by Jane Godman
Here, in the late afternoon light, he looked…different. The fog had dampened his coat and his hair and even his skin was moistened by October mist. Out of the house, he seemed almost vulnerable, though with his broad shoulders and tall physique she couldn’t imagine why she thought it. Against his damp hair and dark eyes, his skin was pale. The onyx chip in his left earlobe glittered darkly. Any shadows she perceived couldn’t be blamed on a dimly lit room. And there were shadows. His face was stark and tight. His jaw clenched, but it seemed more a battle against constant tension and less about her. Until his lips softened as if fingering her scarf made him remember and desire. Then his tension seemed very much about her after all.
“Idle curiosity, then?” he asked. “Dead children. Graveyards. Dust and bones and crooked headstones…all for an afternoon lark?”
He didn’t believe it. He knew better even if he didn’t know it all.
She stood there with a man who seemed fascinated with the dead and gone, but she was very much alive. Her hands were meant to heal and save whenever they could. He had been to a watery grave and seemed to bring it back with him again. With his grim fascinations and the lingering death and darkness in his eyes, Creed might prove to be more dangerous than anything she’d ever run from in Scarlet Falls.
She’d spent her life learning a way to defeat the darkness and he seemed far too willing to embrace it. She had practically run to get away from the photographs, musty files and gloomy stories she’d found at the Historical Society, and Samuel Creed was their benefactor.
“No,” she said. She didn’t want him digging into her secrets, but she couldn’t pretend that her curiosity was all in fun. “This isn’t a lark,” she continued. She felt sympathy for the poor little girl buried under their feet, dead too soon even though some part of her might still roam intent to bother and burn.
His dark eyes surveyed her face. Her skin felt fragile in the breeze like glass, as if one more jarring incident would shatter her.
It didn’t.
As she looked up at Creed, something appeared at the periphery of her vision.
The Girl in Blue stood under a blazing maple at the edge of the cemetery. She posed exactly as she’d been posed in the photograph except she clutched empty hands to her chest where the rag doll should be.
Trinity blinked.
She forced herself to breathe.
She didn’t shatter.
She absorbed one more oddity in silence. One more. Each and every one weighed on her, but she didn’t buckle.
“What happens when your whole body stills like the universe is going on without you?” Creed asked. He whispered the words in his whiskey-drenched tones and the query couldn’t have been more intimate even if their heads had been lying on pillows.
“Nothing,” she lied. The untruth came from numb lips.
“Your eyes go wide and your breathing stops and then you catch yourself. You make yourself breathe. You make yourself blink,” he continued a play by play of this moment, but also a commentary on so many such moments he’d witnessed before.
And still she could see Clara Chadwick out of the corner of her eye as if the photograph in her pocket had come to life…if life could describe the hollow-eyed shade of the dead girl who was actually dust beneath her boots.
Creed reached up. He touched her cheek and the chilled brittle flesh there suddenly became supple and warm.
She wasn’t fragile.
That was an illusion.
She was so strong and resilient that she could stand among the restless dead in a cemetery and desire the touch of a man she should fear while resisting the need to confide in him.
He stepped closer when she didn’t flinch from his fingers on her cheek. He stepped closer and leaned down and tasted her again. As if this wasn’t their third kiss in seven years, as if he often leaned to taste her, but also much slower, obviously savoring and prolonging a move others would take for granted because they didn’t have to wait or resist.
“Oh,” she breathed out when his tongue eased in.
He tasted her, slight and teasing, but she hadn’t expected the sensual deepening of a kiss that should have been brief because it was public. The cemetery was sheltered, but it was outside in the open air where anyone might pass. Creed must not care if the whole town saw him lick into her softly open lips and she met his tongue with hers because, while she cared, her body had a mind of its own.
She didn’t reach for him. She responded only with her lips and tongue, kissing him back, but not burying her hands in his hair or twining them around his neck. She kept her hands in her pockets, but both of his came up to hold her face so gently she could barely feel the heat from his fingers. And still his tongue dipped and twirled and dueled with hers, showing her the passion that belied the stillness of his body and hers.
They weren’t alone.
There were shadows around them that didn’t belong. Along the ground they were cast by nothing discernible against the stones. They shifted and swirled though there wasn’t a sunbeam strong enough to create them. The Girl in Blue stood under the tree. Not laughing or burning. Only clutching empty air against her chest.
But for long moments Trinity didn’t care about anything except Creed’s Scotch-flavored kiss.
Then he moved back. Then several strides more. He pushed his hands up into his thick brown hair as if to hold himself together or tear himself apart.
“Every time I kiss you I feel like I’m coming alive. Like I’m coming up out of that freezing water you pulled me from all those years ago,” Creed confessed. His voice was ragged and raw and shuddering.
Then his meaning penetrated and chilled away the vestiges of heat his lips had left on hers.
He was obsessed by his close brush with death. He might as well be soaking wet and shivering in her arms. They were still trapped in that moment and probably always would be.
“And every time you kiss me I feel like I want to die,” she said.
