Jesse screamed.
Al kept his voice sure and calm. “You’ll come back able to remember everything that happened, without fear and in complete control of your memories. Five … Four …”
Jesse opened her eyes. For a moment she blinked at the ceiling, mouth working, and then she looked at Al with complete awareness. She’d brought herself out of trance as swiftly as she’d gone in.
Al leaned forward. “Are you all right?”
“I think so.” She sat up, massaging her forehead. “Yes. I’m all right now.” She gave him a lopsided smile. “It wasn’t exactly what I expected.”
That was one hell of an understatement. Al stood up and pushed away from his chair. “It was a mistake to enter into this so quickly. If something had gone wrong—”
Her touch on his arm brought him to a halt. “It wasn’t your fault. I talked you into it.” She swayed, and Al steadied her as best he could when he was none too sure of his own balance.
He guided her to the chair and resumed his own. “You weren’t able to describe much of what you experienced while you were under. Do you remember what happened?”
There was still a paleness to her face, a distance in her gaze. “It’s fading quickly,” she said, “like a dream after you wake up.” She sighed. “No. Most of it is gone now. Except— At the end I saw fire. Fire and smoke. I felt as if I were dying.”
“You screamed,” he said. “Do you remember any such incident in your childhood? A memory you may have suppressed?”
She shook her head. “I was always … afraid of fire. I wouldn’t go near the fireplace at home. But nothing like that ever happened.” Her clear hazel eyes focused on him. “Nothing I felt—it wasn’t what I needed to remember.”
Not her childhood, or her past with Gary. “When you think of who you were in those memories—were you ever a little girl?”
“No. It was as if I were—” All at once the wariness was back, the same guarded disquiet she’d shown when she first arrived. “It wasn’t home,” she finished. “My mother wasn’t there. And Gary—”
Al had seen her rage during the trance when she’d declared hatred to someone she couldn’t describe. It flashed in her eyes now, and her fingers dug into the leather of the chair.
“Gary,” she repeated. “I didn’t see him. I don’t remember. I don’t remember.”
“The mind isn’t easy to understand,” he told her. “Maybe this was your personal symbolism. Roses, illness, fire … the pain you felt. Your answers may be there—if you still intend to pursue this.”
“I’m not about to quit now. My dreams last night—” Leather protested at the grip of her hands. “I’m close. I can feel it.”
No. Jesse Copeland would never give up, not even if it killed her. “There was a man you spoke to,” he said. “David. Can you tell me anything about him?”
Her body stiffened. “I don’t remember.”
“You can tell me, Jesse. There’s something important to you about that name.”
I love you, she’d said. Al couldn’t forget the sound of her voice when she’d spoken those words.
Or the look on her face—the silent anguish he saw now.
“Did you know him?” he asked. “Before you returned to Manzanita?”
She turned a wild glance on him. “I don’t know who he is.”
But she did. There was no doubt in Al’s mind that the name meant more to Jesse than she’d ever admit. Love, and hate, and consuming need.
“You mentioned a child,” he said.
“I … don’t remember.”
Al looked down, from his good hand to his pinned-up sleeve, feeling the gray walls of detachment close around him. “We’d better give it a rest, Jesse. More may come back to you. It can’t be forced, and it shouldn’t be.”
“No,” she said. The tension left her shoulders, as if he’d given her the permission to relax that she could not allow herself. “You’re right. Thank you, Al. I appreciate what you’ve done.”
And what have I done? he thought. But he walked her to the door of the study, watching her with a remote and clinical eye. Her walk was steady now, her expression self-contained. She was the competent Jesse Copeland most of the world witnessed every day.
The world hadn’t been with her in his study tonight.
She walked down the hall and paused at a half-open door, the bedroom farthest from the study. Al didn’t know how she’d guessed. He stood back as Jesse opened the door a fraction wider and looked in.
“Your niece,” Jesse said. “She must have been very tired to sleep through this.”
Through the scream, she meant. But the child was a motionless lump in her bed, bundled up in covers and apparently oblivious to their presence. Her small table lamp still burned on her nightstand.
“Megan,” he said, by way of introduction. “She was so tired when we got back from the airport that she asked to go straight to bed.”
He heard the relief in his own voice and wondered if Jesse could sense how little he knew about meeting the needs of a child like Megan. A ten-year-old girl hadn’t been part of his modest plans for a life with no complications.
“She’s afraid of the dark,” Jesse murmured.
It was a simple remark, but Jesse made it as if she’d experienced that fear herself.
“Not an unusual reaction,” he said, “given her recent loss.”
“Her grandmother,” Jesse said. “Were they very close?”
Al tried to remember when he’d ever seen warmth in his late brother’s mother-in-law. They hadn’t met often over the years. “I doubt it,” he said. “She spent a lot of time in boarding schools. Until recently she was with other relatives, but they couldn’t keep her.”
“Poor kid.” Jesse leaned her head against the doorjamb. “I’m sorry.”
Of course Jesse would understand. She’d been in foster homes, bounced from one place to another. She would know how Megan felt. She would know how to handle a little girl. How to make a kid feel welcome, and happy, as Al could not.
