The Other Side

by J. D. Robb

  While the judge spoke the words that united them, Vanessa turned to her husband, tears of joy sparkling on her lashes. “We chose well, didn’t we, Ted darling?”

  “That we did, babe. See how much he loves our children?”

  “Jake Ridgeway turned out to be the perfect champion.”

  Seeing a shimmering light, they turned to welcome Lily as she drifted toward them. The young woman embraced them, then looked at Jake as he spoke his vows.

  Her eyes were shining when she turned to Ted and Vanessa. “Look how happy he is.”

  “Thanks to your generosity.”

  “And yours. Perfect love. That’s what we strive for on earth and finally achieve in this place.”

  As the three were smiling their approval, a fourth light joined them.

  “Are you ready now?”

  Ted pressed a kiss to his grandmother’s cheek. “I guess there’s no point in asking if we can hang around for the party.”

  The old woman merely smiled. As she lifted her arms, they began to shimmer and glow.

  “Wait. One last good-bye.”

  Ted and Vanessa hovered on either side of their daughter, kissing her cheek.

  Christina lifted a hand to her cheek and felt the whisper of a breeze. As before, she caught a whiff of her mother’s perfume, and a thought came to her as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud.

  She smiled at the man facing her. Her hero. And the great love of her life.

  “Jake.” She pressed her lips to his. “I was wishing that my parents were here to share this day with us, and suddenly the knowledge came to me that, without any doubt, they are here, looking down on us right this minute and smiling. And I know, too, that they love you every bit as much as Tyler and I do.”

  “Love.”

  They both turned to the little boy who had spoken. It seemed only fitting that his first word should be the most important word in the universe.

  “Yes, love, Tyler.” Jake knelt down so that his eyes were steady on the little boy’s. “I love you and your beautiful sister.”

  The boy’s smile gave him the look of an angel.

  With Tyler walking between them, holding tightly to their hands, the bride and groom mingled with those who had come to celebrate this happy occasion.

  While the guests watched, twin beams seemed to shine like a benediction from high above, casting the bride in a halo of light. Some said it was merely a typical bride’s joy on her wedding day. Others thought it was a reflection of the sun off her shimmering gown.

  Tyler looked up. The smile on his face was one of pure happiness as he lifted his hand to wave to his parents until they were out of sight.

  They weren’t really gone, he knew. They had just gone to a place he couldn’t follow. But they had left behind two people who would love him and keep him safe.

  And wasn’t that what made heaven on earth?

  Never Too Late to Love

  MARY KAY MCCOMAS

  For Shirleen Peplinski Bold, an old friend found anew

  One

  “Mr. Brown, that doesn’t make sense.” M. J. Biderman flipped a folder closed on her desk and leaned back in her soft leather chair. She swept a swag of soft brown hair from her face and blinked her hazel eyes twice, slowly, to help her concentrate. “I gave you the keys to the house and a list of furniture items I want removed and put into storage. Then I want the house torn down and the lot evacuated for the sale of the property. What seems to be the problem?”

  “For one thing, the key doesn’t work. I can’t get into the house.” The contractor’s voice was already straining for patience.

  “Break a window.”

  “That’s the other thing; I tried. Several times. Several different windows. They crack but don’t break.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “That’s what I said. The house is so old and brittle I would have thought a stiff wind could blow it over. But apparently it’s not ready to come down yet.”

  “It’s not what?”

  “I know how it sounds, ma’am, but it happens sometimes. These old places take on a life of their own. Not often, I admit, but my dad told me about one over in Harrisburg when I was a kid. They finally gutted the place and let the woods around it swallow it up. Fifty years later they went back in, and time had rotted away everything but the old stone chimneys.”

  “I don’t have fifty years, Mr. Brown, or a woods in the middle of town to swallow it up. I do, however, have a gentleman interested in buying the lot for a Smoothie Hut franchise, but only if it becomes a vacant lot. Which is why I’ve hired you.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to do more than just hire me, ma’am, because the house doesn’t want to come down just yet.”

