The Man from Shadow Valley

by Regan Forest

  “I just...I just keep to myself is all. Busy, you know.” Ellen thought, When you’ve been in this town a little longer, you’ll understand. We live on different sides of the tracks. But the truth was, it didn’t matter where he lived, or what he did. The man lived in Shadow Valley and she refused to risk forming any ties here. Somewhere far from this dreary place a real life awaited her.

  Cody Laird was not a man to be put off easily, not when he so strongly sensed ambivalence in her mind. He was used to admiring glances from females, but this girl was different. Since he had first seen her, he had been oddly absorbed, if not mildly tormented, with the notion of getting to know her.

  He waited, but only until he had finished his meal.

  “I’ll have more coffee, and pie,” he said.

  Ellen shifted with the strain of being so near him. It was awful remembering the loneliness that had fallen over her when she woke this morning and he was gone.

  “What kind of pie?”

  “Any kind. No, not chocolate. I hate chocolate pie.”

  “Cherry?”

  “Naw. Too sweet.”

  “Banana?”

  He shook his head.

  “I thought you said any kind.”

  “Any kind except those.”

  “We have apple.”

  “No...”

  She tried, and could not suppress a smile. “Mr. Laird, what do you want?”

  “To have lunch with you tomorrow, since you declined dinner. Hey, a lunch is lighthearted enough, isn’t it? If you’d meet me at the Silver Nugget, we could just sit at a quiet table and talk. Maybe you could tell me about your design school and I could tell you why I bought the Shadow Valley radio station. Just conversation. Okay? I’m a nice guy, Ellen. I won’t lead you down any dark paths.”

  Won’t you? You already have! The dream vibrated the very air between them—as close as the hands that had held hers in a haunted mansion. In her dream he was leading her away from danger. Ellen desperately wanted to know why. Her head spun with questions. If she kept her distance, there would never be answers.

  “All right,” she agreed. “I’ll meet you for lunch tomorrow.”

  A massive sigh rocked his wide shoulders. “Great. Twelve o’clock?”

  She nodded, feeling as giddy as a kid with a first date.

  His eyes met hers in the speckled light of rustic ceiling fixtures—eyes more blue than before. A sweet, crooked smile formed on his lips. “I’ll have the apple.”

  “What?”

  “Pie.”

  “Oh, pie.” She laughed self-consciously. “You’ve made a decision.”

  “You have, too. The right one. And I thank you.”

  It was his way of telling her he knew her answer hadn’t been easily given. Ellen flushed. Only she could make such a big deal out of a simple lunch date. It was just that firm, locked-in agreement with herself. So many people knew about her determination to be a hermit that they didn’t even bother to ask her out anymore. Only a stranger would. A stranger who couldn’t know they had been together before.

  Ellen began to wonder how Jeff Calhoun knew Cody Laird. Wasn’t it possible that his wife might know him, too? Maybe she ought to ask Meredith. Tonight was their scheduled secret meeting—her and Meredith’s. She began to hope Meredith wouldn’t call it off because of some conflict with her schedule or her husband’s—he often worked nights.

  Meredith Calhoun phoned the café not two hours later and disguised her voice even though Ellen answered. She always changed her voice, using a different disguise each time.

  “It’s me. Can you come by tonight?”

  “Sure.” Ellen smiled. Meredith could always make her smile when she played the game of intrigue they had begun as children. They enjoyed it too much to ever reach the point of wanting to put aside the past forever.

  The voice, disguised with some unidentifiable foreign accent, replied, “Good. Usual time, then. Summer place.”

  “Right.”

  “Till then.” The accent had become a raspy whisper.

  Ellen grinned as she put down the phone. The secrecy had begun out of necessity years ago, when she and Meredith were ten. They didn’t like to admit the secrecy was still necessary, but, in actuality, it was, for the secret was their friendship.

  Ellen thought back on the beginning of that friendship while she made her way across town in the darkness of a moonless night. Meredith’s name had been Lockwood then; she was the only child of the bank president and the town’s leading socialite. The daughter of the town’s most prominent family was not allowed to have anything to do with a kid from Pebble Street.

