Charon's Crossing (A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel)

by Sandra Marton

  "You're right. But I'd still appreciate an answer."

  "Very well, if you insist. I am accustomed to holding the trust of my clients."

  "I've no idea what my father thought of you, one way or the other."

  "I am not referring to him. I resent the way you reacted when I offered to determine the need for repairs here."

  A lawyer with a tender ego. Just her luck.

  "Fair enough. Is there anything else?"

  Amos shrugged his shoulders. "I am not accustomed to taking orders from females."

  Kathryn nodded. Somehow, that revelation came as no great surprise but that didn't make it any the less infuriating.

  "Well, prepare yourself for more orders, Amos," Kathryn folded her arms. "I asked you to have this place cleaned in anticipation of my arrival but I don't see that it was done."

  "On the contrary. One of the local women came in. She tidied up the kitchen and the West Wing. You'll find them acceptable, if not luxurious. Since there are numerous other rooms, and since you made it clear you wished to personally approve whatever was done in this house..."

  "Touché." Kathryn smiled coolly. "One point for your side."

  "Is there anything else before I go, Miss Russell?"

  "Do I have a telephone?"

  "You do."

  "I suppose you assume it works?"

  "On the contrary. I know that it does not. Telephone service is erratic at best on Elizabeth Island. And I'm afraid cell phones won't work, either. I tried to tell you, Miss Russell, we have limited—"

  "Amenities. Yes, I know." Kathryn sighed. "All right, Amos. It would seem the contractor—Hiram, was it? It would seem his work's cut out for him. Please phone him and tell him to be sure and come by tomorrow."

  Amos nodded stiffly. "Very well."

  "And the realtor. Olive. Was that her name? I'd like to see her, too."

  "I can only convey your message, Miss Russell. I cannot guarantee—"

  "Tomorrow," Kathryn said firmly. "I have only seven days to spend here and I want everything settled before I leave. Please keep that in mind."

  What he was keeping in mind, Amos thought sourly, was that this arrogant, contentious female couldn't leave Elizabeth Island quickly enough to suit him.

  Addressing him as Amos, indeed! And handing out orders...

  Who did she think she was?

  "I shall do my best," he said coldly.

  Kathryn's chin lifted. How was it possible to dislike somebody you hardly knew? Amos Carter was the most pompous, insufferable man she'd ever had the misfortune to meet.

  "I hope so," she said, every bit as coldly. "Now, if that's all, I'd like to unpack my things."

  She was dismissing him, was she? Back straight, Amos marched to the door. At the last second, he turned and smiled pleasantly.

  "There are a few things I should tell you," he said. "The woman who cleaned the house stocked a few foodstuffs in the refrigerator."

  "Thank you."

  "I've made arrangements for a car to be delivered to you in the morning, as you requested."

  Kathryn folded her arms. Impatience was etched into every line of her body.

  "Good."

  Amos opened the door. The heat and the scent of the tropics swept in on a breath of salt-tinged air.

  "There is one last item..."

  She sighed, and he knew she was doing her best not to let him see that she could hardly wait for him to shut up and leave. It made his parting shot all the sweeter.

  "And what would that be, Amos?"

  "I don't suppose you've ever heard of jumbies or duppies, have you?"

  Kathryn looked at him as if he'd spoken in tongues.

  "Jumbies? Duppies? What are you talking about?"

  "Spirits, Miss Russell. Ghosts. Do you believe in them?"

  "No. Of course I don't."

  Amos smiled. "Good. In that case, it won't concern you that the locals claim that Charon's Crossing is haunted."

  He put on his Panama hat, tipped the brim, and shut the door after him.

  Chapter 3

  Catherine was here.

  And she was alone.

  Matthew had watched from the attic window as the old man who'd brought her to Charon's Crossing left the house. The old man had not returned, and now the day had drawn to a close.

  It was time to stop savoring the anticipation of revenge and take it.

  He could have settled the score many times already. While she'd strolled through the house. While she'd unpacked her luggage or when she'd dawdled among the books in the library, or made herself dinner in the kitchen. He could have simply reached out, put his hands around her slender throat, and ended it all with one quick twist.

  But there was such sweetness in the imagining.

  He had waited for this moment. He could wait a bit longer. There was no rush.

  Time had no meaning for him; the sun rose and set and he saw it do both but it was as if he watched a painter making brush strokes upon a canvas. What were the meanings of sunrise and sunset to a man who was dead?

  But Catherine was not dead. She was very much alive. How many times had he wished that she would return to this house? Wished? That was far too simple a word. He had yearned for her return, prayed for it...

  And his prayers had been answered. How she had come to be here was beyond his comprehension, but then, nothing that had happened to him since that last terrible night in the garden made any sense.

  Besides, what did it matter? She had come back, come to him and to Charon's Crossing. He could do with her as he pleased. And what he pleased, he thought with a cold smile, was to destroy her as she had once destroyed him.

  His life had been ended by Lord Waring's blade that warm June evening in 1812.

  But it was Catherine who had truly killed him.

  He knew just what would happen when he revealed himself to her. How her eyes would widen with terror. How she would try and deny his existence.

  Eventually, she would have to accept the truth.

