Always

by Jude Deveraux

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know you,” Jack said formally. “At least I don’t think I do. You see, I have lost my memory.”

  Darci had to keep from laughing with pleasure at Jack’s game. She’d been told that he was excellent as an undercover FBI agent, but she hadn’t guessed how good.

  “My darling,” Chrissy said, stroking Jack’s face. “My own true love. You don’t recognize me?”

  “No, but you’re very beautiful.”

  Chrissy’s face turned pink with pleasure. “I am Lavender Shay, and you asked me to marry you six months ago.”

  “Did you get married?” Darci asked.

  Lavender, in Chrissy’s body, turned eyes full of hatred onto Darci. “Who is this?” she hissed.

  “A relative,” Jack said quickly. “My sister. Don’t you remember her?”

  Lavender stepped back, looked at Darci for a moment, then glanced about the room. “I do not seem to remember any of this. Where are we? Why did you not return to me?”

  “I told you, I lost my memory,” Jack said, reaching out his hands to her. “Tell me where we live and when.”

  “When we live?” There was doubt in her voice. “You said you would love me forever but you didn’t. You don’t even remember me now. You have betrayed me yet again.” She was backing away from him, getting closer to the bookcase where Jack could see the outline of that Devlin. He was a mere blob now, as though he were listening so hard that he couldn’t be bothered to form himself into a shape.

  “I remember my love for you,” Jack said quickly.

  “The wedding,” Darci whispered. “Tell her of the wedding.” She’d tried to talk to Jack with her mind, but hadn’t been able to. With this spirit in a human body, the mind connection was broken.

  “What wedding?” Jack shot back as he said, “Your dress. Lace. I remember a lot of lace.”

  Lavender smiled at him, her eyes softening. “You must have peeked.”

  “It’s just that I know you so well. You were made to wear lace. Did you decide on the cake?”

  “No chocolate, you naughty boy,” Lavender said coquettishly, moving toward him again.

  “And what about our honeymoon?”

  She stopped walking. “You know that will have to wait as Father is so ill.”

  “Where? When?” Darci whispered.

  Lavender turned angry eyes on Darci. “Who are you? Why do you speak?”

  “She’s to be your bridesmaid, remember?” Jack said, his voice soothing. He extended his hands to take hers, but instead she flung her arms around his neck.

  “It’s been so long,” she said, her lips on his neck. “So very, very long. When you left Camwell I thought I would die.”

  “Camwell!” Darci said, in spite of her intention to be silent.

  “Darling,” Jack said, running his hands down the sides of her body, “please set a date for our wedding.”

  “But it is set,” she said suspiciously, pulling back to look at him.

  “I’m a man. How can I remember dates?” he said in such a charming way that she smiled at him.

  “The twelfth of June, of course. My birthday.”

  “And which year? This one or next?”

  “This one. 1843. You are a silly goose.” Pausing, she put her hand to her head. “Something is hurting me. I can’t think clearly. It’s after the twelfth, but we didn’t marry, did we? You weren’t there.”

  She was standing back now, out of reach of Jack. Quickly, she turned to Darci and her face distorted in rage. “You. You stopped him.”

  Only Jack’s quick reflexes kept Chrissy/Lavender from leaping onto Darci. In a replay of that morning, Darci once again had hands around her throat.

  Chapter Six

  “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?” JACK ASKED.

  Slowly, Darci turned her head. In a reversal of roles, she was now lying on J. Barrett Hallbrooke’s bed and Jack was holding a cold washcloth to her forehead.

  “You and your friends,” Darci said through a bruised throat. “Is she gone?”

  “Yeah. He…it…sent her back. I guess. I pulled Chrissy off of you, and she went limp for a while, but then she picked up her gloves and went back to cleaning. All in all, I think I’d rather get shot at than this.”

  Darci didn’t speak for a moment as she closed her eyes and tried to swallow.

  “I think we should get you to a doctor.”

  “No,” Darci whispered. “Where is she?”

