“I guess I won’t be meeting the director after all,” she said over lunch.
“We’ve only started our tests,” Vernell said. “Tonight you’ll sleep here. Dr. K wants to measure your brain activity.”
Phoebe shuddered at the thought of sleeping in a laboratory hooked up to electronic machines, with strangers watching her. “Does Cara know?”
“She offered to sleep nearby if that would make you more comfortable. We could set something up in one of the observation rooms.”
Phoebe shook her head, determined to not to be a baby. “No, I’m fine by myself. But I’m not sure if I’ll be able to dream in that kind of situation.”
“No one expects you to,” Vernell said in same tone she’d heard him use when he spoke to his young son over the phone.
“Where are we going this afternoon?” she asked.
“St. Johnsbury, Vermont. I want you to take a look around a house there. It’s owned by a woman we think may have been abducted by the man we’re looking for.”
The moment he said it, a memory flashed into her mind, a tiny fragment of a dream from the night before. “Is her name June?”
Vernell’s dark brown eyes lifted to hers. “June Feldstein.”
“She’s hurt.” Phoebe touched the back of her head. “Here. He must have hit her.”
Vernell’s voice took on an urgency. “She’s alive?”
“They’re always alive in my dreams,” Phoebe said sadly.
*
“The photo is authentic.” Mrs. Chauncey flipped through a folder of carefully preserved images, each encased in its own plastic envelope. “Ah, here it is.”
Juliet Baker’s original portrait was larger than the reproduction sold in the museum stores, and Rowe stared down at the sepia image, trying to make sense of her neighbors’ uncanny resemblance to this long-dead woman. Obviously the two families must share some common ancestry.
Now that she really focused on Juliet’s face, she could see her nose was a little wider and shorter than the Temples’ and her chin was slightly softer, the shape of her face more rounded. She was beautiful, but hers was an adolescent beauty. She was not quite as finely chiseled in her bone structure, and her jawline was less pronounced. The differences were subtle, but Rowe could pick them out. Having her face only inches from Cara’s had branded the Temples’ features into her memory.
She was struck again by the pearl at Juliet’s throat. How had it ended up in Phoebe’s possession? “Do you know the Temple sisters, Mrs. Chauncey?” she asked.
“Not personally. But we wave.”
“Have you ever noticed that they look rather like this Juliet Baker?”
“I can’t say I have.” Mrs. Chauncey’s penciled eyebrows inched together. “But now you mention it, I see what you mean. Fascinating.”
“Maybe they’re related in some way.”
Mrs. Chauncey’s nondescript blue eyes took on a coy glitter. “I guess old man Baker spread his seed a little more widely than anyone knows. Perhaps Juliet had a half brother or sister born on the wrong side of the blanket.”
“So, if we want to find out who that is, we’d have to research the Temple family tree,” Rowe concluded.
“Which is exactly what we can do, thanks to the Harry Stewart genealogy records bequest.” With an air of satisfaction, Mrs. Chauncey smoothed her long beige sweater over her broad hips and scanned a shelf full of tall leather-bound volumes.
The head of the Islesboro Historical Society, this woman made it her business to know everything worth knowing about the families who had lived on the island since the first cottages were built. She seemed thrilled by Rowe’s project and said she would like to feature any findings in the next Society Bulletin. Everyone knew about the Disappointed Dancer, of course. She was almost as famous Lilian Nordica, whose ghost could be heard singing opera in the Farmington auditorium.
With a ladylike grunt, she hauled a hefty volume onto a ruthlessly polished table and opened it. “The Temples are Mainers through the maternal line,” she said, reverently turning the thick pages. “Early last century the Temples’ house was owned by one Verity Adams. She had a daughter Anne, whose daughter Elizabeth married a Temple. Elizabeth is the twins’ grandmother. I don’t see a Baker connection that would explain the resemblance.”
Rowe crossed the room to stand at her hostess’s elbow, inwardly repeating this potted genealogy so she could grasp who was who. “The twins’ parents are dead?” she asked, deciphering a small entry on the family tree.
