Night Mist

“Back where?”

“Leave. Tonight. Now. You can’t…I can’t let you meet…Damn.”

“Who? Meet who, Joe?”

“No good. It’ll only put your own life in danger. I’m not going to let that happen, understand? I’m willing…willing to lose it all, the memory of you…of us, if it means…”

“Hush now.” He wasn’t making any sense, and he was using up precious strength. “Try to lie still. Let me think.”

He rocked his head back and forth. “No. Won’t go like this. Not with you looking at me as though I was some stranger.” The pain had to be excruciating, yet he struggled to sit up. Then he reached for her. “Once more. I have to just once more….”

As soon as she understood what he meant to do, Rachel tried to back away from him. But it was too late.

She felt his touch, a ghostly caress of air against her cheek. Fleeting and eerily cold as it was, it left her feeling a burning awareness she knew she didn’t dare examine too closely.

Then he began to disappear.

CHAPTER TWO

“No!” Rachel lurched forward—to do what, she didn’t know since on some level she understood that any action she took would be pointless—and as expected, he vanished before her eyes.

She balanced herself by resting her palms on the cement, felt something warm and wet, and inspected her hands. They were smeared with blood. Real blood. Closing her hands into fists, she searched through the mist swirling around her. “I don’t understand this! Do you hear me? I don’t understand.”

As if in reply, Rachel found herself illuminated by a pair of fast-approaching, blinding lights. Through the din of a roaring engine a horn blasted her. Certain the wide-bodied beast was broad enough to sweep her up in its path, she spun around and pressed herself flat against the steel beams where Joe Becket had reclined only moments ago.

The eighteen-wheeler raced by. Although it didn’t come close enough to hurt her, she decided it had added enough impact to the moment to shock a decade or two off her lifespan.

With her heart thudding in her throat, chest and head, she gulped for air. Brilliant place to catch your breath, Gentry, she chastised herself. Keep it up and you’ll become a ghost yourself.

It was the first time she’d admitted to herself what she might be dealing with, and the thought had her shaking her head in instant rejection. She was a sensible, logical person, she reminded herself, an educated professional. She’d never had cause to believe in the possibility, let alone the plausibility, of such things in all her twenty-nine years. Even while she’d been gauging the chances of succeeding in this encounter, she hadn’t allowed herself to put a label on it. Him.

Then she inspected her hands. To reassure herself, since she’d never heard anything about ghosts bleeding. Only, the blood was gone. Except for a few grains of street grit stuck to her skin, her palms and the pads of each finger were clean.

“Who are you?” Rachel murmured, staring at her hands before gazing up into the night. “Who are you?”

She didn’t get a reply. At least he was going back to being consistent, she thought, grasping at whatever seed of sanity she could. But he did have a name. It was a start, she decided, pushing herself to her feet and collecting her bag.

For the rest of the crossing she found herself constantly looking over her shoulder, torn between wishing she would see him again and being relieved when he didn’t reappear. Recurring visions of some past tragedy were one thing—if that was indeed what she was dealing with, and it was the one explanation that made the most sense at this point—but being warned that she could be in danger put a flaw in that theory, didn’t it?

How had he learned her name? And what about the intimate way he’d spoken to her? Bright Eyes. She’d received enough compliments about her brown eyes to accept that people thought they were her best feature. She’d attributed that to having a fast, inquisitive mind and a clear conscience. Right now, however, she was less than enthralled with her fascination for pursuing mysteries.

As she walked, she struggled to recall if and when she might have met Joe Becket, but try as she might, it proved useless. They were complete strangers, no doubt about it. With his lean, hard face and probing eyes, he wasn’t a man a woman would be apt to forget; her own reaction to him—and she’d been known as a bookworm through school—proved that. Yet she’d done more than notice this injured, brooding being; she’d let him get inside her head…and now she didn’t know if she could get him out.

But at the same time, she couldn’t miss the irony in that. What safer way to avoid dealing with real human beings, and her sexuality, than by focusing on someone, or rather something, that vaporized the instant she got close to it? Her mother, who for years had assumed the role of relentless matchmaker, would probably find the situation completely understandable.

No, her phantom was nothing like the smooth-talking, power-hungry men who’d moved in her family’s social circle, or even the financially or intellectually aggressive ones she’d met through her own studies and work. There was a harder edge to him; she’d seen it in his deep-set, piercing eyes and in the sharp planes of his face. He seemed the sort you wouldn’t relish having as an enemy, and when muted by his sensitive, vulnerable side…well, anyone would find him intriguing.

Not that she couldn’t handle it, she thought, giving herself a mental shake. She stepped off the end of the bridge onto the rocky shoulder of the road.

“Oh!” She gasped, landing awkwardly on the uneven ground. Pain shot through her right ankle. In the next instant she was rattled by a splash as something jumped or fell into the creek, which was followed by vicious barking not far downstream.

Spooked, she rubbed at the pain, and, assuring herself that the leg would take her weight, set off again. All she wanted was to get to her room.

Still, her step was more cautious this time as she made a left down the dirt road that ran behind Beauchamp’s and parallel to the creek. The meandering path ran through some of the lowest-lying property in the area, and the farther down she went, the denser the fog grew. It increased Rachel’s awareness of her solitude and her unease with the dank, dark aura of her surroundings.

When she’d first arrived in Nooton several weeks ago, she’d thought this portion of town evoked an atmosphere perfect for the set of a horror film, the kind with a cast of no less than three dozen corpses. The idea had ceased to be amusing.

