The Shape of Night

by Tess Gerritsen

  My murder too, could just as easily have been overlooked. I’m the crazy tenant who saw ghosts in her house, who had a bin full of empty wine bottles in her kitchen. A woman who just might stagger up to the widow’s walk one night and tumble over the railing. The townsfolk would shake their collective heads about the unfortunate death of a boozy outsider. The curse of Captain Brodie strikes again, they’d think.

  I hear more visitors spill into the room and there’s a fresh round of “Hi, darlin’!” and “You look so much better today!” But I lie alone on my side of the curtain, staring out the window, where raindrops tip-tap on the glass. The doctors say that I can leave the hospital tomorrow, but where will I go?

  I only know I will not return to Brodie’s Watch, because there is something in that house, something that both terrifies me and also draws me in. Something that was captured on camera the night the ghost hunters were there, something that moved in to engulf me as I slept. But now I wonder about the shadow that slithered toward me across my bedroom. Perhaps it was there not to attack me, but to protect me from the real monster in my house: not a ghost, not a demon, but a live man who had already killed one girl in the turret.

  The door whooshes open and shut again, admitting yet more visitors for my popular roommate. I watch the rain spatter the window and think about what happens next. Home to Boston. Finish the manuscript. Stop drinking.

  And Lucy. What do I do about Lucy?

  “Ava?”

  The voice is so soft I almost don’t hear her through the chatter of my roommate’s visitors. Even as I register the voice, I can’t believe it’s real. She is just another ghost, someone I’ve conjured up, as I once conjured up the ghost of Captain Brodie.

  But when I turn to look, there is my sister stepping past the bed curtain. In the gray light through the window, her face is sallow, her eyes sunken with fatigue. Her blouse is wrinkled and her long hair, which is usually swept back into a tidy ponytail, tumbles windblown and tangled to her shoulders. Yet she is beautiful. My sister will always be beautiful.

  “You’re here,” I murmur in wonder. “You’re really here.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “But why—how did you know?”

  “I got a call this morning from some man named Ned Haskell. He said he’s a friend of yours. When he told me what happened to you, I jumped right in the car and just kept driving.”

  Of course it would be Ned who called her. During his visit yesterday, he’d asked me where my family was, and I’d told him about Lucy. My cleverer, kinder older sister. “Don’t you think she should be here?” he’d asked.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were in the hospital?” Lucy demands. “Why did I have to hear about it from a complete stranger?”

  I have no good answer. She sits down on my bed and takes my uninjured hand and I squeeze it so hard that my knuckles turn white. I’m afraid to let go, afraid that she will dissolve like Brodie, but her hand remains as solid as ever. It’s the same hand that held mine on my first day of school, the hand that braided my hair and brushed away my tears and high-fived me when I landed my first job. The hand of the person I love most in the world.

  “You have to let me help you, Ava. Please let me help you. Whatever the problem is, whatever’s bothering you, you can tell me.”

  I blink away tears. “I know.”

  “Be honest with me. Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what I did to turn you away from me.”

  “What you did?” I look at her tired, perplexed face and I think: Here is yet another way I’ve harmed her. Not only did she lose Nick, she thinks she lost me, as well.

  “Tell me the truth,” she pleads. “What did I do wrong? What did I say?”

  I think of how the truth would destroy her. Confession might help me heal, might relieve me of this overwhelming burden of guilt, but it must be my burden alone. When you love someone as much as I love her, the ultimate gift I can bestow is ignorance. Captain Brodie has forced me to face my guilt, to atone for my sins. Now it’s time for me to forgive myself.

  “The truth, Lucy, is that…”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s my fault, not yours. I’ve been trying to hide it from you, because I’m ashamed.” I wipe my face but I can’t keep up with the tears that keep trickling down and soaking my hospital gown. “I’ve been drinking too much. And I’ve ruined everything,” I sob. The answer is both honest and incomplete, but there is enough truth in it to make her nod in recognition.

