Touch Me in the Dark

by Jacqueline Diamond

  Now Jody had fixed her sights on another child and found another victim, a near twin to Susan. Bella had misunderstood the message and become obsessed with the idea that the woman Bradley hated was Sharon.

  He supposed the ghost must have been struggling to communicate with them all along, but its messages hadn’t come through clearly until Bradley seized control of him tonight. Or perhaps dozens of small clues had simply fallen into place in Pete’s subconscious. He would never know, but that didn’t matter.

  He only knew that he had some vital task to accomplish, and that time was passing much too rapidly.

  He could hear sirens screaming behind him, and ahead, too. They must be circling around the block to cut him off. Romero had surely figured out where he was going.

  If only the man could figure out the reason, they’d leave him alone and go after Jody.

  Pete wished he weren’t so old. He didn’t see how he could save Sharon if Ian couldn’t. Or was Ian already dead?

  A moment later, rounding the corner onto his own block, he stared in dismay. The widow’s walk listed at a horrifying angle, with a woman’s slim figure clinging to it. Directly beneath stood Greg. The balcony would crush him when it fell.

  The woman was shouting the child’s name, trying to get him to move out of danger. He stood frozen with fear or with a childish lack of comprehension.

  Pete had been sent to save the boy. That was what Bradley meant. Greg was the future.

  But as Pete screeched to a halt in the middle of the street and leaped out, a cracking noise tore through the air and the balcony sagged, hung frozen for one instant and collapsed.

  He had arrived too late.

  Chapter Twenty

  The only possible way to save Greg was to jump. Once Sharon left the balcony, Jody would have no reason to knock it down. She still hoped Ian would manage to make his way through the house in time to help, but she couldn’t count on that. And if she went now, before that madwoman could cut through the clothesline, she might be able to push her way over to the skylight.

  Sharon climbed gingerly onto the first rung of the railing, but the balcony’s support was so fragile that the mere shifting of her weight added to the strain. It creaked and sagged, shaking so precariously that she was afraid to make another move.

  She couldn’t climb over the railing without sending the platform on a death plunge. Yet it was likely to fall even if she stayed here.

  Sharon closed her eyes and prayed.

  Below on the street, sirens raced toward the house. Someone must have heard her screams and called the police, but unless they’d brought a ladder truck, there wasn’t much they could do.

  “It’s going to break under my weight,” she called to Jody. “Help me in or it’ll hit Greg.”

  “He’s mine!” The old woman’s face creased with rage. “You man-stealer! You slut!”

  “I’m not Susan!” If only there were a way to shatter the woman’s delusion. “I’m Sharon Mahoney. I just look like your sister. Please help me!”

  “You can’t have him,” Jody snarled. “The boy’s mine.”

  There was no point in pleading, Sharon realized. You couldn’t reason with madness any more than you could reason with the laws of physics.

  “You took my baby away and now I’m getting him back.” Her teeth bared with pure malice, the old woman leaned out and stamped on the balcony

  With a shriek of splintering wood and a sigh like lost hope, the balcony gave way.

  Time slowed and the air thickened as Ian struggled through the attic. Wrenching open the Gaskells’ half-shut window had been a battle against rusted hardware and a warped frame, and now his legs felt like stumps.

  From ahead of him came the unearthly wail of old wood tearing loose. He had to reach Sharon before the balcony snapped off entirely. The clothesline might be a blessing or a curse—Even if it broke her fall, the initial jolt might snap her spine.

  He had to save her.

  The sight of his great-aunt’s figure in the balcony doorway filled Ian with pain. Even now, after all she’d done, he didn’t want to harm her, but he couldn’t let her kill Sharon.

  “Out of my way!” Grabbing her shoulder, he tried to engulf her in a blanket he’d brought. With a crazy kind of agility, she dodged away.

  The balcony sagged at a crazy angle. Sharon half-dangled, half-clung to the line, bracing against the tilted railing to reduce the pressure on her waist. “Greg’s down there! Ian, help him!”

