The Vanishing (20 page)

I wished that was all there was to it, the sweet and wistful romance of impossible love, but there was a dark side to their story. They had experienced something monstrous and—dare I think it?—murderous together. And now, here I was, in the same house and, if Adrian’s story was to be believed, that evil was still haunting the dark corridors of Havenwood, all of these years later. And I had found it in the library the night before.

Unexpectedly, my stomach began to churn. A wave of nausea sent me running to the bathroom, where I vomited up that morning’s breakfast. I coughed the last of it up and sat on the tile floor for a while, getting my bearings, before pushing myself to my feet, my knees knocking. I splashed cool water onto my face and looked at myself in the mirror, wondering what in the world
that
was about. I ran some water onto a washcloth, squeezed out the excess, and took the cloth with me back to my bedroom.

Something about the breakfast that morning didn’t agree with me, I reasoned, as I slid onto my bed on top of the bedspread, chills shaking me from the inside out, my stomach tensing into tight cramps. I kicked off my shoes and pulled an afghan over me, snuggling down on my nest of pillows. I closed my eyes and placed the washcloth over them, trying to will away the nausea. I thought of ringing for Marion to bring up an antacid, but then I remembered I had some in my travel kit. I tried to rise to get it, but the effort proved too great, and in the end I slumped back down, grateful for the comfort of goose down pillows and a cozy afghan. The antacid could wait.

I don’t remember lying there even one minute longer; I fell immediately into a deep sleep. My dreams were a collage of images: a man with searing dark eyes looking into my soul, spirits whirling around me, people whispering their innermost thoughts and feelings, reindeer in a snowy field, green taffeta crinkling as I
walked. The images flashed through my dreams like a slide show, one after another after another until finally a loud knocking jolted me awake.

“Julia!” I heard, far off in the distance, as though the sound were coming from another place and time. And then the knocking, going on and on and on.

My eyelids were heavy, so heavy I could hardly get them open. But when I finally did, I saw Drew’s face. He was sitting at my bedside, gently shaking me.

“Hey,” he said, pushing the hair out of my eyes, his hand lingering on my cheek. “I was worried when I couldn’t wake you.”

“Oh,” I mumbled, my eyelids struggling to stay open. “What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for you forever.”

I could feel him gently stroking my hair, way off in the distance.

“I’ve been waiting for you longer than that,” he whispered, curling down next to me. I rolled into his arms and snuggled my head onto his chest.

“It’s about time you got here,” I murmured, just before I stopped fighting the sleep that wanted so much to overtake me.

My eyes fluttered open to find Drew sitting in the armchair by the window.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” I said, my receding dreams making a jumble of my thoughts.

I glanced at the clock on my bedside table. When I registered what it said, I bolted upright. “Noon?”

Drew stretched. “You’ve been out awhile.”

“My goodness, what—” I didn’t finish my thought, remembering the unfortunate incident in the bathroom earlier. “I think something in today’s breakfast didn’t agree with me.”

He shook his head. “It wasn’t the breakfast, I’ll wager. You’ve had quite the frightening time of it, last night in particular. You’ve hardly slept at all, from what you’ve told me about your exploits. No wonder your body is reacting to the stress and lack of sleep. I think this is Havenwood, catching up with you. You need the rest, Julia.”

I thought of standing up, but fell back against the pillows instead. “Mrs. Sinclair is expecting me for lunch.”

“She isn’t.” He smiled. “I’ve let her know you’re not feeling well. You’ve got the whole day free.”

“But what about Adrian—” I started.

“Adrian can wait.”

“Oh,” I mumbled, rubbing my temples. Then I remembered our conversation of that morning. “Did you see Mr. Tucker?”

Drew nodded. “I did.”

“And?”

“He didn’t find anything,” he said. “Not a shred of evidence that someone was inside this house.”

“So, whatever I heard in the library—”

“Wasn’t our visitor from the other night, back to do you harm.”

I exhaled.

“There’s something else, too,” he said. “Adrian was going to tell you after breakfast, but…”

“But my little outburst put an end to that.”

“Well, yes. Anyway, he’s heard from his sources in Chicago. They’ve found the person responsible for the fire.”

I sat up. “Who was it?”

“Chap by the name of Carson. Michael Carson.”

I squinted at him. “That doesn’t ring a bell. Should it?”

“He was one of your husband’s clients. Lost everything in the scheme, including his wife, who left him. He had invested his parents’ money and his brother’s; they lost everything, too. His whole family was wiped out.”

