Haunted

Tears welled in her eyes again. She closed them tightly, and prayed. Then she rose, kissed the coffin, and murmured. “Josh, I will never forget you. And like your dad said, you will always be in my heart. Always. If I live to be a hundred.”

At last, she turned away. She started for the road where her parents, and Hunter, waited.

For a moment, the hate remained. She couldn’t even look at Hunter. Then she remembered Josh’s words, so real in her mind. Don’t be so hard on Hunter.

He was still crying. She managed to walk to him and place a hand on his arm. “You tried,” she said very softly.

“Oh, Darcy!” he whispered sickly.

“You tried,” she repeated. “One day…one day, we can talk again.”

Amazingly, she felt better. And she knew that Hunter had tried. She knew, too, that his leg would heal. His heart never would. He would live with the night in which Josh and Mike had died all of his life. And he would fight the guilt in his soul just as long.

Her mother was waiting with outstretched arms. Her father, too. She ran to them, and let them do all the right things they thought that they could do.

That night, her mother gave her a sleeping pill, since she hadn’t really slept since the accident.

And it was the pill, she was convinced the following day, that caused her strange dreams.

She was back at the cemetery. It wasn’t a blue day anymore. It wasn’t exactly gray, either. It seemed that there was a cast of silver, like a mist, over the day. Time had passed, and she walked through the old gnarled trees, ancient graves, and newer ones, that composed the cemetery. Josh had been buried beneath a beautiful old oak. She walked toward it, clad in black, bearing a bouquet of flowers.

And yet…

As she neared it, she saw a thin man standing by the old oak. Frowning, she came closer. And it was Josh.

He looked very handsome, dressed in the dark suit, tailored shirt, and crimson tie in which he had been buried. His dark hair was trimmed and brushed, as it had been for the prom. He was leaning against the tree, arms casually crossed, smiling as she came.

For a moment, she was afraid. Only a moment.

“Josh?”

“Darcy, poor Darcy,” he said softly. His rueful smile reminded her of his father’s when he had spoken to her over his son’s coffin. “Darcy, you’ve got to know. It’s okay. Honestly, it’s okay.”

“It’s not okay, you’re dead.” She frowned, amazed to realize that she was a little angry with him. “You knew it, Josh! You knew you were going to die. The day that Mike threatened you…you said that maybe you’d be dead, but he’d be dead as well. And he is!”

“I know. I’m sorry. He was a true jerk, but I didn’t really hate him.”

“Josh—”

“I’ve got to go, Darcy. I just wanted you to know that I’m okay. I’m really okay. And you’ve got to go on.”

“I will, Josh, but…I never knew how much I’d miss you,” she whispered.

He touched her hair. Except that…he wasn’t real, and of course, it was just a whisper of the breeze.

“I’ll always be with you, Darcy. When you need me, just think of me. Here.” He laid his palm against his heart.

“Oh, Josh!”

He was fading. Into the silver color of the day. Of course. It was a dream. A drug-induced dream.

He smiled. “You’re special, Darcy. You’ll need to be strong,” he said softly.

And then he was gone.

It began the next day.

Her father had determined that he wasn’t going into work; neither was her mother. They were going to spend the day with her, take a drive to the nearby mountains, and just spend time in that quite and beautiful part of their state.

He couldn’t find his Palm Pilot.

“You left it on the counter of your bath,” she told him.

“How on earth would you know that? Were you in our room, sweetheart?” her dad asked.

“No,” Darcy said, startled herself. “I just…well, I guess it’s a place you might have left it.”

He went upstairs to his bathroom and returned with his Palm Pilot, looking at her oddly. “Thanks. I guess you know your old man pretty well, huh, kid?”

Of course, that was it.

But then…

Little pieces of precognition began to come to her, now and then. A few that summer, a few during her first years of college, more after that.

They were disturbing at first. Then she came to accept them. She thought that they were maybe something that Josh had very strangely managed to leave her.

It wasn’t until later that she decided it was time to call Josh’s father.

When the ghosts came.

1

Jeannie Mason Thomas lay in the white expanse of the four-poster bed in the Lee room at Melody House in pure bliss.

Roger was snoring softly at her side. Men, she thought affectionately. Bless ’em. Whatever came, they could sleep.

She could not. She had to keep playing over the day, minute by minute. Her wedding day.

There had been the usual hassles in the morning. Her mom had gotten all teary every few minutes, and insisted on giving speeches about sex and marriage that were totally unnecessary. Alice, her matron of honor, had clipped off two of her newly purchased acrylic nails trying to fix Jeannie’s train. Sandy, another bridesmaid, had gotten too looped on the champagne they had shared while dressing for the service. The limo had been late. Her original soprano had come down with a sore throat leaving Jeannie desperately seeking a new singer at the last minute. But she’d managed to find an Irish tenor through the priest, Father O’Hara, and once she had reached the Revolution-era church just outside town, everything had gone perfectly.

Everyone claimed that it had been one of the most beautiful weddings they had ever seen. Roger had been tall, dark, and glorious in his tux. Her father had been stately, her mother beautiful. Her brother and sister, both part of the wedding ceremony, had been well behaved, joking, laughing, and wonderful. Her first dance with her new husband had been magical, but it was during her dance with her father that she had realized she was one of the luckiest human beings in the world with a tender, tight family, and an incredible groom.

The reception would be the talk of a number of counties for months to come. The Irish tenor had joined with the band. The music had gone from classical to rock and pop to theatrical. The food had been delicious, the cake stupendous.

Then, after fully enjoying their own reception, they had taken off at last for Melody House. And it hadn’t been as if making love had been anything new for them, but making love as man and wife was new and therefore, somehow, more sensual, more erotic, and so deeply satisfying. They’d been hot and heavy, they’d laughed, they’d joked over getting out of clothing, slipping in the shower in their haste, rolling off the bed, and all sorts of little foibles. They’d had a great deal more champagne, finishing the bottle that had been left in the elegant little silver bucket on the antique table set before the fireplace. They’d dined on the delicious little snacks left for them, caviar, quiches, chocolate-dipped strawberries and more. Then they’d made love again, all lazy and slow, and it had been incredibly luxurious as well. Melody House had offered everything they had wanted. In the morning, they could go downstairs and be served breakfast in the sunny little nook off the kitchen. They could spend a day indulging in the heated pool—a recent addition to the colonial manor. They could ride the trails that meandered through miles of forest when the sun was just setting. They could have both privacy and service. Jeannie had every right to be entirely blissful, and also, patient with the fact that her new husband could sleep, while she could not.

She rose, feeling as agile and luxuriously sinuous as a cat, naked in the coolness of the night. She stretched, thinking that the strenuous exercise program she had put herself through before the wedding had been well worth it—she didn’t think that she could be more than five percent body fat at the moment, and Roger had been delighted. She was glad, too, because she liked to think that she had talked Matt Stone into allowing them to use the seldom-rented room for their wedding night because she had just been cute and charming. Stone was known to be something of a hard-ass.