Phantom Lover

‘So you’ve already said. But I think that your very presence here establishes the fact that whatever it is is no longer a purely personal matter,’ it was pointed out with inescapable logic.

‘I don’t see why I should be treated like a criminal just because I went visiting uninvited,’ Honor said sullenly. They would probably laugh themselves sick when she told them. Either that or charge her with wasting valuable police time.

‘Extortion is a crime,’ the constable intoned sternly.

‘Extortion!’ Honor’s beautifully distinctive voice creaked like an old rusty gate, her green eyes widening in horror.

‘Extortion,’ confirmed the DI heavily. ‘Or blackmail, if you want to put it in its more common emotive term.’

Blackmail?

Oh, hell!

Suddenly what had been merely an embarrassing misunderstanding took on hideously serious complications.

Honor’s truculent resistance crumbled. She squeezed her eyes tight shut to combat the sinking realisation that she really wasn’t going to escape without giving a very thorough account of her actions to the police.

And all because of that damned Shakespearean sonnet she had mooned over this morning!

CHAPTER TWO

DARLING,

Is it thy will thy image should keep open

My heavy eyelids to the weary night?

Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,

While shadows, like to thee, do mock my sight?

The idea that her ordinary self could engender such wild longings in a man that he couldn’t sleep at night was so bizarre that Honor’s green eyes glowed with amused delight.

She picked up the cup of tea that she had just brewed for herself when she had heard the postman’s whistle, and carried her precious letter over to the comfortable chair behind the untidy desk that served to designate part of the lounge of her small cottage as an office. She settled down in her familiar sprawl, a jean-clad leg slung over one padded chair arm, and scanned the rest of the Shakespearean sonnet, down to the last, jealous couplet:

For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,

From me far off, with others all-too-near.

She couldn’t help smiling. Others? There were certainly no ‘others’ in the sense that the sonnet suggested. The small community of Kowhai Hill, tucked in below the Waitakare Ranges just north-west of Auckland, wasn’t exactly bulging with eligible males, and those she did come into contact with generally knew her too well to suffer any sleeplessness on her account. For one thing she was distressingly plain. For another, her reputation was as spotless as her name.

‘Good old Honor’ was a mate, someone with whom a local lad could be seen having a drink at the pub without being accused of unfaithfulness by his girlfriend or wife, a woman whose social life consisted largely of group outings or happily ‘making up the numbers’ at dinner parties where she could be relied upon to fit in, regardless of the age or diversity of the company.

Except to Adam. To Adam she was someone quite different: a woman enticing in her mystery, challenging in her intellect, desirable in her elusiveness.

Honor’s smile had disappeared by the time she reached the bottom of the page, its place taken by a vivid blush. Adam’s prose might not have the unique beauty of Shakespeare’s poetry, but it was none the less powerful stuff, a passionate outburst of feeling that was lyrical in its erotic intensity.

Although she had never met him in person, in eight months of correspondence Honor had formed a mental picture of a warm, witty and literate man whose love of writing cloaked a personal shyness that made him quite content to pursue their acquaintance entirely through correspondence.

Their letters had been a lively exchange of ideas about books, places, philosophies and world events rather than mundane personal details. Although she had learned that he was thirty-five, owned his own development company and lived on Auckland’s North Shore, that was about the extent of her knowledge of his physical existence outside his letters.

But with the last six letters, her cosy conclusions about him had been exploded. Not only had they arrived weekly instead of at the usual monthly intervals, they were so joltingly different in emotional tenor that Honor would have thought they were penned by someone else if she hadn’t recognised Adam’s distinctive handwriting.

At first Honor had not known how to reply. What did you say to a man who suddenly told you that you were the only thing that gave his life hope and meaning and that your letters were his lifeline? When he begged you to believe that he had fallen wildly in love for the first time in his life? That although he had never had you, except in his illicit imagination, he missed you savagely in his heart, his arms, his bed...?

She had been amused. And enchanted. Apprehensive and intrigued. And...yes, in spite of herself, seduced...

So, after the second letter, she had gathered her own courage and replied according to the dictates of her wayward heart rather than her sceptical head. Amazingly the words had flowed out of her pen as if they had been in there all along, awaiting the perfect moment to escape the repression of her earnest common sense. No one ever fell in love through the post, for goodness’ sake! She didn’t even know what he looked like!

‘All my love, Adam’.

She sighed as she reached the end of the second, sizzling page. Unlike his other letters, which often ran to nine or ten pages, these passionate outpourings were invariably as short as they were hot and sweet.

She began to fold the delicate, onion-skin sheets along the sharp crease-lines only to discover that there was a third sheet, stuck to the second by some of the ink which had run along the edges.

Carefully she peeled it free and froze as a name leapt out at her from the few hastily scrawled lines.

I know we’re not supposed to meet but if I don’t get to see your beautiful face soon, my darling, courageous Helen...touch the soft spun gold of your hair...make love to your lush mouth and delicate body the way I’ve dreamed of these last months I’ll go mad! Please come to me... Don’t put me through the agony of having to wait any longer. I need you...

Helen?

Helen!

Honor bolted upright in her chair.

Beautiful face?

Spun gold hair!

She swivelled her head to stare at her reflection in the blank grey computer screen which sat on her desk. By no stretch of the imagination could the unruly brown curls that tumbled around her shoulders be described as spun gold. Or the oval face sprinkled with freckles and rendered stern by the thick straight brows be considered beautiful. Her nose, rather pink from the spring cold that she was just shaking off, was the only thing about her that was glowing. And no one in his or her right mind would call her sturdy figure ‘delicate’...

Her confusion turned to dawning horror.

Frantically she tugged open the stubborn bottom drawer of her desk and sorted through the sheaf of letters, carefully filed by date. Most of the envelopes were typed, addressed to Miss H. Sheldon at Rural Delivery, Kowhai Hill.

Her hands shaking, Honor opened some at random, scanning the opening lines.

The later, passionate letters were headed ‘Darling’, the rest were teasing salutes to ‘M’Lady’, a reference to the whimsical valentine card addressed to ‘My Lady of the Moonlight’ that had arrived by special delivery the day after the St Valentine’s Ball in nearby Evansdale, which Honor had helped organise for a children’s charity. She had been one of the hostesses and had introduced and been introduced to so many new people that night that all their names and faces had intermingled in her hazy recollection. She couldn’t remember an Adam at all but there was no doubt from the handwritten rhyme inside his card, referring to roses and moonlight and ladies in distress, that he had known exactly who she was.

After all she had been pretty distressed that night, desperately fighting off the summer flu that she had later succumbed to, wandering the small memorial gardens in the moonlight while the dancing went on inside the adjacent community hall, trying to rid herself of a murderous headache that had refused to respond to the pills she had swallowed.

She had finally dozed off on a cramped park bench, waking an hour or so later to find herself tucked under a light rug in the back seat of her car, a sheaf of deep red roses lying on the seat beside her—obviously illegally picked in the gardens. Since there had been any number of hefty farming friends at the ball who could have performed the kindly deed she hadn’t thought twice about it until she had received the stranger’s valentine the next day. Then she had been curious, and yielded to the temptation of the implicit and very untraditional invitation of a post-office box number on the flap of the envelope.

She pulled out more letters until she had gone through them all and then began stuffing them haphazardly back into their envelopes, trying to control her rising panic at the awful realisation:

Not once in all their correspondence had he actually addressed her as ‘Honor’! And her own trademark signature—a large, dramatic H with the other letters of her name an illiterate scrawl that she had fondly imagined was dashingly sophisticated—that too could have easily been misread.

‘Honor?’