Spirit Lost

by Nancy Thayer

  Spirit Lost is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2014 Ballantine Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1988 by Nancy Thayer

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer

  Excerpt from Nantucket Sisters by Nancy Thayer copyright © 2014 by Nancy Thayer

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Originally published in hardcover by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1988

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Nantucket Sisters by Nancy Thayer. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-553-39109-1

  Author photograph copyright © Jessica Hills Photography

  Cover design: Eileen Carey

  Cover image: © Moment Open/Getty Images

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  An Introduction from the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Afterword

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Nantucket Sisters

  An Introduction from the Author

  John Constable is a married man in love with another, younger, woman—a ghost who appears to him at night in the studio of his Nantucket house. His wife, Willy, has never seen the ghost. Is her husband going mad? Or is he unfaithful?

  When I first moved to Nantucket, I learned that many houses here have ghosts, and most people here believe in ghosts. I knew at once I wanted to write this novel, a love triangle tangled with allusions to what it’s like to be an artist—or a spouse.

  I’m delighted that my early novels are being made available to my readers as ebooks. My style has changed slightly, as the world has grown faster, but my subject, family life, remains as mysterious and fascinating to me now as it was in these early books: falling in love, raising children, friendships and betrayals and forgiveness.

  Looking back at all my books, I note one other consistency: most books are set somewhere near water. Stepping begins on an island in Finland where I lived for a few months. My other books take place in Vancouver, British Columbia on the Pacific Ocean, in Milwaukee on Lake Michigan, and finally on my beloved Nantucket. I’ve always found the blue immensity of water inspirational, and of course the storms and sunny beachside days provide wonderful settings and metaphors for novels.

  I hope you enjoy these early novels and discover some new friends there.

  Nancy Thayer

  Chapter One

  Ghosts and vampires were knocking at the wide front door of the old stone house in Cambridge.

  Willy opened the door of her friends’ house and looked out. A chilly gust of late-autumn wind flashed past her into the house, making her shiver in spite of her cashmere dress.

  It was six-thirty, but pitch black already, and here, where the house was set so far back, behind other houses, the streetlight did not reach. To get here, the children had to walk a narrow stretch of driveway and brick sidewalk between two high brick mansions where ivy flapped darkly and whispered in the wind. She was surprised that the children would brave these gloomy depths, even for candy.

  Anne and Mark had already turned off the porch lights, hoping to discourage any more trick-or-treaters. Earlier, their guests had all rushed into the hall, cocktails in hand, delighted by the novelty of the Halloween costumes, laughing and exclaiming and calling out clever things to the children, who looked back skeptically through their disguises, unimpressed, interested only in the loot. But now the party was established; people gathered in groups around the buffet table or the fire, engaged in their conversations, comfortable, no longer enchanted by the children.

  Anne and Mark, who had spent the first hour mixing drinks and passing hors d’oeuvres, were finally settled with the group near the fire. Anne, who was six months pregnant, had just put her feet up on the antique wood box that served as a coffee table when the knocking came. Willy had signaled to her friend that she would get the door.

  Now she put the boxes of Cracker Jacks that Anne had set on the hall table into the opened plastic bags held out by the ghosts and vampires. One ghost had a jacket on under his sheet, but the others were nearly shaking with the cold. Willy started to suggest they go home and get sweaters on. Then she saw a tall figure waiting out in the shadows, a parent accompanying the children, so she only smiled and said, “Happy Halloween,” before shutting the door.

  “Thank you,” the children said politely, but their faces showed signs of disappointment, and it occurred to Willy to wonder as she closed the door if these children had been hoping for something more from this tall, dark, old house hidden off the street, something more exciting than a nice woman saying nice things. Perhaps she should run around the front of the stone house and jump out at the children from the bushes, shrieking, giving them a good Halloween scare? But no, the parent would probably be furious, and besides, she was cold.

  She hurried back to the warmth of the living room and snuggled down on the floor close to the fire across from Anne, next to Elaine Flynn, the receptionist at the Blackstone Group. Elaine was telling a funny story about a lovely but dumb blonde who had modeled for the agency once for a kitchen-floor ad. Willy had heard the story before, and now she only vaguely listened to the conversation that had flowed on in her absence. She relaxed, letting the voices blur pleasantly into a kind of music that seemed to lilt and leap like the flames that flared and crackled along the log of applewood.

