Authors: Barbara Davis
“Which is why I’m asking the council to take up the matter and schedule a vote for the immediate closure of Hope House, as well as exploring the possibility of eminent domain of the property for auction at some future date.”
Lane felt a sick hollow in the pit of her stomach as one by one the
council members nodded their assent. And with that, Mayor Landon announced the date of the vote, two weeks hence, and quickly concluded the meeting.
Scattered applause gradually gained momentum, a wave that seemed to roll from the front of the room to the back, where she and Michael were standing. Lane couldn’t say she was shocked; numb was a better description for what she felt. One look at Michael, however, was enough to tell her he was anything but numb. His hands were fisted at his sides, his shoulders bunched up toward his ears, an enigmatic gesture that had become strangely familiar.
“Michael?”
He didn’t answer, just stared at the dais where the council members had begun to collect their things and move toward the steps.
“Michael,” she said again. “The meeting’s over.”
He turned finally, blinking hard, as if he’d forgotten she was there at all. “Let’s go,” he said thickly, and headed for the door.
Lane trailed him to the car, saying nothing as they waited their turn to pull out of the rapidly emptying lot. She was caught between seething over Landon’s false accusations, and an uneasy curiosity about the black mood that had suddenly come over Michael. While she would dearly love to think he’d suffered a change of heart about Mary, it hardly seemed likely.
It was far more probable that he was miffed with her for ignoring his advice and publicly crossing swords with the mayor. Well, maybe she had, but someone had to stand up for what was right. Not that it had made any difference. If she didn’t connect with someone from Hope House soon—someone with the resources to fight Harold Landon—there’d be no hope for Hope House.
T
he parlor felt too quiet after the crowded buzz of the meeting hall, the clock in the hall hollow and gloomy as it began to strike nine. Michael pocketed his car keys and headed for the stairs without so much as a word. Lane watched him go, his feet slow and heavy as they negotiated the steps. He hadn’t even bothered to remove his jacket.
He hadn’t said a word on the ride home, his eyes intent on the road, hands locked on the wheel, as if driving through a storm only he could see. She had wanted to go for coffee, or maybe grab some dinner, since neither of them had eaten, to talk about the meeting and ask what he thought she should do next. Instead, she had decided to leave him to his mood. This was her fight, after all. He’d made that plain from the start.
Her head was throbbing, and had been since about halfway through the meeting. In the kitchen, she scared up a couple of Advil, washed them down with a glass of milk, made a peanut butter sandwich, then climbed the two flights of stairs to her rooms. She hadn’t done much work of late, almost none, in fact, and she had an article due next week. It was only nine. Maybe she could get the thing started, scribble down an outline, a few bullet points. Except she
didn’t feel like working. Her thoughts were too jumbled, outrage and impotence and disgust all roiling together like water behind a dam, bottled up with no outlet.
Tomorrow she’d have to tell Mary how things stood, that they had two weeks to find a way to block the mayor’s plans or Hope House would be shuttered, its residents scattered who knew where. Two weeks. She dreaded being the bearer of such news. But what of the recipient? What would it be like for someone like Mary to hear such a thing, to know the one safe thing in her life was about to be yanked away?
After changing into her sweats, she wandered into her writing room and flipped open her laptop, hoping the muse would descend. Instead, she checked her e-mail. Her mother had arrived home safely. Robert promised to have his people on Hope House’s funding trail first thing in the morning. Well, it was something at least. And maybe she’d hear something back from R&C Limited in the next few days.
It took only a few minutes of staring at her notes to realize she was wasting her time trying to work in her present mood. Instead, she shut down the computer, removed the battered sketchbook from the desk drawer, and padded back to the bed to prop herself up against a bank of pillows.
As always, the fairy-tale images spoke to her, a beautiful queen and handsome young knights, castles twined with flowers like small white moons. But tonight there was something new—or rather, something she’d missed—tiny, almost imperceptible differences between one page and the next that she now realized created a kind of visual timeline. Suddenly, it was clear, in the gradual but steady climb of vines up castle walls, the subtle leaching of color from the queen’s golden hair, the growing gloom of a darkening sky and mounting gray waves, all of which seemed to culminate on the book’s final page, with the red-haired siren calling across the waves to a beached and broken boat. It was an ominous chronology, a cautionary tale woven from page to page—but a caution against what?
Not liking the dark direction of her thoughts, Lane closed the book and slid it into the nightstand. She had enough on her mind without worrying about a collection of old drawings. Flicking off the lamp, she rolled onto her back, praying that sleep would come quickly, and without dreams. Instead, she lay awake, counting the seconds between the rhythmic blue-white strokes of Starry Point Light.