  But Meredith did find her way down to Pebble Street where the kids all had puppies and kittens. She had been enthralled by Ellen’s pet mouse that rode around on her shoulder. Meredith wanted one, too—a most unthinkable thing for a Lockwood.

  The family’s horror at the budding friendship, and their determination to keep them apart, only encouraged the girls and elevated their friendship to a “high-secret intrigue-adventure.” Their bond strengthened through the years. After Meredith returned home from finishing school, the secrecy continued because Ellen would have it no other way. Even today, the two had never been seen together in Shadow Valley.

  The Lockwood family had been horrified when their daughter married a lowly veterinarian, but Ellen wasn’t surprised. She knew a side to Meredith no one else knew; with her love for animals, Jeff was a perfect choice. Meredith swore that even Jeff didn’t know about their friendship, but Ellen suspected he did know.

  The back porch light cast a glow over the lawn—enough to see the outline of the tree house, their “summer place.” The log tree-house had been there when Jeff and Meredith bought the old frame house and they had left it as it was, with the shingled roof and worn linoleum floor. In the shadows of giant trees, eerie in the moonlight, Ellen made her way up the ladder, knocking three times on the “trap door”—their time-honored signal.

  Meredith knocked back and opened the rope-handled hatch. Feeling her way, Ellen climbed in, and as soon as the hatch was closed, Meredith turned on her flashlight. A tiny woman with short auburn hair and green eyes, she gave her friend a quick hug and motioned for Ellen to sit down on one of the two pillows she had brought up earlier. They sat close together in the small space, facing each other.

  “I’ve missed you,” Meredith said, handing Ellen a cola.

  “I’ve missed you, too.” She snapped open the can. “What have you been up to all summer?”

  “Helping Jeff. He’s trying to open a new office in Boville and train a technician to run it, so he won’t have to go over there so much except for emergencies. I’ve been scouting for office space—that sort of thing.” She set down her can of cola and reached for Ellen’s hand, squeezing hard. “What’s happening with you? Aren’t you about finished with your design course?”

  “Just about. That and work are my life.” Ellen rested her back on the rough wall of the tree house. “Well, almost. I had a strange experience. I don’t know what it means, but I have to tell someone and you’re the only one I can tell. Besides, there’s a chance you might know him.”

  “Him?” Meredith straightened. “Him who?”

  “A guy who bought the radio station. He was in the café with Jeff. They seemed to be friends. Do you know him?”

  “No...although Jeff and I have talked about the radio station being under new ownership and the changes going on there. Jeff said he knew the owner, but Jeff knows everybody five minutes after they arrive in town.”

  “I wonder why,” Ellen said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why Jeff knows him. Maybe he has a pet. A dog. He’s more the dog type than the cat type, I think—”

  Meredith interrupted with a hand on her shoulder. “Ellen, what are you going on about this guy for? What happened?”

  “He asked me out and cajoled me into saying yes.”

  “Well! That beats all! I thought you had a rule.
A stupid rule, but a rule nonetheless. I’ve never heard you talk about a guy before, either, since about tenth grade. What gives?”

  “I don’t know if you’ll believe it. I hardly do myself. The truth is, I had a dream about this guy the night before he came into the café. Isn’t that weird? And then after I saw him, I dreamed about him again, and back he came again yesterday.”

  Meredith was hugging her knees. She said in a flat tone of disbelief, “You dreamed about a guy before you met him.”

  “Crazy but true. We were in the Whitfield mansion, and the ghost was there. I seemed to belong there. We both belonged there, and yet we didn’t. I couldn’t believe it when the very same guy walked into the café!”

  “Wait, wait, wait! You dreamed about the mansion? A guy in the mansion! Omigod! It’s like the prediction of long ago!”

  Ellen’s stomach went weak. “What prediction?”

  “Mine! My prediction about you and the mansion. Remember? You were so obsessed with the place and I had my new Tarot deck that predicted you would be queen of that mansion and there would be a handsome king.”

