Imaginary Lover

by Sandra Chastain

  Dusty looked at the others making preparations to leave and shook her head. “No, if that’s what the others did, that’s what I’ll do. May I take it home with me and read it tonight?”

  “Of course,” David agreed. “Then we’ll meet with you tomorrow afternoon and practice it at least once before we go to final rehearsal tomorrow night.”

  “Tomorrow night? But I don’t know if I can learn it that soon.”

  “I’ll help you,” Nick said, standing up beside her.

  “Fine,” Betty agreed, glancing at her watch. “Now it’s calorie time. Shall we adjourn to the coffee shop?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Dusty began, edging toward the door. “I think—”

  She was going to decline, plead that she needed to read the script, but the words that finished her sentence weren’t hers. They came from nowhere.

  “I think—I’ll go!” she said, then blinked in surprise.

  “Fine with me,” Nick agreed.

  He hadn’t expected her to go with the cast, but he hadn’t expected her to agree to Hattie’s request either. He wasn’t sure whether he was pleased or disappointed.

  As for Hattie’s fortune, greed usually won, and he couldn’t blame Dusty for taking the money. But somehow he had the feeling that Dusty wouldn’t have decided on following Hattie’s request for the money alone. Unless she had some kind of take-the-money-and-run plan in mind.

  Moments later they were walking down the sidewalk and entering an artistically lit coffee house.

  “How’d it go?” one customer asked.

  “Dress rehearsal tomorrow night?” another questioned.

  “Does everybody here know everybody else?” Dusty asked as she slid into the booth and Nick followed.

  “This place is the chief hangout for all the artists and painters. So, yes, they pretty much know each other.”

  “And you? Are you part of the group?”

  “No,” he said, then thought about his answer for a moment. “Sometimes. When Hattie insisted on coming, and when she wasn’t feeling well. I came with her.”

  The waitress took orders for drinks and snacks, her eyes straying back to Nick between each order, then on to Dusty with something close to animosity in her glance.

  “Personal friend of yours?” Dusty asked when the woman walked away.

  “Who?”

  “The waitress.”

  “No. I don’t have any personal women friends, not anymore.”

  “You cared about Hattie, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” he answered, but he didn’t volunteer any more information.

  David walked through the throng toward their booth, taking the last available seat on the outside, forcing Nick to slide even closer to Dusty. He leaned out to speak around Nick. “We’re really glad you’re going to take Hattie’s place and work with us at the Station. Hattie has been with us almost from the beginning.”

  “I don’t know how much I’ll be doing,” Dusty said. “I’m no actress and I don’t know a thing about the arts.”

  David took a long, interested look at Dusty before answering. “I think you’re going to be surprised. Hattie always thought you had a terrific imagination. She said you used to make up your own plays, the two of you.”

  “She did?” Dusty felt uncomfortable with the constant reminders of Hattie’s expectations. “I thought you didn’t know anything about me.”

  “We didn’t, not about Dusty. But she talked constantly about a little girl named Desirée. I thought Desirée was her own child, that she’d died,” David said softly.

  “Desirée did,” Nick said. “But Dusty lives on.”

  Dusty was surprised by David’s interest in her, but then she realized that he made everyone feel special. Still, she was glad to see the waitress bringing their drinks. She had the feeling that if Nick hadn’t been pinned in, he would have fled. David’s attention was eventually drawn to another table, and he stood and moved away. The other storytellers sitting in the booth began to talk about the upcoming dress rehearsal.

  “Hattie was to wear a red satin ballgown,” Nick said. “Complete with a hoop.”

  “I hope they don’t expect me to do that. I probably can’t walk in a hoop. My legs and feet always get tangled up in my bathrobe.”

  “Hattie said she felt like Scarlett O’Hara.” Nick chuckled. “Truth is,” he continued, “she was more like Miss Pittypat.”

  “I think I’d be more comfortable as Mammy.”