  “He did something with her.” Jack didn’t turn but he nodded toward the bookcase and Devlin, who had shaped himself into a sleeping baby.

  “He’s put her asleep,” Darci said, moving to sit up in bed. “I think we need to try to find out who she is and why you missed the wedding. I hope you were killed and that you didn’t run off with some other woman. Maybe if we show that spirit evidence of your death she’ll forgive you.”

  “Evidence of my death,” Jack said. “We’ll show a ghost that I’m dead? Tell me, Darci Montgomery, do you live like this all the time?” He held the bedroom door open for her.

  “No, only since my husband and sister-in-law disappeared has my life been like this.”

  He wanted to ask her questions but her manner didn’t allow him to. Always, there was a kind of dignity about her that made him keep his distance.

  “That’s it,” Jack said, leaning back in his father’s leather office chair. He and Darci had just spent the last several hours on the Internet and on the telephone. It was after midnight now and they were both exhausted—but they’d found out what they wanted to know.

  “That poor girl,” Darci said, stretched out on the leather couch. On the coffee table were the remnants of the huge meal Jack’s relatives had prepared for them.

  It had taken a lot of digging and Darci had had to hex a couple of people into divulging some unlisted phone numbers, but they’d at last found Miss Lavender Shay.

  She had grown up in Camwell, Connecticut, in the 1840s, the only child of a rich businessman and his wife.

  Lavender had fallen in love with a boy she’d known all her life, a Mr. John Marshall the third, the only child of a rich, widowed landowner. As far as the town was concerned, it was the match of the century, and everyone had been looking forward to the festivities of their wedding.

  But on the day of her wedding, Lavender had put on her wedding dress, climbed the stairs to the roof of her house, and jumped off.

  The day of joy had turned into a day of mourning.

  Darci and Jack had read a single sentence about the suicide in a book about Connecticut ghosts, but could find nothing else anywhere. But after a call to the Camwell library—“You call,” Darci had said. “They’ll remember me”—they’d found out that the house where Lavender had lived and died was still there, as were some of her family’s descendants.

  Darci watched Jack use a seductive voice—while she used what she’d always called her True Persuasion—to get Lavender’s descendants to talk to him. Why? was what they wanted to know. Was Lavender being forced into the marriage? Was the groom a despicable person? Or had he jilted her? Maybe he’d been killed and Lavender couldn’t bear to live without him.

  “How the hell would I know?” a sleepy man said to Jack. “That old ghost story happened over a hundred and fifty years ago.”

  “Is there a town historian? Anyone who would know what happened?” Jack had asked the man, a descendant of Lavender’s family.

  “The only thing this town cares about are witches. Ever since that witch thing a few years back…you hear of that?”

  “Yeah,” Jack said, looking at Darci, who turned away. “I heard about it.”

  “Nobody here’s interested in a girl that threw herself off a roof a hundred years ago. People in this town only care about witches. Tourists come here wanting to see what’s left of the tunnels. And downtown now has three so-called witchcraft stores.”

  Darci was concentrating, trying to send a message to the man to reveal what he knew.

 
“Hey! Wait a minute!” the man said. “I just remembered that my wife told me something the other day. Let me ask her.”

  Jack put his hand over the phone, meaning to talk to Darci while he waited, but her eyes were glazed over with her concentration. Coming from down the hall were muffled sounds of struggle. That…“thing,” that Devlin, was holding Lavender’s spirit prisoner. If she were released, she’d go back to Jack.

  And the hatred would return, he thought. But now, for the first time in his life, he didn’t feel as though he were full of hate and anger. Now he felt like…well, maybe like he might settle down, have some kids. After he buried the hatchet with his old man, that is.

  His hand still over the phone, he looked at Darci. She was really quite pretty. Most of the women he knew weren’t exactly what you’d want to invite home to dinner, or out to the country club. Maybe if her husband was gone—

  “Stop it!” Darci said under her breath.