  Anne and Mark’s house looked wonderful tonight. It was a vast, high-ceilinged, shadowy old Victorian, perfectly suited to parties, to Halloween. Anne had decorated it for this occasion with bright bittersweet berries and Indian corn. Fat orange candles gleamed from the jagged grinning mouths of jack-o’-lanterns, throwing shadows that danced with those from the fireplace. Willy had helped Anne carve the pumpkins earlier that day; they had salted and roasted the pumpkin seeds, then munched on them as they worked in the kitchen, preparing the buffet dinner. Later, they set bowls of seeds out for the party. A creamy pumpkin soup sat warming in a silver chafing dish in the dining room along with a huge bowl of thick, hot chili, corn bread, and a green salad.

  How long would it be before she had another night like this, Willy mused, another day like this, leisurely chatting with Anne while they prepared for a party or just a dinner for the four of them, laughing, licking chocolate mousse off the beaters? Willy looked at her friend, then at the fire. Willy and John were moving away. To Nantucket. An island isolated from the mainland by thirty miles of Atlantic Ocean. Where they knew no one, had no friends. Where John would give himself over to his work.

  Willy felt Anne’s gaze on her, and she turned her head to see her friend’s sympathetic smile. Anne knew how Willy felt. Of course they would have other nights like this; Nantucket was not the moon. But the everyday ease of companionship would be gone. Already the intense intimacy of friendship had been broken, by both women: Anne was pregnant and would so
on be involved in her family, and Willy would go off with John. Willy did not regret these changes, yet she felt an ache of melancholy pass through her. Like all independent, self-sufficient people, once she let herself become attached to another person, she was devoted, loyal, and unswerving; she would not easily find a friend to replace Anne. But John was her husband, her first loyalty in life, and she would do anything for him.

  Now Anne bent forward, leaning over the lap of a man seated next to her on the sofa. “Willy!” she whispered, and made a face, and gestured with a sharp sideways motion of her head, widening her eyes in a silent message.

  Willy looked out into the hallway. John was leaning against the door into the dining room, drink in hand, grinning at the young woman who was slithering along the wall next to him, all slinky in a tight black jersey dress. Erica Hart, a young artist at the agency where John worked, had gone slightly punk tonight, her thick black hair slicked up and back and her slim body adorned with lots of clattering jewelry. She looked sensational.

  “Oh, Erica!” Willy laughed, whispering back. “Anne, she’s lovely, but don’t you know she’s just a little fool!”

  “I don’t think so, Willy,” Anne said, warning in her voice, but Willy would not be serious. Could not be serious about this, about Erica.

  Willy had never been given to easy jealousy in spite of the fact that John was more handsome a man than she was beautiful a woman. Willy went through her life with the kind of innate serenity that came, perhaps, from being an only child who had been adored by interesting, intelligent, loving parents. When those parents had died in a plane crash when she was a teenager, there was the comfort of a gentle godfather-guardian and, later, the inestimable solace of a great deal of money left to her from her family’s estate. She missed her parents, but their early love and attention had taught her to value herself, and so she quite early on became self-sufficient.

  And now that she was in her early thirties, she no longer even worried about her looks; she had long ago come to grips with all that. When she was sixteen, she reached her full height, nearly six feet, and she was a big-boned girl, powerful, even Amazonian. This could have caused her a great deal of misery, but her parents and later her guardian had the sense to send her to an all-girls prep school where she spent her youth quite happily riding her horse, playing tennis, skiing and sailing and charging in a kilt across the hockey field. By the time she started college, she had learned that if she could not ever look cute or even pretty, she could certainly look handsome and elegant and regal, and she hadn’t been surprised when men fell in love with her.

  She had been surprised when John fell in love with her, but only because she was so amazingly in love with him; they had both been astonished in the way that people are when something seems so absolutely right that it almost implies a pattern in the universe. They had been married for eight years now, a happy marriage that they both lived in as if in a safe and roomy house.

  And now there was this move they were making, together, which had caused a renaissance of passion and commitment in their marriage.

  So she couldn’t be bothered with worrying about Erica flirting with John—that would be like an airplane worrying about a gnat. It was more than Willy’s natural indolence here; it was, for the moment, a sense of complete security.

  “You are so brave,” Erica was saying to John. “You are so brave I like can’t believe it.”

  John smiled, amused but still slightly flattered. Not by Erica’s seductive attempts—she was a gorgeous girl but had been trying to get into bed with John for so long he was almost bored by it—but by her understanding of the courage it was taking to make this move. Erica wasn’t as stupid as she could sometimes look or sound; she was only very young. She had joined the ad agency just a year ago and was a quick learner and a good craftsman. Like John, she had wanted to be a serious artist but had to make a living and, like John, found every day she spent at the agency a compromise in life.