  “Please stop saying that.”

  “I rammed my backhoe into its southeast corner this morning. There was a rumbling noise and dust flew everywhere. When it cleared, the house was the same. I didn’t even crack the foundation. It ain’t coming down.”

  “Mr. Brown, will you hold for just a moment, please?”

  Tears of frustration pressed against the back of her eyes before the line was muted. She blinked slowly at the ceiling until the stinging subsided, and she curled her fingers into fists. This was her mother’s fault. If just once her mother had listened to her when she advised her to sell Hedbo House and buy into an easy-turnover residence in a retirement community, it wouldn’t be happening. Her mother never listened.

  And now she never would.

  She didn’t have the time or energy for this. She needed every second, every ounce, to make partner at Wilson and Bows, and the audit and analysis of Longwire Industries was the deal breaker. She could feel it in her bones. All eyes would be on her for the next few weeks, and she couldn’t miss a step.

  She took a deep breath and splayed her hands out flat on the desktop, trying to relax. The only house she ever heard of that refused to fall down was in a nursery rhyme about pigs, and even then, she thought the wolf gave up too soon. There were laws of physics that applied to this situation, so there had to be an answer somewhere.

  She adjusted her headset and reconnected with Mr. Brown. “Maybe I’d better drive out there Friday after work and see for myself. Can you meet me at the house about six?”

  The drive from Alexandria, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., to Loudon County and the barely there, drive-through town of Johnnie’s Bend was easy enough. Despite the fact that she’d spent time there as a child and her mother had lived the last ten years of her life there, her trips out had become fewer and fewer in recent years as her life became increasingly consumed with her job and the responsibilities thereof. But she could see immediately that Johnnie’s Bend was changing . . . growing.

  At last.

  And no one, including her, was going to miss Hedbo House—a ramshackle, three-story, brick colossus built in the late eighteen hundreds by Horatio Hedbo, who invented and manufactured a modern press that put holes in buttons and left his fortune and home to his only son, Hobart Hedbo, when he died in 1930. Hobart, something of a womanizer, married late in life and had three daughters—Imogene, Odelia, and Adeline.

  Imogene married and had a son, Rufus, who died of pneumonia at a young age. Odelia never married. Adeline married four times, producing only one descendant: M.J., who was as convinced as any completely unsuperstitious person could be that it was living in the very old and truly dreary Hedbo House that had killed them all.

  But it wasn’t going to get her. She’d planned to raze the house even before the lucrative offer from Smoothie Hut, Inc., arrived at the family lawyer’s office almost a year after her mother’s funeral.

  However—and wasn’t there always a however somewhere—certain family heirlooms needed to be removed and looked after: given to distant relatives and donated to specific museums or charities to be auctioned off according to her mother’s will. With so little time in her schedule, she’d given the list to her contractor, Mr. Brown, who owned a decons
truction company out of Leesburg. He planned to salvage the doors, hardware, wood paneling . . . everything he could, actually, and recycle the rest. Profits to her would come in the forms of sale of the salvage, a tax-deductible donation of the refuse, and selling the land rights to Smoothie Hut, Inc.

  “Okay. Give me the key, and I’ll try it this time.” The standard key in the dead bolt worked fine. It was the long, nondescript skeleton key that fit into the ancient lock under the doorknob that he was struggling with. She pulled her gaze from the second of two large picture windows on the front of the house that were cracked, shattered in fact, yet inexplicably intact. “Old locks get rusty, Mr. Brown. It’s as simple as that. This house will come down, no matter what you think it’s trying to tell us.”

  “Yes, ma’am, and I’ll be right here waitin’ on it.” He stepped back with his hands low on his hips. His fifty-year-old beer belly looked taut under the green T-shirt he wore with an unbuttoned blue-plaid cotton shirt. He was shorter than her five-foot-nine frame and looked every bit as much a demolition man as she did a financial analyst. Well, she at least hoped the distinction was that clear. No offense to Mr. Brown, but she’d worked very hard to get where she was, and she liked to think that people could tell merely by looking at her that she was diligent and good at what she did.

