Trace Their Shadows (28 page)

“I’d as soon check some things out before the briefing,” Morris said.

“What do you think will happen to Grace?”

He stroked his bristly mustache. “She’s a Signal 20, all right. A real psycho. She also took things from other apartments at the condominium. We’ve had complaints from the manager.” Brandy remembered Grace’s maid saying she had to return something that belonged to another resident. “I expect she’ll be committed to a psychiatric hospital.”

“I feel sorry for Mabel.”

“Her companion may be able to help her there. She’ll probably want to. She’s worked for Grace so long she’s a little addled herself.”

“Grace told me there was something evil in the house. There was. It was Grace herself.”

A buzzer sounded on the hospital intercom, and the nurse reappeared in the doorway. “Visiting hours are over,” she said. Morris nodded and followed Tyler.

Brandy sank back on the pillow, suddenly weary.

“Finally.” Mack gazed up at the nurse. “I need a few minutes more.” The woman looked at the blond wavy hair, the earnest blue eyes, and melted. “Just a few, now, really.”

Brandy took his hand again when they were alone. “It’s no use, Mack,” she said in a quiet voice. “I’m not being fair to you. We’re going in different directions.”

Mack’s jaw went hard. “It’s that half–assed architect, right?”

“No, Mack,” she said truthfully. “You and I——we’ve got nothing in common. We couldn’t make a life together. You deserve the kind of woman who’ll appreciate all you have to offer. I’m not that girl.”

He pulled his arm away and dropped his head. “That’s pretty tough to take——after all the years we’ve dated, all the laughs we’ve had.”

“I promised you an answer when this case went down. This is it.” She felt her eyes grow damp. “I’m so sorry, Mack.”

He rose to his full height then, big hands on his hips. “Sorry, like hell,” he said.

Sighing, Brandy lay back and closed her eyes.

***

She sat in the back of a small boat with her father, Lake Dora glinting around them in the sunlight. He reached into the bait can. “Now you wouldn’t fish for a fresh water bass with a salt water rig,” he said, threading a worm onto her hook. “You’ve got to use the right bait for the right fish.”

She flung her line out into the water and waited for the bobber to sink.

The boat and the lake faded. With a sucking sound, Brandy sank. She was standing alone on an outcropping at the bottom of a deep well. In the darkness she clawed at the slick, narrow walls, struggling for breath. Around her feet gurgled rising water. She thought she could hear a cottonmouth’s fat body slither along the rock. Far above at the opening shone a distant patch of light. She tried to call out, but no sound would come. Footsteps echoed near the light. Then a face looked down, one with high cheekbones, dark eyes, a mustache. She tried to cry out again. Still no sound.

“Don’t come in, please,” a familiar voice said. “I’ve tried to explain. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid it’s over between us.” Then the face withdrew.

When Brandy stifled a groan, the well slipped way. She raised her hand and felt bandages, saw a square of light from the corridor and a woman in the doorway. Brandy could make out the blonde, tousled hair, the slim figure in tight jeans. “I want to see her,” the woman said. “Just talk to her.”

Now the man moved again into the light. “Sharon, please go home. She can’t see you. She’s been hurt. We can talk later.” Heels spun around, clacked on the terrazzo floor, receded.

John moved silently into the room, leaned across her bed, and switched off the overhead lamp. “When I was in the hospital after the snake bite, I tried to tell you how I felt about you, but you kept blabbing on about Sharon and your boyfriend. I saw him leave a little while ago. He looked bent out of shape. As for me, I didn’t want to be here with all the others.” She moved her head and watched him place a tape player on the bedside table. “The only thing that seems right for you now,” he said, “is Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man.’” Brandy remembered its soaring heroics.

She opened her lips, but still no sound came. John kissed the one spot on her forehead that was not swathed in a circular bandage. “Life would be forever dull without you.”

She closed her eyes, warm and tingly down to her toes. Maybe she had used the right bait, after all. Then her lids flipped open. “You’re forgetting,” she murmured. “We’re not finished yet. There’s still the house, and what about the ghost?”

***

The following summer, as John and Brandy stepped out of the pontoon boat onto the pier, bromiliads sent scarlet heads shooting up under the live oaks around the Able mansion. Behind them, a crimson band marked the passage of the setting sun. In a thicket of wax myrtle at the water’s edge, a cloud of cattle egrets had settled for the evening. A black and white sign nailed to a post on the dock read HISTORIC ABLE INN AND RESTAURANT.

“I miss the ‘gator,” Brandy said.

“Probably gone farther up the shore like the ospreys, where there won’t be any more building.”

Within the curved lines of the tiny harbor bobbed two pontoons, a small cabin cruiser, and several motorboats.

“No story tonight,” John said. “No more sleuthing.”

On a flagstone terrace beneath the high windows of the second floor, guests were seated at wrought iron tables, sampling an appetizer buffet.

Weston Stone advanced toward them across the lawn, his hand extended. “We have a nice room ready,” he said, “on the fourth floor. I’ll have your bags carried up.”

Brandy glanced up at a dormer window, remembering the shadow that had once moved behind the glass.

