Читать книгу Wife Without a Past - Elizabeth Harbison - Страница 9

Laura!

Drew Bennett froze midstep on the sidewalk of Broad Street in Nantucket. His heart gave one mighty bang, like an ax cutting into solid oak, then fluttered, like leaves spiraling to the ground.

Impossible. Still, he didn’t move. He couldn’t move.

His eyes were fixed, practically burning, on a woman by the old bank building. It was her familiar stance that caught his eye first. In the midst of a crowd she looked untouchable. She was tall and slender—more slender than she’d been before—with a chin-length swish of glossy red hair. It used to be long, he thought vaguely. Past her shoulders. But that vibrant color was unmistakable.

Drew tried to see her face but it was difficult. The light breeze pushed tree shadows back and forth across her, alternately illuminating and hiding her face in darkness. He was too far away. But he was afraid to take a step toward her for fear that she would disappear, a spirit in the mist.

Again.

So he stayed at his vantage point, studying her. He didn’t have a lot of experience with hallucinations, but it struck him as odd that he didn’t recognize the clothes she wore. Faded jeans and a bright blue T-shirt that read Ozone Or No Zone. A threadbare green sweater was knotted around her waist.

The wind lifted again, and she raised her chin and flipped her hair back out of her eyes. His stomach lurched. It was a gesture he’d seen her do a thousand times before.

Laura. Drew swallowed hard and closed his eyes. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. It felt real, but his thundering heart, burning eyes and the chill grinding down his spine were proof of nothing. Surely it was all a figment of his weary imagination. But when he opened his eyes she was still there. Only ten yards away at the most. A memory, seeming to live and breathe like everyone around her. He could barely breathe.

She was looking at something in her hands. A street map? Of all people, she wouldn’t need one. Drew squinted his eyes to see better. It was a street map. He frowned. Why would Laura—even his own hallucination of her—need a map of the town she’d lived in all her life?

His pounding heart gave no promise of calming, so he took a moment to gather some strength and moved toward her. One step. Still there. Two steps. She hadn’t disappeared yet. She hadn’t even moved. Three steps closer made him three times more positive that it was her.

No. It had to be a ghost.

Before he could take a fourth step, she turned away. Not vanished—turned away. He took a moment to catch his breath as she ambled up the street, pausing occasionally to look in a shop window. Drew followed, watching, slowly closing the gap between them. She stopped in front of Addy’s Attic, a store featuring the paintings of local artists. Addy’s had always been one of her favorite haunts. Now it appeared that was literally true. He watched for her usual enthusiasm to draw her in as it always did.

But as she stood there, her stature took on an odd stiffness. She pressed her lips together and leaned in, laying her hand to the window glass. Her stillness was unnerving. Then she gave a small shake of her head and walked away.

Moving with the slow hesitation of a dreamer, Drew continued following.

When she stopped at a bookshop a block up, there was no more than fifteen feet between the two of them, but he stopped, too. After what he’d been through since she’d…gone…he didn’t want to take any chance of spooking her before getting some answers from her. How can you be here? Can you speak? Can you hear?

Can you stay?

A crowd of people milled around them. May was busy enough on Nantucket, but add lunch hour to the formula and you had a real mess. Drew had to step aside once or twice just to keep his eyes trained on her.

She must have felt his gaze because she turned suddenly and faced him.

Bam! It was a sucker punch to the gut. Even though he knew the face well, the impact of seeing it, albeit from a slight distance, pulled his stomach straight into his empty lungs.

“It’s you…” His voice trailed off and he reached an arm out toward her, even though she was too far away to reach, or to even hear him.

He realized quickly, though, that she wasn’t looking at him but at something behind him. Her eyes seemed to search the crowd, as if she was looking for someone else, before she turned and walked away again.

Drew was dazed for a moment; then he moved to catch up with her. “Wait!” he called, but she only picked up her speed. “Laura!”

She didn’t even turn around.

“Laura, answer me!” he yelled, heedless of the curious stares of passersby. “What’s going on?”

