Maidenstone Lighthouse (7 page)

Danny Freedman
was
Freedan.

And Freedan's specialty, his most sought-after works, were marvelous, idyllic landscapes featuring Victorian-era houses and cottages. I buried my face in my hands and began to chuckle. Because it really was funny. “Danny Freedman is a house painter!”

“Pardon!”

I looked up to see the sour-faced waitress hovering over the table. She was balancing a lobster on a platter and squinting suspiciously at me.

“Danny Freedman is a house painter,” I repeated.

The beginnings of a smile creased the corners of her thin, humorless lips.
“Ayeh!
That's a good one,” she said and laughed, placing the steaming platter before me. “Enjoy your dinner now.”

“H
ow are you feeling, darlin'?”

Damon's soft Louisiana drawl sounded far, far away. I pressed the cell phone closer to my ear, straining to hear him. “I'm fine, Damon. Can you speak a little louder? I haven't had the phone in the house hooked up yet, so I'm still on my mobile.”

His voice came through a little stronger. “You sound different, girl. Better.”

“I am,” I agreed. “Coming up here to get away was really a wonderful idea, Damon.”

“You should have gone weeks ago,” he said.

And I was certain he was getting ready to launch into one of his rants about all the money I'd wasted going to see Laura.

“How is everything at the office?” I asked without much hope of distracting him from a lecture.

There was a long pause on the line.

“Damon?”

“Everything's fine, honey. Don't you worry about a thing. Damon's got it all under control.”

Now, I can read Damon like a book. So I knew that three reassurances in a row from him meant trouble. “Oh, shit,” I murmured. “What happened?”

“Nothing
happened,
Sue!” His voice had suddenly gone up an octave. Something was definitely wrong. “Nothing for you to worry about,” he added, clearly trying to placate me.

I had been sitting propped up in bed with a teacup balanced on my knees. Now I was angrily pacing the confines of my small room, my euphoric mood of a few moments earlier shattered. “Damon, if you do not cut the bullshit and spit it out I'm getting dressed right now and driving back down there tonight!”

“Sue, calm down,” he pleaded. “It's no big thing. I've already taken care of it.”

“Taken care of what?” I shrieked. The first possibility that popped into my mind was that something had gone wrong with a complex estate appraisal we had just completed for a major insurer. The company was a first-time client, and a very important one. “Did we screw up on the Met job somehow?”

“Good God, no!” Damon laughed nervously. “The Metropolitan appraisal went fabulously. In fact, they're so pleased that they're putting us on a long-term retainer…It's something else. A minor annoyance, really.”

I could hear Damon's breath coming in little gasps, a sure sign that he was working himself up into one of his stress-induced asthma attacks.

“Okay, I'm sorry I yelled at you, Damon,” I apologized, speaking as slowly and calmly as I could. “Now, just tell me what happened, okay?”

“Your apartment was broken into,” he confessed.

I sank back down onto the bed. Though I wouldn't class myself as well-off I do love beautiful things and the apartment was filled with antiques, many of them quite valuable.

“Sue, are you there?”

“I'm here.”

“It's really not bad at all,” he assured me. “A typical Manhattan junkie burglary. The morons went through all your drawers and closets, evidently looking for things like cash and cameras.”

Damon emitted a high-pitched snort at the burglars' stupidity. “They took your third-rate Korean stereo but left the $20,000 Federal side table and the Tiffany sterling.” Then he giggled. “Like I said, morons.” He rushed ahead breathlessly, “Anyway, I've already made the police report, had new and much bigger locks installed and called a housecleaning service to tidy things up.” He snorted again, then snickered nasally. “That tacky old stereo really did suck, Sue.”

I finally laughed. “Okay,” I said, taking a sip of my tea and managing to relax just a little. “If they didn't get anything of value I guess my coming back down there won't serve any purpose now.”

“Precisely my thinking,” Damon said. “Besides, you can't live in Manhattan without getting burglarized at least once. There's a city ordinance.”

I must have been calming down because I even gave the weak joke more of a little ha ha than it deserved. Then I pressed him for the details. “When did this break-in happen?” I asked. “I've only been gone since yesterday morning.”

