The last thing she remembered saying before Raleigh and the fantasy faded away was, “This is the best dream I’ve ever had.”
Chapter Three
When the alarm went off, Shelby let the radio play. As she stretched with hedonistic pleasure, the weatherman was telling her it was going to be warm and sunny. Her muscles had that relaxed, lush feel they got after satisfying use.
Flexing gently, she pulled off the covers, got out of bed, and padded into the bathroom. After turning on the shower, she dropped her nightshirt on the tiled floor. Standing in front of the shatterproof glass door as it began to steam up, she ran her hands over her skin. Her breasts felt full, her nipples plump and prominent. Her labia felt swollen, too. In fact every inch of her felt sensual and alive without the edginess of sexual arousal. She stroked herself, grinned, and wasn’t surprised when her fingers came away coated with a thick residue of cream.
The water on her skin was yet another sensual delight. Despite the sensation and the mellow heat infusing her, she just wasn’t in the mood to masturbate and proceeded to wash herself with more attention and gentleness than usual.
* * * *
“I’ll be at your audit meeting, Ted. Right beside you.” Pacing her office as she talked, Shelby adjusted her little earpiece. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Yes, even plumbers get tagged now and then by the IRS. They probably pulled your return for review because you’ve got employees on the books now. No, that doesn’t mean you should fire your employees. You worked hard to build your business.”
She plucked a yellow leaf off the plant sitting near the windows. Lee should never have bought the thing for her. Her anti-green thumb would probably kill the poor thing off within the week. Stepping over to her desk, she looked through her business-card holder.
“I’m going to give you the name and number of a firm that specializes in tax law. I’m not saying you’ll need them, but having a lawyer waiting to step in has helped a few of my clients feel better, like they’re being proactive instead of just waiting around for the IRS to call. Again.”
When Ted chuckled, grudgingly, she felt a little better.
Shelby continued. “You’re okay, and your tax returns are okay. The IRS earns their money by rooting around and disallowing every deduction. It’s my job to prove your deductions are valid. Sadly it’s a case of guilty until we’re given a chance to prove you’re innocent—which we’ll do.
“Give your wife and kids a big hug for me,” she added before ending the call.
Sitting back down, Shelby brought up Ted’s financial records, printed up the pertinent ones so she could go over each line with a ruler, then called the secure storage facility she used and asked them to courier Ted’s receipt boxes to her.
Audits were a bitch, but she’d be ready.
* * * *
Late that night, Shelby was stretched out on the sofa in the family room, watching a summer rerun. Outside, the landscape lighting had turned on like it did every day at dusk. Through the tall bank of windows looking over the lake, she could make out the artful silhouettes of trees and shrubs waving in the breeze. They framed the view with slumberous grace.
She’d worked longer than usual. Dinner had been a microwaveable something she’d eaten standing over the sink before returning to her office. Ted had never been audited before, had never been so much as a blip on the tax man’s radar. He was nervous, and when he called her back—which she was sure he would—she wanted to be able to tell him about the ducks she had lined up for his benefit.
Predictably, Shelby fell asleep before the second set of commercials.
In yet another one of those overdrive dreams she seemed prone to up here, when she opened her eyes, the little girl from a few nights ago was standing in front of the sofa. Blinking, Shelby sat up. The little girl sat down beside her, looking small and proper in her pretty linen dress. This close, Shelby could again smell her…fresh air and flowers.
“I haven’t seen your father,” Shelby offered quietly.
“That’s too bad. I know he’d like you.”
“Why?”
“Well, you’re a lady and he likes ladies.”
“Sounds typical.”
The child in her dream must have caught the humor in Shelby’s voice because she turned her elfin face up to her and smiled. Her smile lit up her dark, serious eyes.
“Thank you for planting the red flowers behind the white ones,” the child said after awhile.
“Y–you’re welcome. Did you move them?”