  “I can’t—“ From the corner of his eye, Ian saw a figure fly at him. Instinct and training sent him ducking and rolling so that Jody’s own weight carried her over and past him.

  She scrabbled to hang onto the door, ancient hands dropping the knife she had produced from nowhere. Ian caught an instant of disbelief in her eyes, and then she tumbled outside.

  Beneath this final insult, the balcony cracked and fell.

  The distance from Pete’s car to the little boy could be measured in jarring strides. One to get clear of the car, a second to reach the curb, a third onto the sidewalk, and then Jody and the platform came hurtling down—too soon and too far away. Pete couldn’t reach him

  Greg stood motionless, face turned up, watching his mother dangle at the end of a rope. He was directly beneath hundreds of pounds of falling wood and metal. Above him, Jody uttered a high, thin wail like the death cry of some exotic bird

  Pete’s vision blurred. He could have sworn he saw a whitish mist surround the boy and ease him aside an instant before the ground shook.

  After the shock of the crash came an eerie silence. Coughing, Pete hurried forward, not sure what he would find until he rounded a pile of wreckage.

  The child stood unharmed, inches from the jagged ruins.

  Resting one hand on the boy’s shoulder, Pete guided him away. He tried to shelter him from the sight of Jody’s crumpled body amid the mess. “It’s all right,” he murmured over and over. “It’s all right.”

  “I know,” Greg said. “Bradley helped me.”

  Above, Pete heard Ian calling encouragement, and saw that Sharon had managed to swing onto a bit of second-story roof near the skylight.

  “The fire department’s on its way. They’ll get you down!” Officer Romero called before kneeling next to Greg. “You okay, little fella?” Other officers were pulling away the splintered wood, trying to reach Jody.

  “The ghost helped me,” Greg said.

  “Ghost?” Romero didn’t seem to know what to make of that response.

  “Bradley. He told me he’s my great-grandpa.” The boy wrapped his arms around himself. “Is Mom okay?”

  Pete looked up. Sharon was sitting on a solid jut of roof.” She’s fine.”

  “What’s this about a ghost?” asked the officer.

  “He lives in the house,” Greg said.

  “Family legend,” Pete explained. “Officer Romero, I’m sorry I drove off like that. I knew people were in danger and I couldn’t stay to explain. It’s a very long story.”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to make a statement,” said the policeman. “I’ll be interested to hear this one.”

  Paramedics treated Ian’s and Sharon’s bruises and pronounced Jody dead at the scene. A detective drove up a short time later and took first her and then Ian aside. Throughout his questions and the answers that sounded strange to her own ears, Sharon’s thoughts remained focused on her son. How devastated he must be at seeing yet another loved one die, this time in front of his eyes.

  She wondered what childish interpretation he would put on what had happened. She also wondered how he would describe the events to the officers, who were regarding her and Ian with guarded skepticism.

  In the end, Greg helped convince the police that the key points of the story were true. He told them that Jody had awakened him in the night and taken him downstairs, promising that he could stay with her and not leave in the morning.

  “She was trying to take you away from your mother?” the det
ective asked, jotting in his notebook.

  “She acted nice but she was mean,” Greg said, sitting in the back seat of a parked police cruiser. Although the detective had asked to interview him alone, the boy refused to let his mother out of his sight, and Sharon could hear her son’s voice through the open door. “Bradley told me so.”

  “Bradley? That would be this so-called ghost?” said the policeman.

  Greg nodded. “He told me Jody killed her sister and Bradley, and then she killed Ian’s parents, too. She wanted to kill Mommy.”

  “Who really told you this?” the detective asked.

  “Bradley. He talked inside my head.” Greg spoke calmly, as if recounting the plot of a movie to one of his friends. “He made me get out of the way. You know, when the beckonly fell down.”

  “The balcony?”

  “Yeah, the balcony.”

  Romero, who had emerged from the house in time to hear this last exchange, stuck his head into the patrol car. His voice drifted back to Sharon.