“That’s horrible,” I said, aching for them and for everyone Jeremy swindled. “So, is he in custody? Did he admit setting the fire?”

“Yes to the admission, no to the custody. He left a note before swallowing a bottle of pills.”

My hands flew to my mouth. “Oh my God!”

“Don’t feel too badly. In the end I’m glad the bastard is dead.”

I shook my head, not knowing quite what to say to that.

“Julia, his intent was to kill you, not just burn down your house. He thought you were inside. He said he saw someone in the upstairs window—of course he couldn’t have, but that’s what he thought. He wrote all about it in his note.”

“If Adrian hadn’t come to me when he did—”

“But he did. And you’re here now.”

I exhaled. “How do you know all of this? Was it in the newspaper?”

Drew shook his head. “Adrian has sources inside the Chicago Police Department. He made some inquiries and got the whole story.”

I digested this for a moment, turning the facts over in my mind. It sounded true, but one aspect didn’t make sense. “If it wasn’t the man who set my house on fire, who was looking in the kitchen window that night? We know someone was there. We followed his tracks.”

Drew shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know, Julia. We can speculate about it, but we have no way of knowing unless he comes back.”

A knock on the door. Drew hopped up to answer it and found Marion, pushing a wheeled silver trolley containing what looked like lunch.

“Chicken soup and crackers for you, miss,” she said to me, lifting a silver lid off a steaming bowl and setting the bowl on the table by the window. She turned to Drew. “I brought a sandwich and soup for you as well.”

She slipped back out the door, and I pushed myself up, pausing at the edge of the bed for a moment to make sure I’d be steady on my feet. I had no more nausea, thank goodness, and the smell of the soup was restorative.

Drew pushed a couple of chairs over to the table and held mine out for me as I slipped onto it.

“How in the world did she get that trolley up the grand staircase?” I asked him.

“Elevator,” he said, taking a bite of his sandwich. “It’s in the back of the house, near the servants’ stairs.”

Elevator? I hadn’t even seen the back area of the house or the servants’ stairs.

After we finished our lunch, Drew pushed the trolley out of the room and into the hallway, where, presumably, Marion or one of her assistants would fetch it. Then he turned to me.

“How are you feeling? The soup seemed to go down okay.”

“I feel just fine. I think those extra hours of sleep were just what I needed.” I thought of him in the chair beside me when I woke up. “You didn’t sit here all morning with me, did you?”

He shook his head. “While watching you sleep was lovely, I had a few other things to take care of. I slipped out to tell the rest of the household that you weren’t feeling well, tended to the horses, that sort of thing.”

“And then you came back.”

“And then I came back.” He smiled. “I didn’t want you waking up alone, especially if you were off your game.”

The memories of Jeremy that I was fighting so hard to contain rattled around in my brain. The police had told me, over and over, that I had been married to a sociopath. I refused to believe it, even after everything I knew.

But now, looking into the impossibly kind face of the man standing across the room from me—a man whom I was just getting to know, a man who, upon finding me under the weather, had jumped up to arrange for chicken soup and all the rest—I realized what the police had told me was true. Drew had taken better care of me that morning than Jeremy ever had during our entire marriage. I had forgotten what it felt like to be cared for.

“I have an idea,” Drew said as he took his seat next to me, startling me from my musings.

“Do you, now?”

“I do. Would you care to hear it?”

“I’m dying to hear it.”

“Do you feel up to a short walk to the stable?”

I wondered what was on his mind. “I think so. Like I said, the sleep really seems to have done the trick. I feel pretty good, especially after that soup.”

“I was thinking we could go down to my little hideaway and watch a couple of movies this afternoon. You’ve probably noticed the lack of modern technology in the main house, but I’ve got a flat-screen TV and loads of films. And I’ve already told you
Mrs. Sinclair isn’t expecting your company today. So, what do you say?”

“Really?” I asked him. “Don’t you have better things to do than babysit me?”

As those words escaped my lips, a snake of icy suspicion slithered its way up my spine and took hold. I squinted at him. “That’s not what you’re doing, is it? Babysitting me? Please tell me Adrian didn’t put you up to this because I threatened to leave.”

His smile dropped and he sighed heavily. “Julia, I know the guy you were married to turned out to be a total bastard,” he said, mirroring my thoughts of just a few minutes earlier. “But I’m not that guy.”