  “Oh, Ava. I’ve known about it for a long, long time.” She wraps her arms around me and I inhale the familiar Lucy scents of Dove soap and kindness. “But we can do something about it, now that you’re ready to let me help. We’re going to work on this together, the way we always do. And we’re going to get through this.” She pulls back to look at me, and for the first time since Nick died, I can look her in the eye. I can hold her gaze and also hide the truth, because that is what you sometimes have to do when you love someone.

  She brushes a strand of hair off my face and smiles. “Tomorrow, I’ll get you out of here. And we’ll go home.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Unless you have a good reason to stay in Tucker Cove?”

  I shake my head. “I have no reason at all to stay,” I tell her. “And I am never, ever coming back.”

  Thirty-One

  One year later

  A widow and her two children now live in Brodie’s Watch. Rebecca Ellis bought the house in March, and already she has put in a vegetable garden and built a stone patio that faces the ocean. All this I learned from Donna Branca when I called her three weeks ago, to find out if the house is available to be photographed. My new book The Captain’s Table is scheduled for publication next July, and because the book is as much about the place as it is about the food, Simon wants to include photos of me at Brodie’s Watch. I told him I didn’t want to return, but he insisted these photos are necessary.

  Which is why I now find myself riding in a white van with a photographer and a stylist, headed back to the house I fled a year ago.

  Donna told me that the family’s been happy living in their new home, and Rebecca Ellis has had no complaints whatsoever. Perhaps the captain’s ghost has finally departed. Or perhaps he was never there in the first place, except as a figment of my imagination, conjured up by shame and guilt and far too many bottles of booze. I have not had a drink since I left Tucker Cove, and the nightmares are less and less frequent, but I am still nervous about returning to Brodie’s Watch.

  Our van climbs the driveway and all at once, there it is looming above us, the house that still casts a long shadow over my dreams.

  “Wow, what a gorgeous place,” says Mark the photographer. “We’ll get some great shots here.”

  “And look at those huge sunflowers in the garden!” pipes up our stylist Nicole from the backseat. “Should we ask the new owner if I can cut a few for the photos? What do you think, Ava?”

  “I’ve never met the new owner,” I tell her. “She bought the house months after I left. But we can always ask.”

  The three of us climb out of the van, stretching away the kinks that have settled in during the long drive from Boston. Unlike the misty afternoon when I first beheld Brodie’s Watch, today is bright and summery, and in the garden, bees buzz and a hummingbird swoops past on its way to a mound of sweet pink phlox. Rebecca has transformed what was once a front yard of weedy shrubs into floral drifts of yellow and pink and lavender. This is not the forbidding Brodie’s Watch that I remember; this house beckons us to step inside.

  A smiling brunette emerges from the house to greet us. Dressed in blue jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with MAINE ORGANIC FARMERS, she looks like just the sort of back-to-earth woman who’d plant exuberant gardens and happily dig in the peat and manure all by herself.

  “Hello, glad you all made it!”
she calls out, coming down the porch steps to greet us. “I’m Rebecca. Are you Ava?” she asks, looking at me.

  “I am.” I shake her hand and introduce Nicole and Mark. “Thank you so much for letting us invade your house.”

  “I’m pretty excited about this, actually! Donna Branca told me these photos will be in your new book. I think that’s pretty cool, having my house featured.” She waves us toward the front door. “My kids are spending the day at a friend’s house, so you won’t have them underfoot. The house is all yours.”

  “Before I bring in the gear, I’d like to walk through it first,” says Mark. “Take a look at the light.”

  “Oh, of course. It’s always about the light for you photographers, isn’t it?”