A beefy hand grabbed his arm. “Looks like the lady wants to be left alone,” a gruff voice cautioned.

Drew jerked his head toward the interloper. It was a construction worker. Part of the crew that was patching the sidewalk in an effort to keep the historic district in top form. His big face was seared a menacing red by the sun, and his forearm was the size of a small tree trunk.

Drew shrugged him off. “You saw her? A woman with red hair?”

The man’s face went slack. “What are you, some sort of nut? Of course I saw her. I’m not blind.”

Then she’s real. She’s not a figment of my imagination.

“Go home, buddy. Sleep it off.” The worker walked off, shaking his head.

Drew barely heard him. The man’s words had a certain ring to them. Was she running away from him?

No, these thoughts were crazy. If she was a ghost, which she surely was, she would have better ways to get away than by running. And maybe she didn’t realize he was calling to her. After all, the noise of the crowd created a dull roar.

Drew picked up his pace. She’d be glad to see him. Of course she would. He just had to catch up to her. He lost sight of her for a moment, then saw her again by the menu outside the Cobbler Restaurant

“Laura! Here!” In three strides he was there, and turned her by the shoulders.

The woman who faced him was unfamiliar, and bore little likeness to Laura. For one thing, she couldn’t have been older than twenty and she was shorter and a little on the plump side. The hair was similar to Laura’s, the cut was the same, but nothing else was.

She smiled a big toothy grin at him and winked an amber eye. “My name’s Gert,” she said in a broad Australian accent. “Will I do?”

“I’m sorry,” Drew said, trying to shake his mind clear. “I thought you were someone else.” Was this the woman he’d been following for the past twenty minutes? Was he that far around the bend?

That was a more comfortable explanation than anything else he could come up with.

He flicked a glance across her. No, it wasn’t the woman he’d seen. Gert wore a gauzy tie-dyed outfit one of the stores by the wharf was selling, not the jeans and T-shirt he’d seen Laura in. He gave a brief, distracted smile. “Sorry, my mistake.”

“If you want to make another one, I’m staying at the Driftwood” the girl called after him.

He walked away, scanning the crowd for Laura. It wasn’t long before he spotted her standing at the counter in the drugstore across the street, signing a check and tearing it out of the book.

Do ghosts write checks? The idea was so absurd that he immediately concluded that this was a person with an uncanny resemblance to Laura. Perhaps even a twin she’d never known about. Was that possible? No. A twin wouldn’t have the same mannerisms unless they’d grown up together.

The corner traffic light turned green and a veritable stampede of cars roared out in front of him. Drew muttered an oath and searched for a gap in traffic to run through. It was bumper to bumper and moving fast. This time he shouted the oath. What was going on? Suddenly it was like rush hour in New York City.

Finally he got to the other side of the street, and he burst into the drugstore, the tiny bells on the door tingling a small, frantic announcement. He rushed to the crowded counter area.

She was gone.

He pressed through the customers in line and said to the bored-looking cashier, “There was a woman in here just now.” He swallowed and tried to catch his breath. “A minute ago. Tall, red hair. Did you see which way she went?”

The cashier snorted. “Do I look like Sherlock Holmes?” A titter of laughter in the line brought a smug smile to her lips.

Drew tried to keep his voice sounding controlled. “This is important.”

“I don’t know where she went.”

He braced his hands on the counter and raised his eyes skyward. Then it hit him. “She wrote a check.”

The cashier nodded her gray head and settled back on her considerable haunches, a challenge clear in her eyes. “What about it?”

Drew tried to smile. “You won’t believe this…” He reconsidered. Better not to sound like a lunatic. “I think that’s someone I went to college with but I’m not sure it’s her and I don’t want to call all over town trying to find her if I’ve got the wrong woman.”

She was not receptive. “Uh-huh.”

“There’s a line here, mister,” a voice complained behind him.

