The Ghosts of Ravencrest (The Ravencrest Saga Book 1) (25 page)

Yawning, she scanned through Randy’s ten messages.
I miss you. Your room is waiting
.
Are you ready to come home yet, Lindy? I changed your sheets for you :-),
and then several in a row announcing that if Belinda wouldn’t come home, Randi would drive out to check up on her. Belinda sighed.
I’ll have to tell Grant not to let her through the gates.
She yawned.

The cell slipped from Belinda’s hand, startling her. She smiled to herself.
If I can doze off while reading this stuff, there’s hope for me yet
. She set the phone down, not bothering to turn off the dim lamp, and drifted toward sleep ...
 

First, there were the scents of lavender, spring water, and night-blooming jasmine. Then she sensed someone in the room with her. She opened her eyes and saw the lady in the red gown from the gallery portrait sitting on the edge of her bed, watching her with sad eyes.
 

Alice Manning!
 

I need your help.
The apparition’s mouth didn’t move but Belinda heard her voice, soft and insistent, inside her head. And she was not frightened.
 

“I don’t understand.”

My daughter.
Alice’s eyes implored.
You saw my
real
daughter.

“Your
real
daughter?”
 

Prudence. She is trapped on the other side.

“The other side? What do you mean? In Purgatory?”
 

On the other side of the door! Please help her! Dr. Lanval will know what to do.

“Who’s Dr. Lanval?”  
This must be a dream.

Your Dr. Lanval, not mine!
The phantom’s voice filled with frustration.

“I don’t have a Dr. Lanval. Do you mean Dr. Akin?”

Dr. … Lanval… Dr. … Phister! He will know what to do. Please help her!

Alice Manning’s ghost looked up at the door, eyes terrified. Belinda turned and saw the knob moving, heard it wiggle back and forth.
 

Carmilla Harlow. She is here!  Don’t let her touch my baby girl again!
Alice disappeared in a burst of chill air.

Belinda blinked, realized she wasn’t sitting up, but lying on her side in bed and she could still hear the doorknob. She had locked it before bedtime. The ghost
- was that a dream? Did I dream that? -
said it was Carmilla Harlow at the door.
Who the hell is that?
The name sounded familiar but she couldn’t place it.

Curiosity overcame fear when she heard a jangle of keys. Belinda leapt from the bed, and yanked the door open just as she heard a key being inserted. She stared at the woman before her. “Mrs. Heller, what do you want at this hour?” She was too angry to be frightened.

Heller plastered on a smile. “I had a dream about you, dear, and wanted to make sure you were safe. You were about to jump out of your window and my dreams are often prophetic. I came to save you, should you need saving.”

Belinda straightened her back and kept her eyes on Cordelia Heller’s. “I assure you, I will not be jumping out any windows, Mrs. Heller, however I appreciate your concern. It was very kind of you to check on me.” She started to close the door but Heller stopped her with a hand. Belinda took in the black nails, the eyes that were perfectly made up even in the middle of the night, and the long black negligee that was too transparent. Cordelia Heller was naked underneath.
 

Heller smiled. “Are you certain, dear?”

“Good night, Mrs. Heller.”

Heller looked her up and down. “You’re a very pretty girl, Belinda.” She smiled, all teeth, all shark.

“Thank you. Good night.” This time, Belinda was able to shut the door. She turned the lock then dragged a chair over and stuck it under the knob. In the morning, she’d ask Grant for an interior lock to keep Heller out - right after she asked him a dozen other questions. She crossed to the windows and drew the drapes. It was nearly dawn, perhaps 4:30 in the morning, and she could just make out the shapes of trees and the statues that gleamed like specters in the light swirls of mist.

And she caught movement again, in a garden no more than a hundred feet from the house. She squinted, trying to identify it, expecting a deer - but it rose on two legs, a man darker than the fleeing night. It looked like his hand was on a staff of some sort -
a shovel?
- but the mist swallowed him and a second later, when the fog cleared, there was nothing there.
You need to reel your imagination in before you lose your mind.