“Plane crash,” Mrs. Chauncey confirmed. “Elizabeth Temple brought the girls up after the accident. She still owns the house, as far as I know. But she lives in Miami these days. It’s so much easier to hire good help there.”
“So, if Mr. Baker fathered a child out of wedlock, who would it be?” Rowe scanned the birth dates.
“There’s only one possibility.” Mrs. Chauncey sounded intrigued. “Anne Adams was born in December 1912. But this is very odd—”
“Verity Adams, the mother, was widowed fourteen months earlier,” Rowe completed, noting the date of decease for Henry, the husband. “Longest pregnancy in history.”
“The Bakers were summer people,” Mrs. Chauncey mused. “Normally they would have arrived in April and departed in September. But in 1912 they extended their visit, it seems.”
Rowe did some mental calculations. If Thomas Baker wasn’t on the island until April, Anne must have been born prematurely if she was his child. She wondered if the twins knew of their possible connection to Dark Harbor Cottage and its ghost.
“Do you know when the Baker family sold the cottage?”
“Your attorney can tell you that. It will be on your property title.” Mrs. Chauncey closed the genealogy volume, her face thoughtful. “There’s something else that may interest you. For the longest time, an old lady who lived here wrote letters to the editor of the Camden Herald seeking information about her daughter. The girl was once a maid for the Bakers. It sounds like she ran off with some young man, never to be heard of again.”
“When was that?”
“Around the time Juliet Baker died. The girl’s name was Becky O’Halloran. Her mother was in service, too. She was Verity Adams’s housekeeper for many years.”
Rowe’s head spun. The more she learned, the more tangled the cottage’s past became. And she’d discovered virtually nothing about Juliet Baker herself, other than the intriguing possibility that she might have had a half sister—Anne Adams. Could that information hold the key to laying her ghost to rest? Rowe was dubious. She thought about a cemetery picture Dwayne and Earl had shown her and the strange inscription on Juliet’s headstone: Pray you now, forget and forgive. She sensed a clue in those words, the same words spoken by King Lear to his daughter Cordelia.
Had Juliet discovered her father’s infidelity with their neighbor and been so distressed that she had done something stupid? Was that why her ghost roamed the house? And where was Juliet’s mother in all of this?
Rowe thanked Mrs. Chauncey, wrote a donation check for the Historical Society, and strolled outdoors. Immediately she felt like a stranger in a strange land. It seemed every pickup truck on the street had a snowplow mounted on it, and every driver was wearing peculiar headgear. She and her shiny Lexus SUV looked like they’d beamed down from the mother ship.
A guy driving a dog sled waved at her and slowed his team. “Hey, Rowe,” he called out like he knew her. “How’s that book coming?”
“Great,” she lied.
“Well, things can only get better.” With a nod of dour encouragement, the stranger yelled a command to his dogs and they hurtled off down the road.
Rowe got into the Lexus and rested her head on the steering wheel. She was a washed-up writer living in a haunted house in Maine in the middle of winter. She had now exchanged a hopeless passion for someone’s wife for a doomed crush on her neighbors. Plural. And instead of finishing the piece-of-crap novel her agent was hounding her for, she was on s
ome wild ghost chase with two young males who thought the government was spying on them.
The dog-sled driver was right. Things could only get better.
*
June Feldstein’s home was a graceful butter yellow Victorian on the hilltop of St. Johnsbury, a picturesque town in Vermont. A portrait artist in her thirties, Feldstein lived there alone. Phoebe felt like a burglar standing in the missing woman’s bedroom, handling items that belonged to her.
Vernell and Harriet were having a muffled conversation out in the hall, waiting for her to make some kind of pronouncement. Hoping to spark a paranormal revelation, she entered the closet and ran her hands over coats, dresses, pants, and shirts.
June was a tidy person. Her clothes were divided by season and organized into color groups. Although there were some good-quality pumps on a rack of their own, it looked like she wore sensible shoes most of the time. She had small feet, Phoebe noted, and her tastes were more conservative than one might expect of a creative person. Even her underwear was unadventurous—drawers full of plain white cotton panties and bras, and unsexy pajamas. If June had a boyfriend, he obviously didn’t expect her to be anything but a lady at all times.