He could have easily pulled her into the lake that day. They could have sunk to the bottom, together forever in an icy grave. He hadn’t, but when she saw his haggard face and haunted eyes she knew the danger of it wasn’t past. She’d resisted the gloomy pall that held Scarlet Falls in its clutches. She’d fought against the idea that she had to be afraid of the dark forever.
But Samuel Creed lived in the abyss. It was crazy for her to play along its edge, contemplating the dive while he dragged her down with him, kiss by heated kiss, disguising darkness with desire.
Chapter Five
They didn’t stroll back together through the gathering dusk holding hands and gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes. She left Creed at the Chadwick plot with his lips swollen and his hands in his pockets.
The Girl in Blue had disappeared, but Trinity wasn’t fooled. Not by Clara and not by Creed. Neither threat was past merely because they were no longer in sight.
She walked back to Hillhaven alone with nothing but lengthening shadows to keep her company. As their dark amorphous tendrils seemed to caress her skin, she wondered if staying in Scarlet Falls would invite the shadows to come inside and dance on her soul.
* * *
Trinity put the old photograph back where she’d found it as soon as she arrived at Hillhaven. The house was echoing and empty around her, but she hurried because she wanted to be out of Creed’s rooms before his return.
The rag doll was gone.
She stood inside the threshold where she’d stopped to scan the room out of habit. It was only an old toy. A bundle of cloth scraps and musty stuffing and…button eyes. Trinity scrutinized Creed’s collection bit by bit, but couldn’t spot the missing item. Crazily, her instincts caused the hair to rise on the back of her neck and a chill of adrenaline to flow down her spine.
Creed must have moved it.
That was all.
He’d put the doll somewhere else.
It certainly hadn’t slumped down from its perch to crawl across the floor…
Trinity forced herself to step forward and put the photograph of Clara Chadwick back in its place. But she didn’t linger. Because if Creed hadn’t moved it and it couldn’t move itself, then maybe the Girl in Blue had come home to play.
* * *
That evening Trinity decided to study in her room. Even surrounded by comforting and familiar things, she was on edge. When Creed came home, his movements weren’t loud, but it was as if the house expanded and breathed around her, more full, with more potential for…something.
He charged the atmosphere by simply being in it.
Close to midnight, Trinity gave up trying to review coursework she might never have the opportunity to resume. She hadn’t heard Creed in a while and she thought he must have gone to bed.
Of course, Hillhaven was never silent, but unlike an apartment building full of nursing students there was no concrete cause for the continuous rustling sighs and occasional ambiguous creaks. Unless the age of its timbers was cause enough.
For all its size and its years, it should sit, dignified and quietly dusty.
It didn’t.
It never had.
Trinity’s father blamed mice behind the baseboards and spent years watching mostly empty traps and untouched baits. Her mother blamed other rodents in the attic, but there had only been one small confused brown bat fifteen years ago to justify the attribution.
That night, Trinity listened and could only blame Creed every now and then for what she’d heard.
If Clara Chadwick had manipulated the matches, could she have moved the much heavier rag doll? And what of other things? Had the ghost she saw become as malevolent as the invisible threats that caused accidents in Scarlet Falls or, worse, had she been part of that phenomenon all along?
Finally, Trinity changed into a sachet-scented nightgown she pulled from her old bureau drawer. Most of her clothes had been ruined in the Boston fire and the subsequent dousing of its flames, but she didn’t mind pulling the once familiar folds of satin over her head. Its loose soft sleeves left room for the light bandages on her arm and, as always, her petite height made its length warm against her legs.
As it settled on her shoulders, she noted that she filled it out more than she had several years ago. The delicate pink material was made immediately more adult by her full breasts and defined hips and legs. When she’d been a teen, she’d been thin. Now, she was fit, but she didn’t diet away every ounce of softness. The nightgown seemed to approve of her fitness regime, sliding into place by hugging her curves.
Okay. Maybe a little less chocolate before exams wouldn’t hurt.
While she brushed her hair into calmer waves that wouldn’t try to take over her bed in her sleep, she heard another noise, a muffled thump and what sounded like a voice.
She paused. Tendrils of hair clung to the brush as static held them out from her head and the whole room seemed to go electric as she waited for the laughter.
And waited.
She didn’t realize she held her breath until the high tinkling humor sounded and then hot air from her lungs left her in a rush.
It would be dangerous to follow and find that laugh.
Instinctively, she knew it.
Though she had no proof Clara had caused the fire in Boston, the lifelong visitation had suddenly become more solid, more real.
The electricity in the air had settled to sizzle in a warning wash of adrenaline beneath her skin. But she couldn’t ignore the laughter, could she? Not after the fire in Boston. Not after the matches and the long cemetery stare.
Trinity lowered the brush to the table and turned to the door. She avoided meeting her eyes in the mirror. They would be wide and afraid. She could feel her lids straining as if she was terrified to blink because she might open her eyes to find The Girl in Blue hadn’t waited to be found, but rather had come looking for her instead.
She went to her bedroom door and opened it with a click of the knob and her hand pressed against the wood. It swung inward ever so slowly as she tried to be quiet. And because her ears strained and her breath was light, she suddenly noticed that the never-silent Hillhaven had gone as deathly still as the grave.