She had just dozed off when something, a creak or a thud, brought her up with a start. Propped on one elbow, she trained her ears to the silence. There was nothing. Convinced that she’d imagined the whole thing, she lay back down, then heard it again, though perhaps sensed was a more apt description. She was used to the inn’s arthritic moans and groans, the creaking of walls and floors, like century-old bones settling at the end of a long day, but this was different. This was man-made and furtive somehow—the kind of sound a person made when trying to make no sound at all.
Breath held, she padded to the door, peered out into the empty corridor, then tiptoed down the first flight of stairs. Michael’s door was closed, no sign of light leaking from the narrow chink beneath. At least someone could sleep.
Downstairs, she moved from room to room, bumping about in the dark as she checked doors and windows, but nothing seemed amiss. She had just placed a hand on the newel post, preparing to return to her rooms, when she caught the muffled but unmistakable crack of breaking glass, shards ringing in the quiet night air as they tinkled to the ground.
It came again, from outside, from somewhere near the front of the house. Lane hurried to the parlor and pushed back the curtains, peering across the street at the Rourke House, bone white now, and bled of color beneath the waning half-moon. She saw nothing at first, just vacant windows and the stark silhouette of its long-forsaken tower. Then her heart squeezed against her ribs as a light appeared, not inside the house this time, but moving stealthily through the
greenhouse. A prickle coursed the length of her spine as she stared at the hollowed-out structure, eerily skeletal with half its panes gone.
With hands gone suddenly clammy, she eased open the window, wondering how she’d ended up in a bad episode of
Scooby-Doo
. The sound came again, jarring in the icy stillness, but this time it was punctuated by a wild arc of thin white light. Again and again, the brittle shattering repeated, each blow synchronized with a similar blade of light.
It took a moment to make sense of what she was seeing, but eventually she realized the intruder must be using a flashlight to smash out the greenhouse’s few remaining panes. She shivered as it came again, a stark and chilling sound, of long-held anger finally being unleashed—of someone gone mad.
She should wake Michael, she knew, but she was shaking all over, and her legs seemed to have grown roots to the floor. And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the light was gone, the night dead still. She was about to head for the phone when she was struck with the uneasy notion that she was being watched, that whoever was in the greenhouse not only knew she was at the window but was staring right back at her.
The thought sent a shot of adrenaline through her. Finally, she was able to move, to think. Should she phone the police, or would it only fuel Landon’s plans when the story hit the
Islander
Dispatch
the next morning, as it almost certainly would, complete with quotes from Starry Point’s illustrious police chief? On the other hand, if she did call and they managed to catch the real perpetrator, the mayor’s accusations would be exposed as the utter nonsense they were. Hope House would be spared.
Easing the window closed, she flipped the latch to the locked position, double-checked it, and made a beeline for the phone. She no longer cared about being quiet. Michael would be up soon enough when the police arrived. She had just picked up the handset when she
noticed a pale spill of light from the kitchen, a light that hadn’t been on when she came down. Had she been so distracted that she’d left the back door unlocked?
The phone felt slippery against her palm as she crept toward the kitchen. She was still trying to decide whether to use it to dial 911 or wield it as a weapon when she heard what sounded like the refrigerator door opening and closing. She let her breath out. Unless the intruder had worked up a thirst and rushed across the street for a cold beverage, she was probably safe.
Michael tossed her a look as she peered tentatively into the kitchen, his face in shadow from the small fluorescent over the sink. The sight of him, standing there with a carton of orange juice in his hand, nearly made her legs buckle with relief.
“God, Michael,” she said breathlessly, moving to check the bolt on the back door. “I thought you were asleep. Actually, I’m glad you’re not. I was about to call the police. There’s someone over at the Rourke House again, in the greenhouse this time.”
“You saw them?”
“No, but I saw a flashlight and heard glass breaking. Breester won’t be able to pretend it was all a figment of my imagination when there’s glass everywhere.”
Michael made no reply, just stood there, looking at her, his glass of juice untouched, a faint sheen of sweat slicking his forehead.
“Michael, are you—”
She saw it then, his jacket draped on the peg beside the door, the collar glistening with splinters of broken glass. She reached out to touch the sleeve—still cool—and bumped against something protruding from the pocket. With a dawning sense of dread, she pulled it free—a heavy black flashlight, its lens shattered.
She took a step back, and then another, until her spine was against the door and there was nowhere to go, nothing to do but stand there, a flashlight in one hand, a phone in the other, as she put the pieces
together, remembering another night, another mysterious beam of light.
“It was you?”
Michael said nothing. He was breathing heavily, she saw now, his nostrils flared with the effort to appear composed. But his eyes were somewhere else, vacant and filled with something that made her mouth go dry.