  When John had asked Willy to marry him, he had not known about her family’s money. Strange how the presence of that money had been a burden to him, for if she had been poor, he would not have hesitated to ask her to live in poverty with him, even to work at some boring job to support them, so that he could spend a few years seriously trying to be an artist. He had been told by many people, college professors, art critics, that if he would just keep at it, he had the stuff to be a first-rate artist. But because Willy had all that money, he felt he had to prove that he didn’t need to live off that money, his wife’s money—it was a cliché that he could not live with at the time. So he had gone to work for the ad agency and had spent years turning out careful drawings that made microwave ovens look like the Holy Grail. In some convoluted way, this made him feel he was showing his love for Willy.

  But they had gone past all that now in their marriage and knew how completely they were bound. Suddenly his proud decision had seemed a foolish one—or perhaps it was just that the time was right, now, for him to try to get serious about his work.

  He had come home one night in the spring and told Willy he wanted to quit his job, that he wanted to spend a few years at his art. Willy had been completely supportive; more, she had been thrilled. They had spent excited nights sitting up late, talking, brandies in their hands, planning, scheming, dreaming. They had discussed John’s desires and needs and how to fulfill them and how Willy could keep happy during the enormous change.

  They had been pleased with each other for coming to the agreement that it was all right to live off Willy’s money for a good five years—what else, as Willy said, was money for? John loved Willy for her easy, generous commitment to him; Willy loved John for his ability to agree to use the money, for his lack of any stupid machismo that would have kept him stuck at his job and made them both miserable.

  John wanted to move, away from Cambridge and Boston and the ad agency and their friends, away from everyone who knew and judged him in all the slight and oblique ways that people judge. He didn’t even want to see the people he knew from passing them on his jogging route, who after so many months would nod hello or ask if he’d been sick, they hadn’t seen him jogging lately. He wanted freedom from everyone’s opinion and a complete break from the pressured, active, glittery world he had made his own, a world of commerce and hype and pretense and parties and innuendo and slickness. He wanted a major change, a physical move that would symbolize the finality and significance of his decision.

  All spring and summer they had made weekend trips to Nantucket, where Willy had vacationed as a child, to Maine, to certain artistic spots in the New England countryside, looking for the perfect place for John to work, a territory and a house that would feel right. They settled on Nantucket because it was so far from the mainland, so cut off, literally, by thirty miles of ocean, from the world they knew. They had bought a wonderful old house filled with atmosphere—and they would be moving there this week.

  During these past few months, their marriage, which had always been strong, became, once again, after eight years, exciting. Willy and John had gotten comfortable with each other, companions; with the move, they became best friends, conspirators, caught up in a secret that linked them against the world, and they became obsessed with each other, with their plans, their bravery. For months they went through the day as they had when they first met and married, counting the minutes until they were with each other, needing the other as much as they needed air, feeling complete, alive, safe, happy, only when they were together. It was not the sort of mood a marriage could sustain for a long period of time; it was too intense. But it would carry them along a while more, until they were established in their new home.

  So pretty Erica, who was rubbing along the wall, closing in on John, wasn’t any kind of threat at all to Willy.

  Not that she could ever have been. A few years ago, when in the doldrums of his career, making a lot of money for what he knew was mediocre work, painstakingly doing line drawings of refrigerators, John might have
been more grateful for Erica’s flirtations. Oh, he wouldn’t have done anything; he didn’t want anyone but Willy and, for all the world, would never have done anything to hurt Willy.

  But in his heart he knew he might have liked to see how Willy would react, to see if she would have been shaken up a little.

  “So like I’m thinking maybe I should leave the agency, too,” Erica was saying now, “see if I can, you know, be a serious painter. You know, you really like inspire me.”

  John looked over Erica’s thick black hair, which tonight was combed rooster fashion up and backward, making her look both ridiculous and sensational. He caught Willy looking at him from where she sat curled on the living room floor, her back to the fire. She grinned at John, obviously amused. He grinned back. They were cohorts.

  But a few years ago he might have found that grin of Willy’s insulting. He certainly would have found it frustrating. If the truth were known, many things about Willy frustrated him, many things that were all part of the same thing: Willy’s incredible ease in the world.

  He didn’t wish his wife ill, but he often did wish that she had some idea of what it was like to have to struggle for something, to have to fight a bit to get what she wanted. She was so serene. Things came to her so easily. There was all that money she had, and there was her embroidery work.

  Willy designed and embroidered tablecloths and matching napkins, bedspreads, curtains, baby clothes, cotton blouses, negligees, in a variety of styles ranging from floral to art deco, but always vividly colored, with a splendid and unusual mixture that only Willy would think to put together. What she made sold for a fortune in the few select Boston shops, but Willy worked too slowly and painstakingly to make a living from her craft. And she did only what she wanted to do, when she felt like it, for she didn’t need to make a living. She didn’t need to compromise or skimp or rush; she did only what she wanted, and not two pieces of her work were exactly alike.