She started to return to bed, but knew she wouldn’t sleep any longer, so she went to the desk in front of the windows and opened her laptop. It was time to do some research. Before seating herself, she crossed to the painting of Alice Manning in her lavender gown and whispered,
“I’ll help you if I can.”

Lavande d’Amour

Naked, chained, bent over in the pillory, her ass filled with the biggest meanest dildo in the dungeon. That will teach the little bitch! Who does she think she is, looking me in the eye and lying to me?
Cordelia Heller stalked through the hall and down the stairs to the first floor. Her heels clacked across the marble, echoing through the main hall. Passing her black and white drawing room, she turned off into her private corridor, ignoring her office in favor of her bedchamber.
 

That dead bitch Alice Manning had been in Belinda’s room. She knew it; she could feel her presence there - hell, she could smell the interfering trollop’s scent,
Lavande d’Amour,
in the room. And Belinda Moorland, she was sure, was aware of her, too.
And not afraid.
The girl should have been hiding under her quilt, relieved to have Cordelia burst in, but she wasn’t. She was downright uppity.
 

But what does Alice Manning want with Belinda?
 

She obviously wasn’t preventing a ghostly tryst, which was something the jealous dead bitch loved to do. What else could it be? And then it hit her: Belinda must have seen Alice’s irritating daughter in the east wing.
Fucking little whore just like her mother.
Dead or alive, Alice Manning would do just about anything to get the girl back in her clutches.
 

“That’s not going to happen, Alice. That’s not going to happen.”

She had set and reset the wards to keep spirits from crossing between the east and west wings. Nothing short of a miracle would break the bindings.

The Scream

Belinda spent nearly an hour fruitlessly Googling “Carmilla Harlow” before deciding to go for a swim in the indoor pool. Eric Manning, Grant, and Riley had all recommended it. 

After pulling on a baby blue bikini, she tied a matching sarong over it, slipped on her sandals, and descended the stairs. Hoping for coffee, she passed through the kitchen, but it was only 5:30; no one was up yet. She let herself out the back door and walked across the grass, passing the persimmon tree, catching the aroma of coffee as she passed by Grant and Riley’s carriage house. Finally, Belinda came to the beautiful but chilly-looking outdoor pool. She passed it, heading for the tall stone building nearby.
 

It looked so imposing when she got to the ornamented double doors that she nearly turned back, but she made herself stop and peer through the glass. It was shadowy at the edges but golden lamps built into the walls cast some light. Later the sun would stream golden rays into the indoor pool from skylights in the ceiling, but not yet. The water was empty, available, and she wanted to swim. “Here goes,” she murmured as she pushed on the door. It wasn’t locked.

Inside was another world. Surprisingly warm and humid, the huge room echoed with the sound of water. It slurped and guzzled and burbled, fragrant with the fresh scent of chlorine.

The tall walls were tiled in cobalt and ornamented with flurries of silver and gold stars. At one end, near the high ceiling, a huge silver moon looked down over the pool. Overhead, between the skylights, the ceilings were painted in the same rich blue and frescoed with constellations of silvery-gold stars.

White Grecian statues ranged around the pool, half a dozen of them; the biggest, Poseidon on his throne, beneath the silvery moon.
 

But the pool itself was the most beautiful - and frightening - aspect. Like the walls, it was tiled in cobalt. Pool lights showed off the constellations of stars on the bottom. Parts of it narrowed and disappeared in different directions which, she knew from Grant, became narrow tubes that led beneath water spouts and back into the main pool - which was so vast that Belinda knew she needed to shake off her nervousness before getting in. For the first time, she wished she wasn’t alone; but she forced herself to walk around the pool to the dressing rooms hidden beneath the second-story diving board.
 

The hall of dressing rooms was dark and she didn’t see a light switch, so she grabbed a fluffy white towel from the stack just outside the doorway and walked away from the darkness until she was directly under one of the wall sconces. There, she untied her sarong and hung it and the towel over the extended arm of a white marble undine.
 