I could feel the heat rising to my face. What had I been thinking? “I’m sorry for saying that,” I said, my words tumbling out too fast. “It’s just… I’m sorry. I’m just being paranoid. I know you’re not that guy. You’re not even close to being that guy.”

He smiled. “Listen, your life has been upended. You’re adjusting to a whole new world. It must seem like you’ve walked into the haunted house at the amusement park and gotten stuck there for good.”

This elicited a chuckle. “Can we just forget I said anything?”

“Consider it forgotten,” he said, hopping to his feet. “Now, what about those movies?”

I slipped into the bathroom to freshen up. But even though I tried to silence it, my suspicion remained. I had fallen ill right after breakfast… and right after I told Adrian I wanted to leave Havenwood. I had left the breakfast room briefly. Any one of them could’ve put something in my coffee to ensure that I physically couldn’t leave, at least not right then.

And now here was Drew, babysitting me all afternoon.

I ran a brush through my hair and tried to shake those dark thoughts out of my head. I didn’t need this, not now. Not after everything I had been through during the last year. Havenwood was supposed to be my way out. Why was I beginning to suspect it was even more of a prison than the one I had been facing?

Drew and I trudged through the snow toward the stable, the dogs running in joyful circles around us. In the end, I took him up on his offer of movies. What else was I going to do? Prowl around the house alone? Stare at the four walls of my room?

I felt even better about it after we ran into Mrs. Sinclair on our way through the foyer.

“Oh, Julia, darling!” she said, walking toward me with her arms outstretched, pulling me into an embrace when she reached me. “You’re up and about! I was so worried.”

I let myself fold into her arms, taking in her powdery perfume. “I’m feeling much better,” I told her. “A few hours of sleep really did the trick.”

“I understand you’re going to have an afternoon at the cinema, so to speak,” she said, winking at Drew.

“That’s the plan.” I smiled at her. “If you don’t need me. I’m feeling perfectly fine, so—”

“Absolutely not, darling,” she interrupted. “You need some downtime. Besides, Adrian has promised to spend the day with his mother. I may give him fits by suggesting I drive into town!” Her giggle infected all of us. “We will reconvene at dinner if you’re feeling up to it.”

“I’m sure I will,” I said.

“But it’s not going to be formal,” she continued, waggling a finger at me. “Jeans and sweaters. Slippers if you must. There’s nothing
worse than dressing in formalwear if one isn’t feeling up to par. No, comfort is the name of the game!”

We parted, then, with promises to meet at six thirty in the drawing room. Drew and I headed toward the door and Mrs. Sinclair went on her way to find her son.

A fierce, protective sort of love bubbled up inside of me for the eccentric, charismatic woman I was watching walk away. I had been so concerned about myself, I hadn’t even considered what sort of horrific nightmare she herself had gone through.

I watched her walk through the foyer until she was out of sight, and all we could hear was the clicking of her heels, echoing off the walls.

Soon afterward, the snowy trudge behind us, Drew and I were in the stable peeling off our jackets and pulling off our boots.

“Tea?” he asked over his shoulder as he hung our jackets up on the wrought-iron hooks near the fireplace.

“That would be lovely,” I said.

“Let’s migrate into my quarters,” he said, leading me through the doorway from the main stable. “As delightful as the horses are, there can be a certain aroma in this part of the building from time to time.”

I laughed and stepped into his apartment, a tingling coursing through me. We were well and truly alone. No Marion to intrude, no Mrs. Sinclair to summon us. I wondered, for the first time, what the afternoon might bring.

His eyes were full of an intensity that almost frightened me, just a bit. I wanted nothing more than to throw my arms around him and see where the afternoon might take us from there, but at the same time, I barely knew this man.

I thought he was going to pull me into a kiss, but instead he pulled away and walked to the kitchen area, a grin on his face. He filled up the kettle and set it on the stove.

“Julia, Julia,” he said, looking at the kettle and shaking his head slightly. “Being alone with you has me thinking things I shouldn’t.”

I grasped around in my mind for a witty response to that, but all I could think of was the heat that was rushing to my face and the tingling in my hands. I wasn’t exactly prepared to jump into bed with a man I’d only known for a few days. And yet. There was a timelessness to my brand-new relationship with Andrew McCullough that I didn’t quite understand, but felt just the same, deep in my soul. And it made me want to be as close as possible with him. Yet I wasn’t sure why. I watched him as he stood over the kettle until it boiled.

