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Leigh was not there, and they found no sign that she had been.
The two were defeated, even anxious. They came all this way, and now had nothing. Ray brought the second bottle of French wine from the car. Kat located small glasses in the kitchen, and wiped them well. They drank the wine warm in front of the rock fireplace, where Ray had built a small fire. He placed two more logs on the fire, and shifted the logs, sending sparks flying. “Y’know, we are trespassing or burglarizing or something.”
“I’ll just say I’m doing a detailed appraisal. You remembered to open the flue?”
He smiled. “Obviously. You sound just like Leigh, who never trusts me. Yes, I opened the flue before setting these logs on fire. I’m not suicidal anymore, in spite of what you might think.”
“And I have plans,” she said, knowing she sounded haughty but unable to help herself. “Every single one of them involves me living past the age of forty.”
“Kat,” he said, eyes lit with the reflection of fire.
“Yes?”
“I’m grateful to you, whatever happens.”
She didn’t believe him but felt bad to be such a doubter.
She slept in the basement bedroom paneled in a plastic wood veneer. In the middle of the night, she woke up. She pummeled her pillows, rearranging them, closed her eyes.
Still no sleep.
She checked out the clock. Three a.m.
Too early to rise, too late to read.
She punched her pillows again, putting one where a man would be, if a man were around.
Closed her eyes. The air felt close and heavy and she wished she had opened the window.
Thought about Ray and Leigh.
Opened her eyes.
Saw a shadow on the wall that didn’t belong there.
Felt an aching hollow inside her as the shadow moved and grew larger. The curtain was closed. It was dark. How could there be a darker shadow? The illusion hovered off the ground.
Now she saw that it wasn’t on the wall but stood out from the wall, a black mass shaped and sized like a floating door. But it was alive, she could feel it, aware of her, watching her.
She froze; stopped breathing. Held her eyes in exactly the same place. Did not dare to widen them.
“It’s me.” In the doorway, silhouetted by the hall light, a figure stood.
And for a terrifying, emotional moment, she thought she saw Tom, and he was furious with her, madder than she remembered seeing him ever before. He moved closer. She found her voice. Her scream must have echoed for miles up and down the old Tahquitz valley.
Where was Zak when she needed him?
21
A light came on in the hall and Ray materialized, stepping into her room, appearing quite sturdy. “What? What’s happened?” he asked, looking around confusedly as she flipped on the little lamp.
“I saw it! I saw-”
“What did you see?”
She rubbed her eyes. “I screamed, didn’t I? Sorry.”
“A bad dream?”
“It must have been.”
“Okay, so you don’t need me here?”
“I guess not. No.”
But he lingered in the doorway. “Listen, Kat. There’s something you need to know. I got cold and went looking for a blanket in the upstairs bedroom closet. I found something.”
“You did?”
“Leigh’s purple shirt. The one she was wearing when she left.”
Kat shivered and pulled the cover up to her shoulders, unable to care for the moment about some old shirt he found.
“Kat, are you really okay?”
“No, I’m not. I saw the damn ghost. At first I thought-then I realized it was a black door, floating by the doorway. I saw it and it saw me. I’m not staying down here! God, what if you hadn’t showed up? What would it have done to me? Stop laughing!”
“You saw-a door?”
She threw off the covers and jumped out of bed. Ray’s eyes widened and she realized she was wearing bikini underwear and nothing else. Ray wore boxers, cotton, and his skin had a warm glow from the light behind him. “Lovely girl, aren’t you?” he murmured.
The air between them quivered like their breaths.
She looked at him standing in that awful doorway, the hairy chest and legs, the loose boxer shorts, the goose bumps forming on his muscular arms.
A mutual, accumulated longing soaked the room.
Ray didn’t move, just stood there gathering up that frightening masculine power that usually slayed her on the spot.
Under such heavy pressure, in the quiet she heard a tiny voice saying, “No, no.”
Maybe he heard the same voice. He turned away.
“Don’t leave, Ray, please? Wait for me,” she said, pulling on her jeans and T-shirt. “Okay, let’s go.” At the top of the stairs she closed the door firmly and tilted a chair back against the knob.
“If we had done anything,” Ray said, as they walked toward the living room, where the embers of their earlier fire continued to flare, “we would have ruined everything.” He pulled a fla
She nodded. She felt better, back by the fire, in better light, her jeans on and zipped. “Yep,” she said. Ray poked the fire, bringing up some heat. They sat on the floor, feet as close to the burning wood as they could stand. Finally warmed up again, Kat said, “I thought you weren’t positive what she wore the day she disappeared.”
“I am now. Take a look.” He led and she followed him into the upstairs bedroom. A purple V-necked shirt lay across the pillow.
“That’s Leigh’s, and I don’t mean from years ago. It was thrown in the back. The rest of the clothing was folded.”
Kat picked the shirt up. It was inside out and wrinkled. She spread it, looking closer. “My God. What’s this?” She held the shirt up to the light, and even he could see it, holes. Rusty-looking spots. “What the hell?”
Ray examined the shirt. “Oh, no,” he said. “I didn’t really look at it. God, no.”
“She was injured.”
Voice constricted, like someone who had been punched in the stomach, he finally said, “Yeah.”
“What happened to her?”
Ray broke through a long silence saying, “But she left the shirt here. Doesn’t that mean she’s okay?”
Kat, the shirt dangling from her right hand, didn’t know. “Maybe. Should we call the police?”
Ray looked flummoxed. “I just don’t know. Maybe she was working with her power tools? It wouldn’t be the first time she hurt herself.”
“Oh no, Ray. These are like-jabs. Too many to be an accident.”
After a long discussion, they decided to bag the T-shirt and take it to the sheriff the minute they got back.
“She left it here. She’s okay,” Ray said.
“If that’s so, they’ll figure that out,” said Kat.
And so at last they had something, and it was hard to look at each other, because they were both thinking the same thing. Ray fetched the sleeping bag and resettled himself on the living room couch, not far from the dread door to the downstairs. Kat took the upstairs bedroom bed and left her door open and the light on. Even so, she only dozed. Ghosts, dead bodies, old houses, and bloody shirts flitted through her dreams.
She was ru
She poured it full. It had been a long day, starting with calling in sick at the store. She settled herself on her couch.
No need to cook tonight; she wasn’t hungry.
During the couple of years they were together, when the world seemed so wide open and possibilities stretched out infinitely, the fact that Henry’s parents didn’t like Esmé seemed like nothing, a flick of a feather duster. Who cared what they thought? Her grandparents did not approve, but nobody expected to gain their approval. Good God. These people had been born in the early nineteen hundreds, so very, very long ago.