  “I saw the damn thing,” he told the detective. “Like a white cloud around the little boy. It pulled him back in the nick of time, if you can believe that.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” said the detective, and shut his notebook.

  “Bradley kept me safe,” said Greg. “Like my Daddy used to do. I thought when people died they were gone, but they’re not. I guess if they love you, they can stick around.”

  Sharon hadn’t believed she would be able to fall asleep again, especially since, by the time the investigators left, broad daylight had displaced the darkness. But somehow she did, wrapped in a comforter on her couch with Greg dozing in his bed.

  She dreamed about Jim, but she couldn’t see his face any more. She kept visualizing Ian the way he’d appeared in the attic doorway, his face tight with concern as he helped swing her onto the recessed roof.

  The transition from sleep to wakefulness came gradually, so that she seemed to have been thinking about last night’s events rather than dreaming. Sharon sat up, wondering at the changed angle of the light, certain she couldn’t have dozed for more a few minutes.

  Yet they’d reached mid-afternoon, she discovered. After checking that Greg was asleep in his room, Sharon showered and dressed. She felt shaken but not frightened any more. Whatever had haunted this house had left.

  From down the hall she heard footsteps and men’s voices, talking quietly. She went out and found Ian helping Pete Gaskell carry out suitcases. Pete had come back last night, she remembered. He’d been standing beside Greg after the widow’s walk fell.

  “I’ve taken a room at a residential motel near the hospital,” he told her. “Bella seemed almost her old self this morning, and then she started spouting nonsense. The doctor says she suffers from something called paranoid personality disorder. This ghost business pushed her over the edge.”

  “Pete’s decided to rent a condo in Palm Springs,” Ian added, going down the steps with two large valises. “And move her to a facility there.”

  “I hope you don’t mind us leaving our things here until I can find a place.” Pete shifted from one foot to the other as if there were many things he wanted to say, and didn’t quite dare. “Not more than a week or so.”

  “It isn’t up to me,” Sharon said. “The house belongs to Ian now, I guess.”

  The older man cleared his throat. “I never expected anything like this to happen. Bella and I were toying with something dangerous, like children playing with matches. I should have seen this coming.”

  “What about me?” Sharon asked. “I didn’t leave even after my TV set caught fire and I saw weird visions in the church. I didn’t expect anything really bad to happen either.”

  “Things will be all right now.” Pete pressed her hand. “You deserve a break.”

  After he left, Sharon became aware of a residual weariness lurking behind her eyelids. There was no question of sleep, however. Her mind was busy picking over thoughts and trying to organize them.

  Tomorrow school would start, and she had to be ready. If she were going to move into that nearby apartment, she needed to take care of the matter today. Except, she realized with a start, the place probably didn’t exist. Most likely Jody had invented it to keep Sharon around for another day. There’d been so many lies and machinations, she couldn’t sort them all out.

  She sank onto the top step. She didn’t feel competent to deal with much of anything at the moment, let alone finding a new home.

  Ian came back and sat beside her. His presence was infinitely welcome. “You won’t leave now, will you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sharon said.

  “I wish you’d to stay.” He slipped one arm around her. “This is your house, too. Yours and Greg’s.”

  Her head sank onto his shoulder. “I can’t think straight.” Except I know I belong with you.

  He’d endangered her last night, but she understood that he too had been caught up in an ancient pattern of misplaced trust and blind passion. Nothing could ever take away the wildness inside him, nor would she wish for that. It was part of what she loved about him.

  “I’m not in such good shape myself.” Ian’s voice tingled through her. “There is one thing I’d like you to help me with today, if you don’t mind. Would you and Greg come with me to church? I’d like to put flowers on the graves.”

  Today was still the anniversary of Bradley’s and Susan’s deaths, Sharon recalled. “Do you think they’ll insist on moving Bradley’s grave now, even though he didn’t kill her?”

  “The pastor might be there,” Ian said. “Let’s find out.”