  “Thought you couldn’t read minds.”

  “Any female on earth can read a man’s mind.”

  Chuckling, Jack put the phone back to his ear and listened. The man gave him a phone number of a local high school student who’d been trying to put together a history of Camwell. “With no witches,” the man said, laughing. “The kid wants to sell the book to raise money for the school, but who’ll buy a book on this town with nothing about witches in it?”

  Jack thanked the man, then called the number even though it was after 10:00 P.M. He was rewarded with a young man who was eager to share what he’d found out. Forty minutes later, pages came through the fax machine.

  It was from a proposed book about the history of Camwell. The chapter he sent them was entitled “The Lavender Shay Mystery,” and Jack read it aloud. Basically, it said that no one had any idea why the young woman committed suicide. When her body was found, her fiancé had been waiting for her at the church.

  “Murder,” Jack said, putting down the paper. “My guess is that she was murdered.”

  “That makes sense. She was in love with you—John, that is—but was murdered before the wedding, so now she hangs around you and tries to kill any woman who gets near you.”

  “More than tries,” Jack whispered.

  Darci knew what he was thinking. Greg had told her of the young woman killed in the car wreck that had so injured Jack. Since Darci worked every second of her life to stamp down her own pain, she wanted to distract Jack from his. “But if Lavender was murdered, wouldn’t she attach herself to the murderer? And it was my impression that the woman we saw tonight wasn’t sane, so maybe she did kill herself.”

  “I’m sure that being a ghost for a hundred and fifty years would make anyone crazy,” Jack said.

  “Actually, it doesn’t. People stay the same.” She thought about the chapter the boy had written. He’d spent too much time on the beauty of the young Lavender, but it was clear that he also believed there had been foul play involved in the death. “If a high school kid thinks there was murder involved and we do, why didn’t they think of that back then?” Darci asked.

  “Because we’ve been bombarded with blood and gore all our lives. It comes naturally to us.”

  “Right. And the good ol’ days were free of mayhem. Can you think that after reading what happened to John Marshall? To you?”

  “He got married, then died when his house burned down.”

  “Poor man. I wonder if he pined over Lavender all his life. Here, hand me that paper and let me see what I can feel. Maybe—”

  “What’s that?” Jack asked.

  “Oh no!” Darci said, starting toward the door. “It’s a vacuum cleaner. I forgot to turn them off.”

  “Turn them—” Jack began, then grinned. “Mickey Mouse left the broom running.”

  “More or less,” Darci said sheepishly, as she ran from the room. When she returned, she said, “I got them settled and off to bed. I—” She paused to yawn.

  “I’ve had about all I can take in one day. You mind if I take that blue room upstairs?”

  “It’s not my house.”

  “Legally…” She broke off. “Where do you plan to sleep?”

  “In my father’s bedroom. In the master’s bed. King of the palace.” He lowered his voice. “You think you could get that…that thing to leave the room?”

  “Devlin? He has a mind of his own but I’ll see what I can do.” When she turned to leave, Jack halted her.

  “You have something in your hair,” he said. “I’ll get it out.” He ran his hand over her hair, then tripped over his feet just enough to bump into her. When she seemed to notice nothing, he gave her shoulder a pat and gently shoved her toward the door.

  “I don’t know when I’ve been so sleepy,” she said, yawning again.

  Smiling at her in a fatherly way, Jack closed the door behind her. Alone in the room, he reached into his shirtsleeve and withdrew the green cord. On the end of it was the key that Darci had worn around her neck.

  Smiling, he quietly opened the door and looked out into the dimly lit hallway. He’d liberally laced Darci’s drink with the same tranquilizers she’d used on him earlier.

  All evening he’d been biding his time. He hadn’t been the least interested in Darci’s boring old ghost story. Who cared if some Victorian chick jumped or was pushed off a roof?

  While it was true that he felt as though something dark and ugly had been removed from him, and it was true that some happy, homey little thoughts had been running through his mind, his basic nature hadn’t changed. Jack loved adventure, and he couldn’t stand an unsolved mystery.