“What were you doing at the Rourke House tonight?” she demanded, holding up the phone. “Tell me now, or I’m dialing 911.”
Michael set down his juice and met her eyes without flinching. “I grew up in that house.”
Michael
T
here was a flood of relief as the words left his mouth, relief and horror that for the first time in thirty years he’d actually said them aloud. And yet deep down, he’d wanted to say them, had perhaps even needed to. A bead of sweat traced along his temple as the clock ticked and the silence yawned. Before him, Lane stood pale and disbelieving, back against the door, knuckles white around the damning flashlight.
“I don’t understand. Tell me why you were there.”
He couldn’t help it. He found himself grinning at her, a slow-spreading rictus that had nothing to do with humor and everything to do with the quiet rage still thrumming in his veins. It wasn’t new, this rage; he’d been living with it for thirty years, quietly ignoring it, carefully controlling it—or so he’d thought until tonight. Landon had been the touch paper, the bastard’s thinly veiled reference to his mother and the fire that had taken his brother’s life, tossed to the crowd like so much red meat, as if he actually gave a damn about the Rourkes, or the events that had torn them apart.
He hadn’t planned on losing it when he slipped out the back door and across the street with his flashlight. He’d gone there to be with
his anger, to prove to himself that he could still live with it, control it. But that’s not what happened.
“Michael?”
She said his name as if she were calling him back from somewhere very far away, leery, tentative. He was scaring the hell out of her, he knew, but he was eager to have it all out now. The words kept coming, like water from a hose that had been clamped for years.
“I was born Evan Michael Rourke, son of the Honorable Samuel R. Rourke, Starry Point’s once-beloved mayor, and his mad wife, Hannah. The little ghost everyone’s so fond of talking about was my brother, Peter. Tonight, at the meeting, the crazy person Landon was talking about was my mother.”
A series of emotions played over her face: shock, pity, fear. She was shaking her head back and forth, slowly, as if trying to get the words to settle into some space in her brain where they might make sense. He wanted to tell her not to bother. He’d long since given up trying to figure out life’s brutal sense of humor.
“There’s more,” he said, and saw her go a shade paler. “Showing up here wasn’t an accident. I didn’t need a place to do research.” Was it possible she’d pressed herself even more closely against the door? “The truth is that for nearly two years I slept under this roof with a lot of other boys in what you now call the Tower Suite, and I needed to come back.”
“Why?”
Why indeed? He felt a wave of nausea as he flashed back to that night, to the mingled reek of vomit and whiskey and smoke, his mother clinging to him, wild-eyed with panic. How could he make her understand the shame of it, the guilt of an eight-year-old boy, carried with him still, not for some hideous thing he’d done—but for something he hadn’t? How telling it, even now, brought the terror of that night screaming back, until he could taste the ashes at the back of his throat, hear the terrified screams of the brother he couldn’t save.
“I needed to find something.”
She tilted her head, eyeing him warily. “What?”
“Something I left behind when I was a boy. I thought it might . . .” He let the words dangle. “It doesn’t matter.” But it did matter. It mattered a great deal, though even now he couldn’t say why. So he lied. Because it was easier, and because he wanted to believe it. “It was a lifetime ago, three lifetimes, actually. Hannah and Peter Rourke are dead, and I’m someone else now.”
Lane took a step forward, then checked herself. “Your mother was . . . sick?”
He nodded. She was putting it all together now. He could see it in her eyes. “For almost as long as I can remember.”
“And you blame her for Peter?”
“I blame myself.”
“But that’s—” She stopped midsentence and blinked at him. “Why?”
“I wasn’t there. When the fire started, I wasn’t there.”
“Where were you?”
He hated the gentleness of her voice, the carefulness of it, as if he were as mad as his mother and might suddenly snap. “I was in the greenhouse. I would go there sometimes. Hannah used to grow these flowers that only bloomed at night. Moonflowers, she called them. They were her favorite. She said if you waited for one to bloom and then made a wish, whatever you asked for would come true. So I was out there waiting to make a wish.”
Her face softened. “What were you wishing for?”
It was an absurd question, but one he had known she would ask. “For my mother to not be crazy anymore. It didn’t come true. I fell asleep instead, listening to the rain against the glass. When I woke up I saw the flames shooting from our bedroom window.”
She laid a hand on his arm. At some point she had put down the phone and the flashlight; he didn’t know when or where. Her eyes
were wide and full of feeling when they met his. “That’s why you went there, why you smashed the windows.”
“I think I must have been waiting thirty years to do that.”
“Do you feel better?”
“No.”
“Michael, you can’t blame yourself for what happened that night.”
“I was supposed to be the man of the house. That’s what Hannah said when my father died, that it was up to me to look after her and Peter.”
