Читать книгу The Awakening - Amanda Stevens - Страница 11

Six

I used Temple’s absence for a trip to the ladies’ room, where I applied a layer of lip gloss and tightened my ponytail. I examined my reflection as I washed my hands and dried them on a paper towel. Like Dr. Shaw, I had dark circles under my eyes from stress and lack of sleep. A ghost visit always took a toll and I didn’t think I’d seen the last of this one. A part of me did wish she would fade away without further contact, but my curiosity had been roused despite my dread.

Leaning in, I stared at those dark circles as if I could somehow wish them away. And then I focused even more intently until the tiny motes at the bottoms of my pupils took on the look of keyholes. How many times had I wished for the ability to see into those openings, to peer so deeply into my psyche and soul that I could somehow divine my destiny?

The prospect of knowing the road ahead was at once intriguing and terrifying, I backed away from the mirror, turning my attention once again to the smudges beneath my eyes. Poor Dr. Shaw. I’d tried not to dwell on our conversation, but his mannerisms and vague musings about wrong turns had left me disquieted. And then how strange to already have Ethan Shaw on my mind when Temple had called to invite me to the very restaurant where the three of us had spent our first evening together.

The universe was aligning in strange and disturbing ways, and somehow at the center of it all was Woodbine Cemetery. Ever since I’d been awarded the project, there’d been so many references to my past.

I was still brooding about all those niggling moments as I left the ladies’ room, but none was quite as unnerving as the sight of John Devlin standing in the alcove blocking my path just as he had done once before, in this very space, in this very restaurant. He leaned a shoulder against the wall and managed to look surprised, but my suspension of disbelief only extended so far. He must have seen me leave the table and followed me into the alcove to wait for me. Why, I couldn’t imagine, but a happenstance meeting this was not.

I faltered, but only for a moment. Then I mentally braced myself as I moved forward, already feeling the heady pull of his orbit. His eyes were just as dark and perhaps even more mesmerizing than I remembered. He was tall, lean and still otherworldly handsome though his looks had changed. The five-o’clock shadow had become a perpetual feature, it seemed, as had the longer hair and his more casual attire.

My throat tightened as I approached and I hoped I wouldn’t embarrass myself, either by being tongue-tied or blurting something far too revealing.

As it happened, Devlin was the first to speak. “Amelia,” he drawled. “Just like old times.”

He spoke softly, intimately, and yet I had no trouble at all hearing him over the din of the restaurant. His voice drew a quiver and I closed my eyes briefly, steeling myself against his unfair ambush.

“Hello” was all I could manage, along with a brief smile. I clung to my poise, but it was a feat hardly worth celebrating because I should have been over John Devlin a long time ago. I should have been dining with a new lover rather than an old friend, and I set my chin with an accusing jut, as if the blame for my bleak love life rested solely on Devlin’s shoulders.

He said, “This seems to be quite the popular place tonight.”

“Doesn’t it?” My smile turned wry and I added an edge to my voice. “I’m still reeling from the coincidence of it all. You. Me. This alcove.”

“One would almost think it planned.”

And just like that, poise shattered. I made a nonsensical gesture toward the archway. “I was just on my way back to the table.”

He made no move to allow me passage. “You look good,” he said, searching my face and then dropping his gaze for a more subtle scrutiny.

Good, not well. I hated myself for taking note of the distinction.

I had on a simple black dress with my mother’s pearls. Perfectly safe and acceptable attire, but that dark gaze made me feel as if I had on nothing at all.

“You, as well,” I said. “I mean, good. You look good. Different, but...good.” Why did that scruff on his lower face appeal to me so? Or those silver strands at his temples? I had the strongest urge to run the back of my hand against the stubble and then plunge my fingers into his hair. Instead, I toyed with the string of pearls at my neck. I could feel my great-grandmother’s key beneath my dress and I wondered if I should pull it free and hold it in front of me to ward off Devlin’s magnetism.