  For him, the evening had been a study in self-control. All evening, he’d had to work to control his raging desire to explore that secret room of his father’s, to examine the four objects, and to further search for whatever else might be hidden in there. And he wanted to find out what his father was involved in. Did his staid, cold-hearted father have some underworld secrets?

  But, first and most, he wanted to open that box Darci had taken to her bedroom. Jack tiptoed upstairs to the blue bedroom. Darci should be sound asleep by now.

  Once inside the dark room, Jack stood still until his eyes adjusted. Mainly, he was interested in whether or not that blob that had been swirling about across the bookcase was gone. It seemed to be. Probably followed Darci off to bed, Jack thought.

  Now, where was that box? Ah, yes. On her bedside table.

  As he reached out to touch the box he could barely see, the light came on.

  Darci was on her side on the bed, her head propped on her hand. “Did you think I wouldn’t know you’d stolen my key? Now, would you please give it back to me?”

  For days, Jack had been sizing Darci up, and he knew she was a loner, like him. He only told about thirty percent of what he knew and he figured she only told about ten. It was his guess that she’d meant to open the box in private and if she had, he doubted that he’d ever find out what his father had been hiding.

  Jack had seen her paralyze people, but he knew she couldn’t work her witchcraft on him—when jealous little Lavender was around, that is. But that ghost was stuck in a prison somewhere, so right now maybe Darci could control Jack. Maybe she could stop him from opening the box.

  Everything happened in a split second. When the bedroom door flew open, and a cold gust of wind filled the room, Darci looked up. Jack grabbed the silver box and jammed the key into the hole as he took a flying leap at Darci. He meant to distract her from casting some spell that would prevent him from opening the box.

  But too many things happened at once. Lavender’s spirit had escaped just in time to see her beloved jump into bed with another woman, and the box opened while Jack, Darci, and Lavender were entangled with one another.

  When Darci felt herself falling down, down, down, and felt two other spirits, only one of which was in a human body, falling with her, she cried out, “Jack, what have you done?”

  Part Two

  1843

  Chapter Seven
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br />   AN ACRID SMELL FILLED DARCI’S NOSE AND WAS beginning to enter her brain. She turned her head away, trying to get away from the smell.

  “She’s coming around,” she heard a man say. “The smelling salts worked. Now, step back. Let her breathe.”

  Slowly opening her eyes, Darci took a moment to focus. At least six people she’d never seen before were looking down at her, all of them appearing to be anxious and worried. She blinked up at them, not understanding where she was or who they were. She tried to sit up but she couldn’t seem to get enough breath to move.

  “Out!” a woman said. “All the men must leave so we can loosen her stays.”

  Seconds later the men were gone and Darci felt hands lift her and begin unbuttoning the back of her dress. When they’d unbuttoned and untied her, she could breathe again.

  “Better?” asked a woman and Darci nodded.

  As she took several deep, slow breaths, she looked about her. She was in a room with tall ceilings and two tall, narrow windows encased in striped curtains. The wallpaper was blue with big brown pineapples on it. All the furniture was old-fashioned, heavy and dark.

  Darci turned to look at the three women hovering over her. Two were middle-aged, with the top of their hair parted in the middle and slicked down, with shiny, tight ringlets over their ears. They didn’t have on a speck of makeup and their eyebrows were unplucked.

  What made them even more strange-looking to Darci was that they weren’t surrounded by the colors of their auras. All her life, she’d seen people bathed in colors that changed with mood and personality. But these women had no colors surrounding them. It was frightening as Darci couldn’t read their moods, but it was calming at the same time. Without the ability to see auras, she didn’t have to worry who was angry or sad, or who was carrying some dark secret.

  Puzzled, she looked at the third woman. She was young—and beautiful. Drop-dead gorgeous beautiful. Supermodel. She had dark hair, full lips—and eyes a lovely purple.