  “I hope you’ll be doing more than just waiting. Contrary to what you think, this house has no magical powers, and it’s not going to simply fall down on its own when it feels like it.” She slipped the strap of her purse up high on her shoulder, put the key in the lock, and gave it a hard twist. There was no give inside, so she rattled the knob a little and twisted more gently the second time.

  Mr. Brown was watching intently with a patient but smug expression on his face, and it was making her edgy. She realigned her body and the strap of her purse so he couldn’t see, then shook the knob twice, good and hard, before twisting the key—this time in the opposite direction.

  Truly. She didn’t have the time or the energy for this. A scream of frustration started to build in her throat.

  “What about oil? Have you tired oiling the lock? Maybe it just needs lubricating.”

  “I did, but I’m happy to do it again for you, ma’am.”

  “Please. Call me M.J. Ma’am is so . . . my mother.” Her cringe was barely visible.

  “Yes, ma—” He caught himself. “Oil’s out in my truck. I’ll be right back.”

  “Fine.”

  She left the key in the lock and turned to watch him bound down the steps of the wide front porch and lope across the unkempt lawn toward his truck.

  It was a warm, muggy night in August, and the fireflies were still active—jumping, frolicking as if at play. She glanced down at the top step where it met the tall white support pillar, where she’d spent hundreds of blissful hours as a child watching them before bedtime, dreaming of fairies and fantastic wonderlands where she reigned as Princess Ariel.

  She was almost thirty-three now, and those memories seemed a hundred years old.

  So did the paint on the pillars and porch, she ruminated in distaste. Only the ornate cast-iron gate remained of the fence that once encircled the front yard; weeds had choked out what few flowers remained in the beds along the sidewalk. She thought she ought to feel bad that her mother had fallen into such straits at the end of her life, but she didn’t—it had been her mother’s choice.

  There were track marks crisscrossing the front lawn from some monster machine Mr. Brown had loaded up and sent elsewhere to work until he gained cooperation from the house . . . that’s what he’d said, cooperation from the house, like it was something alive.

  She looked away from the yard, and because there was nothing else to do while she waited for Mr. Brown, she reached out and rattled the key in the lock again—and the door sprang open.

  “Oh, for . . . Mr. Brown, I have it,” she called over her shoulder as she stepped inside. A sigh of aggravation turned to a hacking cough full of dust. Aside from a slightly thicker layer of grime on everything, the place hadn’t changed since her last visit a few days after her mother’s sudden passing.

  The dark wood floors and faded wallpaper in the hall harkened back to a time when fern fronds were in fashion. And while both the front living room and the small parlor on the other side held proof of her mother’s attempts at modernizing the décor, the stark white walls had long ago gone grunge brown . . . a not-too-bad basic color, except that everything in both rooms had gone grunge with them.

  Yet it was the smell of the place that kept her rooted in the doorway and feeling oddly anxious. A musty smell, of course, as one would expect in a house of this age, but other scents as well . . . her mother’s lily perfume, apples and cinnamon . . . and something else . . . baby powder maybe.

  “My wife says some things just need a woman’s touch. I guess that dang lock is one of them, huh?” Mr. Brown joined her in the vestibule, looking around, nodding his head, his hands on his hips. “I’ll get the moving crew back in here first thing Monday morning to remove the items on the list you sent me. I’ve lined up a good antique dealer for the rest of this stuff. My team can come in Tuesday and start the salvage. If that works for you . . . ”

  Nodding vaguely, she was still wrapped up in the odors that hadn’t faded in her olfactory receptors.

  “In fact, I can take those two little tea tables you want shipped to Florida right now. You said to rush them?”