  “Good grief, Mere. We were making it up. You didn’t even know how to use the cards yet.”

  “I wasn’t making it up. I was following the instruction book. It was there.”

  “We were children then. They were all childhood fantasies.”

  Meredith seemed quite unnerved. “But you had the dream. And then the guy...who walked in and asked you to dinner, even though he didn’t know you. Or did he? Know you?”

  “No, of course not. He’s a stranger in Shadow Valley.”

  Silence filled the dark tree house. At last Meredith drew in her breath. “It’s a sign! Some kind of sign. Or maybe a warning. Tell me about the dream. Was it scary...with the ghost? Details. I want details!”

  Meredith knew about warning signs. Ellen rationalized Meredith’s second sight by calling it superstition, and it was superstition, to be sure. But it was more. Meredith had hung around the gypsy woman when she was a kid, always fascinated by the gypsy’s strange powers. Meredith herself was soon trying to communicate with spirits of the dead and tell fortunes by cards and tea leaves. She was the only person with whom Ellen shared her sighting of the ghost of Whitfield mansion, because as a child she’d considered Mere an expert on such things.

  “The details?” Meredith demanded again.

  Ellen had relived the dream a hundred times. “The mansion wasn’t run-down. It was gilded and magnificent. He appeared on the stairway and held out his hand to me but I was afraid because the ghost was in the house. I drew back because of the awful sounds in the house, and he disappeared when I resisted.”

  Meredith processed this information like a scientist gathering data in a lab. “Hmm. And the second dream?”

  “In the second—after I had met him—dust and cobwebs filled the mansion, as if no one had been there for a long time. He was inside and called out my name. He said he had been waiting for me and wanted me to come with him—again. We walked around inside and the ghost was following us and we ran...and I woke up.”

  “This is no coincidence, Ellen. It can’t be. Something about that mansion has always haunted you.”

  “He haunts me, too—just his voice on the radio.”

  “You mean the new voice? No guy could look like that one sounds. Even in a dream.”

  “He could, believe me.”

  “Omigod! And you’ve broken your resolve—your blood oath—not to date anybody in Shadow Valley. We have to get to the bottom of this dream phenomenon.”

  “I’ve never met anyone like him,” Ellen admitted. “He makes me feel all these strange...things....”

  Meredith opened a second cola. “I don’t know about this, Ellen. You’re starting to sound human. The first thing you know, you’re going to be discovering all kinds of things you’ve denied yourself.”

  A picture formed in Ellen’s mind of herself and Cody Laird sitting across the table from each other. She savored the image more than she wished to. “There isn’t time for discovering anything, even if I wanted to. I’m working on my last assignment, then I’ll get my diploma.”

  “Something strange is going on here,” Meredith said. “A stranger in your old mansion beckoning you from the dreamscape...and the mansion covered in cobwebs is symbolic of your not having thought about it for a long time.”

  “One grows up,” Ellen said.

  “Not always. Our friendship is the same secret liaison as before. Dreams don’t have to grow up, do they?”

  Ellen nodded, trying to remember the exact point in her life when she stopped going to the mansion—it wasn’t long after she and Meredith had stopped going there together.

  “I’m going to ask Jeff about the new owner of the radio station and see what I can find out about him. This is all very eerie. How can you be so calm about it?”

  “I’m not calm. I’m trying to act calm. I wanted to just run from it, Mere, not get to know this guy because it scares me. But he wouldn’t let me get away with that. I found I couldn’t say no to him.”

  Lights shone in the driveway, announcing Jeff’s arrival. “Yikes, he’s early,” Meredith said. “I’d better get myself down out of this tree house.” She took her friend’s hand. “Something is going to happen at that lunch. I can feel it.”

  This frightened Ellen, because Meredith was never wrong about her psychic impressions. She asked, “Is it good or bad?”

  “I can’t tell. I can just feel an intensity. A tremendous intensity. Something strange.”

