“Do you think she’s attractive?” Phoebe persisted.
Cara avoided answering that with total honesty. She wasn’t sure how Phoebe would react if she thought they might both be interested in the same woman. All she needed was for her twin to seduce their neighbor for competitive reasons.
“I suppose,” she said in a bland tone.
Phoebe gave her a sharp look. “Was it my imagination or were you hitting on her?”
“Do you really think I’d hit on our next-door neighbor? We were messing with each other, that’s all.”
Phoebe seemed reassured. “I looked her up on the Internet. She’s been on the New York Times Best Seller list.”
“But not recently, hmm?”
“You know, it’s funny.” Phoebe removed her wristwatch and rings and placed them on the dressing table. “The first time I met her, I thought she had a damaged heart.”
“Sounds like that woman Marion was your typical mind-fuck.” Cara recognized the symptoms from far-off days in junior high, before she’d learned the art of damage control. “I get the feeling Rowe would like to flirt, but she won’t let herself.”
“Pity.” A smile played at the corners of Phoebe’s mouth.
Cara planted a kiss on her sister’s head and caught a trace of honeysuckle. Phoebe had been using the same shampoo for years. Oddly, it smelled different when Cara tried it on her own hair. “You don’t need any more problems in that department and, from the looks of her, neither does she.”
“Hey! I could have slept with her, but I didn’t.”
“Did she ask you?”
Phoebe leaned away slightly and looked up at her. “No. But you know what I mean. She could be tempted.” Eyes glinting with mischief, she said, “Maybe some harmless flirtation would help her writing.”
“Somehow I doubt that.” Cara yanked a little on the braid, and Phoebe faced the mirror once more.
“You are such a spoilsport,” she complained.
“Otherwise known as your conscience.”
“I have a conscience!”
“You just don’t use it all the time.”
“Oh, please.” A groan. “Not Bev again. Can’t you let it go?”
Cara fastened the braid with a band and dropped it over Phoebe’s shoulder. “I’m just reminding you where those lapses of conscience lead.”
“Well, you can stop now. I’ve suffered enough.”
“You are such a trip,” Cara scoffed. “
She’s
the one who suffered. You just felt ashamed of yourself. It’s not the same thing.”
Phoebe got to her feet, wringing her hands. “If I could take back what I did, I would.” Tears seeped into her long eyelashes, enhancing the tragedy queen routine. “I know I behaved badly.”
“Have you told Bev this?”
“I keep starting a letter, then I don’t finish it. She won’t want to hear from me anyway.”
“That’s not the point. The point is you owe her an apology. Even if she rips it up and throws it in the trash.” Cara set the hairbrush aside. “That’s the last I’m going to say about it, okay?”
“Okay.” Phoebe took a step toward her and sidled into an embrace. “I don’t know what I would do without you—I think I’d die.”
Cara rocked her gently. Phoebe had never been completely secure since their parents had been killed. She wouldn’t even speak to anyone else for a year after the tragedy. Out of necessity, Cara had become the interface between her and the rest of the world. In many ways, it was still the case, especially since Phoebe’s accident. She had been in a coma for three months and had awakened oddly changed, psychologically and emotionally. The doctors could offer no explanations and had no bright ideas about treatment other than therapy and Prozac, neither of which made much difference. Phoebe had stopped both in the end.
Cara tried to be firm with her, but she found it hard to stay angry with her twin for long, she was so grateful to have her alive. “I’m not going anywhere,” she said, stroking Phoebe’s head where the skull had been fractured.
“Can I sleep in your bed tonight?” Phoebe asked. She always wanted this when Cara got back from a trip.
“Of course you can.”
Half an hour later, as Cara was drifting into sleep, Phoebe said, “I wish we weren’t going to Quantico.”
“It’s going to be fine. You’re a big deal for them.”
“If I really didn’t have a conscience, I’d refuse.”