  Nick turned an odd look on her. “You know, in the new Scarlett book, Mammy was buried in that red petticoat.”

  “Are you threatening my life?” Dusty shivered, not from the thought of Nick making a threat, but from the heat of his gaze. He hadn’t moved when David had left. They were still thigh to thigh, his arm planted along the back of the booth, creating a little hollow in which she was sitting.

  He was surprised at the latent sexual desire she continued to feed in him. Sex was one of the things that he hadn’t had much time for before the accident. All his energy had been concentrated on his career, on his reputation, on the specialized laser surgery that he’d helped pioneer and continued to develop.

  Even his wife had given up. Their sex life had never been particularly intense, but she hadn’t seemed to mind. As for Nick, she was available and their coupling didn’t take energy away from his career. She probably would have been surprised to learn that there hadn’t been others. As his wife, she’d always been there for him, and he’d thought little about her.

  Until that last night. She’d accused him of being too tired to see what was happening and too full of his own importance to know when it was time to stop. It had taken one of his surgical assistants to send him home, to dismiss him from his own operating room, to take a chance on being ruined by the powerful Dr. Elliott when he demanded that Nick go home. Oh yes, he knew about threats. He took a long look at the woman beside him and realized in surprise that tonight he wasn’t on the defensive.

  “I never threaten anymore,” he said softly.

  “And I never wear red satin.”

  He shook off the feeling that they were being enclosed in some kind of bubble that closed off the conversation of the others. “Too bad, red is the color of your aura.”

  Dusty scoffed. “Auras, horoscopes, signs, I’d have thought a man like you would laugh at all that nonsense.”

  “I did. Once.” Nick drained his coffee mug and stood. He didn’t understand what he was doing there with this gypsy woman, or why she was chiseling away at the protective shell he’d constructed around himself. “If you’re going to read your ghost story, we’d better go.”

  “You’re right.” She followed him from the restaurant, returning the generous good nights being issued by the cast. Their comfortable acceptance wasn’t easy for Dusty. She felt as if she were being welcomed under false pretenses. “I wonder if they’d be so friendly if it weren’t for Hattie’s money?”

  His surprise showed. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “I guess I haven’t got too many friends left. Prison has a way of making good-bye permanent. And suddenly you’re alone and you don’t know how it happened.”

  “Fate or by choice, the end results are the same. People find it easy to leave you alone if you push them away.”

  “From the looks you get when you step into the room, Merlin, I think any loneliness on your part is definitely through choice.”

  “And yours?”

  “Through choice too.”

  “Is that normal for a police officer? I thought you had to be a team player.”

  Team. She felt a pain slice through her. “I had a partner once.”

  “Once? What happened?”

  She waited a long time before answering. “We were answering a call. He was killed by a drug-crazed kid. It was my fault. I didn’t follow procedure. I was so sure I could talk him down. My partner tried to save me.”

  “Is that why you went to jail? Pretty strong punishment, isn’t it, fo
r a bad judgment call?”

  “No, that’s how I got reassigned to a nice safe desk job that would keep me out of trouble and not put anybody else in danger.”

  Nick laughed. “Safe? Keep you out of trouble? Now, why don’t I believe that?”

  “Because there is no safe place, Merlin. You know it and I learned it. My nice safe job made me the fall guy in an organization that stole money from orphans and widows. After that I became the example to anybody else ready to blow the whistle. That’s how I went to jail.”

  Nick stopped at the corner beneath the streetlight and took a long look at Dusty. He hadn’t been able to get over the drastic change in her appearance. She wasn’t the tough, hard-edged woman she’d been that first night. Wearing the skirt and shawl, she looked like a wild-eyed gypsy. His body still tingled where they’d touched, and his mind had done a fast reshuffling of his impression of her character.

  “But you’re innocent, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Sure, but that conclusion and a dollar will get you a dozen stale doughnuts. What about you, magic man? Why are you still holed up here?”

