Touch Me in the Dark

by Jacqueline Diamond

  Carl Arbizo indicated the bucket of baseballs. “Do I understand you’ve withdrawn your objection to leaving Bradley’s grave in this location?”

  The old man nodded. “Damn right. Move his grave next to Susan’s if you want. Build a mausoleum. Erect a blooming Taj Mahal for all I care.”

  “I think these flowers will do for a start,” said the young minister, and set them by the gravestone.

  “I’d like for you to conduct the funeral for my great-aunt,” Ian told him. “I think she should be buried in the family plot here, although not close to her sister. If no one objects, of course.”

  “She must have led a sad, twisted inner life,” the pastor told him. “The irony is that she did a lot of good in the community through her volunteer work.”

  “I’m going to try to forgive her,” Sharon said. “I don’t want to harbor bitterness.”

  “We all have to learn to forgive,” Ian said. “Otherwise we risk ending up like her.”

  After the others left, he and Sharon stayed for a while, strolling and listening to Greg read headstones aloud. From the way he stayed close by her side, she knew the tragic events of the previous night had left their mark.

  The old circle had closed at last, Sharon thought. Amazingly, it had brought her and Ian together.

  When they headed back to the car, she held hands with him and with Greg, and the sunshine warmed her shoulders.

  Epilogue

  The amount of junk that had accumulated in the attic was phenomenal. Sharon marked a large red X on a box of outdated textbooks to notify Ian to discard it, then stretched her aching back.

  Gazing over the marked and unmarked boxes and crates, she realized she would be keeping more than she’d expected. Once the place was remodeled, the old clothes and toys would turn the playroom into a child’s delight. She’d already picked out a cheerful, up-to-date color palette.

  The past year had brought remarkable changes. The biggest had been her marriage to Ian three months ago at the old church. Karly, the matron of honor, had also sung, something she did often these days as a member of the choir. In addition, she was performing with a small group and had made some demonstration tapes to send to record producers.

  The show at Jane’s gallery had been a huge success. Ian’s works had sold out, with the painting of a man and woman struggling on the edge of an abyss bought by a major collector. In a variation on his theme, Ian had begun portraying new life bursting the tentacles of the past, and had already been offered a one-man show at a notable gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona.

  Sharon massaged her shoulders to get the stiffness out. She was glad she’d nearly finished sorting through the attic during Christmas vacation, before school started again.

  Running her hands across her smock, she traced the solid thrust of her belly where the baby lay sleeping. At fourth months along, she could still bend and angle between the rows of clutter. Another month or so, and she wasn’t looking forward to climbing the attic stairs.

  She would have preferred to delay the baby’s birth until summer, but she’d become pregnant more quickly than expected. Fortunately, College Day School had agreed to hire a substitute for the last couple of months this spring. She’d be returning next fall. Not only would she and Ian need her income for the foreseeable future, but she also felt genuinely at home with the students and faculty there.

  As she started forward, Sharon paused to admire the bay window that had replaced the balcony. She still trembled when she thought about that January night when the three of them had nearly died, but peace had reigned in the house for a year now. Slowly, she and Ian together had transformed it into a place of happiness.

  Although Ian had grieved for a while after Jody’s death, he remained free from seizures. He’d finally opened up with his counselor, and no longer took medication.

  He clearly enjoyed being a father and was looking forward to the birth of their baby. On weekends, he often took Greg to the park and spent hours with him in the evenings, working jigsaw puzzles and playing computer games.

  Although she didn’t want Greg to forget Jim, Sharon was pleased to see him developing a new sense of security. She’d taken her son to a psychologist several times as a precaution, but the boy had showed no long-term ill effects from everything he’d gone through.

  The three of them currently occupied the Gaskells’ former suite. They’d made plans to tear out the apartments and restore the house to a floor plan suitable for a single family, but they had to proceed one step at a time, as finances allowed. The first phase, already accomplished, had involved turning Jody’s place into an office and family room.

  In Palm Springs, Bella Gaskell was reported to be doing much better. Pete had decided to keep her far from the Fanning house, and Sharon agreed.

  Emerging on the second floor, she was on her way down the hall when she was surprised to see Ian removing the painting of his father. Although the grim visage had startled her more than once, she’d never asked to remove it.

  “What are you going to do with that?” she asked as she approached.

  “I’m tired of the gloomy thing and Jane says she can get a good price.” His voice rang with satisfaction. The growing demand for his work was a personal validation after Ian’s struggle. “In fact, her assistant is coming by any minute with the van. I’ll paint another one of Mom and Dad from a photograph I have of their wedding day.”

  It could join the portrait of Susan and Bradley, which they’d moved into the living room. Jane had sold the eerie painting from above the mantel.

  Sharon took another look at the picture of Martin. “It’s you, too, though, as well as your father,” she said. “The way you used to be.”

  Ian regarded her admiringly. He smiled more openly these days and looked healthier. Even the scar across his cheekbone seemed less vivid. “You saw that, did you? My guilt and my doubts got poured into my work because I couldn’t express them directly. But I’m not living half in darkness anymore.”