“Yes. You were going to do it wrong. The red has always gone behind the white.” There was no condemnation in the child’s voice, merely a simple and conversational statement of fact. “You should look at the pictures.”
“What pictures?”
“The pictures,” she repeated with a patience that made Shelby feel rather obtuse. “You’ll see.” With that, the child stood and walked away.
Perhaps an hour later, judging from the satellite read-out on the screen, Shelby woke up. She was lying on the sofa on her side, her head propped up on a throw cushion. She got up, switched off the TV, and stumbled upstairs to bed.
* * * *
The next morning, Shelby fit in her run first thing. The day was supposed to be oppressively muggy, and even in the relative post-dawn coolness, her lungs felt tight. It was an effort to keep going. Despite that, she forced herself to sprint the last few hundred feet from the rose garden to the flagstone patio. She liked the patio off the library as a starting and finishing point. The decorative, concrete railing was great for stretching, there was room to pace and cool off, plus the open lawn was only one step down.
When she eventually went inside, the air-conditioning felt wonderful. Her lungs started to loosen up. Shaking her arms lightly, she headed for the kitchen like she always did, and stopped. There was a small stack of what looked like old photo albums on a side table in the library.
Yet another thing about the house that had found its way into her subconscious. The house was massive and filled with a century’s worth of art, furniture, and personal belongings. She didn’t like to think of herself as unobservant, but every day, she spotted at least a dozen things she’d never noticed before.
Like so many other parts of the house, she hadn’t explored the library. She just walked through it twice a day. Obviously, she’d seen the photo albums, not paid any attention to them, and they’d perversely put in an appearance in her dream. Carefully, she picked them up and carried them into the kitchen so she could thumb through them over breakfast.
Working in isolation was great for her productivity, but her head kept making up imaginary friends. If that was what it needed while she settled in, maybe she’d feed the muse with some pictures of Lee’s relatives.
After she’d thrown breakfast together, Shelby sat at the kitchen island, spooned cereal and milk into her mouth, and opened the least decrepit-looking album. She smiled when she saw what had to be Lee as a child, sporting a mullet and swim trunks at least twenty-five years out of date. He was doing a cannonball off the end of the dock. She spotted him again and again, playing with other children, with a man who could almost pass as his twin, sometimes with a startlingly beautiful woman with bright blue eyes. In most of the pictures, it was summer. It was winter in some, and she watched Lee grow from a snowsuit-swaddled toddler to a hellfire adolescent racing a snowmobile past the photographer so fast his face was a blur.
When he was about twelve or so, the photographs stopped. Oh there were a few odd pictures stuck in after, but the fluid progression of a happy, vacationing family stopped. One of the last photos showed a teenaged Lee standing proud and holding a large fish. In the last picture, he’d aged at least two years and was surrounded by luggage, wearing a sweatshirt with a University of Detroit Mercy logo and the words College of Engineering and Science printed across the chest. That one hadn’t been fastened in place. It sat alone, loose between pages.
She sipped her juice, closed the album, an
d spooned more cereal into her mouth. About the time the regular progression of photos stopped, Lee’s mother disappeared from them. The three previous albums were far more cheery. Page after page of cousins, aunts, uncles—the male relatives all identifiable by their dark hair, dark shining eyes, and what she’d come to think of as the Tanner jaw. There were pictures of parties, friends with children, canoe races, dogs in soap-filled tubs. Grandparents watched over the family with obvious pleasure.
Time moved backward as she worked her way down through the pile of albums. The grandparents became young parents. Adults became children, then infants, then were nowhere to be seen. The flagstone patio and the rose garden remained constant. Shelby watched stately maples digress into saplings. Less and less skin was revealed, swimsuits became comical, and sailor suits gave way to dresses with ever lengthening hemlines. The texture, size, and color saturation of the photos changed. Color gave way to black and white then sepia. Decade after decade, the informal history of Lee’s family flowed backward.