  “Mmm, I did, to in-laws from my mother’s third marriage.” She was staring at a photographed portrait of the three sisters hanging in the hall and speaking absently. “She stole them during the divorce, but I guess she didn’t want to take the grudge too far beyond her grave. They’ve been calling. . . . ” She paused. “They all looked so young here.”

  He nodded noncommittally. “I can drop them off at the postal business center tonight . . . the tables, I mean . . . or first thing Monday morning on my way back here. They’ll box ’em up and ship ’em. Insure ’em, too.”

  “That’s fine. Thank you.”

  He hurried off to fetch a classic eighteenth-century Massachusetts reverse serpentine tilt-top tea table and an American Chippendale from the same era. She ambled down the hall, her high heels clicking in the silence, toward the big kitchen at the back of the house renovated—made bigger and updated—almost fifty years earlier for her aunt Odelia, who’d loved to cook.

  The scent of apples and cinnamon grew stronger, thick like a palpable thing. She stopped and turned with the distinct impression she was being watched. “Creepy old house, you’ll be whistling a different tune next week, I promise you.”

  “You talkin’ to me, ma’am?” Mr. Brown met her in the hallway coming from the small parlor.

  “No.” She looked him over. “Why are you out of breath? Are you ill?”

  “No, ma’am—”

  “M.J.”

  “But I’m plenty embarrassed to tell you . . . well, it’s the damnedest thing, but considering the lock and the windows and all, and what I told you before . . . I guess I just assumed that once we got the door open . . . ”

  “What is it, Mr. Brown?” She was down to her last drop of patience.

  “I can’t lift the tables.” She stared at him until he finally looked away. “I also can’t push them, and the little doily deal and candy dish on the one in the living room won’t come off. Queer as snow in July, is all I’m sayin’.”

  “No, what you’re saying makes even less sense than that.” She stepped around him, heading for the living room. “It makes no sense at all.”

  She strode up to the mahogany claw-and-ball-foot tea table where the scent of baby powder tickled her nose and all but made her sneeze. Taking the faded old crochet doily in one hand and the small crystal bowl in the other, she lifted them off the table . . . rather tried to lift them off, but they wouldn’t budge. They wanted to, she could feel a tiny bit of give, but it was as if something was holding them in place. She pried up the edges of the doily to see if
some idiot had glued them to the table.

  “Is there a light in here?” The sun had yet to set, but it was dark and gloomy in the house.

  “Power’s off, but I’ve got a flashlight out in my truck.”

  And he was out the door. M.J. could sense his trail of relief and didn’t blame him. She hadn’t been able to shake the sensation of being watched, but it didn’t feel . . . well, it didn’t feel threatening, like being watched by a stalker or someone who meant her harm might. It didn’t make the hairs on the back of her neck stand up or call on her instinctive alarm to run. Still, it wasn’t entirely comfortable, so she whispered out loud, “It’s rude to stare at people, especially if they’re not allowed to stare back.”

  “There, you see? I told you she’d catch on quickly.” It was her mother’s voice coming from behind her. Spinning around, she was in time to see her materialize, tall and young and beautiful, before the boxed-in fireplace. “Hello, darling, sorry to cause you all this trouble, but who knew that crossing over to the Other Side was going to be such a royal pain in the ass?”

  Two

  “You knew it, you ninny,” came another voice from the doorway where Aunt Odelia, short and plumpish with pink cheeks and wild curly blond hair—and much, much younger than M.J. remembered her—was entering the room from the hall, drawing with her the wafting aroma of fresh-baked apple pies. “Imogene and I told you before you died. We said, ‘Crossing over to the Other Side is a royal pain in the ass’ . . . unless you know what you’re looking for.”

  “Which none of us do,” said a third voice, again behind M.J., who turned to see her aunt Imogene sitting on the Chippendale tea table, doily and candy dish in her lap. “And now you’ve got this dear girl trying to remove things from the house and planning to tear the place down when you know perfectly well she can’t until we leave.”