by Rachel Lee
“That would be nice. I don’t mind going to the Inn for dinner, but the food isn’t…well…”
“It’s pedestrian,” he said, giving her an amused look. “I can turn out a better steak in a frying pan.”
She laughed. “So can I. I only go there when I absolutely can’t stand the thought of cooking.”
“Well, Witt’s new hotel should be better. All we have to hope is that it gets enough business so he doesn’t have to cut corners.”
“Somebody said it’s going to look like a huge old Victorian resort.”
“Yeah. I’ve seen the model. Nothing like the usual Colorado ski-country look. Straight out of the past and the days of the really fancy resort hotels.”
“Maybe it’ll be like that hotel in The Shining.”
He turned his head and wiggled his eyebrows at her. “Without the evil twins, I hope.”
He was obviously in a good mood tonight, and he was lifting Mary’s spirits, as well. As they approached the restaurant on the north side of town, she forgot all about the fire, all about the sandwiches she was going to have to make tomorrow and all about everything else. It was a beautiful evening, if you could breathe the sooty air, and she was in the company of a handsome, charming man. Surely she could be allowed to enjoy herself for a few hours in a fantasy woven from being with an attractive, eligible man.
The restaurant was quiet, serving only one other couple, out-of-towners. The smell of the fire had been kept sternly at bay, and indoors there were only the good aromas of food cooking. It was like another world.
“Ah,” Sam said, settling back in his chair with obvious contentment. “I feel like I’m on another planet.”
“Me, too. It’s nice not to worry about the fire for a while.”
“That’s what I was thinking all day today. How nice it was to do ordinary cop work again. Except that I knew the people involved in the domestics.” He shrugged. “Oh, well. It happens.”
“It must be difficult to deal with, though.”
“Today I was lucky. It wasn’t so bad.”
They ordered coffee, and Sam asked for a seafood appetizer without even looking at the menu. “Do you want any particular appetizer?” he asked Mary. “Or do you want to share mine? There’ll be more than enough.”
“More than enough for me. I’ll just share, thanks.” After the waiter left, she added, “You come here often, don’t you?”
“It’s a dead giveaway when someone has the menu memorized, isn’t it?” He smiled. “Sometimes I can’t stand any more of my own cooking.”
“I know how that is.”
“It’s not that I can’t cook, I just have a limited repertoire that I’m willing to make for myself. Sheer laziness.”
“I guess neither of us is a born chef.”
He laughed. “It looks that way. Cooking is a necessity for me, not a hobby.”
Sam leaned back to allow the waiter to serve the appetizers and coffee. Talking about cooking…man, he was rusty. All his conversation seemed to revolve around work. He was like a fish out of water when it came to making casual small talk with someone, particularly a pretty woman he didn’t know all that well.
And he wasn’t especially eager to consider why he had asked Mary to dinner. After spending all day counting all the reasons he didn’t want to get involved again, on the spur of the moment he’d asked an attractive, single woman out to dinner.
He needed his damn head examined.
Except that he knew what was happening. Something about Mary felt like a cool, refreshing oasis in the midst of a life suddenly full of stress: his father’s presence in town, his job, the fire…all of it was weighing on him, and Mary felt like an emotional escape somehow.
So he was sitting there, trying not to talk about the things that were absorbing his attention, namely his father, the fire and his job, which left him with nothing to offer except some inane remarks about cooking.
And Mary seemed to be feeling the same restraint. As if she sensed the boundaries of where he didn’t want to go. It was going to make for a pretty silent dinner.
And that made him feel increasingly awkward.
Mary sampled the bacon-wrapped shrimp and pronounced them excellent. Her smile across the table was brighter than the candle that sat between them, seeming to embrace him and warm him. Lord, she was pretty.
“You ever been married?” he heard himself blurt. One of those places he didn’t want to venture, so naturally, he’d brought it up himself. He wondered if he could kick himself in the seat, or if that was physically impossible.
Her smile, her beautiful smile, vanished. Apparently the topic was as bad for her as it was for him. “Forget it,” he said swiftly. “None of my business.”
She hesitated, a profound sorrow shadowing her face. “No, it’s okay,” she said quietly. “I was married. Seven years.”
“What happened?”
“He proved he was the same idiot I married. The going got tough and he got going…far away.”
She’d tried to be light about it, but she didn’t succeed, and he wouldn’t have been deluded, anyway. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m better off without him.”
She sounded as if she really meant that, but at least he still retained sense enough not to pursue it. There was a disparity between her reaction to the question and the definite way she said she was better off without him. Something else had happened, and while his curiosity was piqued, he knew better than to ask.
Which again left him with little to say. He rapidly sorted through a list of safe topics, discarding them one after another. The weather? Nah. That had been talked to death all over town. The upcoming football season? The current baseball season? Politics? Yeah, right.
But she seemed to feel awkward about not explaining, and before he could think of a way to change the subject, she said, “We, uh, lost our son. He was only six. And Chet just ran away from it all.”
