His olive-dark face turned ruddy at her words. “You have it all wrong. What happened to Eileen certainly triggered my fears, but it was your disappearance that scared the hell out of me,” he said bluntly. “So, what are we going to do about that?”
She shrugged and tried to smile, not sure exactly what he was trying to tell her or what he expected in the way of a response. “I don’t think there’s much we can do about it.”
“Me either,” he mumbled, shying away from her steady gaze.
“Is it so terrible?” she asked. “That you worry about me, I mean.”
The pained expression on his face and the terror—still ebbing from his dark eyes—answered that question for Carol. Frank hadn’t simply been worried when she was late, her tardiness had put him through a special brand of hell.
“It isn’t fair,” Frank murmured.
“Life isn’t always fair, Frank,” she whispered. “But please… I am so sorry.”
He went on as if he hadn’t heard her apology, as if he were talking aloud to himself. “When you didn’t show up this morning… when I went into your room and saw all your things there… I can’t begin to describe the way I felt.” He looked into her eyes, his own a dense, smoky black. “I went crazy, Carol.”
“Surely you knew I’d come back.”
“Eileen never did.” He paused—a long, still silence. “I was sure I’d never see you again either, that I’d have to spend the rest of my life searching for Eileen and for you, Carol.”
“Oh, Frank!” Carol longed to hold him again and soothe him, but his mention of Eileen held her at bay. What good could come of getting involved with a man who still had a wife, even if it was in name only? Frank had to let Eileen go before he could ever really resume his life. And certainly love would be out of the question for a man so obsessed. Carol wondered if she might be falling once more for someone incapable of loving her in return. If so, life was, indeed, far from fair.
“Tell me where you went, Carol,” Frank demanded. “Today and yesterday.”
She caught her breath when he mentioned her early-morning jaunt the day before. “How did you know about yesterday?”
“I saw you coming back to the hotel just as I was getting up. What’s going on, Carol?”
Carol sank down on Frank’s antique brass bed. She bit at her lower lip, trying to decide how to explain everything.
Suddenly, Frank laughed, but there was little humor in his tone. “I sound like a jealous lover, don’t I? Well, you’ll have to pardon that, ma’am. I know I have no right beyond our professional association to demand explanations, but, to be right truthful, Carol, I’m afraid for you. You may be getting in over your head on this case.”
So much for the lame explanation she’d planned to use—that she had gone out early to see the sights or go window shopping. Frank had his own ESP working here.
“It’s a long, complicated story,” she began.
“I’ve cancelled the boat to English Turn. We have plenty of time. Want some coffee?” he asked. “Maybe that would help us both settle down.”
Carol nodded and smiled. Frank poured out two mugs of black Creole coffee with chicory. One sip of the strong, hot brew brought Carol’s jumbled thoughts into instant focus.
She began her explanation with her arrival in New Orleans and her first encounter with the anonymous woman in the red tignon. She told him of the shadowy ferryman named Choctaw. When she tried to explain about Camille and how she actually became the young woman when she went back in time, Frank frowned, obviously finding it difficult to believe the things she was telling him.
“Don’t look at me that way, Frank. I know it all sounds bizarre. But it really happened—every last bit of it.” She paused for a moment, trying to think of some way she could prove her story. Her eyes lit up when she remembered something. “You said you were in my room. Did you notice the long, white evening gloves on the dresser?”
He nodded. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I did.”
“Those belong to Cami. She was wearing them when I left her yesterday. I had them on when I got back to the hotel. There’s even a stain on one of them. One of her dancing partners had dirty hands.”
He cocked his head and squinted at her skeptically. “You really believe all this, don’t you?”
“Yes, every word of it. You’d better believe it, too. And there’s more.” She licked her lips, tasting again the faintest trace of blood. “Victoine Navar—I’ve seen him twice now.” She grinned, embarrassed suddenly. “In fact, I… that is, Cami had a fight with him a short while ago. She bit him—hard! Drew blood, in fact.”