“I’m very proud of you. Mom and Dad would be, too.” Cara could hear Phoebe’s mind ticking over.
“If this works, maybe I’ll be able to talk to them.”
A dull ache cramped Cara’s throat. “You never know.”
Phoebe rolled onto her stomach and draped an arm over Cara’s middle. She always fell asleep that way when they shared a bed. There were photos of them sleeping in the same position as babies.
“If I can, what do you want me to say to them?” she whispered.
Cara called her parents’ faces to mind. “Tell them I wish I knew them now. I think we’d be good friends.”
*
Rowe opened her eyes and drew a quick breath. The air seemed thin, depleted of oxygen. She listened intently and heard a rushing noise as if from a great distance. Her heart was doing its job, pushing a persistent tide of blood through her body. The muffled drum in her ears grew more rapid as she heard something else, a sound that didn’t belong in her night.
Footsteps. Faint laughter. She reached for the switch that would flood her room with lamplight, then arrested herself and lay rigid in the darkness. Where was it coming from? She slid silently out from under her bedclothes and stepped onto the cold wooden floor.
For a moment she wondered if Dwayne and Earl had shown up ahead of time to carry out some kind of nocturnal investigation. Surely they would not have broken into the cottage. She dragged on her robe and quickly tied the belt. Should she call the police now? Were there any police on Islesboro?
A smart woman living alone kept a gun on hand. Not Rowe. If she wanted a weapon, she would have to use whatever she could lay her hands on, or rustle up a knife from the kitchen. Avoiding the board that creaked, she crossed the room, cracked open her bedroom door, and listened, motionless, trying to breathe without making any noise. The dogs were asleep in the next room, which she had converted to a cozy library. She had shut them in there that night because Zoe snored like an old man and having them on the bed meant lousy sleep and she could say good-bye to writing the next day.
She crept to the top of the stairs, thankful her thick bed socks eliminated any sound. The footsteps floated nearer, and she knew it was not laughing she could hear, but crying. Her arms crawled with gooseflesh, and her teeth began to chatter. Lowering her weight carefully, she gripped the banister and descended. Her sensible self kept insisting that the noise she could hear was wind in the trees and something banging inside the house. She would enter the ballroom and find a trapped bird making small thumps as it flew time and again into impervious windows. Or she would wake up in bed at any moment and realize this was nothing but a dream.
When she reached the base of the stairs she paused and pinched at the soft flesh of her wrist, hoping to open her eyes and see her bedroom wall. Instead, she sensed a brooding malevolence, the presence of something old and discordant in the house. Her mouth dried until she could barely swallow. The ballroom loomed ahead.
What if she just turned on the lights and marched in like she owned the place, w
hich she did
. It was crazy to stand trembling in the hall, allowing her imagination to run riot. Yet she had to know what lay beyond the two solid timber doors. She wanted to see with her own eyes what her mind refused to accept could exist. A ghost.
A shudder played along her spine and she groped for an ornate brass latch. Chill air and whispered voices seeped from the gap between the doors as she slowly parted them. Holding her breath, she slid inside.
Moonlight from the far windows etched the room in silver. Footfalls echoed, but she could see no one. No shimmering apparition. No mist. No flickering light. Yet she was not alone.
“I know you’re there,” she said, trying to sound calm.
The footsteps halted.
Rowe advanced a few paces. “Juliet?”
Something stirred the air near her face. An ice-cold hand touched her cheek. She gasped and stumbled back into the hall. Panting like she’d run a marathon, she fumbled her way up the stairs and fell into her room. This couldn’t possibly be real, she reasoned feverishly. Ghosts didn’t exist. There was nothing in that room.
She crawled into bed and hunkered beneath the covers, shivering in fits and starts, waiting for her heart to slow down. Granted, she hadn’t
seen
a ghost, Rowe thought, but she knew she had felt one.
*
“It’s serious,” Dwayne said, sitting on the parlor sofa scrawling notes.