“I have a sitter coming in to look after her tomorrow, while I’m at the library,” he said. “Megan is quite withdrawn. I haven’t been able to reach her. I think she needs someone else to … talk to.”
“You’re her uncle,” Jesse said. “Family.”
He clutched his empty sleeve with his good hand. “That’s not always enough.”
“But you are a psychologist, Al. You could—”
“I know my limitations. A woman might do better with her.”
She backed away from the bedroom, averting her face. “Maybe I can drop in tomorrow. If you think it’ll do any good, considering …” She trailed off, but Al knew how she was judging herself, finding herself inadequate. Or worse.
“I have no doubts about your mental competence, Jesse,” he said.
But she turned for the back door without another word, and as he watched her start across the open field to her cabin, he was bemused to find in himself an unanticipated insight that had very little to do with intellect and nothing at all to do with logic.
Something new had awakened in Jesse Copeland. He had witnessed a birth there in his study, when she’d spoken to people she saw only in her mind. Or in her memory. He had felt it in the shiver down his spine—a feeling he hadn’t experienced since Vietnam.
Al relied on facts, on what he could see and touch and analyze. But what Jesse had discovered was not so easily bound within those walls of rationality. She was no longer as safe as she wanted to be.
Perhaps she’d never be “safe” again.
Al closed the door and stared at the smooth wood. For the first time in decades he envied those who knew the comfort of blind faith.
She’d lied to Al. It was a strange thing, to lie—to deliberately withhold the truth from the one man she thought she trusted.
She’d lied to her hikers for the rest of their excursion earlier that afternoon—lied by behaving as if nothing had happened, as if she weren’t desp
erately holding on until she could let herself react. None of her people guessed that she’d been shaken to the core. If she was a little quieter, a little more withdrawn, they hadn’t noticed. She’d given them the spectacular views they wanted, and led them back to the Lodge without incident.
But he had been with her every step of the way. Even his disappearance hadn’t brought relief.
She didn’t whisper the name as she marched unseeing across the calf-high lawn, though that single word dominated her thoughts like a permanent lodger.
David.
Yes, she’d lied to Al. She knew that name. She had met its owner, a creature of myth and fairy tales, a soldier in an antique uniform who spoke as if he knew her, who began as misty illusion and crystallized into sudden, terrifying reality the moment she …
Touched him. No, that was too simple an expression for what had happened when she’d walked through the being who called himself David Ventris. There was no language to describe that moment of union, when she’d felt another … life, consciousness, spirit … join with her own.
And then the hypnosis, where she’d sought answers and found only more questions: disjointed impressions of yearning and pain and fear flooding through her, sweeping by too swiftly to grasp and hold. Most she could no longer recall, but she’d revealed only part of them to Al.
She hadn’t told him that the person she’d been in those waking dreams wasn’t herself. That she’d worn clothing and existed in a place that bore no resemblance to the world she knew.
And that, in some way she couldn’t remember, David Ventris had been in those visions with her.
Jesse closed her eyes and stumbled over a buried tree stump halfway to her cabin. The jarring didn’t knock sense into her brain. That sense was long, long gone.
If David had been sent as a test of her rationality, the results were inconclusive. A few seconds of sharing the same physical space with a ghost had almost convinced her that such supernatural entities actually existed, in spite of every logical assumption to the contrary. That David Ventris was as vital and alive in his way as she was in hers—a ghost possessing her dreams, her hypnotic memories, as if they’d shared something inexplicable but very real. In her visions he’d been as familiar to her—to the person she’d been—as her own soul.
As if once … sometime, somewhere … she’d loved him.
Jesse shuddered and paused at her doorway. “You called me,” he had said. Called a man she’d hadn’t “met” before a dream last night.
Did a ghost even qualify as a man?
She laughed weakly at her own absurdity and opened the door to her cabin. Sanctuary no longer, for he’d been there in her dreams, at her bedside.
As he was here now. Sitting at her table—sitting, solid as you please, holding yesterday’s Manzanita Herald in his hands. Glancing up with a quizzical look, as if he had discovered an interesting item in the paper he was waiting to share with her.
He dropped the paper and rose, pushing back the chair. “Jesse,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
She didn’t doubt it. There was something grotesquely appropriate in finding him here, invading her home once again as he had her body and her mind.
“Please forgive my informality,” he continued, in the wake of her silence. “I didn’t intend to leave you so abruptly before, but—” He gazed at her with eyes of a dazzling and vivid blue. “There are things we must discuss.”
Jesse stood frozen in the doorway, her hand still on the knob and a frantic laugh stuck in her throat. She could run the other way, as she’d done on the hillside. She could make one final pitch for reason and sanity.
But the outrage at this further imposition bubbled over, and she slammed the door shut and strode recklessly toward him—stopping just short of any danger of accidental touch. She couldn’t see through him now.
He was real.
“Tell me,” she demanded, “can you just … pop up anywhere you like? Walk through walls, appear and disappear, with no regard for privacy? Or are there rules wherever you come from?”
“Then you do believe in me.”