“You’re trying to tell me that’s Navar’s blood on your face?” Frank gave her another skeptical frown.
“It must be. The taste of it is still in my mouth.” Quickly, she explained to Frank all about Cami’s escape from Mulgrove and how Black Vic mistook her for a runaway slave. “If Cami hadn’t sunk her teeth into his hand, she’d be back with her scheming cousins by now. Of course, Cami didn’t realize the guy giving her trouble was actually Navar, the hunk who tried to crash the party earlier. She just figured he was some bounty man out to pick up a quick reward. In fact, he told her as much.”
Frank leaned closer, all attention now that he knew these phantoms of Carol’s imagination could actually bleed. “Tell me more.”
“I’m sure now that he must be the man who eventually became Cami’s lover and fought a duel with her cousin, Morris Pinard. But when Vic left Fiona’s house he still believed that Cami was a runaway slave.”
Even to Carol, who had been part of it all, the tale sounded just too weird. She fully expected Frank to laugh in her face or at the very least shake his head and tell her she’d gone bonkers. His reaction came as a total shock.
“I don’t like this—not a-tall! What if you go back there and get stuck? I’d never even know what happened to you. There’d be no way on God’s green Earth that I could do anything to help you. So, next time you go to meet Choctaw, I’m going with you.”
“I don’t think you can do that, Frank.”
“Why not?” he demanded.
She shrugged. “I’m not sure Choctaw will come unless I’m alone. And even if he does, you have no gold doubloon. That seems to be my key to re-turning to the past. He has to see it before he’ll let me get in his boat.”
Frank rubbed a hand over his chin, thinking. Then Carol saw a new light in his eyes. “You forget,” he said, “that the mummy was wearing a similar coin around her neck. If my Jane Doe is really your Cami, as you believe, then her doubloon should be good enough to pay my passage. If not, then it seems to me that would prove that that’s not Camille Mazaret lying over in the morgue. I’m going, Carol! Damned if I’m not!”
His determination worried Carol. She wasn’t sure how she actually managed to cross over that invisible line into the past, but she was fairly certain her psychic powers enabled her to make the trip. If that was the case, there was no way Frank could accompany her. And what if, on seeing Frank with her, Choctaw disappeared and never returned?
“I don’t think this is a good idea, Frank,” she repeated.
Instead of arguing, he reached down and slipped one hand around the back of her neck, massaging gently. “Good idea or bad, I’m not going to let you run any more risks alone. I’m not sure I believe that all you’ve told me is anything but a dream, some sort of vision. However, if it is true and you are traveling back in time, I mean to be right beside you from now on.”
They spent what was left of the morning in Frank’s room, drinking coffee and talking, really getting to know each other. Carol figured that was only right if they were going to be traveling through time together.
Frank told her about his motherless childhood, spent mostly in military schools. He’d been a loner back then just as he was today. His father, embittered after his wife died in childbirth, had never forgiven his son. During Frank’s formative years, no closeness grew between farther and son. Carol ached f
or him as she listened in silence to Frank’s boyhood stories. The year he entered The Citadel, his father died. A heart attack—sudden, unexpected, final. There had been no “Granny Bess” in Frank’s life. No one at all in the way of family. Not until he married Eileen did Frank even begin to realize all the love he had missed, had ached for, all his life. Then—suddenly, unexpectedly, tragically—she, too, was taken from him.
Frank told his long, sad tale without emotion. He didn’t feel sorry for himself, but Carol felt sorry enough for both of them. She was verging on tears by the time he finished. She had the greatest urge to take him into her arms and comfort him and tell him everything would be all right from now on. Yet she sensed that Frank was not a man to accept sympathy gracefully.
“You hungry?” he asked finally.
Carol nodded. Actually she was starved. She’d had only a light supper the night before and no breakfast at all.
“How about some eggs?” he said. “I can scramble some up in a jiffy on the hotplate.”
“Sounds good!” Carol agreed.