  Oh, then she would plead for mercy! She would weep and beg to be saved from the damnation that had been his lot since she had betrayed him. She would promise him the moon and the stars, just as she had before. And they would be promises she never meant to keep and that would be as it had been before, too.

  Matthew smiled thinly. He would relish all of it. Her fear, her pleas. He would let her sob while he laughed and told her that there was no logic in asking compassion of one to whom she had showed such cruel duplicity.

  He would put his hands around her neck and press his thumbs into her flesh and squeeze and squeeze until her eyes, those beautiful, lying eyes, turned opaque and filled with death.

  Then, at last, he would be free.

  And that was why it was a moment worthy of delay. The slow anticipation was half the pleasure.

  That was why he'd been content to observe her as she walked through the house and familiarized herself with the things that had once been hers, though watching had given him a moment's pause.

  Time had lost all meaning for him so that he had not thought overly much about the condition of the mansion. But seeing Catherine's reactions to the dirt and the ruin, it struck him that many, many years must have gone by.

  How could that be, when she was still so young? Her hair was as he remembered it, black as midnight and shiny as silk. Her eyes were as blue and as unchanged as the sea. Everything about her was still beautiful.

  He puzzled over it, but not for long. One did not dwell on things for which there were no answers, for in that direction lay insanity. He had learned that the hard way, after he had fallen, dying, at Lord Waring's booted feet.

  After that, there had been only... Only what? How did a man identify something that was beyond definition? How could he describe the nothingness in which he'd found himself? The Sunday preachers of his childhood had warned of the afterlife that awaited sinners. Now he knew they'd been wrong. Yet, the fires of hell could have been no worse.
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br />   It was safer for his own sanity to remember only that he had eventually awakened and found himself adrift in a place where there was only darkness. There'd been no dimensions. No walls or windows, floors or ceilings.

  No escape.

  There was only blackness. Blackness—and, at length, his awareness that he was not completely alone.

  There was Something Else out there. He sensed a presence of some sort, not inside the blackness with him but just beyond it. It was not there all the time but when it was, he could hear the sounds it made. He could smell the stink of its evil and he knew instinctively that it searched for him.

  The Thing terrified him. Whenever he sensed its nearness, he curled up within himself, holding his breath until it was gone.

  But that reaction hadn't lasted long.

  Captain Matthew McDowell was a man who had never run away from anything while he was alive. Why should that change now?

  So he began to taunt the Thing, to tease it through the curtain of darkness that separated them. Luring it closer and closer became a game. A dangerous one, perhaps. But it was far better than hiding from it.

  He could sense the creature's growing frustration and it pleased him enormously. One day, or whatever passed for a day in this place, he laughed out loud at its rage.

  It roared. The air had begun to shimmer and a smell of decay and putrefaction rushed towards him.

  "I am done for," Matthew had thought, not just with calm but almost with satisfaction.

  Surely, there was another place to move on to, where one could spend eternity in peace?

  He had shut his eyes, in preparation for whatever lay ahead...

  When he'd opened them again, the darkness was gone. In its place was a white, curling mist.

  He found himself in a room, a very ordinary one filled with bits and pieces of what looked to be old furniture.

  "What is this place?" he whispered.

  There was an oval mirror on the wall. He went to it and stared at his reflection, then raised a trembling hand to his face. His features were the same as they had always been: the sun-shot chestnut hair drawn back in a queue from a high-cheekboned face, the fierce green eyes, the straight nose, cleft chin and firm mouth... it was all familiar, yet at the same time, alien.

  He turned from the mirror and went to the window. He took a deep breath, then pulled open the shutters.

  At first, the rush of fresh, sweet air and glimpse of bright blue sky brought a faint smile to his lips. But then he looked down, and his heart leaped into his throat.

  Below, just beyond a brick terrace, he could see a wrought-iron gate and a curved trellis, overgrown with lush pink roses.

  Bloody hell!

  He was in the attic of the house called Charon's Crossing.

  It was in the garden of Charon's Crossing that he had been killed.

  He sprang to the door and wrestled the knob, but it would not turn. He raised his fists and beat them against the wood panels until his knuckles were raw and bleeding, but the door would not give.

  "Let me out," he roared...

  And just that easily, he found himself on the door's far side.

  He lifted his hand, lay it against the door, and watched in horror as his fingers passed through the surface as if it were not there.

  God, oh God!

  He was a spirit. A ghost. A thing, doomed forever to walk the dark halls and gardens of the place that had been the scene of his betrayal and death but never to leave it, for he quickly found that the boundaries of Charon's Crossing were his boundaries, too.

  His anguish took the form of rage. People moved into Charon's Crossing, then moved out. No one appreciated the nighttime rattles or moans, though they were not always his.

  Sometimes, they were the sounds of the Thing on the other side of the darkness. It had apparently passed into this new dimension with him, though it could not penetrate whatever curtain it was that still separated them.

  The attic became Matthew's special place. There, among the spiderwebs and discards, no one disturbed him. He was able to find at least a modicum of peace.

  He could shut his eyes and let his mind float into something that, for want of a better name, he called sleep.