His heart stopped. He couldn’t imagine losing a child; he just knew that it had to be as bad or worse than anything he’d experienced. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Mary.”
“Me, too.” She looked away, toward the window that gave them a view of the dying day and the mountains. “I miss him. I’m always going to miss him. My son.”
He nodded and reached instinctively for her hand, covering it with his, squeezing gently.
He waited, and after a minute or so she visibly shook herself and faced him with a smile. “But we’re here to have fun. So let’s eat and laugh.”
After that the appetizer disappeared quickly and was soon followed by their steaks.
“So,” she said, after taking a few bites of steak and pronouncing it delicious, “what’s the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to you?”
He arched a brow and hurried to swallow. “Weird how?”
“I don’t know,” she said, musing. “Twilight Zone weird?”
He pondered for a moment. “I guess it was when I was fourteen. Playing out back in the yard. I had one of those pitch-back things, where you throw a baseball into it and it will bounce back to you. So you can play catch by yourself.”
He paused. “I didn’t have a lot of friends that summer. I think we’d just moved. Anyway, I was playing ball, and I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, and there was this old lady walking across our lawn, on the far side, near the woods. I looked at her for a minute or two, wondered who she was, what she was doing there. But for some reason I was too…scared, stunned, I don’t know what…to say anything. Then she stepped into the trees and just…vanished.”
He took a bite of baked potato, waiting for a response, but she merely sat and listened. So he continued. “Well, for some reason, that was when I got curious, so I ran across the lawn to where she’d walked into the trees, but there was no sign of her. No sound. I walked along all the paths…nothing. The woods weren’t that thick, and I hadn’t been so far away that she could just have vanished in the time it took me to cross the lawn. But…
she did. And for the rest of my life, I’ve wondered if she was really there at all or if I just imagined her.” He poked at his salad and looked back at her. “So now you know I’m strange, right?”
She smiled. He had a lovely voice. She hadn’t meant the conversation to go this way, but it had, and it didn’t bother her. “Well, no, not strange. Weird things happen.”
“To you, too?”
She nodded. “Let’s say the mountains can be very, very disorienting at five in the morning, when the fog is thick and you’re camping, and you wake up needing to relieve yourself and not a single other soul is awake for miles around.”
“You were alone?” he asked.
“No. But my parents were sleeping late. Well, not late…5:00 a.m. isn’t late. But…it was just me and the mountainside and the dark fog. And that’s when I heard the footsteps, or whatever, something big moving in the brush around me. I thought maybe it was a bear, so I ran for the latrine. But it was just…there.” She suppressed a shiver. “It wasn’t an animal. Don’t ask me why I think so. I just know it wasn’t. I’m not sure it was human, either. It was…like I could feel it thinking about me, deciding if I was…the right one.”
“The right one for what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I did my business and dashed back to the tent as fast as I could. Didn’t sleep another wink that night or the next.”
“Sounds like one of those bad teen slasher flicks,” he said, smiling. Then he seemed to read something in her face, and his smile dropped. “I’m sorry. That was insensitive.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “The really strange thing is that it does sound like some cheesy horror movie. Except…I was in it. And I didn’t like it.”
He nodded. “I had the same sort of feeling about that woman I saw. And I’ve been grateful ever since that I’ve never had another experience like it.”
“I wish I hadn’t,” she said.
“It happened again?”
She colored faintly. “Never mind. You’re going to think I’m off my rocker.”
“It’s obvious you’re not off your rocker. Go on, tell me.”
She hesitated, toying with her food. When she spoke, she tried to sound lighthearted. “Those footsteps I heard in the brush?”
“Oh, God, don’t tell me something attacked you.”
Her eyes jumped up, meeting his. “Oh, no! Nothing like that. No, it’s just that they…followed me home.”
He wasn’t sure he understood her correctly. “Followed you home? How? When?”
“It’s kind of hard to explain. But after that camping trip, when we came home, I heard the footsteps in the house late at night. Something would wake me, and I could hear them. Sort of. Oh, it’s so hard to explain. It wasn’t exactly as if I heard them the way I’m hearing you, but I still heard them, if you can get some idea what I mean.” She grimaced. “Sometimes language fails.”
“I think I know what you mean. Like something on the very edge of hearing.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “That’s a great description. That’s exactly what I mean. Night after night, I’d lie awake listening. I’d hear those footsteps start at the base of the basement stairs. They climbed slowly and walked into the kitchen. Then they’d stop.”
“Now that’s really creepy.”
“I lost count of the nights I lay awake with my heart hammering so hard I could scarcely get enough air in my lungs. Listening. Terrified they’d go farther, that they’d come down the hall to my bedroom. I started needing the hall light on outside my door, not that I ever understood what the light would do. I tried to tell myself it was just some sound the house was making, the heating system or something. But I kept right on hearing it. For years. It didn’t stop until I left home.”
“That must have been awful! Did you tell anyone?”