  Mark and Nicole follow the owner through the front door, but I pause for a moment on the porch, not yet ready to enter. As their voices fade away into the house, I listen to tree branches rattling in the wind and the distant whoosh of waves on the rocks, sounds that instantly bring back last summer, when I lived here. Only now do I realize how much I have missed those sounds. I miss waking up to the crash of the waves. I miss my picnics on the beach and the scent of roses on the cliff path. When I wake up in my Boston apartment, I hear traffic and I smell exhaust, and when I step outside, instead of moss, I see concrete. I look at the open front door and think: Perhaps I should never have left you.

  At last I step inside and take a deep breath. Rebecca has been baking and the air smells like fresh bread and cinnamon. Following the voices, I head down the hall to the sea room, where Mark and Nicole stand at the windows, transfixed by the view.

  “Why on earth did you ever leave this place, Ava?” Nicole asks. “If this were my house, I think I’d spend every day right here, looking at the sea.”

  “It’s nice, isn’t it?” says Rebecca. “But wait till you see the turret. Now there’s a view.” She turns to me. “I heard it was in pretty rough shape when you moved in.”

  I nod. “For the first few weeks, I had two carpenters hammering upstairs.” I smile, thinking about Ned Haskell, whose wooden carving of a sparrow wearing spectacles and a chef’s hat now adorns my desk in Boston. Of all the people I met in Tucker Cove, he is the only one who regularly writes to me, and whom I now consider a friend. People are complicated, Ava. What you see isn’t always what you get, he’d once said. Words that were never truer than about Ned himself.

  “They’d have to drag me kicking and screaming out of this house,” says Nicole, still entranced by the view. “You never thought about buying it, Ava?”

  “It was out of my price range. And there were things about the house that…” My voice fades. Quietly I say, “It was just time for me to move on.”

  “Can you show us the rest of the house?” Mark asks Rebecca.

  As they troop up the stairs, I don’t follow them, but remain at the window, gazing out to sea. I think of the lonely nights when I’d stumble up those same stairs to my bedroom, drunk on wine and regret. The nights when the scent of the sea would herald Captain Brodie’s arrival. When I needed him most, there he was. Even now, when I close my eyes, I can feel his breath in my hair and the weight of his body on mine.

  “I heard what happened to you, Ava.”

  With a start, I turn to see Rebecca has returned and is standing behind me. Mark and Nicole have gone outside to unload their gear and Rebecca and I are alone in the room. I don’t know what to say. I’m uncertain what she means by I know what happened to you. She can’t possibly know about the ghost.

  Unless she too has seen him.

  “Donna told me about it,” Rebecca says quietly. She moves closer, as if to share a secret. “When I inquired about buying the house, she had to disclose its history. She told me about Dr. Gordon. About how he attacked you, up on the widow’s walk.”

  I don’t say anything. I want to know what else she’s heard. What else she knows.

  “She told me there were other victims. The tenant who lived here just before you moved in. And a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  “You knew all that, yet you still bought the house?”

  “Dr. Gordon’s dead. He can’t hurt anyone now.”

  “But after all the things that happened here…”

  “Bad things happen everywhere, and the world moves on. The only reason I could afford a house this beautiful is because it comes with a flawed history. Other buyers were scared off, but when I walked through the front door, I instantly felt as if this place was welcoming me. As if it wanted me to be here.”

  As it once wanted me.

  “And then I came into this room and I smelled the sea, and I was certain this is where I belong.” She turns to the window and stares out at the water. Mark and Nicole noisily chatter in the kitchen as they set up lights and tripods and cameras, but Rebecca and I are silent, both of us mesmerized by the view. Both of us know what it’s like to be seduced by Brodie’s Watch. I think of the women who grew old and died here, who were equally seduced by this house. All of them were dark-haired and slender, like me.

  Like Rebecca.

  Nicole steps into the room. “Mark’s almost ready to start shooting. Time for hair and makeup, Ava.”

  And then there’s no other chance to speak in private with Rebecca. First I must sit in the makeup chair to get brushed and fluffed, and then it’s time to smile for the camera in the kitchen, where I pose with heirloom tomatoes and the copper pots and pans that we’ve brought up from my Boston kitchen. We move outside, where I pose among the sunflowers, and then it’s on to the stone patio for photos overlooking the sea.