“I offered her a honeymoon in a fancy Orlando hotel,” John said, shaking hands. “But she insisted on coming to your grand opening instead.”

Brandy noticed that Blackthorne’s manufactured homes were concealed by a thick bougainvillea, ablaze with lavender, where one had stood almost fifty years ago. “You’ve got a clever landscaper,” she said.

They followed Weston up a flight of stairs above the cement bays, now entrances into a kitchen, laundry, and work area, to a second floor deck, crowded with chattering couples, and entered what had been the parlor, now the dining area. Its focal point was the fireplace portrait of Brookfield Able, his stern gaze a sharp contrast to the broadly smiling face of his son. They admired the shining cypress woodwork, the re–furbished floors, the delicate egret wallpaper, the restored mantle, the Tiffany lamps.

Rising above the other diners, Brandy saw Sylvania’s tall form. She sat at a table near the staircase, beaming at Weston’s elder son, beside her the bulky figure of Axel Blackthorne.

“Curt Greene’s been generous with your time,” Weston said to John, showing them to a table below the stained glass fanlight. “Greene’s lucky to have you on his staff. I couldn’t have done the restoration without your research. As it was, it took months for crews working night and day to get this place ready for the anniversary.”

John leaned across the table as Weston moved away to greet other guests. “Aunt Sylvania says Brookfield would’ve wanted his son to have the house, but restoring it as an inn and restaurant was Weston’s idea.”

Brandy looked out at the dark rim of the opposite shore, and her voice dropped. “It’s ironic that I owe my new job to reports of Eva Stone’s ghost.”

With one hand John opened his menu. With the other he rubbed his forehead in that familiar gesture. “Let that go, Brandy,” he said. “Forget it. You got your story a year ago.”

She smiled then, and ordered, and tried not to look at the growing shadows on the terrace. After dinner they carried their cordial glasses downstairs to a cocktail table. A few low density lamps glowed around the outer flagstones. From speakers hidden in the cypress came the plaintive Irish melody——“it was a moment when I sensed a miss in the beat of time…”

Inside the crowd had thinned, a murmur of voices drifted from the parking lot. The deck and terrace were deserted. Weston Stone stood on the pier under a moonless sky, helping the last boat customer cast off.

“It was just about this time of night,” Brandy said. “Remember? When we found the skeleton. When I left you here.” To herself she added, when I saw the form in the window, and later on the lawn.

“Not a night I like to recall.”

The lighted boat pulled away and was lost beyond the palmettoes and cabbage palms to the east. The only movement came from the lank silhouette of Weston Stone, coiling a line around a post on the pier. A chill passed through her. She pulled her light jacket around her shoulders and took a sip from her glass, her eyes on the bougainvillea. “I thought everyone out here had gone,” she said, touching John’s arm. “There’s someone over there alone.”

“I don’t see anyone.”

“Over there…” A slender form wavered in the shadow of the hedge, dark hair stirring in the slight wind, and looked toward Weston Stone.

Brandy’s eyes widened. “My God,” she whispered. “I can see a white border below the head and a smudge of red fabric. Can’t you see it?”

The pale face lifted and turned for a moment in the terrace lights, its soft lines blurred, and then it began to fade, like the petals of a flower closing.

John’s hand folded over hers. “Nothing there. The power of suggestion.”

Brandy’s own fingers trembled and then quieted. All that remained before her were the lavender blooms of the bougainvillea.

“Get real,” he said. “You think hatred for Grace held Eva Stone here all these years?”

Brandy lifted his hand to her lips. “Not hate. Eva Stone was here because of something much stronger. Don’t you know who she’s been waiting for?” Surely, Brandy thought, she had seen a mother with her child at last.

She reached up and smoothed away the frown gathering on his forehead. “Not long ago who would’ve believed in neutrinos and quarks? But think what you like. We’re certainly alone now.”

“No more ghost talk,” he said, drawing her close. “I’ve got something more substantial in mind.”

As he slipped his arm around her waist and they turned toward the stairs, Brandy cast a last long look at the night sky. Undefiled by lights from the town, it rose above the tall house——black, serene, and splendid with stars.

Afterword
 

Tavares and Mount Dora are charming small towns that cluster near the Harris Chain of five large lakes in Central Florida. The Dora Canal, although usually packed these days with sightseeing boaters, is one of the most beautiful short stretches of natural river in the state.

The lyrics of the Irish ballads in the book are actually from poems in Prose and Verse Anthology of Modern Irish Writing, edited by Grattan Freyer, Irish Humanities Center, Dublin, published in 1979.

“It was a moment when I sensed

A miss in the beat of time…”

“On a frosty night and a bashful star

Stood above a hill

Frozen in the sky …”

from “That Moment” by S.E. O’Cearbhail, p. 3, 4

“O you are not lying in the wet clay, For it is a harvest evening now and we Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight And you smile up at us——eternally.

from “In Memory of My Mother” by Patrick Kavanagh, p.98

About the Author
 

Ann Turner Cook began life as the model for the Gerber Products trademark, and her works emphasize the bond between mother and child. A member of Mystery Writers of America, the retired English teacher and her husband research her novels among the rivers, lakes, and small towns of Central Florida. The couple lives in Tampa.