“She just wrote a check,” Drew persisted to the cashier. “Could you just take a look and see if it’s the same woman?” Silence. “Her name is Amy,” he tried to think of a last name and his eye fell on the cigarette display behind her, “Camela. Amy Camela.” You’ll never be an actor, Bennett.

“Amy Camela,” the woman repeated dully.

By now his blood pressure had shot up to nearstroke level. “Please,” he said through his teeth. He fumbled for his wallet and slipped a five-dollar bill out. He handed it to her, feeling like a bad actor in a bad movie. “Can you look at the check?”

Unbelievably, she relented and took the cash. For interminable moments she sifted through the cash drawer, then produced a plain beige check and read. “Nope. Says Mary Shepherd.”

Well, what had he expected?

He’d expected Laura. He’d been so sure, so completely sure, that the cashier was going to say Laura Bennett that it took him a moment to comprehend what she had said. “Mary Shepherd?” he repeated, knowing as he spoke how insane his contention was. “You must have picked up the wrong check.”

With that the cashier’s patience reached its limit. “Look, fella, this is the only check I got today.”

“Okay.” He started to turn away, then turned back and asked, “Did you happen to notice if she was left-handed or right-handed?” Laura was left-handed. But what would finding out prove?

The cashier glared at him. “No.” She looked behind him. “Next, please.”

Drew stepped back. Mary Shepherd. This had to be a dream. A terribly realistic dream.

Or was he going insane?

Of course he was going insane. He’d just followed “Laura” across town. If that wasn’t crazy, what was? Outside, he stopped by a strip of sidewalk shops and leaned against the warm stucco wall. He tilted his face toward the sun, then closed his eyes and heaved a sigh. Had it been some sort of mirage? Or had he invented the whole thing? That was seeming more and more possible.

Maybe he needed a vacation. He and Samantha could go someplace far away from Nantucket, far from the memories that haunted every street and alleyway. Samantha had been talking about going away anyhow. After seeing nothing but ocean all year round, she wanted to go to the mountains. Maybe that was just the break he needed.

He opened his eyes and glanced at his watch. One o’clock. One o’clock and no specters in sight. It was just an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. Might as well get back to work, he thought. As if I can get anything done today.

His gait back was slow and decidedly heavy. His head ached, and his stomach was in knots. He was tired, he decided, not insane. Drew almost smiled to himself. Bennetts didn’t go insane—his father never would have tolerated it

By the time he got to the town house with the Biggins, Bennett and Holloway, Architects sign, he had just about convinced himself that he’d seen a woman that looked something like Laura and his imagination had conjured the rest. He was probably coming down with the flu and had experienced an elaborate hallucination.

Then he saw her again.

She was slipping some postcards into a mailbox not half a block away. This time there was no one else around her, and he got a good look. She was real, all right—and if nothing else, this Mary Shepherd had an extraordinary resemblance to Laura. He wondered again if she was a twin, but he couldn’t believe Laura’s overbearing mother could ever give up anything she considered hers. And she’d always considered Laura hers.

The woman held the last postcard back and took a pen out. She jotted something on it.

With her left hand.

“Hey!” Drew called to her in a voice that trembled. “Laura!”

She didn’t even look at him. Instead, she raised her hand to stop a passing cab, and thrust the card at the mailbox, apparently without noticing it slip to the ground. She stepped into the street toward the car.

“Hey!” he called again.

She didn’t pause, she didn’t turn, she just opened the door and climbed in. As the car trundled toward him, he breathed her name one more time. She turned and looked straight at him. It was an arrow to the heart. Her face was as familiar to him as his own child’s except for the utterly blank expression in her eyes.

It was more than blank, it was totally empty. No spark, no smile, no anger, nothing. No emotion at all. She was like a ghost—he went cold at the thought— or a shadow of a person from another time.

A chill—was it fear?—rattled through him.

“Damn it,” he muttered as the car disappeared around a corner. Of all the things he would have imagined feeling at seeing Laura again, fear shouldn’t have been on the list.

He went to the postcard on the ground and picked it up. His adrenal glands must have worn themselves out because, even as he studied the handwriting, certain it was Laura’s, he was numb.