She busied herself setting the table while Frank went to work in his kitchenette, still rambling on about domestic bliss with Eileen.
A knock at the door and the maid’s voice put a sudden end to one of Frank’s stories right at its middle. Annoyed by the intrusion, Carol shot a mean glance at the door.
Noticing her reaction, Frank said, “It’s just the maid bringing me some fresh towels.”
His simple statement almost brought the tears Carol had been fighting. Imagine a man at Frank’s stage in life who lived so impersonally that he didn’t even own his own towels. His life was exactly the way she had envisioned—a Christmas tree with no presents, a mailbox with no letters, a bathroom with no towels. She stifled her pity, knowing it was the last thing Frank would want.
All intimacy between them vanished with the maid’s interruption. Frank suddenly grew silent and withdrawn. Carol felt almost uncomfortable with him now, as if she were intruding on his deep need for solitude. She wanted desperately to ask him if something was wrong or if she had offended him in some way. But she sensed that he would not welcome any questions right now.
Sense his mood was all she could do, she realized with a start. She’d been able to read Frank’s thoughts with ease since their first contact over the phone. Suddenly, she was being blocked. She had no idea if Frank was doing it consciously or if something in her psychic system had gone on the blink. At any rate, the loss of this power gave her an odd feeling, as if she were now placed at a distinct disadvantage.
Silently, they sat down across the table from each other and passed the salt and pepper, then set upon their food. The tension between them—tension that Carol could not comprehend—grew with every wordless moment.
“Eggs okay?” Frank asked laconically.
“Fine!” she answered too quickly, too loudly. She realized that she was almost pathetically happy that he had finally spoken to her again. “They’re delicious, really,” she added in a more composed tone.
“Well, eat up, then. I know you must be worn out. I have to dress and go to my office for a while—some things I need to pick up. You’d better head on back to your room and catch some shut-eye. I’ll come back for you around five and we’ll go to a little Cajun joint I know.” He’d been staring down at his empty plate and rambling on as if he were talking to himself. He paused and looked up at Carol, his face so dead-serious suddenly that her heart raced from fear of what he was about to say. “You like Cajun? Real spicy?”
Carol nodded enthusiastically. “Love it!” Actually, she had no idea whether she liked Cajun or not. But faced with Frank’s strange mood shift, she would have told him her favorite dish was snake eyeballs with ’gator-tail gravy, if he’d asked.
“Good. Then we’ll do it.”
He rose and began clearing dishes from the table, stacking them in the tiny sink in his kitchenette.
Carol got up, too, scraped her plate, and positioned herself in front of the sink, ready to finish the domestic chores.
“Hey, the maid’ll do that,” Frank said suddenly.
“I don’t mind.”
He caught her elbow and directed her away from the dishes and toward the door. “But I do,” he told her. “I can’t afford to get the maid spoiled. I pay her extra to do housework for me.”
He gave Carol no opening for argument. At the door, he said simply, “See you about five,” then he hustled her gently outside.
Frank leaned his back against the closed door with a long, pent-up sigh, then muttered, “Damnation!”
He bent forward and put his face down in his hands, then ran his clutched fingers up through his hair, grinding his teeth as he did. He felt a sudden killing rage that threatened to engulf him. He wanted to kick butt, scream obscenities, smash some guy’s face to a bloody pulp.
“Why?” he growled. “Why in hell is this happening to me?
He remembered once when he was a kid of about eight and he’d gotten into a fight with one of the other boys from school, a cop had spotted the two of them slugging it out. The hefty Irishman had caught each of them by the collar and hauled them up off the ground until their fists and feet were thrashing blindly through the air.
Frank recalled how scared he’d been at that moment, sure he was about to be hauled off to jail because of his hair-trigger temper. In spite of his present pain, he gave a wry chuckle and said, “I almost pissed my pants!”
But the big cop hadn’t turned them in. Instead, he’d taken the two young rascals to the backyard of his own house in the Irish Channel. There he had armed the boys with a boxload of empty mayonnaise jars, pointed them toward his board fence, and ordered, “Fire away, lads!”