  “Fine. Thanks a lot.” Ellen was on the ladder. Now that her eyes were used to the darkness, she didn’t need a flashlight. The moonlight was enough.

  “You’ve got to let me know what happens at lunch,” Meredith said, following right behind her.

  4

  WHAT TO WEAR WASN’T a problem, except for deciding. She stood in the open doorway of her closet, eyeing the choices.

  What to wear. The Silver Nugget, located on the lower floor of the hotel, was the only truly nice restaurant in Shadow Valley. Ellen had never set foot in the place. During the three years of her design course, she had completed several dozen outfits of all styles and fabrics and never worn any of them. They were the clothes of her portfolio. Saved for New York.

  This might be interesting, after all, she thought. A chance to wear one of her high-fashion designs. A chance to eat in a place where manners would count. After all those memorized books on etiquette, it would be refreshing to jump the gun on New York, and step out of the drab and faceless role she was born into. With far and away the best-looking guy in the whole town! Plenty of eyes would be on them. Eyes of the social register, ogling.

  She took out a white linen summer suit and a paisley silk scarf cut from a dress imported from Paris decades ago. Owners of thrift shops usually didn’t recognize superexpensive fabric in outdated clothes.

  People rarely looked beyond the obvious. Her room, for instance, would have been a surprise to anyone viewing the dilapidated house from outside. Flower-patterned wallpaper in tones of pink and mint green covered the wall cracks. The old furniture and a glass-front cabinet were painted white. Lace curtains, purchased from Goodwill and hand-washed monthly, hung at the windows, and leafy potted plants were placed where the morning sun could touch them. On a table fashioned from an old door was her grandmother’s sewing machine. Clothing patterns and a few fashion magazines were stacked neatly on a shelf. Three unmatched throw rugs covered the worn wood floor.

  She glanced in the mirror, wondering whether or not to change her hair. “Eyelash curler,” she reminded her reflection. For months it had been on her “should have” list. Today was the occasion to splurge.

  She found her grandfather pulling weeds from his flower beds in the front yard. Theirs was the only tended yard within view; Emory Montrose had a special knack for gardening. In summer he picked his own fresh flowers for their breakfast table. “I have a short errand in town, Gramps. Anything
you need?”

  “Tobacco,” the old man replied without looking up.

  It was an eight-minute walk into town. This morning the sun was shining in a cloudless sky. Normally, she would be bent over the sewing machine or studying her books, but it was not like other mornings. Her mind was adrift in memories from a dream—air-drawn mirages. Even Meredith’s impressions and warnings weren’t going to get her down.

  Mr. Post, owner of the drugstore, always had a smile for her. “Morning, Ellen. Fine day.”

  “Good morning.”

  He said, “The new Vogue is here. I’ve promised the copies to Mrs. Stewardham, but if you want to look it over, she’ll never know the difference.”

  “Thanks, I will.” The magazine was probably not promised at all, but Mr. Post knew she couldn’t afford to buy it. He had been allowing her to look through the magazines for years and never mentioned to anyone that he did so.

  A belted jersey dress caught her eye. On her sketch pad, she quickly, expertly, copied the design to study later, grateful no other customers were in the store. Setting the magazine back with care, she purchased an eyelash curler—the first she had ever owned—and her grandfather’s favorite brand of tobacco.

  Back in the privacy of her room, she tried the curler, blinking, pleased at the results. She pulled her blond hair away from her face and put on her grandmother’s antique pearl earrings, and took longer than usual with her nails.

  She held out her hands and blew on the light pink polish, wondering what it could be about an old mining town hunkered between mountain peaks that attracted a man like Cody Laird.

  “Or for that matter,” she asked her reflection, “what about me attracts him?”

  * * *

  SHE ENTERED THE HOTEL at exactly twelve o’clock, thinking he would already be seated in the restaurant. Instead, he was waiting for her in the plush lobby and was on his feet the moment she passed through the carved double doors. He came toward her wearing dark slacks and a sports jacket and a smile. And a tie. A date with a man wearing a tie? It was a day of firsts.