Approaching the pool, she tested the water, found it warm, dove in and swam as far as she could. She popped up, gasping for breath, and looked around - she was out in the middle of the deep blue pool. The bottom was far beneath her. She felt the eyes of the statues on her and shuddered; they seemed alive.

She turned and saw the tall diving board directly across from her. On the one hand, she couldn’t wait to try it; on the other, she didn’t like looking at the dark doorway beneath it. She swam toward the far edge of the pool, and it felt so good she ignored her silly fears and pushed off the edge, swimming back across, coming to a halt beneath the diving board, where she stared boldly into the darkness of the dressing room corridor.
 

Only children are afraid of the dark. You’re not a child anymore.
She thought she caught movement in the darkness, just a flicker at the edge of her vision, but when she focused, nothing was there. Behind the gentle slap and gurgle of water, she was certain she heard bare feet padding on wet cement.
You’re imagining things.
 

She couldn’t possibly hear footsteps over the ambient sounds of the water and filters. But there they were again, somehow separate from the other sounds, drawing closer and closer, right to the wrought iron ladder that spiraled up to the diving board.
 

The ladder creaked.

Belinda forced herself to remain calm, and began a slow backstroke across the pool.
Metal creaks. That’s just what it does.
She came to a halt, hanging in the water halfway across, her gaze flicking toward the diving board and dark doorway. Overhead, the skylights showed gray dawn. She treaded water, still watching as she chided herself for acting like a baby.
You really know how to freak yourself out.

Someone dove off the board.

She gasped and stared - the plank was still, but she was sure she’d heard the distinct thump and rattle of a diving board. She heard the splash as if an invisible body had plunged into the pool, but there was no movement in the water. Nothing was there.
What the heck was that?

Panic flooded her as she caught the sounds of someone stroking toward her. Without thinking, she turned and scissored down in a quick dive, and headed in the opposite direction.
Don’t let them catch you!
 

Gasping for breath, she broke the surface and glanced around. The statues leered at her and the stars seemed too close. She bobbed on the same side as the diving board but quite a ways down from it, just inside the entrance of one of the narrow swimming tunnels. She reached up and grabbed the lip of the pool, ready to boost herself up and out.
And run like hell!
 

“When the moon la-la-la la-la-la la-la-la, that’s amore …”

Belinda went as still as one of the statues.
 

“When the world la-la-la la-la-la la-la-la, that’s amore …”

That’s not a ghost!  
She peeked over the lip of the pool.

Eric Manning, below the silver moon, was undressing as he sang. He’d already put his shirt on Poseidon’s knee and was adding his pants to the pile. Belinda eyed his red Speedos, opened her mouth to greet him then stopped.

Facing away from her, he peeled off his underwear and gave them to the sea god’s care. “Thanks, old fellow,” he said to the statue. “Jolly nice of you.”
 

Belinda’s breath caught, and of their own volition, her eyes traveled over his backside. His body was powerful and fit, his shoulders broad, leading down to a tapered waist; a perfect swimmer’s form. His muscles flexed as he raised his arms and stretched for his swim. Belinda stared, then burning with embarrassment, ducked down before he could turn around and catch her looking. A second passed, and she heard him dive into the pool.

Oh my God! Oh my God!  
She heard him swimming nearer and nearer - he was going the length of the pool, she was certain. Taking a deep breath, she ducked under the surface as he passed. He was so close she could hear his strokes underwater.
 

She came up for air as he reached the end of the pool. Barely breathing, she listened to him suck in a breath then kick off again. She went back under and waited for him to swim past, but heard nothing. She held her breath as long as she could then came up with a gasp.

“Belinda,” said Eric, who floated no more than five feet from her. “I didn’t realize you were here.” His dark hair clung to his forehead, giving him a schoolboy look. His blue eyes took her in.

“I didn’t think anyone would be down here this early. I’m sorry. I can leave if you want.” Her entire body burned with embarrassment.

“No, no, don’t leave.” He held onto the poolside, treading water a respectable distance away, but still close enough that she could almost feel his heat. His gaze widened, showing a flash of worry. “Did you see me come in?” He was trying to sound casual.