Frank and his sparring partner had spent the next twenty minutes heaving mayonnaise jars at that back fence, giggling their fool heads off and whooping gleefully each time a direct hit sent bright bits of glass flying. By the time they ran out of things to throw, the two of them had worked out their frustrations and were laughing and joking with each other and the cop. Neither of them could even remember what their fight was all about.
“I could use about a million mayonnaise jars right now, and a board fence twenty feet high.” Lacking that Frank took his anger out on a nearby chair, kicking it halfway across the room.
It didn’t help. He sank down on the bed, his face buried in his hands again.
“Eileen, Eileen!” he moaned.
He could barely remember his wife; it had been that long. Yet whenever he started to feel something for another woman, the guilt came washing over him, turning any affection he felt into something dark and twisted and ugly. Eileen wouldn’t have wanted it that way and he knew it, but there was little he could do to change things. His gnawing guilt led to frustration and that frustration to impotent rage.
“Not this time!” he said through clenched teeth.
Flopping back on the bed, Frank closed his eyes. He could still smell Carol’s perfume—not a scent purchased over a department store counter, but the warm, earthy essence-of-woman that was her own delicious trademark.
Frank inhaled deeply, then let his mind go blank to wander as it would—he hoped it would be away from Carol Marlowe and the need he felt building inside him every time she came near.
He tried to concentrate on Eileen. “Yeah, think it through,” he said, “figure it all out. What happened? Why? Whose fault was it?”
Frank squinted hard, trying to bring a picture of Eileen to mind. He could visualize her long, blond hair, her nice figure, her smile. But individual features remained indistinct in his mind. He recalled that last day—how they’d made love before he left for work. He hadn’t wanted to, afraid it might harm the baby she was carrying. Eileen, playful and coaxing, had insisted that it would be perfectly safe until she was much further along. He’d been more than willing to take her word for it. Afterward, she’d cooked him breakfast—his favorite, French toast and link sausage—hurriedly ironed him a fresh shirt,
and kissed him goodbye for the day.
“No, not for the day,” he reminded himself with a moan. “Forever!”
He’d come home that evening to find everything neat and tidy. Eileen had been a wonderful housekeeper and she was so proud of their first real home, which they had moved into barely a month before her disappearance.
He’d known the minute he unlocked the front door and stepped inside that something was wrong. Eileen loved to cook. She had told him at breakfast that she’d be trying out a new recipe for dinner. “Creole pot roast,” she’d said, “with lots of spices and a thick, red gravy. I just hope all the neighbors don’t show up to join us. I figure on smelling up our whole block, cooking it all day like I’ll have to.”
Neither Eileen, who always watched for his car, nor any spicy, mouth-watering aromas had greeted him that night. The fact that his dinner wasn’t cooked should have been his first clue that something was very wrong. But he’d been young then, and so innocent of the cruel tricks life can play. He’d told himself Eileen must have decided to go to a movie or do some shopping at the new mall. He’d waited hours before alerting authorities to her disappearance. Those wasted hours might have been crucial in finding her, and he—her own husband—had allowed the trail to go cold.
Now, all these years later, that trail was even colder. Frozen over, in fact. No answers. No clues, except his name scratched on a pad of paper beside the phone, then crossed out. Just this same old soul-shattering remorse and guilty rage when he tried to tell himself it was all right for him to feel something for another woman.
“I still have a wife,” he murmured. “I do! She’s out there somewhere.”
Carol crossed the courtyard hurriedly. She felt like every eye was on her and had seen her coming out of a married man’s room. That was ridiculous, of course. After so many years, Frank was no more married than she was. Besides, they hadn’t done anything really—a couple of hugs and a lot of talk. But it wasn’t anything they’d done that made her feel this way. No, it was what she felt growing between them. She had been aware of Frank as a handsome, sexy man from the first moment she laid eyes on him.
Whispers in Time Page 13