  “Thank goodness.” She helped him angle the painting and lower it along the stairs. From the family room came the delightful sound of childish voices. Greg and a friend were building with Legos. “Everything seems so normal.”

  “Isn’t it great?” Ian remarked. “Us and this house, normal.”

  “Who’d have believed it?” Sharon said lightly, and helped him carry the sorrowful painting through the front hall and out the door, to be taken away forever.

  The End

  About the Author

  Jacqueline Diamond has sold more than ninety novels, including mysteries, romantic intrigue, Regency romance, fantasy and paranormal romance. She received a Career Achievement Award from Romantic Times magazine and has twice been a Rita Award finalist. Jackie is a former Associated Press reporter and television columnist in Los Angeles. You can learn more about her at jacquelinediamond.com or at her Facebook page, JacquelineDiamondAuthor.

  More suspense/paranormal novels by Jacqueline Diamond

  Danger Music (mystery)

  Echoes (paranormal mystery)

  Out of Her Universe (s.f. thriller)

  Shadowlight (fantasy)

  The Eyes of a Stranger (mystery)

  Regency romance

  A Lady of Letters

  A Lady’s Point of View

  Lady in Disguise

  Song for a Lady

  The Day-Dreaming Lady

  The Forgetful Lady

  Nonfiction

  How to Write a Novel in One (not-so-easy) Lesson

  If you enjoyed this book and are willing to post an on-line review, it will help other readers find it. Thank you!

  Please enjoy the opening from Jacqueline Diamond’s

  science fiction thriller Out of Her Universe

  Chapter One

  Outside the anthropology building, Carlos Brujo was heading for his car when a young woman, hair askew and face bright, hurried from the adjacent arboretum. Her book bag bumped the sign that read, “Off limits to
students and visitors.”

  Beneath it, a smaller notice warned, “Danger! Corona Anomaly may damage small electronics.”

  Naturally, she whipped out her cell phone. If you were going to ignore one alert, you might as well trash both of them.

  “Hey!” Carlos waved at her in annoyance. It had been a long day trying to teach inattentive undergraduates the mind-bending subject of anomalous anthropology. Although only thirty-four years old, he felt about ninety around most students. “Put that away.”

  “Isn’t it safe here? I was just going to call my … oh, Professor Brujo! You have to see this!”

  Although the girl had apparently recognized him, the spectrist—whose title was an arch contraction of synergy specialist--didn’t recall her from any of his classes. Long hair, round face, straight teeth--that description fit half the girls and a good percentage of the boys. He sometimes suspected that the same students circulated through Grovener University year after year, changing only their names and, not often enough, their clothes.

  “There’s a rainbow,” she hurried on. “It’s the weirdest thing! This little arc’s sitting right on the ground. You can pass your hand through it!”

  “Did you?” he asked, his pulse speeding. This could be far more significant than he dared let on.

  “Yeah!”

  Fascinated by any addition to his secret store of knowledge, he said, “Did it hurt?”

  “I got lightheaded. Is that normal?”

  Yes. “You’re probably coming down with a cold.” Carlos struggled to keep his tone bland. Until he knew more, no sense getting worked up, especially in front of a student.

  Who’d just spotted a rainbow that might mark the return of the phenomenon the professor had longed to see the entire four years he’d filled his post at Grovener U here in Escondido Heights, California. Hell, after a decade-long hiatus, even the inner circle that knew about the pirisma was beginning to believe it might never show up. Now, apparently, the arcane entity that defied the known laws of physics had left its calling card, a small visible reminder that it had crossed between parallel universes.

  The pirisma was an enigma wrapped inside a mystery stuffed into a–oh, some damn thing like that. No one had succeeded in portraying the unpredictable quantum transport with precision, although previous spectrists had tried, in their top-secret reports. Dazzling and radiant…I felt as if it was reading my mind… They’d agreed that it usually took the shape of a parallelogram, and had chosen a name indicative of its mysterious qualities. With a nod to California’s Spanish heritage, the term pirisma derived from the Spanish words prisma, or prism, and pira, or pyre, as in the funeral pyre on which the legendary phoenix incinerated itself and was reborn.

  To Carlos, the thing sounded both magical and parlous in the wonderful old-fashioned sense of running unimaginable risks in the name of adventure, something he was eager to do.

  “Did you take a picture?” A slim chance, but worth exploring.

  She made a face. “I tried. It didn’t show up.”

  No one had succeeded in capturing an image of the thing yet. In this case, Carlos was glad, due to the risk that the student might post it on the Internet. “Where exactly did you see it?”

  “I’ll show you.” Sticking the phone in her pocket, the girl trotted back past the sign.

  “Wait! Leave that…” Too late. And as long as they were breaking rules, Carlos held onto his own phone as he loped after her. He might need it.

  Despite being short, she moved fast. Also, she cut between the paths. Must be a freshman who hadn’t yet encountered the university’s truculent horticulturalist, Bjorg Bensen.

  They skirted the greenhouse. Like the rest of the arboretum, it was noted, or notorious, for its plants of unknown provenance, which were off limits to scientists outside the university staff. Occasionally, a blogger mentioned rumors of ancient ferns, carnivorous hybrids and uncatalogued species of butterfly, but without evidence, these tales meant nothing.