  Mark gives a thumbs-up. “That’s it for the exteriors. Now we need just one more location.”

  “Where do we go next?” I ask.

  “The turret. The light’s gorgeous up there and I want to get at least one shot of you in that room.” He picks up the camera and tripod. “Since your book’s called The Captain’s Table, let’s have you pose looking out to sea. Just like the captain in your title.”

  They all head upstairs, but I pause at the bottom of the steps, reluctant to follow them. I don’t want to see the turret again. I don’t want to revisit the place where so many ghosts still linger. Then Mark calls down: “Ava, are you coming?” and I have no choice.

  When I reach the second floor, I glance into the bedrooms of Rebecca’s children and see scattered tennis shoes and Stars Wars posters, lavender curtains and a menagerie of stuffed animals. A boy and a girl. Ahead is my old bedroom, its door closed.

  I turn instead to the turret staircase. One last time, I mount the steps.

  The others don’t even glance at me when I enter. They are too busy staging lights and reflectors and tripods. Silently I survey all the changes that Rebecca has made to the room. A pair of wicker chairs is tucked into the alcove, inviting visitors to an intimate chat. A white sofa sits warming in the sunshine, and on the end table is a stack of gardening magazines and a nearly empty mug with a few last sips of cold coffee. A crystal dangles at the window, casting rainbows of light on the walls. This is a different room, a different house than I remember, and I am both relieved and sorrowful about the changes. Brodie’s Watch has moved on without me, to be claimed by a woman who has made the home her own.

  “Ready for you, Ava,” says Mark.

  As he snaps the final photos, I assume the role everyone expects of me, the cheerful food writer in the captain’s house. For the book’s introduction, I wrote that Brodie’s Watch was where I found inspiration, and it’s true. Here is where I tested and perfected my recipes, where I learned there is no finer condiment than the scent of sea air. It’s where I learned that wine does not cure grief, and when you dine with guilt, even the most tenderly prepared meal is tasteless.

  This is the house where I should have died, but instead learned to live again.

  After the last photo is snapped, and the gear is p
acked up and carried downstairs, I linger alone in the turret, waiting for one last ghostly whisper, one last whiff of the sea. I hear no ghostly voice. I see no dark-haired sea captain. Whatever once bound me to this house has since vanished.

  In the driveway, we say our goodbyes to Rebecca, and I promise her an autographed copy of The Captain’s Table. “Thank you for opening your house to us,” I tell her. “I’m so glad Brodie’s Watch has finally found someone to love it.”

  “We do love it.” She squeezes my hand. “And it loves us, too.”

  For a moment we stand looking at each other, and I remember Jeremiah Brodie’s words, spoken so softly to me in the darkness.

  Here in my house, what you seek is what you will find.

  As we drive away, Rebecca waves goodbye to us from her front porch. I lean out the window to wave back and suddenly I glimpse something up on the widow’s walk high above, something that, just for an instant, looks like a figure in a long black coat.

  But when I blink, he is gone. Perhaps he was never there. All I see now is sunlight gleaming on slate and one solitary gull, soaring across the cloudless summer sky.

  TO CLARA

  Acknowledgments

  Writing a book is a lonely journey, but the road to publication is not, and I’m grateful for the superb team that guides me every step of the way. My literary agent Meg Ruley of the Jane Rotrosen Agency has been my fiercest advocate, the kind of agent every writer dreams of finding. Thank you, Meg, for over two decades of being my advisor, my champion, and my friend. A huge thanks to my Ballantine (US) team: Kara Cesare, Kim Hovey, and Sharon Propson, and to my Transworld (UK) team: Sarah Adams, Larry Finlay, and Alison Barrow.

  Most of all, thanks to the one person who’s been with me on this adventure from the very beginning: my husband, Jacob.