Someone obviously had committed a murder here. Joe Becket seemed to be proof of that. She couldn’t figure out what else was going on, but that part seemed devastatingly clear. The question was, when had it happened? Who had done it? And why? Her thoughts flowed one after the other like the lonely toll of a church bell.

Mrs. Levieux’s boardinghouse rose out of the fog. Three stories tall, it was a gothic-style dwelling nestled within a giant’s grasp of ancient oak trees. The fog muted the effects of the peeling paint, but at the same time turned it tombstone-white, emphasizing the starkness of the numerous windows. They seemed to stare at her like the hollowed eyes of a skull. Lifeless yet watchful eyes.

Rachel shivered. For all she knew, Joe Becket’s killer could be renting a room in there, as she did. As she squinted to see each black rectangle through the mist, she focused on the side of the house, specifically the one at the top floor on the far right corner. Her neighbor’s room. The reclusive Mr. Barnes.

If anyone deserved to be a prime suspect, he was the man. No one knew anything about him except that he worked at Beauchamp’s and avoided speaking to anyone if he could help it. He wasn’t a Nooton native, either. In fact, Mrs. Levieux—Adorabella—had made a point of telling her more than once how he’d moved to town not long before she did.

The pale chintz curtains framing the screened window shifted slightly. Rachel sucked in a quick breath, then reminded herself that after what she’d been through, it was perfectly understandable for her to get a little paranoid—but unnecessary. As eccentric as her neighbor seemed to be, there was nothing going on up there except the night air stirring the curtains. A quick scan of her own window proved hers were fluttering, too.

She was about to turn onto the sidewalk when her gaze was drawn back to her neighbor’s window. At that instant she saw the tiny dot of reddish-orange. It grew brighter, and then dimmed…like the burning tip of a cigarette, she concluded, with renewed unease.

Mr. Barnes smoked. Sometimes, when she walked in the hall, she smelled it, and at other times, as well, like when she was in the bathroom they shared. Which meant…?

That was him up there watching her.

For the second time that night, the hairs at her nape and on her arms lifted, radioing messages of fear. What was he doing awake at this hour? From the darkness of the room, it didn’t look as though he was trying to watch TV or read.

Maybe he’d seen what had happened on the bridge. She glanced back and decided otherwise; the mist was too thick. But then what was he doing standing there in the dark?

Whatever the reason, Rachel told herself, she didn’t need to stand down here and blatantly advertise that she’d spotted him. Ducking her head, she walked briskly the rest of the way to the front steps. It took supreme effort not to break into a frantic run. But at the door, she needed a moment to lean back against the wall, and press her hand against her heaving chest.

Coincidence. That’s all it was. There could be any number of innocent explanations. The man probably suffered from insomnia. What with their stuffy rooms and the lack of air-conditioning, why shouldn’t he seek the coolest spot—the window?

Even so, she regretted not having asked Mrs. Levieux more questions about him when she’d learned the two of them would be the only tenants on the third floor. Recalling the casual comments— “such a quiet man” and “so private”—which her landlady had volunteered during her initial tour of the house, Rachel now found them oblique and hardly reassuring.

If she sought out Adorabella tomorrow and made a point of bringing him up in conversation, could the old woman tell her more? Would she? It hardly seemed likely—not if she hadn’t seen fit to share the news about the murder on the bridge. No, the wily old fox had kept silent—probably for the sake of gaining another boarder.

Listen to yourself. You’ve practically got the poor soul tried and convicted along with your neighbor.

This proved she needed to calm down and figure things out, she thought, digging her keys from her pocket. She opened the screen door and unlocked the glass-and-wood one behind it.

Once inside, she gingerly set the bolt. The extra care wasn’t necessary, since there was no great threat of rousing Adorabella. Although the woman normally ran the house like a dowager queen, keeping track of everything and everyone in her tiny kingdom, Rachel suspected that at night a burglar could carry off the antique cast-iron stove in the parlor without waking her. She attributed that to Adorabella’s affection for her “medicinal” peach liqueur and an equally potent stash of sleeping pills obtained from who knew where.

But that didn’t mean Jewel’s antenna was shut down, even if her room was farther back in the house. Adorabella’s housekeeper, cook and confidante made the lady of the house look like an innocent. Deciding there were enough watchful souls around here as it was, Rachel proceeded with caution, tiptoeing as she began climbing the first flight of stairs.

There were eight bedrooms on the top two floors of the house, and only four were currently occupied, two on the second level and two on the third. Every night since taking a room here, Rachel had felt it both a blessing and a curse that hers was on the top floor; however, at the moment, all she remembered were the negatives—like how with almost every step the stairs creaked, and how so far she’d managed to avoid only a percentage of them.

When she reached her floor, she paused. Her room was at the end of the hall, opposite Mr. Barnes’s. She had chosen it because she’d wanted the view of the creek rather than the barn at the other end of the house, or the woods out back. She’d assumed—perhaps too naively—that Mr. Barnes had chosen his for similar reasons.

The most she’d ever seen of her neighbor was his back as he slipped into his room after using their shared bathroom, or the top of his dark head when he hurried down the stairs. To be fair, there were logical explanations for their lack of contact. Their work schedules were complete opposites. That didn’t exactly enhance their chances for striking up a conversation. But fairness wasn’t an issue at the moment; her sanity, if not her safety, was.