His question startled her anew. The way he said the words and his lopsided smile implied that her belief was very important to him. His grin was surprisingly engaging. It suggested goodwill and sincerity and a desire—a need—to be accepted.
Acceptance was too much to ask, but Jesse felt herself sucked into those eyes, seduced by that smile into an unwilling but undeniable belief. The fact that he was staggeringly handsome didn’t help. Not Gary’s slick good looks, but a devastating combination of boyish charm and seasoned maturity. His chin was firm, his brows thick and well shaped. His black hair was just a little too long, falling over his forehead. His face was darkly tanned, the eyes creased at the corners with sun wrinkles.
He wore the same uniform he’d had on this afternoon: short blue jacket with tarnished buttons and braid in horizontal stripes across the chest, a long and slightly curved sword that hung at his hip from a shoulder belt, snug light-colored trousers that hugged distinctly muscular legs, black spurred boots coated with dust. There were holes in the jacket and a patch on his trousers, but their raggedness made him seem more what he claimed to be.
A soldier. A soldier as Al had been, but from a war nearly two hundred years ago. In a faraway and different land.
“I don’t know what to believe,” she said slowly. “But after we—” No. She wouldn’t talk about that mystical communion. She couldn’t even think about it without shaking. If she treated this whole business as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, she’d be more likely to get through it intact. “You seem to be able to … affect things. Doesn’t that make you real?”
“Ah. The paper.” He picked it up. It rustled in his hands. “I’ve been practicing. It’s something of a skill to become solid. A chancy business, at best.”
“Then you are a ghost.”
“For lack of a better definition,” he conceded with a wry twitch of his mouth.
She dared herself closer to the table. “You’re here to haunt me. Is that it?”
He set the paper down and ruffled the pages. “ ‘Haunt’ is such an unpleasant word.”
“Unpleasant?” She laughed shortly. “What do you call this … barging into my life, invading my space, making me think I’m—” She stopped herself. Calm. “Don’t ghosts haunt specific locations? I built this cabin myself. No one like you ever lived on this ground.”
He refolded the paper and sat down again, his very tangible weight shifting the chair on the floor. “I’ve been reading about your village,” he said, dodging her question. “It’s rather discomposing to realize how much has changed since I was last … here. Of course, I didn’t make it to the colonies.”
“Before you … died.”
“Another unpleasant word.” He spread his hands flat on the table as if to test their substantiality. “But one with which I am somewhat familiar.”
Jesse looked at his hands. Strong, long-fingered, scarred but elegant. His hands alone convinced her that he was no concoction of some personal psychosis.
“And where have you been all this time?” she asked, reluctantly fascinated.
His gaze met hers, its brilliance shadowed. “Ah, Jesse. There are places no mortal words can describe.” One hand lifted to touch a hole in his blue coat. “Have you ever seen a battlefield?”
In the echo of his question she could have sworn she heard the staccato blasts of gunfire, the roar of cannon, the shrill whinny of a frightened horse, the screams of a dying man. She tasted dust in her mouth, felt the scorching heat of fire and a brutal sun on her skin.
She felt for the nearest chair. “I’ve seen death,” she said. “I’ve seen places like battlefields, where the victims were innocent.”
There was startlement in his eyes, as if he hadn’t expected an answer. He didn’t read minds, then. He didn’t know of her past. He could walk through walls, in her dreams, through her body—but ther
e were places even he couldn’t go.
Yet the awkward intimacy between them felt remarkably potent, as if he were a long-lost lover turned up on her doorstep.
Jesse had no long-lost lovers.
“You said I called you here,” she said.
He recovered his poise quickly enough. “You dreamed of me,” he said softly.
There was no disputing that, no lying to him as she had to Al. “Yes. But until two nights ago, I’d never seen you even in my dreams. Why now?”
“You don’t know … why you called my name,” he said, watching her face.
She couldn’t admit how little she did know. “Are you here to haunt me? What do you want?”
“There is much to explain, Jesse. Much even I don’t understand—”
“You could start by telling me why the hell you’ve chosen the worst possible time to complicate my life. Why me, David Ventris?”
He looked toward the window and she saw the tension in his jaw, the telltale body language of someone hiding a vital truth. “If you would trust me—”
“Trust you?” She slammed her open hand on the table, inches from his. “Who are you? How does this work? Are you some distant ancestor I haven’t even heard of? Or does everyone have their own personal ghost, and I’m the only one who can see mine?”
There was an answering flash of anger in his eyes. “I see that you won’t accept what you can’t immediately comprehend.” He shook his head, just as suddenly contrite. “I’m not here to curse you. You have nothing to fear from me.”
“Does that mean I have some control over this? Can I send you back to wherever you came from?”
“It isn’t that simple.” “Are you telling me I need an exorcist or a … ghostbuster to get rid of you?”
“I’ve no doubt that you could send me back to perdition, Jesse.” He trapped her with his eyes, holding her fast. “You wanted to know who I am? I’m a lost soul, and you are the key to my salvation.” His voice, so properly British, held a false lightness that mocked his own words. “If you refuse me, I’m quite simply damned.”
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