  At first, his sleep was peaceful. But then he began to dream, and the dreams changed everything.

  He dreamed of an island, lush and green beneath a hot tropical sun.

  He dreamed of Charon's Crossing, and of Catherine, smiling as he held her in his arms.

  He dreamed of a tall-masted ship upon an azure sea. He could read her name, Atropos, and he smiled, for she was his ship.

  But then his smile vanished, for the ship became a battered hulk sinking slowly into a dark sea, with her crew dead and dying on her shattered deck. He heard them crying out for him to help them but he could not, God, he could not!

  He sprang awake racked with anguish.

  "Why?" he whispered, and then his voice rose to a roar. "Why?" he shouted at his reflection in the oval mirror, and he pounded his fists against the glass.

  The glass shattered, the shards falling to the attic floor in a hundred bright, shiny pieces.

  Catherine had done this. She had destroyed him and everything he'd ever believed in.

  There was a roaring in his ears. The pieces of glass flew into the air like arrows and into the frame that had contained them.

  The mirror was whole again, and Matthew stared into it.

  "When will I be free?" he whispered.

  The mirror imploded and sucked him into a spinning vortex of light.

  He'd cried out, certain he was being swept away to some plane even more awful than the one in which he'd so long languished.

  Instead, he'd found himself in the rose garden, behind Charon's Crossing.

  Catherine was there, too. And even after everything, the sight of her made the breath catch in his throat.

  Like a starving man brought before a laden banquet table, he feasted on the sight of her. The soft, lush curves of her body were hidden beneath a demure cotton gown that buttoned to the neck. Her hair was plaited, giving her a look that was, he knew, falsely demure.

  The memory of how it felt to hold her in his arms had raced through his blood. Despite himself, he'd whispered her name and when she turned towards him he'd gone to her, taken her into his embrace and kissed that luscious, lying mouth until her protests had become sighs of pleasure.

  Matthew buried his head in his hands as he remembered that moment.

  If only he'd killed her then. Christ, why hadn't he? It would have been so simple.

  It was his disgrace that he had not done so. He'd been too caught up in tasting her, touching her. By the time he'd begun to regain his reason, a white mist had surrounded him. When it had cleared, he'd found himself back in the dreary attic, alone.

  Enraged, despising himself for his senseless stupidity, he'd pounded his fists against the unyielding walls.

  "Enough," he'd bellowed. "Damn you, let me out!"

  But, of course, no one had come.

  There was no jailer to hold him captive at Charon's Crossing. It was he and he alone who had sentenced himself to this eternal captivity just as it was he and he alone who could set himself free.

  In Catherine's death, he would find peace.

  Now, at last, the waiting was over. Catherine had come, and he would kill her.

  His torment would end at last.

  Matthew rose from the chair in which he'd been sitting. He walked slowly to the window and looked out. The sky was already beginning to lighten. It would be dawn soon.

  He closed his eyes and grasped the sill with both hands, drawing in great breaths of air, savoring the scents of far-off places lying far beyond this prison. Then he turned and made his way to the door.

  He slipped through it, a dark shade blending into the greater darkness of the silent house, and made his way down the narrow attic steps to the second floor. There would be no dramatic moans and rattles on this night.

 
He had no wish to warn Cat that he was on his way.

  At the doorway to her bedroom, he paused. The door was shut, and he thought of slipping through it without bothering to open it. But it somehow seemed important to come to her as if he were still of her world on this night. Slowly, he put his hand on the knob, and turned it.

  The door swung open on darkness. She must have drawn the velvet drapes that covered the windows. Had she thought to protect herself from the night? he wondered with a twisting smile.

  Darkness meant nothing to him. Still, he went to the windows, drew back the draperies, knowing in his heart that he was prolonging the moment until he would go to her.

  At last, he turned around.

  The cobwebs that had clung to the corners were gone, swept away by an old woman who had spent half her time cleaning the room and half of it making the sign of the cross.

  Matthew had found it amusing, though he had not done anything to frighten her. The house's reputation, and the icy draft that swept down the stairs from the attic, had done that all by themselves.

  But there was nothing frightening in this room.

  There was only Catherine, asleep in the big, four-poster bed.

  She lay on her back, with a pale pink blanket drawn to her chin. One hand lay palm up over the blanket's binding. The other was flung above her head, the fingers slender and lightly tanned against the white pillowcase.

  Her guilt should have made her repulsive but it didn't. Her beauty still made his throat constrict.

  He moved towards her slowly, his gaze sweeping over her. He felt a sudden painful hunger for the feel of her in his arms.

  He hated himself for it but he understood. Hell, he thought with grim humor, what man wouldn't be stirred by the sight of a beautiful woman after he'd been locked up alone for so long?

  He paused beside the bed and looked at her. His memory had played tricks on him, he could see that now. Catherine was even lovelier than he'd remembered. Her hair was more lustrous, her cheekbones more finely sculpted. And her mouth, that beautiful, lying mouth. He hid told her once that her lips were like the petals of the pink roses that grew at Charon's Crossing and that within them lay the nectar of the gods.

  Now he knew that to compare her lips to rose petals was to be overly generous to the flower, for surely none had ever been so perfect.