“I didn’t agree to come down here to seduce you, you know.” I smiled as he handed me a cup of tea and slid down next to me on the sofa. “I thought we were just going to watch a movie.”

“Make no mistake, Julia,” he said, his voice low. “If I’m ever lucky enough to coax you into my bedroom, it will be for one reason and one reason only.”

“What’s that?”

“True love.”

The room seemed to shimmer and sway, then, my peripheral vision blurring. All I could see was Andrew’s face, his eyes gazing into mine. Tears began to sting around their edges, and the sheer force of what I felt for this man washed over me like a wave.

“I found the letter,” I whispered.

“What letter?” His voice was a rasp.

“The one from Seraphina to Andrew.”

“The one she wrote to him after what happened at that last séance?”

I nodded.

“Where did you find it?” he wanted to know.

“In her biography,” I told him. “That’s the reason I went into the library in the first place, to find that book. I wanted to learn more about her. The letter was there, in the back of the book.”

“So that’s where it got to,” he said, his expression far away, as though he were looking directly into the past. “Mrs. Sinclair must’ve put it there when she was doing her research.”

I leaned back against the sofa. “You’ve seen it before?”

“Aye,” he said, taking a deep breath and letting it out in a long sigh. “Andrew kept it with his private papers.”

“So you know that it’s true, all of it,” I said, my voice wavering. “Seraphina was my great-great-grandmother.”

“I know. The name might have been a coincidence, and the name of her sister and your great-great-great-aunt being the same might have been a coincidence. But when I took one look at you, I knew it was true.”

“So, you also know they were deeply in love, my great-great-grandmother and your great-great-grandfather.”

He ran a hand through my hair, letting it rest on my shoulder. “Oh, I know that, too.” He was looking deeply into my eyes.

“Did true love find them, I wonder?” I whispered.

“I think we can be altogether sure of that, Julia,” he said, pushing me deeper into the back of the sofa and kissing me with an urgency I had never before felt, as though he himself had been waiting for this moment for more than a century. We slid down until we were lying together on the couch, his hands reaching under my sweater and burning hot on my bare skin.

I fully expected we were going to give in to what was obviously happening between us, despite what we had said just moments before. But he pushed himself away and sat up.

“I think I need some water,” he said, his voice gravelly and rough. He stood up and walked toward the kitchen. “You?”

“Okay,” I said, gathering myself and curling my legs up beneath me, my whole body shaking.

He handed me a glass and slid back down next to me. “I’m sorry, Julia.”

“What for?”

“I’ve not been altogether honest with you,” he said, his eyes crinkling.

Not him. Not now. I took a sip of the cool water and tensed for what was coming. “Okay.”

“I told you that I didn’t want to, ah, take advantage of our aloneness but I didn’t tell you why,” he said, clearing his throat.

My stomach seized up. These types of conversations didn’t tend to go well. “Okay,” I said again.

“You threatened to leave Havenwood,” he said, averting his eyes from mine. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did. But I’m not going anywhere. This is my home and I’m here for the duration. If you do decide to leave us, it’s going to be hard enough to lose you when I’ve well and truly fallen for you.” His voice was shredded with the emotion of it all.

My spine tingled.
He’s well and truly fallen for me?
While part of me liked that idea, I had just met this man a few days ago. It seemed a little soon for this kind of a declaration, didn’t it? Although… was it, really? Our feelings were obviously leading somewhere, given what nearly happened a few moments before. He struck me as an honest man who wouldn’t abide any game playing. Maybe he was the kind of man who would say what he felt when he felt it, chips fall where they may.
Okay,
I thought.
That’s something new
.

“So you see,” he said, moving a bit closer to me. “If we were to continue this conversation in my bedroom, and you decide later to leave, I couldn’t bear it. I just couldn’t lose you like that.” Tears were shimmering in his eyes and he cleared his throat and shook his head, willing them away.

Sure, things were heating up between us, but tears? I didn’t quite understand the depth of his emotion. Maybe he was just a guy who fell hard and fast?

But, perplexing intensity aside, I knew he was right. If I did decide to leave Havenwood, it would be hard enough to leave him as it was. I was beginning to have feelings for this man. And I wasn’t at all sure how long I’d be staying.

And so, with the fire crackling in the fireplace and snow lightly falling outside, we snuggled down onto the sofa and put our feet up on the ottoman. We spent the afternoon watching movies. I sunk into the soft leather and exhaled, wrapped in the blissful normalcy of it all.