into the drive behind my Volvo late that evening.

During the long drive down from Boston we had spoken little of the day's startling events, content in the warm confines of the Mercedes merely to be together, listening to music and the rhythmic sweep of the wipers across the windshield. Now Dan switched off the engine and looked across at me.

“Do you feel like going out somewhere for dinner, or have you had enough of my company for one day?” he asked.

“Neither,” I smiled. “Why don't you come in and build a nice crackling fire while I fix us something to eat? I warn you it won't be up to the standards of the Hyatt's four-star chef, though.”

Dan laughed, nobly protesting that too much haute cuisine got on his nerves, anyway. So we went inside, debating the relative merits of frozen fettuccini Alfredo versus tuna salad—the only two dishes I could put together in a reasonably short time. We settled on the pasta and I went off to the kitchen while Dan headed for the parlor to see about the fire.

Though the rest of the house had been kept reasonably warm by the central heating, which I had left on while I was away, the kitchen was icy as a tomb when I stepped inside and flipped the light switch.

I stood there for a moment, puzzled and shivering in the unexpected cold as I surveyed the half-filled coffee cup on the counter beside the uneaten slab of burnt toast that I'd abandoned two days earlier.

Only slowly did I realize that the door leading out onto the sunporch behind the house was standing open to the frigid night air.

Frowning, I walked over to the door and peered out into the dark backyard. The overhanging branches of the huge oak loomed eerily through the thickening mist as the lighthouse beacon swept across the empty yard. I quickly closed and locked the door and turned back to the brightly lighted kitchen, shaking my head at my own carelessness in forgetting to lock up and wondering gloomily how much heating oil from the newly filled tank had been consumed while I was away.

By the time dinner was ready the kitchen had warmed up and I'd put the incident with the open door to the back of my mind. Later, sitting in the fire-lit parlor, Dan and I ate our fettuccini and sipped cheap red wine from the grocery store while I carefully directed the conversation to the weather and other mundane subjects.

“So,” he suddenly said, after we'd cleared away the dinner things and were looking at each other over mugs of steaming coffee, “where do we go from here?”

“Please, Dan,” I groaned, certain he was again bringing up the troubling matter of our deepening mutual attraction for one another. “I thought you were going to let me off without any tough questions tonight.”

Dan's intense green eyes refused to release their hold on mine. “If I learned one thing in the marines, it was never to retreat in the face of a difficult situation,” he said. “I watched you pondering Damon's situation all the way down from Boston tonight…”

Surprised by the subject, I stammered out a reply. “I was…just listening to the music—”

Dan shook his head to stop me. “You and I are too much alike for me to buy that, Sue,” he interrupted. “The minute you meekly agreed to come back here and leave Damon at the mercy of Alice Cahill's hard-nosed psychiatric mumbo jumbo I knew you were up to something. What is it?”

I sighed, secretly relieved at not having to address the emotionally confusing issue of our relationship, but dismayed at how easily Dan had seen through my carefully composed acceptance of the good doctor's orders.

“Don't get me wrong,” I began, “Alice is obviously an extraordinary physician, and I think her intentions toward Damon are basically good—”

Dan finished the thought for me. “But her diagnosis of him as being delusional is totally off base.”

I nodded emphatically. “It was maddening listening to her,” I ranted. “There she was, rattling on and on about the need for scientific evidence and hard proof, when the only
evidence
that anyone has about near-death experiences is what people like Damon have reported.”

Dan smiled ruefully. “Otherwise sane, rational people,” he continued, “whose sworn testimony in a court of law would be plenty good enough to sentence an accused criminal to prison.”

“Or death row,” I added somberly.

“I guess you know you haven't got a chance of changing Alice's mind about anything,” he said.

“Oh, to hell with Alice,” I snorted. “It's Damon I'm worried about. I want to know what really happened to him while he was technically dead—”

“And you think maybe Aimee Marks can tell you,” Dan interrupted.

Surprised that he had figured out my scheme, I meekly replied, “Yes. I do.”

Dan smiled. “And if she can't?”

I shrugged. “Then she can't. At the very least, if I can establish some level of communication with her I might be able to help free her spirit from this house and Maidenstone Island.” I hesitated. “I think that something is holding her here.”

Dan raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“Well, isn't that what's supposed to happen to ghosts?” I asked defensively. “Don't they become trapped and unable to go on?”

“I don't know what happens to ghosts,” Dan said quietly. “And neither do you, Sue. But I do know that meddling with such things could be extraordinarily dangerous to someone…” His voice trailed off and he bit his lip.

“To someone in my fragile mental state?” I demanded. “Is that what you were going to say, Dan?”

“Dammit, Sue, that's not fair!” He was on his feet, pacing back and forth in front of the fire. He turned and pointed a trembling finger at me. “I'm in love with you and I don't want to see you hurt anymore,” he declared.

Suddenly I was standing and his lips were on mine, his strong hands caressing my buttocks, our bodies pressed so close together that I genuinely ached with longing for him. Pushing myself away a few inches in order to look up into his burning eyes, I said, “I want to let it happen. Truly I do…But attempting to contact Aimee is something I have to do…for Damon.”

And although I didn't say it, another thought leaped into my mind at that moment: Because if Aimee Marks could explain what had happened to Damon, perhaps she could also tell me what might have become of Bobby. If I only knew that he was at peace now…Then maybe, I thought, I could put away my guilt and grief and Dan and I might have a real chance together.

Still in his embrace I closed my eyes, reveling in the feel of his hands on me.

“…going to stay here, then. I refuse to let you go through this by yourself.”

I opened my eyes and looked up, realizing that Dan was talking to me again. I shook my head and placed my fingertips gently over his lips.

“No,” I whispered, my voice barely audible above the fiery crackle of the logs in the fireplace. “I
have
to do this all by myself.”

Dan reluctantly nodded. Then a broad grin creased his tanned features.

“What?” I asked. He didn't reply immediately, but continued grinning so I shook him. “What?” I demanded again.

“I was just trying to picture what Alice's reaction would be if she could hear this remarkable conversation we're having.”

Suddenly I found myself laughing. “I'm sure she'd order up a couple of straightjackets,” I said, wiggling my behind pleasurably in his grip. “Do you think it's possible that we've both gone completely insane?”

“I guess anything's possible.” He grinned. “I know I'm absolutely crazy about you.”

Dan kissed me again and I kissed him back, hard, fighting the urge to drag him off to the nearest bedroom.

To my great surprise, no mournful image of Bobby filled my mind until minutes after the long kiss was at last done and I had somehow forced myself to push Dan out of Aunt Ellen's big, lonely house and locked the front door behind him.

I suspect that Laura would have interpreted that first guilt-free kiss as a sign that I was making major progress in managing my grief.