Rowe wanted to look over her shoulder. “Seriously haunted?” She watched Earl pack up the spook-catching equipment that would have had her cracking up laughing a few days ago.
“Hot spots all over the place. Confirmed Class Three in the ballroom. Record levels of activity in your kitchen. And that problem with the knives falling off your counter—it’s a level surface, so right off we’re talking object levitation. But with the other phenomena and EVP evidence, and your dogs weirding out, it could be something major.”
“As in Class Five major,” Earl cut in. “There’s a malevolent entity that wants you out of that room. For starters, keep your knives in the drawer.”
“You think I have some kind of poltergeist in there?” Rowe could hardly believe she had just asked that question.
Dwayne gave her an odd look. “No. Unless…I mean, are you feeling like maybe—”
“A poltergeist isn’t a ghost.” Earl cut to the chase. “Dude, explain.”
“It’s a psychokinetic manifestation of an individual’s emotional stress.” Dwayne wet his lips as he spoke. “The person who causes it is called a poltergeist agent. So, if this was a poltergeist situation, then that agent would be…uh, you.”
How could any self-respecting horror writer not know that? Rowe didn’t want to think about her pitiful ignorance leaking out. Her MySpace blog was already a sea of perturbation.
“Right. Of course,” she said, making it sound like a lightbulb just lit the gloomy corridors of her memory.
Dwayne didn’t seem convinced. “Clients quite often blame themselves for a haunting. But this is a residual situation.”
“The ghost was here first, in other words?”
“Yep. Whatever happened in this cottage…” He lowered his voice to a near whisper. “We need to find out what it was so we can deal.”
“Deal? You mean an exorcism or something.” Rowe found herself whispering as well. Feeling ridiculous, she reverted to a normal voice. “I thought the last resident tried that already.”
Earl rolled his eyes. “Jasper was a fucking basket case after a few months here. Man, you did him a favor buying this place. No one else would.”
“We told him the priest would be a waste of time,” Dwayne said. “But some people need to think religion has all the answers.”
“It’s a scary world,” Rowe said.
“Even scarier when it’s run by those exact same people.” Dwayne put his notebook away in the steel briefcase and rolled the combination lock.
Earl got to his feet. “I’ll develop those EVP tapes some more. We’ve got some wailing and the Type B voice calling
Run
. I’ll get that onto our Web site as a midi file, so you can listen any time you want.”
“Great,” Rowe said. Just what she needed—her very own howler.
“Your identity will not be disclosed,” Dwayne assured her. “We take client privacy seriously, unlike certain other paranormal organizations.”
Rowe gave him the grateful nod he seemed to be waiting for. “So, what’s our next step?”
“Well, see, we need to gather more data. Measure your other rooms.” Dwayne stood up and swept a sober look around the parlor. His eyes fell on the photograph Rowe had propped on the desk. “It’s terrible what happened to her.”
“No one likes getting dumped,” Rowe said.
“No, I mean how she died, frozen in the snow like that.” He stared out the window. “Must have been just out there.”
Rowe cast an irritated glance at him. These two knew much more than they’d been letting on. Whenever she asked them about Juliet Baker’s death, all they could talk about was sightings of her ghost.
“I thought you didn’t know what happened,” she said.
“Uh. We do and we don’t.” Dwayne shifted uncomfortably. “Like, obviously, the real story never made it into the newspapers. All the reports said it was an accident.”
“But you have a different theory?”
“Well, see, when a house is haunted the paranormal investigator has to figure out why the ghost is hanging around. Like maybe they’re unhappy or there’s something they want to say. So, you have to ask yourself why a young lady like her would have gone out into a storm in the middle of the night. It’s not…uh, normal behavior. If we can get to the bottom of it and find out what she wants, then we can try a banishing.”
“Which is what? Some kind of an afterlife therapy session with the ghost? You tell her to get lost and she does?”