As we stood there with very little else to say to one another, it occurred to me that perhaps this moment was the essence of Dr. Shaw’s explanation of a death omen. Not a literal passing, but the end of something I’d been hanging on to. I’d been carrying a torch for Devlin for far too long and I waited for that moment of supreme revelation when the weight of unrequited love lifted miraculously from my shoulders, saving me from all those sleepless nights and liberating me for the open road ahead.

Instead, I found myself jostled by someone passing by in the corridor. I was pushed up against Devlin and my heart jolted.

His arm came around me, so fleeting I might have imagined the caress. But for a moment, I felt the pressure of his fingers against the small of my back and I closed my eyes, drawing in that delectable, indefinable essence that was so uniquely John Devlin.

“Sorry,” I mumbled and pushed away.

“You’re here with Temple,” he said.

“And you? You aren’t dining alone tonight, are you?”

The question was a throwback to that first night when he had come to the restaurant alone, but I instantly berated myself. What a stupid thing to ask of an old flame that had recently gotten engaged. I’d momentarily forgotten about his betrothal. Now it all came rushing back to me and as an image of Claire Bellefontaine’s perfect face flashed before my eyes, I did have a revelation.

I thought about the other time Devlin and I had stood here in this alcove and the conversation had turned to Ethan Shaw. Devlin and I had only just met, but I’d had the thrilling notion that he was jealous of my dinner companion. I’d known very little about him then, other than his profession and that two ghosts haunted him. Now I knew quite a lot about his past, about his dead wife and daughter, about his upbringing, his legacy, his affiliation with the Congé. If my hunch was true about his astral travels, I might even know something about him that he wasn’t aware of himself. But for all those discoveries, he was more of a stranger to me at that moment than he’d been upon our first meeting.

He hadn’t answered, I realized, so I gave him a reprieve. “You’re here with—”

“There’s a group of us.”

A meeting of the Congé?

I said very casually, “I heard about your engagement. I should congratulate you.”

Something flickered in his eyes, an emotion I didn’t dare name. “Thank you.” Unlike his eyes, his tone was impassive to the point of dismissive. I tried not to read anything into it.

I started to ask if they’d set a date, make the proper small talk about his upcoming nuptials, but instead I shrugged. “I really should get back.”

“I won’t keep you. But I’m glad I had a chance to say hello.” That beguiling flicker again and a little half smile that made me wonder once more about the unlikely coincidence of our meeting.

Despite his engagement, a part of me wanted him to protest my departure. In the back of my mind floated a vision. His hand sliding up my bare arm as he pulled me farther into the shadowy alcove where he would stare deeply into my eyes for a long, heart-stopping moment before he kissed me.

He was already staring deeply into my eyes, I realized, and his gaze lingered on my lips as if he had read my mind. He straightened languorously, reminding me of all those long, dreamy mornings in bed. I might not know his motives or intentions or even the content of his heart, but I knew his body, all the angles and shadows. The ripple of sinewy muscle.

“I—nice to see you again,” I murmured.

“Good night,” he said, and as I brushed past him, I could have sworn I heard an ominous whisper in my ear. “Watch your back, Amelia.”

* * *

I went back to the table and sipped my cooling tea as I glanced around the dining room. I didn’t see where Devlin had disappeared to or Temple, either, for that matter. Which was just as well as far as I was concerned. The last thing I wanted was to see Devlin with his gorgeous fiancée, and as for my dinner companion, I needed a moment before facing her. Temple’s ability to read me bordered on the uncanny. She would know something was up the minute she sat down across from me and I wasn’t prepared for another grilling about Devlin. My only hope was that she would be sufficiently distracted by her apparent infatuation with Rance Duvall and wouldn’t notice the high color in my cheeks or the slight tremor in my hands.

As I waited for her return, I tried to distract myself by going back over everything that had happened at Woodbine Cemetery. Staring into my cup, I conjured the infant’s face floating on the surface of my tea. The expression captured by the photographer still distressed me. The big eyes, the button nose, the soft cheeks—common attributes of almost any two-year-old. But behind that sweet countenance something dark lurked. Or was that merely my imagination? Was I searching for something in the child’s violet eyes that existed only in my head?