How did a woman like her, living in a town like this, get abducted by a serial killer? Phoebe wondered what common thread linked the victims this monster chose. She thought about Iris. She’d been in Vermont on vacation, staying in a bed & breakfast place not far from St. Johnsbury. So it seemed as if the killer was probably a local man or someone who had once lived here. According to Vernell, he had to know the area. Iris’s grave had been well off the beaten track in the heart of the Northeast Kingdom, a location a stranger would not have stumbled on.
Phoebe wandered over to the bed and lifted a framed photograph from the bedside cabinet. June was an attractive woman with a high smooth forehead and straight light brown hair to her shoulders. Her smile was warm and open. She looked like the kind of woman you would choose for a friend.
“Where are you?” Phoebe asked the picture. All she could hear was the muted tick of the grandfather clock in one corner and the sound of Vernell and Harriet moving around elsewhere in the house.
On an impulse, she lay down on June’s bed and stared around the room, seeing what June would see every morning when she awakened. Rose-hued wallpaper and dark wood. A simple white plaster ceiling studded with wood beams. Floor-length brocade drapes in dark green. Mellow antique furniture. A large bowl and pitcher stood on a marble-topped washstand in one corner. Numerous paintings hung from the walls. Faces. Landscapes.
Phoebe’s eyes were drawn to one of these, a scene of a lake. She pictured June sitting at her easel in this tranquil setting, painting what she saw. An image flashed into her mind, glimmering, edges ragged as if reflected on moving waters. A snow-capped mountain. Naked spruce trees. She closed her eyes and felt strangely light, as if she were floating. A slender brush occupied her hand, paint heavy on its bristles. A gray jay foraged near her feet.
A shadow moved and she had a brief sense of something not quite right, then the bird took flight and she was thrown suddenly from her chair. In front of her lay tubes of paint, ejected from their box. Someone wrenched her palette from her hand. She tried to get up, but her head spun, and she realized she had been struck a blow to the back of her skull. Sinking onto her stomach, she saw a pair of big feet in tan-colored boots, black pants tucked into them. As she turned her head to look up at her assailant, she fell into a pitch-dark void and could not stop falling.
She cried out, but her voice seemed disembodied. Phoebe opened her eyes. Vernell and Harriet were staring down at her, alarm vying with poorly disguised eagerness.
“I saw his feet,” she said. “June was painting a picture.” She tried to call the scene to mind. Mountains and trees. Like most of Vermont. Very helpful.
“Did you fall asleep?” Harriet asked.
“Kind of. I was looking at those paintings on the wall and listening to the clock, and the next minute I was there. It was like I was her. I was seeing what she saw.”
Harriet took out a small cassette recorder. “So, it was more like a trance than being asleep?”
“Yes. It was like being hypnotized.”
“Have you ever been hypnotized, Ms. Golden?”
“No. It seems creepy.”
Harriet’s bright blue eyes shot sideways to Vernell and he gave a nod that was almost imperceptible. Taking a few paces away, he spoke quietly into a lapel mic, and within seconds Phoebe heard running feet and two FBI agents entered the room.
Vernell indicated June’s paintings. “Get these packed up.”
“This is wonderful.” Harriet took Phoebe’s arm and led her out of the room while the men worked. “I think you’ve found a way to enter a meditative state outside of sleep. It’s almost like self-hypnosis, and if this experience is any indication, you can access the unconscious.”
“So, I am a real psychic, then?”
Harriet gave her a funny look. “Of course.”
“Do you work with a lot of other people like me?”
“There is no one like you.” Harriet escorted her downstairs to a formal living room and told her to sit down.
“I’m fine.” Even as she said it, Phoebe felt light-headed.
“You’re extremely pale, and you’re hyperventilating.”
“I faint sometimes.” She perched on a sofa and made an effort to slow her breathing.
