by Jane Godman
“I’m cold,” she said. And she suddenly was, trembling with the memory of High Lake’s black touch.
“I know,” Creed said. “It stays with you for…a while.”
He gathered her close, but as he pulled she lifted his shirt up and off so their skin would meet. Immediately her chill was dispelled. But not her tremble. She shivered for another reason entirely. Her body reacting to the sensual slide of their flushed bare skin.
Creed noted her pleasure. He dropped to his knees before her, in one smooth motion taking her leggings down with him. She burrowed her hands into his dark thick hair, feeling the warmth of the sunlight trapped in its waves.
He kissed her quivering stomach and she thought she’d never be cold again. His tongue teased around the edges of her bikini briefs, and then he nipped the soft swell of skin over each of her hipbones while his hands on her bottom held her firmly in place.
She was captured for long moments. Trapped in his grip for his teeth and tongue, but then he allowed her to sink down and straddle his hips. Maximum heat. Maximum connection. In the bright space of the loft, Creed’s body was a revelation. Lean, fit, spare—perhaps the demons that rode him didn’t allow for ease or any measure of softness.
Trinity gave him hers.
She reached around to undo the hooks of her bra. Then she pressed her freed breasts to the hard plane of his chest. He wasn’t tanned. He wasn’t a person who spent time in the sun, but his coloring was naturally darker than hers. The contrast of her flushed porcelain to his rich cream was delicious. A sprinkling of dark hair on his chest tickled against her and led intriguingly to a line that disappeared behind the waist band of his tailored pants.
Decadence. She’d found it.
Gripping him between her legs while she wore nothing but a scant lace brief.
He met her eyes again. He watched her face as he dipped to take the tip of one breast between his lips.
“Oh,” she gasped. His rough tongue stroked and his mouth suckled. The pleasure he had in her reaction gleamed in his eyes, an onyx flash like the one in his ear.
“Warmer now?” he asked, arching one brow.
“Yes,” she replied. Then added “please” as he moved to close his hot mouth over her other breast. He hummed his approval against her nipple when she reached for his zipper.
Trinity undid his button and rasped the zipper down. He tilted his face back, his cheeks flushed and his breathing quickened. She stood and slowly slid the last barrier she wore down. She let the lace fall, watching him as he’d watched her. Very aware of his erection as he shed the pants she’d loosened. Anticipating the heat they were going to share.
She settled back down against him where he waited on the plush rug that covered the loft’s floor. She straddled his thighs.
“I don’t think I’ve truly been warm until now. Not since that day,” Creed confessed. Then his words faded into a long groan as she opened to him, as he pressed up and inside.
She controlled the rhythm and the thrust. She took him as he’d taken her the night before, but this time they looked into each other’s eyes. This time when she cried out in release, she wasn’t looking out at the night. She was bathed by the sun and looking at a light in Creed’s expression she’d never seen.
He held her so tight, his fingers almost hurt where they pressed into her skin. But she didn’t protest. She held him, too. When he tensed, when he came, she thought maybe in those moments the chill of the lake and the darkness of the town didn’t have a chance of coming between them.
* * *
“I need the doll,” she said. They still lay on the loft’s rug in the sun, but they couldn’t ignore the darkness forever. Night would come and, with it, darker things. His fingers brushed her lips to so that the breath of her words must tickle over them. His gaze rose from her mouth to meet her eyes. She’d taken him by surprise.
“The doll…” he began.
“The rag doll from the picture of Clara in your collection. I think I know what I need to do,” Trinity said.
* * *
The day was long.
Trinity spent it in an uneasy sleep plagued by dreams that skirted the edge of nightmares. Creed spent part of it with Mrs. Jesham and the Historical Society records.
It was probably an indication of her dismay in what she was determined to do that a particularly gruesome vision of The Girl in Blue haunted her sleep, her dress gone to moldy rags and bones showing beneath mummified skin.
Creed woke her at dusk or she woke herself, clawing her way up from the blood-scented depths of High Lake where the bodies of children floated, floated, floated all around her.
“It’s all right,” Creed said. He grabbed her flailing hands as he sat beside her on the bed they had yet to share.
As she fully awoke, the scent of blood was replaced by sandalwood and a hint of Scotch.
It wasn’t all right, but she wasn’t going to argue with him. Not when he held her hands so firmly even as dark shadows under his eyes showed his own need for respite.
“The sun has gone down and the town is settling for the night,” Creed said.
Trinity pulled her hands from his and pushed wild curls back from her face. The gesture didn’t smooth them anymore than it slowed her racing heart.
“Settled for the night or hunkered down to wait for morning?” she asked.
Creed leaned down and kissed her. It wasn’t a gentle peck. His lips opened over hers and she gasped her surprised. His tongue delved between her lips and for those hot moments, need for him chased away all the dark remnants of nightmares clouding her hopes.
He brought his hands up to hold her in place, both palms warmly cupping her jaws and Trinity reached to place her hands on his wrists. Hanging on and holding back at the same time.