Shelby felt a little jealous. She had a family, a large one, but they were spread out. Nobody really knew anymore which great-aunt had which photo albums. An annual family reunion was held in a large, rented hall, and whenever she and her siblings went, they weren’t entirely sure who most of the other people were.
Swallowing the last of her cereal, Shelby checked the time and decided to thumb through just one more album before starting the day. By now, she figured she’d worked her way back to the 1920s, maybe even the late 1910s. Young children still played with dogs, toys, and in the water, but the girls’ clothing was more restrictive than the boys’. Boys and men were allowed fitted swimsuits. They were more abbreviated long-johns than swimsuits, but they obviously afforded ease of movement. For the most part, girls and women wore pretty dresses and close-fitted hats. The adults now played badminton and croquet instead of baseball. With a sense of awe, she took in the details of a sleek, mahogany powerboat. In its day, she suspected there weren’t many boats on the lake that could equal its speed.
In these photos, there were far more servants, either in the background, posing in a group in front of the house, or playing with the children. By the time baby Lee put in his first appearance, there was only one servant, and she’d looked more like a family friend than a maid.
Grinning, Shelby saw that in every photo of the front entrance, even the black-and-white ones, darker flowers were planted behind a row of lighter ones.
Her grin faded when she spotted a familiar face. When she put the album down, leaning away from it like it was dangerous, her hand shook. Standing in a line of girls waiting their turn at skipping, was the child from her dreams. The dress was different, the lace less ornate, but the face, right down to that unmistakable Tanner jaw, was the same.
Shelby flipped forward, page after page, hunting for later pictures of the child, but she simply disappeared from the narrative. There were earlier photos of her, usually with a large, spotted, and very hairy dog. Photos of her and obviously doting parents. Her father had a moustache, and he looked so much like Lee it startled her. Then freaked her out when she realized this early twentieth-century man also looked a lot like her dream lover.
Continuing to look, Shelby found earlier photos of the girl and what had to be an older brother. From there, Shelby again scanned forward in time. The brother’s image continued into adolescence then adulthood. In one, he was dressed in wedding clothes, standing beside a beautiful bride, surrounded by smiling friends and relatives. His sister wasn’t there. As Shelby searched page after page, the man became a father. He and his beautiful wife aged alongside their sons until, likely in the midseventies, the now old and patriarchal man disappeared from the photos.
Her hand was still shaking when Shelby shut the albums, stacked them, and slid them away from her.
Exhaling, she made an effort to calm herself. There had to be an explanation why her subconscious had incorporated two very real people into her dreams. She had to have seen their faces before. Sliding off her stool, Shelby began a deliberate walk-through of the house. Determined yet eerily light-headed, she walked the halls, looked at every face in every painting, every photograph on the walls. Doing a methodical circuit of each room, she looked at framed faces sitting on tables.
Finally, upstairs and down the hall opposite to her bedroom—the hall Lee had referred to in passing as the guest wing when he’d walked her through the place—she found a painting of Raleigh Tanner. He was older than in her dreams, which was a little weird, but still, he was one good-looking guy. Immaculately dressed in a suit from the thirties, standing tall and proud in front of an expensive-looking bookcase, he looked the part of the archetypical fat-cat captain of industry. The painting looked like it used to hang in some boardroom somewhere.
Shelby felt a little better. Okay, so she knew where that dream image had come from. Reaching up, she stroked the oil-rendered striations of his thick moustache, winked at the image, blew it a kiss, and moved on.
Back at the other end of the second floor, in a bedroom two doors down from hers, she found a painting of a little girl. The slightly tarnished brass plaque identified her as Devonna Leigh Tanner. Shelby’s breath caught, and her chest tightened with poignancy. Devonna had been a beautiful child. Her skin was downy, her dark eyes clear and sparkling, and that unmistakable Tanner jaw, on her, somehow managed to look feminine. The child’s dress looked just like it did in Shelby’s dreams. A large, hairy dog slept with artful contentment at Devonna’s feet.