“Last night, I guess,” he replied uncertainly. “I was there last night to pick up Bobby's stuff…” His voice trailed off. “Anyway,” he continued after a nervous pause, “when I came back this morning for the rest of it, the door was standing wide-open and the place had been ransacked.”

“They didn't get any of Bobby's things!” I heard the panic rising in my voice again.

“I don't really know,” Damon stammered guiltily, a sure sign that he was lying. “I mean, dammit, Sue, they went through
everything
. So they might have taken some of Bobby's stuff. But I don't see what damned difference it makes. Half of it went to the dump and you told me to give the rest to the Goodwill, anyway.”

“The bastards!” I dropped the phone and fell back onto the pillows, shattered by the thought of some slimy New York junkie walking around in Bobby's treasured leather flight jacket, or wearing his favorite running shoes. “The dirty, lousy bastards,” I moaned through a sudden flood of tears.

I felt like killing somebody.

“For God's sake, girl, pull yourself together!” I was dimly aware of Damon's concerned voice shouting up at me from the fallen cell phone. “If I hadn't told you, you'd never even have known I didn't just take all that crap to the Goodwill,” he yelled. “It was just a bunch of worthless personal junk and clothes, Sue!”

Something snapped inside of me.

“Damn you, Damon!” I screamed, scooping up the tiny phone and hurling it across the room. It bounced harmlessly off the wardrobe, skittered back across the polished hardwood floor and came to a stop at my feet. The tiny
ON
light beside the antenna pulsed like a malevolent green heartbeat.

Great, wracking sobs shook my body as I stared at the chunk of seemingly indestructible black plastic. “You were always jealous of Bobby!” I blubbered accusingly, though it's unlikely that Damon heard me.

Without bothering to pick up the phone I lurched out of the bed and ran to the bathroom where I felt like I would be violently ill. I leaned on the sink trying to regain control of myself.

Once the sobbing had subsided I questioned whether I was feeling real pain for what I perceived as another of Damon's inflammatory stabs at Bobby or the newly discovered guilt causing what now seemed an overreaction.

I took in a stuttering breath. I could dimly hear the little phone ringing from the bedroom. It rang and rang and rang.

It was very late by the time I finally fell into a deep and troubled sleep, dreaming.

 

I was walking down the same New York street where Bobby and I had met. As it had been on our first day together, the sidewalk was wet with rain. But that had been a warm spring rain, full of hope and promise. This rain was cold and fell heavily, promising nothing but an endless succession of dreary winter days to come.

People kept coming toward me on the street, their faces hidden beneath big black umbrellas. In fact, everyone I saw had one.

Everyone but me.

My hair was drenched and my clothes were sodden with freezing moisture. I quickened my pace, anxious to get in out of the rain.

Then across the traffic-filled street I glimpsed a lone figure hurrying away from me. He was tall and blond, dressed in jeans and a familiar old leather flight jacket. And, like me, he had no umbrella.

I called out to him. He stopped and looked at me through the rushing traffic. Then he smiled and I saw that it was Bobby.

I started to run to him, splashing through the overflowing gutter and into the busy street. A truck blew its horn and swept past me, blocking my view of the opposite sidewalk and spraying me with foul black water.

When the way was clear again, Bobby had vanished.

I stood there in the rainy street calling his name. I could feel the hot, bitter tears of frustration coursing down my cheeks. But nobody saw my tears because the pouring rain continuously washed them away.

I moaned in anguish and cried out for Bobby.

 

Then I felt a cool, soft hand on my forehead and heard a soothing voice in my ear. “Hush now, dear,” someone whispered. “Everything will be all right.” I slowly opened my eyes, realizing that I was safe in bed and had only been dreaming again.

The lovely ghost was sitting at my side, smiling down on me with her sad, dark eyes.

“Oh, God!”

I sat up with a start as the room filled with an incandescent flare of white illumination from the passing lighthouse beacon. The figure before me vanished in the light. Then I was alone in the darkness once more.

“You were only dreaming,” I murmured through chattering teeth. Though the coils of the old electric heater in the corner were glowing cherry red, the room was freezing. I turned my eyes to the windows.

The lace curtains were billowing gracefully around the antique maple wardrobe. For a moment I was certain my ghostly visitor was standing there in the shadows. But then I saw that the curtains were simply caught in a cold draft from a partially open window.