“Yes. It’s what mothers say when they need their sons to be brave. But you were a child. She didn’t mean it literally. She couldn’t have.”
“You don’t understand. Hannah Rourke wasn’t like other mothers. There was talk, after my father died, and even before, about putting her away. ‘All those pills she takes, and who’s going to make sure the children are fed, and what if she finally snaps and hurts one of those poor boys?’ They never said any of it in front of me, of course, but even as a kid you hear things. They could have done it, too—she was that crazy. But she was married to the mayor. So they left her alone—or mostly alone. But things got bad after my father died. Hannah wouldn’t believe he was dead. She wouldn’t even go to his funeral.”
“I’m so sorry,” Lane said, and he could see that she was. She bit her lip, as if reluctant to say what would come next. “People say . . . I mean . . . I’d always heard that Hannah survived the fire. But just now you said she was dead. How did she die?”
“No idea. I didn’t ask for details. My mother—my adopted mother, I mean—told me she heard it from her attorney a few years ago. I think she was relieved. I’ve always had a hunch she was afraid Hannah would pop up one day to claim me, and there’d be a terrible scene.”
“She never did, though?”
“No.”
“Did you want her to?”
Michael turned away, splashing his untouched juice into the sink. “No.”
“It must have been hard on you.”
He heard her come up behind him, felt her hand on his shoulder. “It was harder on Peter,” he said bitterly, shrugging free of her touch. He didn’t want her pity, didn’t want to be consoled.
“Were you very close?”
“Of course we were close. He was my brother.”
“No,” she said softly. “I meant you and Hannah.”
“I don’t want to talk about her anymore.”
“It might help.”
“It won’t.”
“Sometimes if you talk things through you realize you’ve been remembering them wrong.”
He rounded on her then, feeling the memories like brands, as sharp and searing as fire across his right shoulder and down his back. “What do you want to hear, Lane? That I got there too late? That by the time I dragged my drunken mother out of her room the fire had spread too far? That the stairs collapsed while I was trying to get to Peter? That he died because I was out making a wish on a goddamn flower?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Forget it.”
Lane wound her arms tight to her body, shuddering visibly. “I don’t think I can. I don’t think you can either, though you’ve certainly been trying. Can I ask you something?”
He studied her face a moment, wondering what was coming, then decided the harm had already been done. “What?”
“That thing you do with your shoulders, the way you hunch them sometimes, like you’re doing now—I’ve noticed that it happens when you talk about the past.”
Michael went very still, taking careful inventory of his body. He
wasn’t aware that he’d been doing
that thing
. In fact, he’d been doing his best to control the annoying and largely unconscious impulse that had plagued him most of his life. He hated that she’d noticed.
“I’m sorry. Was there a question in there?”
“I was wondering why you do it.”
Michael said nothing. No words could describe the reminder he carried on his shoulders, the thing that marked him with the horror of that night, that would never let him forget. His fingers went to the collar of his shirt, numbly working one button at a time, until he was able to slide the blue oxford down his arms. Shifting slightly, he turned his right shoulder to the light.
It was Lane’s turn to be silent, though her lips parted in a slow dawning of—what? Pity? Revulsion? He wasn’t sure. Becca had simply pretended not to see them, her fingers always careful to skirt the shiny patches of puckered flesh. To this day he couldn’t say for certain that she’d ever touched them.
There were tears in her eyes now, clinging to her lower lashes, making tiny spokes of them. “From that night?” she whispered. “From the fire?”
He nodded, about to pull his shirt back on when she reached for him. Her fingers were soft and cool, featherlight as they lit on his ruined flesh, a gesture of sympathy—and startling sensuality.
“Don’t,” he said, flinching, but made no move to avoid her touch.
“Please.”
The softest of pleas, little more than a whisper. Standing rigid, he closed his eyes, scarcely breathing as her fingers traced the shiny stretch of tissue, forcing himself to absorb all that was in the touch: recognition, acceptance—wanting. She wanted him. The realization was like a jolt of electricity through his limbs, undeniable and nearly crippling. Suddenly, he was shaking.
“Was it very bad?” she asked quietly.
“Yes.” It was all he could do to form the word, to deny the fever
suddenly thundering in his blood. “They kept me in the hospital . . .” His words trailed off in a gasp as he felt the moist warmth of her mouth graze his shoulder, the caress of her cheek, pressed damply there and held.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed against his skin. “About all of it.”
Her arms came around him then, circling from behind, the thrum of her heart pounding against him and through him, matching the beat of his own. At his core, something feral breathed to life, uncoiling like a live thing: primitive, reckless, hungry. How had they come to this place, this blinding flashpoint of rawness and need? He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. Turning, he met her gaze and found the only answer he needed.
Yes.