She wouldn’t forget his stroll beside the lake or the matches she’d found in his box. She couldn’t ignore his fascination with Scarlet Falls’ death-filled history. Even as she kissed him back, licking his whiskey sweetness, she didn’t move into his arms or soften.
She had something horrible to do. And it meant she would have to go out into the night of Scarlet Falls.
Creed noticed her reticence. He ended the kiss, pulling his mouth from hers and resting his forehead against hers as if it took everything he had not to beg her or force her to admit she wanted more.
“I found out some things you might want to know,” he said. The kiss had caused his voice to go low and deep. “We can talk in the other room.” He stood and turned away from her and the bed before walking to the door. Once there, he paused in the threshold.
Trinity thought he would speak again. She waited, still wrapped in his rumpled chocolate brown sheets.
He didn’t.
He glanced at her and then away before he left the room.
She rose. Her teeth worried the edge of the lip Creed had just suckled to soft, swollen sensitivity. She might worry about his macabre fascination with death and with the things he ascertained that she saw, but that didn’t mean she could easily resist the burn between them without an echoing remnant of it settling aglow in the pit of her stomach.
* * *
She brushed her hair and clipped it back. Cool water did little to soothe the heat from her face. At least his lips had dispelled the haze of her nightmares. She stepped from the bathroom to the den with determined strides.
Creed sat in an oversize leather chair. He had the rag doll in his hands. Her eyes went to the box on the counter, but he’d replaced the lid. She supposed the matches were still inside.
“You are Clara Chadwick’s closest living relative. In tracing the family tree, I found several deaths by fire,” Creed said. “Given more time to research fires in Scarlet Falls I might discover more.”
Trinity avoided the sofa. She propped her hip against the bar stool instead.
“Mrs. Jesham mentioned a Courthouse fire in 1972. That was before I was born, so maybe I’m not the first person she’s haunted,” Trinity said.
/>
Creed turned the doll this way and that in his hands, testing its weight and smoothing its dress.
“When I was a boy, I had a flashlight collection. Every kind imaginable. Metal. Plastic. Penlights. I bet I had a hundred of them, and I kept them all in working order. Fresh batteries. Good bulbs. I wanted to see. I needed to see. But even with a hundred lights gleaming at midnight I could never see a thing. Just my room and empty shadows,” Creed said. “My need to see in the dark was a sort of fear, I suppose.”
He’d noticed something about the doll in his hands. He held up one of her threadbare feet to have a closer look.
“That evening by the lake, I saw something. I wasn’t looking for rocks or trouble like most people supposed. I had finally seen something. And it almost got me killed,” Creed said.
His fingers worked at some loose threads on the rag doll’s foot.
Trinity found herself standing and several steps closer to the man and the doll without realizing she’d moved. Her gaze was riveted to his fingers on the rag doll’s foot, but her memory took her back to that chilled evening by High Lake.
She’d seen him drive toward the lake from town and she’d followed on foot. Instinct was something she’d learned to obey even by the age of fifteen. She’d followed because she was afraid the tall, handsome boy who occasionally glanced her way might be hurt. So with the sun sinking on the horizon, she’d walked up to the lake above town instead of going home and shutting the night safely outside Hillhaven.
Creed had already been out of his car by the time she reached the lake. He’d left the family sedan idling while the sun set. She’d seen his striking silhouette against the sky and she’d seen long white grasping arms pull him into the dark waters.
“What did you see?” Trinity asked.
“A pale shimmer under the water…like movement, but there aren’t any fish in High Lake….Besides it was too big to be a fish,” Creed said.
She didn’t ask him why he had driven to the lake in the first place. He couldn’t have seen a shimmer before he’d been standing by the lake’s edge.
“So you leaned closer and…” she said.
“I fell in,” Creed said.
Trinity thought maybe not a fall. She remembered the stones shifting under her feet, but she also remembered Thomas Craig eating the peanut that could kill him as if he was in a trance. She didn’t have time to question his memory because suddenly the seams of the doll’s foot gave way and a pile of Maiden’s Tears fell out into the palm of Creed’s hand.
The hands and feet of the rag doll had been weighted with Maiden’s Tears stones from High Lake. It wasn’t really surprising. They were keepsakes for families all over town. Rare enough to be treasured. Common enough to be found. Most children had a jar full by the time they outgrew the desire to hunt for them.
Still, Trinity felt something akin to horror when the black bits fell free. She remembered thinking she’d grabbed hands full of them near the shore when she’d fallen even though they never occurred in that type of abundance.
“There’s a story about a Native American mother losing her child in the lake. She cried herself to death at the water’s edge,” Creed recalled.
“And her tears turned to stone,” Trinity said, remembering the story from some long ago kindergarten circle time.
“My head knows the stones are remnants of river rock polished by millennia of rushing waters,” Creed said.
“But they feel like tears,” Trinity replied. Whatever the science, the stones seemed to hint at something deeper than erosion.
Creed looked at the stones cupped in the palm of his hand.
“I can’t imagine sewing them into a child’s toy,” he said.
“Superstition or using what they had readily available to weigh the doll’s hands and feet?” Trinity wondered.