I got out of bed and scurried barefoot across the chilly floorboards, intending to close the window. As I drew closer I could hear a faint melodic voice drifting up from the lawn below. I looked outside, telling myself it must be the sound of the blowing wind, or perhaps one of the feral cats that Aunt Ellen used to feed. But the air outside was deathly still and nothing moved in the inky shadows around the house.

Then I heard the voice again, louder than before. My body shuddered with a chill that had nothing to do with the frigid air pouring in through the open window. Because it was unmistakably a woman's voice. Somewhere in the darkness below she was singing a sweet, sad melody.

The lighthouse beacon swept across the house again, illuminating her shimmering figure beside the wrought iron fence out front. She was dressed all in flowing white lace, as she had been the night before.

She did not look up at the sound of my astonished gasp. Instead, still softly singing words that I could not quite understand, she glided away in the direction of Maidenstone Island.

I stood in the window until the last faint traces of her voice were lost among the ordinary sounds of wavelets lapping against the nearby beach. With shaking hands I closed the window and went downstairs to make myself some tea.

I knew that I would not sleep again before morning.

When the tea was done I sat at the kitchen table, trying with little success to separate reality from imagination. For though I believed the beautiful spirit was real, I could not explain her appearances, which twice now had coincided with my vivid, unhappy dreams of Bobby.

Was it possible that she had heard me weeping and had come to comfort me in my grief?

But why? Who was she?

Desperate for an answer, I climbed the steep stairs to the large attic space above the main house. In the middle of the large expanse of the dark room I could see the white cord hanging from the bare lightbulb secured into one of the rafters high above me in the main peak of the roof. When I pulled it a yellow glow seemed to fill the room and I stood looking around.

In his zeal to finish the remodel Damon had deposited here many of the things that had not been sold or discarded. Leaning against the far wall were the dreary family portraits that had hung in the parlor, hall and stairwell all of my life. But there was one I'd never seen before. I pulled it into the light and looked into Aunt Ellen's beautiful brown eyes. She must have been sixteen or so when this was painted—I had no idea she had been so beautiful—in a gown of white lace with a brilliant blue sash. By the time I remember her she was old and always wore black. I set the picture near the door; it belonged over the fireplace in her parlor.

I turned back to the room and found her folding rocking chair, the cushion a petit point rose design that I had done the summer I was fifteen. Aunt Ellen believed that ladies should know how to do handwork and so I had learned. I sat in her chair and could smell the violet fragrance that she loved so much. A tear came to my eye. I missed her.

In spite of my perceived rebellion as a young woman I had, in fact, enjoyed the cotillions, the afternoon teas, the special shopping trips that filled my dresser with gloves and hats because “ladies didn't leave the house without gloves and hats.” Learning the ways of a Victorian lady had actually been one of the highlights of my girlhood.

I rubbed my eyes, back to the present. I found among the dusty relics of that vanished age Aunt Ellen's massive family Bible and her stack of carefully tended photo albums in a large leather trunk, exactly where I had placed them after her death.

Hauling an armload of heavy books down to the kitchen, I made myself another pot of tea and began searching the albums for some clue to the identity of the beautiful young woman I had seen in my room.

The flyleaf of the old Bible seemed the best place to start. Because, beginning in 1842, all the marriages, births and deaths of five generations of Marks family members had been meticulously recorded there. Near the bottom of the list I found my own name, penned in Aunt Ellen's prim, no-nonsense style. Above it, written in by other hands, were the names of my father, my mother, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins.

On the day she had showed me the old picture, Aunt Ellen had indicated that her mother's uncle George, who was presumably the disgraced girl's father, had gone to New York to plead for her to return home. So I backtracked through the years until I found the names of George Hector Marks, Aunt Ellen's great-uncle, and his wife, Emily.

According to the Bible entries, George Marks was born in 1861, married in 1884 and had three children. The eldest, born in July of 1885 was a girl named Aimee. Two boys, Harold and Thomas, had followed in 1889 and 1890.

But there the paper trail ended.

The marriages and deaths of the two boys were duly recorded—Harold died young in France during the Great War in 1917, Thomas as an old man in Providence in 1969. But of Aimee Marks, who, if she was indeed my ghostly visitor, had looked in the photo I'd seen to be no older than twenty-five, no record had been made beyond her birth.