  He continued to study Dusty for a moment, then turned and started walking toward the house.

  “Don’t want to bare your soul, huh? Doesn’t matter. My last roommates were a lot more dangerous, and there were more of them.”

  “The accident,” he finally said. “It left me with some other problems that I’m still dealing with my wife, Lois. And then there was Hattie.”

  “You didn’t kill Lois, Nick,” Dusty said, misunderstanding his statement. “It took me a long time, but I’m a good judge of people now. You loved her once.”

  “No,” he admitted in a tight voice, “that’s the hell of it. I didn’t just kill her that night. I’d been doing it for years.

  FIVE

  The next morning there was a shiny black box tied with orange and black curly ribbons on the table by Dusty’s bed.

  Attached to the ribbon was an accordion folded tag which read: Adopt-a-Ghost, an official souvenir of A Tour of Southern Ghosts.

  There were three pages of serious instructions which proclaimed that Dusty was the proud parent of an original Southern Ghost. The first panel instructed her to give her ghost a name. She moved on to the second page, but the smell of coffee interrupted her reading, and she quickly reached for her clothing, threading her long legs into the wrinkled jeans. This ghost must have been Merlin’s idea; he could help choose a name.

  She could almost hear her aunt’s familiar “Tsk, tsk, tsk” as Dusty pulled a brush through her hair and caught it up in a butterfly clip. So she didn’t look the way she had the night before; Nick would have to accept her as she really was, not as she was when she let Hattie’s influence dictate her dress.

  As she left the bedroom she picked up the box and her script. First she’d thank Nick for her gift. Then she’d read the damned script while she drank her morning coffee. The sooner she got the story down, the sooner she’d get over the feeling that Hattie was looking over her shoulder.

  The kitchen was empty, but the coffee was warm and there were several boxes of cereal on the counter. She grinned at the selection: Monsters and Marshmallows, Crunchy Critters, and Nuts and Bolts. She would never have picked any one of them for the intense, dark-eyed man who was her roommate. It was hard to believe, but Aunt Hattie’s wizard had a whimsical side.

  As she ate the cereal, she finished reading the instructions for the care of her own private ghost. Choose carefully where you place your ghost; they’re often fussy if they don’t like the spot.

  With a smile on her face she slid the ribbon away and lifted the top of the box. She was to leave the box open for twenty-four hours to allow the ghost to get acquainted with its new home. In the meantime, she rose and dutifully followed the instructions to drape the curly ribbon on the outside doorknob to announce the arrival of the ghost to the neighborhood.

  In the box was a small canister marked Ghost Food. It too was to remain open during the night so that the ghost could feed. The canister would last for one year, from one Tour of Southern Ghosts to the next.

  Dusty smiled. The idea for this souvenir had to have come from Hattie. Everything about it brought back memories of their pretend games from Dusty’s childhood. Dusty blinked back the tears as new guilt overwhelmed her. She’d always thought there was time. Once she’d proved herself, she’d come back and say she was sorry. But she’d waited too long. How could everything have gone so wrong?

  Swallowing back the tears, Dusty poured a fresh cup of coffee and settled down to read her script. She couldn’t change the past, but she could do this last thing, tell the story.

  The story, that of a woman who was married to a Confederate officer missing after the Battle of Shiloh, was terse and emotionless. The woman’s children were grown and her slaves had disappeared one by one when she could no longer feed them, leaving her alone to protect her home and wait for her husband to return. When she refused to believe that he was dead, refused to move away with her friends, she was left alone. And every night she waited in the parlor for her man to return.

  “Fool woman!” Dusty said as the back door opened and a sweat-streaked Nick Elliott entered.

  “Who’s a fool?”

  “The woman in this story, waiting night after night for a man who is dead. Why didn’t she get on with her life? There must have been somebody who would help her.”

  Nick could have compared the woman in the story to both himself and Dusty, except she didn’t have Hattie.