“The doll and the photo were part of a lot I bought at auction when Eichelman’s Mortuary went out of business,” Creed said. “For some reason, Old Man Eichelman didn’t prepare the body with the doll the way he was asked. There was a note explaining the family’s wishes, and the daughter’s fear of the dark and attachment to the doll. But it was a hectic time. Lots of sick children died that winter. The doll wasn’t buried with Clara. I bought it several months ago, included in a box of other things.”
“And that’s when I saw Clara in Boston,” Trinity said.
“Maybe bringing the doll out of storage and taking it to Hillhaven…” Creed began.
“Escalated my haunting,” Trinity finished.
“It’s possible the doll might have been moved around previously. Packed and unpacked,” Creed said.
Trinity wondered if each time the doll had surfaced had been a time when The Girl in Blue grew more…active.
“So she’s soothing her fear of the dark with flames because she was buried without her doll,” Trinity said.
“The note is in the box on the counter,” Creed said, squeezing his hands around the black stones.
Trinity stepped to the box. This time its lid was already open and set to the side. She ignored the matchsticks, but almost buried in their pile was a folded piece of paper. When her hands closed around it and she lifted it to the light, it felt heavier than modern paper. When she unfolded it, she could see variations of weave and color that made it almost cloth-like. The ink was faded, but legible. The script tight and hard-pressed to the page.
Dear Mr. Eichelman,
I am sorry that I cannot speak with you in person concerning the impending burial of my beloved daughter. My handkerchiefs are stained with blood and my wife has been lost to demented fever for a week. We are told to keep to our house. I can only be prayerfully thankful that we sent our son to live with my sister in Boston as this hell-spawned illness struck. We have word that he is well. That is our comfort. Our only comfort. I have no doubt that my wife and I will be providing more business for you soon.
Clara fell sick too quickly for us to send her to Boston. She is gone now to her eternal rest, but this is where I must confess to you that our daughter has been plagued her whole young life by night terrors that leave her unable to sleep alone. My wife sewed the doll I have sent with this letter to your door. It is the only means of holding back Clara’s fear of the dark. While I realize it is the request of a sick and superstitious man, I pray that you will bury my beloved daughter with her doll. If you had ever seen her, beset in the night with wild-eyed torment, I am sure you would understand.
Sincerely,
Thomas Ezekiel Chadwick
Trinity had tears in her eyes when she finished the letter. The faded ink and old paper no longer made the letter’s writer seem ancient and distant. She could easily imagine his fear and his helplessness—a father who was powerless to save his child, but who still tried to help her.
“It’s like that sometimes,” Creed said. He still held the doll and the stones. “History,” he clarified before he went on. “Sometimes it can become as immediate and urgent as the here and now.”
Trinity helped him put every stone back into the doll and she held the seams together while he searched for a needle and thread. He knelt in front of her on the floor, once he had found them, sewing—stitch by stitch—a dilapidated rag doll for a poor little girl long past any logical form of help.
When he was finished, he looked up at her and Trinity’s heart tightened. She could no longer deny that it was time, and she could also no longer deny that Creed managed to find his way into her heart no matter how tight it became.
Chapter Nine
It would have been better if Creed had called her idea crazy. If he had turned from her or tried to stop her, she would finally know the evening by the lake all those years ago hadn’t darkened him forever or left its black mark on his soul.
He didn’t.
Though he was as somber as she was, they both moved with the same deliberate slowness that gave the universe time to show them a less macabre solution. To no avail.
This was Scarlet Fa
lls and solutions seldom if ever involved unicorns and cupcakes.
He put the tools they would need in the trunk of his sports car. One long-handled shovel barely fit. Moonlight glinted off a newly purchased ax head before Creed closed the boot. For a second, she couldn’t think what the ax was for and then she realized a hundred year old coffin’s metal fittings might be fused shut.
She pushed it from her mind.
Since Creed drove, she carried the rag doll. It was made somehow even more unsettling now that she knew why its hands and feet flopped with dead weight. Its button eyes gleamed in the dashboard lights.
Trinity looked out the window.
The town slept as their car glided into it. In the distance, they saw the tail lights from Sheriff Constantine’s SUV, but unless he looked in his rearview mirror precisely the moment they passed the Main Street and Elm Street interchange, he wouldn’t have seen them.
“I’m going to park behind the church at the base of the hill,” Creed said.
Trinity nodded.
The oldest Chadwick plots were completely hidden from the street. They probably could have done what they intended to do at noon and no one would have been the wiser. At midnight, they were safe from the eyes of the curious even if they might face danger from other things.
Creed pulled the car as close to where the ground started to rise as he could. Well off the street. They both climbed out. The air was crisp and cool. Trinity started with a mew of disgust when she almost caught herself tucking the rag doll close against her coated chest.
Creed retrieved the tools he’d stowed in the back, easily shouldering a shovel and a pick, and carrying the ax in the other hand. He would have been the sexiest grave robber in Massachusetts if they were going to take something from Clara Chadwick’s tomb instead of putting something back into her long dead arms.
Moonlight illuminated the old path into the cemetery, although too few steps on its surface had left it barely more than an indention in grass.