I sank so deeply into contemplation that the music didn’t register at first. The canned melody was soothing background noise, nothing more. Then slowly the haunting strands wove into my consciousness as familiarity teased me. What was that song? I still couldn’t place it. The tune seemed right there at the edge of my memory. Eerily pervasive and yet maddeningly elusive.

The room grew frigid, a dank, seeping bone-frost that often preceded the dead. I rubbed my arms and glanced around yet again. The other diners seemed impervious to the chill, but the cold wasn’t my imagination. The corners of the window had rimed and I could see my breath on the air.

I turned to the garden in fear. Twilight had deepened to nightfall and the candles on the tables sputtered in a draft. My spine crawled as dread mingled with the cold. I told myself to look away. A manifestation in the garden was nothing to me. No ghost could touch me on hallowed ground and the talisman I wore around my neck was added protection. I was safe inside this former rectory. Safe inside my consecrated bubble.

But I couldn’t tear my gaze from the window. Even as I watched the frost spread and crackle across the glass, even as my hand crept to Rose’s key, I could feel an insidious presence tearing at my fingers, stealing my will as my defenses crumpled.

The scent of woodbine oozed in with the cold. The cloying perfume leached through the glass to whorl around my senses like smoke. I sat enthralled—trapped—as my gaze darted about the garden, searching for the ghost child even as I tried to recoil from her icy tentacles.

She was well hidden and nearly transparent. If not for the faint glow of her manifestation, I wouldn’t have noticed her at all. But as soon as I focused on her, she grew more substantial, as if the warmth of my concentration imbued and emboldened her. The last of the shadows melted away and she stood exposed, an ethereal vision bathed in silky moonlight.

She had manifested in the same white dress as before but I could see more detail now. A row of black buttons set against a scalloped seam decorated the bodice, and a plaid ribbon trimmed the drop waist. She wore patent leather shoes with white tights, and another ribbon dangled from her long blond hair. Her attire was obviously from another decade. Late sixties to midseventies, perhaps, though I was no expert on fashion. She looked to be dressed for church, but her young features were twisted in angry defiance—and a touch of fear, I thought—as she stood with her hands behind her back hiding something in the folds of her skirt.

I became so fixated on her shimmering form that I felt myself slip deeper into enthrallment. She had my undivided attention, but she seemed unmindful of me. She didn’t peer at me from the shadows as she’d done in the cemetery. She didn’t taunt me or try to make contact. It was as if I’d somehow entered her memory, a voyeur to something that had happened in the past. The ghost wasn’t aware of me because I didn’t yet exist. I didn’t belong in her world.

For the longest time, she stood motionless, hands behind her back, face tilted. Still defiant, still angry, still hiding her fear. Someone was with her, I realized. Someone invisible to me. Her companion must have said something to her for she tried to back away only to be drawn up short as though forcibly restrained. Her wrists were pried from her back, but whatever she had locked in her fist remained hidden from me. Her companion shook her hard, may even have struck her. The child’s eyes widened in fear and shock as she flew backward, bouncing and tumbling as if rolling down a steep flight of stairs. Her body came to a jarring halt, arms flung wide, head tilted at a sickening angle.

I half rose from my chair even though I could do nothing. The tragedy had occurred long ago, before I was born, before I had discovered that nameless grave hidden deep inside the willow trees. I couldn’t go back in time. I couldn’t save the child because she was already dead.

My heart continued to pound and I grew dizzy with emotion. I didn’t want to be in that child’s memory. I didn’t want to see any more of her past. Surely she had revealed to me all that she had intended.

But no. She wasn’t done with me yet.

As I sat pressing my great-grandmother’s key to my breast, the apparition floated up from the ground, limbs and head dangling as if carried by her unseen assailant. As they neared the edge of the garden, the ghost child’s nebulous form pivoted back to me briefly as if the attacker had turned to make certain no one had witnessed the crime.

For one terrifying instant, I could have sworn I felt those invisible eyes upon me, warning me away, cautioning me to say nothing. Reminding me that this was not my business.

The scene faded. The ghost child vanished as a curtain of shadows once again lowered over the garden.