“Oh, sure, I told my mom. She asked me to keep quiet about it so my little cousin wouldn’t get upset. I thought she didn’t believe me, but it turns out I was wrong. She believed me, all right. And years after I left, I heard from her and my cousin that they heard the steps, too, and that they started to go farther back into the house, into the bedroom wing.”
“I feel like shivering. But how do you know they were the same steps you heard in the woods?”
“Because…” She hesitated, then blurted it out. “Because I could feel it thinking, ‘Is she the one?’”
“The hair on the back of my neck is standing up.”
“Mine, too.” She gave an uneasy laugh. “I’ve never told anyone else about that. You must think I was hallucinating.”
He shook his head. “You forget, I grew up in a world populated by demons, devils and angels. In my childhood, the unseen was every bit as real as the seen.”
“Do you still feel that way?”
He thought it over for a moment or two. “I guess so. My belief structures are less simplistic than they used to be, but if you want to ask me if I believe in angels or the devil, I’d have to say yes. And if I had any doubts, my experience in police work would have convinced me.”
“Why?”
“Because of what I’ve seen. It’s not so bad here in Whisper Creek, but when I was working in Boulder and Denver, I saw stuff that could chill your soul. Things that couldn’t be called anything except evil. People so far removed from basic conscience that it was as if they didn’t have a soul. But I saw other things, too. Miraculous things. Things that make me believe angels watch over us sometimes.”
“Not chance?”
His steady gaze met hers. “What do you think?”
“I’m a religious person. I go through most of my life feeling that everything around me is a miracle. Other times…” Her face darkened, but she made a visible effort to lighten her mood. “Sometimes I feel as if we’re all lost and abandoned. Victims of random chance.”
He nodded and touched her hand again. This time, while it was also comforting, the touch was electric. He could almost hear the snap in the air. He jerked his fingers back. “We all feel that way sometimes. It’s the old question: why do bad things happen to good people?”
“Why do they?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I guess we’re supposed to learn lessons from it. Deepen our compassion and sympathy and love for our fellow man. That’s all I can think of.”
She nodded slowly and drew a long breath. “Maybe so. I have to believe there’s something positive in it all.”
“Otherwise we’d give up completely.”
They shared a long look of understanding, then resumed eating.
“So,” Sam asked, “have you had any other spooky experiences?”
“No, thank goodness. That was it, and that was quite enough for one lifetime.”
“So what do you think these experiences are?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea. I’d say brain glitches, except I find it hard to believe that leaving home would have made me stop hearing those steps if they were caused by something in my brain.”
“Or that your family would have heard them if it was just in your brain.”
“Power of suggestion,” she suggested.
“But you don’t really believe that. And frankly, neither do I.” He pushed his plate to one side and nodded for the waiter to refill their coffee cups. “The thing is, the whole idea of ghosts doesn’t fit with my religious beliefs. The idea that spirits could get trapped here on earth just doesn’t sit well with me.”
“But demons do?”
He laughed. “I never said I was consistent. Maybe there was a demon after you. But a ghost? That means something isn’t working right in the way things are set up.”
She nodded and pushed her own plate aside. “I see what you mean. I sometimes thought that maybe what I was hearing was some kind of psychic impression left behind in the house. Except that doesn’t explain what I heard in the woods.”
“Hmm.” He thought about that, drumming his fingers absently on the table. “Well, my father would tell you th
at a demon was after you.”
She shivered visibly. “The thought crossed my mind more than once when it was happening. Do you think that?”
He shook his head. “I have to admit I don’t. I’m more inclined to believe it might have been some sort of poltergeist phenomenon.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, the name means noisy ghost. But what the experts think is that kids in adolescence give off some kind of strong psychic energy that can cause noises, or even cause objects to move. So maybe nothing followed you home. Maybe what happened in the woods somehow triggered your unconscious to imitate the experience.”
“But why did it continue after I left?”
“How old was your cousin?”
All of a sudden she smiled faintly. “Twelve. She had just turned twelve. I like your explanation.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know if it makes any more sense than demons. Except that if you accept the existence of demons for the sake of argument, I’d have a hard time trying to figure out a reason why any demon would do exactly the same things night after night like that.”
“Good point.” She looked as if some kind of weight had lifted from her shoulders.
“Of course,” he added wryly, “none of this explains my disappearing woman.”
“I guess not.” But she was still looking relieved.
“I got called in on a poltergeist case once, in Boulder.”
Her eyes widened. “For real?”
“For real. How else do you think I know what it’s called and what it’s supposed to be?” His mouth quirked as he spoke, and she laughed. He loved the sound of her laugh, a gentle ripple of sound.
“So tell,” she asked.
The waiter interrupted just then to take their plates and ask if they wanted dessert. Sam looked questioningly at Mary.
She shook her head. “I think I’m too full.”
“I’m not. Share a piece of turtle cheesecake with me?”
“Maybe a spoonful.”
He grinned. “That’s enough to justify it.”
The waiter departed, leaving them once again alone with the flickering candle between them. He could tell the candle bothered her, but she seemed to have shoved that aside. It was, Sam thought, almost like sharing ghost stories over a campfire.