Harriet signaled one of the agents who was humping paintings out to the cars parked in front of the house. “Tell the SAC I’ll drive Ms. Golden back to the Bubird.”
“Really, I’m fine,” Phoebe protested, not wanting to be coddled like she was some kind of mental case.
But Harriet ignored her, and after they’d sat for a few minutes, she took Phoebe’s elbow and escorted her out of the house. As they walked down the narrow cobblestone path to the curb, the doctor lowered her voice and said, “I’m going to tell you something. This is just between you and me.”
“Okay.”
“The Bureau will want to own you round the clock. Don’t allow it.”
Surprised to hear this from one of the people assigned to wring information from her, Phoebe said, “I have no plans to sign my life away. I don’t want to do this full time.”
Harriet sighed. “We can be very persuasive.”
“Are you saying I would be coerced?”
“I’m saying you are the one with the power. You have what we want, and no one else does. Whatever happens, remember that. You might need a lever one day.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rowe chiseled off the final rusted hinge and lifted the door from its frame. It was not as large as the doors in the cottage, but it was solid hardwood, and her back strained as she tried to hold it steady. Grunting with exertion, she shimmied it along the grit-laden floor and propped it against the wall, dislodging clumps of dust that rained down on her head.
“Lovely,” she said, brushing herself off as best she could. Obviously no one had set foot in the carriage house for years, maybe even decades.
Wielding a flashlight, she fought her way into the servants’ cramped quarters, fending off the cobwebs that festooned the contents. Where to start? Boxes were piled high atop old furniture covered in dust sheets. The electricity wasn’t working, and the sole window on the opposite wall was completely screened by clutter, blocking any natural light.
She should have hired an odd-job man from the village, Rowe decided as she lifted a heavy stack of boxes. These she lugged down the rickety stairs to the empty garaging space below. The floor was damp, so she’d laid plastic sheeting. Her plan was to empty each of the small servants’ rooms and systematically search the contents for information dating back to the Bakers.
On some level, she was aware that the task was a huge distraction from her work. There was no reason why she needed to do this now. The sane option was to wait until summer and invite Mrs. Chauncey and her volunteers in. This was exactly the kind
of assignment that would get their motors running. But no. She had to freeze her ass off in a dark, dank building looking for who knew what to prove a half-baked theory about people who had lived here a hundred years ago. Why?
With flimsy conviction, she answered her own question: “Because I have a ghost.”
The real reason was much more prosaic. She was at an impasse. Her new book was crap, worse crap than the last two, such turgid crap that she would be lucky if her publisher refused it.
Only they wouldn’t.
Instead they would trumpet a new best-seller that would cement her demise into the ranks of those authors in decline who cash their fat advance checks only to foist underwhelming garbage on the public. She would get the promotional push denied to better novels written by authors down the pecking order. Then, when her patient fans eventually started jumping ship and her book sales no longer covered her advances, the gravy train would creak to a halt. Hers was not a big enough name to nourish the indefinite hope that one day she would return to form and publish something good with all forgiven.
If she wrote a decent book now, she could arrest the downward spiral before it gathered momentum. But so far, that wasn’t happening. Just hours ago, she had printed her manuscript, read it, then consigned it to the fire. The book richly deserved a rejection slip—if an unknown author submitted it, that would be its fate. She was almost tempted to send it in under cover of another name, just to prove her point. But it was not exactly earth-shattering news that countless overhyped novels by big-name writers stocked the shelves of airport bookstores while excellent works by those less known came and went without a ripple.
Tomorrow she would call her agent and tell the truth—that she needed to take a year off, and maybe then she would write something worth the paper it was printed on. If her publisher would not grant an extension on her contract, so be it. She would have to return a chunk of change and walk.
Fortunately most of her last big advance was unspent. Her publicist had thought it was time she started acting like a celebrity, so the public would believe she was one. But Rowe had been reluctant to throw money away on a fancy fortress of a house with elaborate security, and even more reluctant to initiate gossip about her private life, then give indignant interviews when it showed up in the media. She had enough problems.
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