  They were, in fact, true, although the Operation Intersect records failed to account for how those items had arrived here. Nor did they offer more than a clearly bogus explanation for the pair of ancient temple columns past which the student raced. What about the stone tablet marked with hieroglyphics, and the conical sandstone tower bearing Hindu carvings? They had simply appeared here over the years, apparently brought secretly via the pirisma.

  Carlos suspected that Bjorg Bensen and his predecessor had somehow managed this incredible feat. After all, how could they have resisted the urge to go exploring? If the phenomenon had returned, he too might finally get the chance.

  “There!” The girl pointed triumphantly to a tiny rainbow half-hidden beneath the fronds of a sword fern. In the filtered sunshine of the late October afternoon, its colors glowed with surreal brilliance. “It’s still there. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  Jesus, Mary and … at the moment, Carlos couldn’t think of the other one. “Never.”

  The radiant arc quivered in front of him, defiant in its fragility. He squatted on the gravel path, heedless of the way his long jean-clad legs jutted at the knees and of the rip close to his crotch. His hands began sweating as he registered the backward display of colors, arching from an inside curve of red across the spectrum to violet.

  “What’s causing it?” The girl crouched, a smidge too close for comfort. Carlos hoped she wasn’t flirting. Too young, off limits and not his type. Of course, so far, he hadn’t yet figured out what his type was.

  “Probably a refraction from the sprinkler system,” he said automatically, and glanced around for droplets of water, just in case it happened to be true. No water that he could see.

  Besides, blaming tiny rainbows on the sprinklers was one of the handy cover stories a former spectrist had devised for the public. So was the Corona Anomaly, a bunch of mumbo jumbo about electrical discharges and geomagnetic formations.

  “But it’s Friday,” the student objected. “They only water on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays.”

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “My roommate told me. She used to come here on her lunch hour. Something spooked her, but that’s silly.” She smiled at him. “Nobody believes that crap about danger.”

  “Well, they should.” Although Carlos suspected it was merely Bjorg who’d frightened her roomie, the peril was real. Long ago, the pirisma had whirled his own father to oblivion. At the time, his family had been told he’d died during an experiment.

  In fact, Pedro Brujo might be alive on some alternate Earth, utterly different or eerily similar to this one. Exploring. Learning. Experimenting. Many years later, when Carlos finally learned about the pirisma, he’d instantly understood why his father never returned. Probably he didn’t want to.

  The odds were against Carlos’s receiving authorization to cross, even if he got the chance. The pirisma evaded attempts at control, showed up at more or less random intervals, and took decades-long breaks.

  He’d grown increasingly impatient as he labored, a professor by day and a researcher poring over secret documents at night. His office lay just beyond the roughly quarter-mile range in the arboretum where its appearances had been recorded. According to theory, the pirisma had formed here due to feedback from a rare looped seismic formation called the Orbach Fault, located directly underneath this part of the campus.

  From a distant part of the garden drifted the scent of a Meyer lemon, sweet as pastry filling. Farther off, students’ voices rose and fell, conducting one of their occasional protests outside the administration building.

  Carlos was wasting this opportunity by getting distracted. Annoyed with himself, he adjusted the glasses on his nose and pulled his phone from his pocket.

  “I thought those weren’t allowed,” the girl chirped, apparently more concerned about a professor breaking the rules than about her own disobedience.

  “They aren’t, and we could get burned. You should leave.” He wished she’d go play a
videogame or something.

  Miss Bright Eyes refused to budge.

  While Carlos hesitated to proceed beneath her gaze, he didn’t dare delay. Besides, she had no way of understanding what this all meant.

  After activating the spectrum analyzer app, he held out the phone. His hand trembled, brushing the rainbow, and hues danced across his vision.

  “Doesn’t that make you dizzy?” queried the student.

  “I’m fine.” Carlos checked the reading. So far, he’d only tested the app on extra-universe material, where it had proved highly accurate in correlating with the known universe of origin. As a result, he’d received the project director’s approval to use the thing inside the intersect zone, even though it required the use of his cell phone.

  Some risks had to be run. It was vital to determine which alternate Earth the pirisma was accessing. Usually the pirisma connected to only a single parallel universe during each major event.

  The reading stabilized, barely in time. The rainbow was wavering. Glimmering. Fading.

  “Don’t go,” whispered the girl. At that instant, Carlos felt in sympathy with her.

  “Vat is dis?” demanded an accented male voice. As usual, the sixtyish arboretum director had sneaked up in the slipperlike footgear he wore to protect the plants. “Who is dis voman?”

  “Hi! I’m Andie,” she replied cheerily.

  “Get out!”

  She gaped at the Einsteinian gray hair rioting around the head of this short, intense man. “What did I do?”

  “Can’t you read?” Bjorg roared. “Off limits to students! Dat means you!”

  Carlos straightened. Though as spectrist he had every right to be here, he wouldn’t put it past Bjorg to lecture him, too.

  Andie went on talking. “I never heard of a college that doesn’t let students use the arboretum.”