Carefully, Shelby lifted the painting off the wall. She looked at it closely then set it on a chair so she could step back. Her fingers passed over what felt like a small knot of fabric caught on the back of the frame. The fabric felt brittle, and Shelby unsnagged it with great care. It was definitely old. Now dusty and faded in places, it was still unmistakably black and gauzy.
Dropping the bit of fabric, Shelby backed away. Black bunting. A chill ran down her neck. The picture had been draped with black bunting at one time.
The child had died.
Chapter Four
“Okay.” Shelby gripped the kitchen counter, trying not to hyperventilate. She opened a cupboard, grabbed a bottle of Scotch, and poured herself two fingers. After giving it a moment’s thought, she added more. “No need to go all drama queen,” she said to herself. The sound of a human voice, even if it was her own, made her feel better. “Okay. Big house, big family, lots of people over the last century. It’s tragic but people die.”
Puffing out her cheeks, she exhaled then inhaled so she could blow the air out again. “Things were different back then, like health care, clean drinking water, no vaccines…okay that part I’m not sure about but still, get a grip.”
She picked up the glass, breathed in the fumes, then put the glass back down. “Time to hang out with the living.” She poured the Scotch back into the bottle. “Go into town. Talk to some real people face-to-face instead of holing up here.”
In no time at all, she was dressed in a pair of Capri pants, a sporty sleeveless tee, and driving faster than the recommended speed limit.
* * * *
Cruising the touristy shops made her feel better. Talking to the shopkeepers, some of whom Lee had introduced her to, made her feel downright chipper. When lunchtime rolled around, she ate at the diner, started up conversations with complete strangers, laughed her ass off because she found everyone’s humor delightful, and asked where the local animal shelter was.
* * * *
That Friday, Lee pulled in around eight p.m. The big shepherd crossbreed Shelby had adopted intercepted him at the door as soon as Shelby opened it. Lee’s eyes widened just a little when the blond dog with the dark eyes and muzzle growled, planted himself directly in his path, gave him a haughty, suspicious sniff, and snorted up at him from Shelby’s side.
“This is Tazer. I think he likes you.”
Tazer lifted his lips, exposing big, healthy teeth. “Good thing. I’d hate to see how he greets
people he doesn’t like.”
“The shelter told me he’s a little protective. He’ll be fine once he gets to know you.”
“Again, good thing.” Despite the furrow between his eyes, Lee gave her a perk-inducing smile.
“Are you hungry?” she asked and cocked her thumb in the direction of the kitchen. “I can heat up some leftovers.”
“No, but thanks. I stopped for something on the way. Just wanted to say hello before I hit the sack.” With a wave, he retreated down the steps. Tazer took two steps toward him, growled again, and stopped only after Lee was a couple of body lengths away. “Maybe I’ll see you around tomorrow.”
* * * *
That night, Shelby woke when she felt a man slip into bed beside her. “Lee?” she asked, confused, worried, and interested all at the same time.
“No, darling.” He caressed her arm, trailed his lips and silky moustache over her cheek. “It’s Raleigh. I’m crushed you’ve forgotten so soon.”
Like before, he kissed her shoulder, then her breast.
“Hmm. I love your breasts. Love their size,” he murmured. “More than a mouthful. Like ripe fruit hanging from your chest.”
He propped his head up on his hand and looked down at her with unmistakable fondness. She should have known. Despite sharing Lee’s coloring and chin, Raleigh wasn’t as flat-out gorgeous. He also smelled different, like sandalwood and oak with a hint of the most delicious cigar smoke. Shelby touched her dream lover’s cheek, caressed the line of his moustache. Like the others, this dream promised to be a good one. She hoped she remembered it come morning.
“How’d you get past Tazer?” she asked abruptly. From the corner where his bed sat, she could hear the dog snoring, hear one of his legs rhythmically rapping the wall like he was chasing rabbits in his sleep.
Ghostly Seduction (Siren Publishing Ménage and More) Page 3