There were no creaking sighs. No rustlings. No mice. No bats. Samuel Creed might have left or been asleep, but wherever he was seemed absent, as if the house was completely vacant except for Trinity and…the laugh that came again down, down, down the dark hall and into the oldest wing of the house.
Trinity had never liked the east wing and she certainly didn’t relish the idea of opening the double doors that led to it in the upper landing at night in search of ghostly laughter.
She did it anyway.
The tender flesh on her arm demanded that she be brave.
She hurried across the cool moonlit floor of the landing, ignoring the flutter in her chest when she passed the long, dark stairway that disappeared into the empty lower reaches of the house.
She was a child of Scarlet Falls. Of course she was afraid of the dark.
But she couldn’t let the fear stop her. She was an adult now. It was time. She couldn’t run from the eerie dead girl who wouldn’t leave her in peace no matter how far she roamed. She couldn’t ignore her and hope that she meant no harm. She couldn’t fight her. But she might be able to find her and discover what kept her restless and wandering.
The doors screeched from disuse when she turned the knobs and pressed them inward. Cold, unheated air rushed dustily out to greet her. She released the knobs and stepped forward, barefoot in her nightgown with nothing but the pounding of her heart in her chest to make this real and not a walking dream.
The hallway stretched out from her in a long expanse, but what made her stop and draw in a sudden startled breath wasn’t the appearance of The Girl in Blue. Clara Chadwick didn’t appear. Trinity didn’t hear another haunting tinkle of laughter. What she saw was the spill of lamplight from one of the east wing bedrooms and what she heard was the archaic sound of a typewriter with decisive staccato strikes of fingers on its keys.
* * *
She should have taken into account what she was wearing and the lateness of the hour, or the odd fact that she was wandering the halls in search of a ghost after midnight. Instead, she was drawn to the warm glow of light and the industrious sound of the typewriter, step by step. She pictured what she would find before looking into the room, but nothing prepared her for the intimacy of Samuel Creed at work.
He sat at a cherry desk with his hands pounding away at a vintage machine the likes of which Trinity had only seen in movies. But it wasn’t the typewriter that held her attention.
It was Creed.
His hair was wild and mussed. His pale face intense. His concentration held and riveted to the paper scrolling upward, ever upward.
Then he noticed her and the full intensity of his concentration moved from the paper to her.
She actually took a step back because the look in his eyes held such ferocity of feeling.
“Trinity,” he said as if he conjured her from thin air by speaking her name. The power of creation was in his tones. When he said her name, and only then, did she become a part of the world in which he currently dwelled.
She watched him straighten and blink and pull his hands from the keys. She’d known a musician once who had woken in much the same way from a jag of composing. There was an otherworldly quality to a passionate artist, one that said they brought a little of wherever they went when they were in a creative fugue back with them when they reentered the real world.
Maybe Creed’s dark eyes couldn’t be entirely attributed to his death. Maybe where he went when he was writing shone through. Of course, she’d seen the book filled with death with his name on its jacket so maybe they were both one and the same.
“I heard something,” Trinity said. It was a lame excuse for showing up at his door.
His bedroom door.
Her gaze quickly inventoried. Unlike his rooms in the other part of the house, this room held no memora
bilia. Only personal items like a coat thrown over a massive leather chair and a stack of books by the large rumpled bed. She looked away from his pillows and back to his desk which only held paper and notebooks and reference materials. No rag doll. No crow. No tiny black Mary Jane. Though she did notice, finally, when she quit seeing slick burgundy sheets every time she blinked, that he had a glass filled with Maiden’s Tears from the lake beside his typewriter.
The sight sent a stab of unease through her abdomen, but it was nothing compared to what she felt when she also noticed a pile of discarded matchsticks beside the glass.
“Sometimes I work late,” Creed said. “I didn’t know you could hear me in your room. I like the noise of the keys. Drowns out…other things.”
The matchsticks meant nothing. She’d found him in the glow of the fireplace the first night, after all. But what if The Girl in Blue had played in his room, too? What if she wasn’t finished?
He stood up and stretched, and Trinity wrapped her arms around the sudden hollow ache in her middle the stab of unease had left behind. His black tailored shirt was open. The shine of its poplin caused his pale muscular chest to stand out in contrast. The light against the darkness was startlingly attractive. As she’d thought before, he was too big and too powerful to be considered vulnerable, but his naked skin seemed so all the same. She tried not to notice the dark dusting of hair that also stood out, leading in a trail to disappear in the low riding waistband of his equally dark trousers.
Creed walked toward her before she could think of what to say and suddenly his intensity had nothing to do with his work. He looked from her hair, which she hadn’t had time to fully tame, down to her satin nightgown, which now showed intimate evidence that the hall had been cold. Of course, it wouldn’t matter if it had been high summer. The chill in the air had little to do with the pebbling of her nipples that showed clearly beneath the clinging fabric of her gown.
That it was October meant nothing.
And he would know it.
Because her skin was also flushed, showing her desire and her emotions vividly against the nightgown’s pastel.