  “I don’t think Hattie had worked out that part of the story. She was still working on the ending when she died.”

  Dusty laid the paper down and took a good look at Nick Elliott. He was wearing a black T-shirt over the kind of latex running pants that covered the entire lower body like the skin, and exposed every part of the male anatomy. She gulped.

  The accident might have left Merlin with some kind of mysterious wound that wasn’t obvious, but there was at least one part of him that was very obvious, or as obvious as it could be, encased in latex.

  His hair, held back by a teal blue band, was damp, feathering over the band and giving an untidy sensual look to a face that seemed to burn with intensity.

  “You’ve been running?” Her voice sounded tight.

  Nick gave a dry laugh. “Running? Me? I’ve been doing my usual slow shuffle through the neighborhood.”

  “I’ve seen lots of athletes wear running gear like that, but never up close. I especially like the lightning bolt down the sides.”

  He wiped his face with a thick towel and reached for the juice carton in the refrigerator. “What’s the matter, wild woman, are my masculine charms getting to you?”

  “Of course not!” she snapped. “I just don’t want you disturbing my ghost.”

  He dropped the towel and turned, a look of cautious disbelief on his face. “Your ghost?”

  “The one you left in the box on my table last night.”

  “Sorry, but I didn’t leave anything in your room last night.” He could have admitted that he had been in her room sometime during the night. But he still wasn’t certain if he’d stood at the foot of her bed and stared at her in the moonlight, or if he’d been dreaming. The one thing he did know was that in his dream she’d had the same effect on him as her silver-blue eyes were having on him now. Latex was hell on body parts. Desire was hell on control.

  “Well, somebody did. I’ve got the box to prove it.”

  She was serious.

  He wasn’t concentrating on the box, but on the thought of being in her room.

  “I’ll shower and then you can tell me about your ghost,” he said, and, carrying the towel strategically, moved past the table and into the hallway. Climbing the stairs was as painful as usual, but this time the accident wounds took second place to another kind of pain.

  Dusty watched him climb the stairs. He might claim his innocence, but she’d seen the box. She’d discovered his weird coll
ection of cereal, and she’d seen the lightning bolt on his running gear.

  A grin slipped out. She was getting to the ice man. That knowledge made the warm spot in her stomach bounce around, touching the nerve endings with heat. She didn’t know about all that nonsense he’d spouted the previous night about not loving his wife, but she’d be willing to give odds that the woman had loved Nick. As for murder, that was some kind of hair shirt he’d wrapped himself in.

  Penance or punishment.

  By the time she heard the water running overhead, she decided that maybe a cold shower was the right idea.

  She sighed and forced herself to relax. It had been a long time since she’d been with a man, even longer since she’d felt such an attraction. Hattie might have been eccentric as hell, but her taste in men was primeval.

  Dusty refilled her coffee cup and listened as the shower finally stopped. Out the kitchen window she caught sight of the tree house and thought about the first night she’d come, when she’d tackled Nick as an intruder. The shiver she was fighting turned into a tremor that would have registered at least a five on the Richter scale.

  Turning back to the table, Dusty fingered the script. “Wow! This isn’t supposed to be part of the bargain, Hattie. I have about as much future with Merlin as I have as a police officer. This house-sharing deal was not a smart move on your part.”

  The black box on the table suddenly shivered and slid toward the edge, where it teetered for a moment until Dusty caught it. She blotted up the smear of coffee she must have spilled beneath it.

  “Sorry, Siggy,” she said. “I’ll find you a safer place.”

  “Siggy?” Nick was standing in the doorway looking around. “Is he here?”

  “How the hell would I know? The thing about a ghost is that you can’t see him, or it. At least I can’t. You want to look?”

  Nick stared at Dusty, catching sight of the black box she was holding. It was filled with a nest of excelsior in which a small empty canister was nestled. “What’s that?”

  “Siggy. My ghost. The one you left on my table.”