The D.M. Mitchell Supernatural Double bill
Page 39
I looked up from my accounts book, in truth glad of the distraction. The tourists had gone home long ago, apart from a few hardy veterans, and even the locals hurried to finish their business in the high street and get home to houses considerably warmer than mine.
Madeline was standing by the shelves containing second-hand travel books.
She was exactly the same as I remembered her; tall, with blonde hair that was streaked through with darker strands, as if lines of molasses had been dribbled down a wall of golden syrup. It was cut short, revealing the narrow sweep of her neck. She was dressed in vintage clothes from the 1970s, or their reproductions. She wore a long brown jacket, tailored so that it hugged her waist. Her legs were covered by a lengthy, flowered skirt that almost reached the floor, its base autumn colour interspersed with flashes of white and reminding me off those old Laura Ashley designs.
I watched her disbelievingly, the sense of having been through all this before knocking me speechless. I stared at her back, at the way her head bent slightly as she read the books’ spines. I couldn’t take my eyes off her and for a moment I even forgot the cold from the door which a customer had indeed left open. There was a faint smell of perfume in the air. It came at me in little puffs, as if blown across to me by an invisible set of bellows.
‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ I asked.
She faced me.
And my insides melted.
‘I was wondering if you had a book about decent local hotels to stay in.’
And this is the second thing I never thought would happen.
When I first saw Madeline, I thought I was being haunted by a ghost of someone who had been dead a long time. I never expected that I was in fact being haunted by the ghost of my future life.
I smiled warmly.
‘Sure,’ I said, getting up from behind my desk and going over to the shelves. The smell of her perfume grew stronger, but it was the smell of the outdoors, of hawthorn blossom in May, or clouds of cow parsley, I thought. ‘We have some more over on this side,’ I said. I went to the other side of the shelf, scanning the rows of books and pulling a couple down that I thought might please her. ‘Is it just Dorset you’re interested in? What about Somerset? It’s not far away over the border, so to speak, and it’s a lovely county with a topography ranging from the flatness of the Somerset Levels to the Blackdown Hills, with everything in-between.’
There was no reply. My heart sank for a second at the silence.
I put my head around the side of the bookshelf.
‘Hello, Toby Turner,’ she said.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for purchasing ‘THE D. M. MITCHELL SUPERNATURAL DOUBLE BILL’.
If you enjoyed these novels, I would be grateful if you could take the time to let other people know and put a review on Amazon. I try to read them all and take every review very seriously. As readers your thoughts and insights are extremely valuable.
Yours,
Daniel M. Mitchell