The card was addressed to a Nella Laraby in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Dear Nella,

Everyone was right, this island is heavenly. It’s exactly the respite I needed. Thanks again for all your help. I can’t wait to see you next week and tell you all about the trip.

Love to all, Mary

Mary. Further proof that this was just a case of mistaken identity. Not a ghost, not a hallucination.

He looked back at the postcard, thinking maybe he should hold on to it as proof. But what did it prove? And who did he need to prove it to? It was handwriting, that was all, and signed by “Mary.” No one would take it as proof that Laura was around. It even gave him doubts. Besides, he had no right to keep it. He opened the mailbox and dropped the card in.

Someone clapped a hand on his shoulder and Drew jumped.

“Whoa! Didn’t mean to scare you, buddy,” Drew’s friend and co-worker Vince Reese said. “What’s going on? What are you doing out here?”

Drew turned to face Vince, whose clownlike orange hair on his tall, lanky body was like a flame on a matchstick. “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you. You’d think I was nuts. Hell, I think maybe I’m nuts.”

“Try me.”

Drew hesitated, then shrugged. “I just saw Laura.”

There was a long silence.

“Laura?” Vince echoed at last.

Drew nodded and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger.

“As in…your Laura?”

Drew tightened his lips and nodded. “Yup. Chased her all the way across town. Ready to commit me?”

Vince’s screwed up his brow. “You just saw Laura. Uh-huh. What was she doing?”

“Window-shopping mostly.” Drew thrust his hands into his pockets. “And then she went for a ride in a cab. So—” he puffed air into his cheeks, then blew it out “—ready to get back in to work?” He started to walk toward the office building.

Vince put a hand up to stop him. “You just saw Laura shopping and riding in a taxi and now you want to go back in to work?”

Drew raised his shoulders. “I considered chasing the cab but I’m not as fast as I used to be, you know. I can hardly ever run fifty miles an hour anymore.” His flippant tone belied the trembling in his chest

Vince shook his head and fell in step beside Drew. “I don’t get this. Is it April Fool’s Day?” He looked at his watch. “No, it’s May. What’s going on, man? Do you need a visit with the old head shrinker, or are you pulling a joke on me?”

“Neither.” Drew clapped Vince on the shoulder. “I saw a woman who looked just exactly like Laura. Exactly. But she slipped away before I got a chance to see her up close.” Or I let her slip away, he thought. I let her slip away all afternoon because I was afraid to know for sure one way or the other.

“But you do know it couldn’t have been Laura. I mean, it’s been more than a year since—”

“A year and three months.” Drew nodded. “I know. I haven’t totally lost my mind. It was obviously a case of mistaken identity.”

“That’s it.” Vince’s voice was just a little bit too patronizing.

Drew ignored it. “I probably just need a good long rest. I thought maybe Samantha and I would go up to Vermont for a while.”

“That’s not such a bad idea,” Vince said. “You’ve always been a major workaholic, but over the past year you’ve been killing yourself working here and at home. Tell you what, I’ll go with you guys. How about Disney World?”

Drew stopped. “I appreciate the offer, but I was thinking of the mountains. Samantha’s been making noise about seeing them.” He sighed, thinking about her, then shook his head. “I owe her something special. She’s the most precious thing in my life. If it weren’t for her, I don’t know what I would have done this past year.”

Vince gave him a dismissive slap on the back. “Well, you got through it, man.” Obviously he was eager to brush Drew’s momentary lapse in sanity under the carpet.

Did I? “I guess I did.”

“And today you just saw someone who looked a lot like Laura. Not actually Laura herself.” Vince tried to give a little laugh, but it sounded to Drew more like a dismissive cough. “Because, you know…”

“I know.” Their eyes met. Yes, Drew knew. He knew all too well. He’d had more than a year to get used to the idea, to accept it and go on with his life.

Laura Bennett, his beautiful young wife and the mother of little Samantha, had been dead and buried for more than a year.