  The day was bright and spring-like. Ian seemed less moody, as if the sunlight bathing his face reflected a new clarity within. Greg kept breaking into a trot as they crossed the nearly empty parking lot, and once Sharon feared he would drop the spray of roses he carried, a twin to the bouquet in her own arms. But the flowers arrived intact at the side door of the church, just as the two pastors Arbizo exited.

  The son, Carl, no longer young himself, supported his slow-moving father. Their heads came up at the same time, startled by the boy, and then two pairs of brown eyes focused on the approaching couple.

  The elder minister spoke first. “We heard on the radio that Jodie Fanning died last night. What on earth happened?”

  Sharon was grateful that Ian took the initiative of filling them in. The men listened solemnly, asking a few questions and trying to make sense of the answers. There were still gaps missing. No one knew, and perhaps they never would, why Jodie had nursed such a vicious hatred for her sister and Bradley. Sharon saw no point in mentioning the accusation against Susan of being a man-stealer, since that had probably been a figment of Jody’s tormented imagination.

  “I’ve been wrong,” Armand Arbizo said. “All these years, I was wrong to think so badly of Susan Fanning. And of Bradley, of course.”

  “Everyone was certain he’d murdered her,” his son pointed out. “And that in some way or other she’d led him on.”

  “There were ugly rumors, but I should have given them both the benefit of the doubt.” The old man’s shoulders sagged. “I was in love with Susan. That’s the problem. I was a jealous fool. More than half a century I’ve called her names, and told myself she was an evil woman, but I was the one who lacked charity. Maybe if I hadn’t, I’d have seen the truth in time to save Martin and his wife.”

  Ian took the old man’s hand. “What about me?” he said. “I saw my great-aunt tinkering with my parents’ car when I was five, but I misinterpreted the whole thing and then I repressed the memory. I’m trying to accept the fact that I’m not to blame for any of this, and you should do the same.”

  “I think I’m going to sneeze,” Greg announced.

  The bustle to relieve him of his flowers broke the tension. Carl Arbizo went to fetch two vases, and the elder pastor insisted on accompanying them into the cemetery.

  “Can the grave stay here?” Sharon asked. “
I think Bradley deserves to lie near Susan.”

  “He wasn’t blameless,” the elder man said. “He got the girl pregnant, even if he did mean to do the right thing by her in the end.”

  “He saved my son’s life last night, and I think all week he was trying to save mine by frightening me away.” Understanding had grown gradually that the unsettling events of the past week had been Bradley’s attempt to chase Sharon out, not to harm her. He had tried to protect her in the only way he could.

  “I’ll have to leave that decision to the congregation,” Carl said, returning with the vases. “Some of the older members might object.”

  One in particular, she thought. Susan’s former fiancé.

  After leaving a bouquet on Susan’s grave, they came around a weeping tree into sight of the charred mound where Bradley’s gravestone lay. To Sharon’s surprise, there was someone already there.

  A dapper suit draped the wizened frame leaning against a walker. On the ground sat a bucket of baseballs.

  “I heard Bradley liked to play ball on the weekends, when he wasn’t painting,” Grayson Wright announced to no one in particular. “Thought this would be a better tribute than some kind of sissy flowers.”

  “They’re not sissy.” Greg, who had relinquished his bouquet to Ian, ran over to the bucket. “Can I have one?”

  “I don’t suppose Bradley Johnson would mind.” Grayson gave Sharon a sad smile. “Pete Gaskell called this morning and told me the whole story. I hope this business isn’t going to drive you out of that house, Sharon. I think it’s right and proper that you should live there.”

  “I agree,” Ian said.

  “You’d better make a more romantic proposal than that,” said Grayson Wright. “If you don’t watch out, I’ll steal this woman away from you.”

  A bemused expression crossed Ian’s face. “I’d like to handle that in my own good time, thank you very much.”

  Sharon’s heart leaped. After the traumatic memories Ian had recovered, she’d wondered if they could ever take their relationship to the next stage. His words seemed to indicate that they had a chance.