Dream Lake (3 page)

The stranger looked down at Alex with an expression of surprise that seemed to rival his own.

“Who are you?” Alex demanded again.

“I don’t know,” the man said slowly, staring at him without blinking.

He was about to say something else, but then he
flickered
… like an image on a cable channel with bad reception … and disappeared.

The room was quiet. A bee landed on one of the screen windows and walked in repeated circles.

Alex set aside the hammer and let out a taut breath. He used his thumb and forefinger to pinch the corners of his eyes, which were sore and puffy from the previous night’s drinking. Hallucination, he thought. Garbage from a wasted brain.

The craving for alcohol was so intense that he briefly considered going to the kitchen and rummaging through the pantry. But Sam rarely kept hard liquor; there would be nothing but wine.

And it wasn’t yet noon. He never let himself drink before noon.

“Hey.” Sam’s voice came from the doorway. He gave Alex an odd look. “You need something? I thought I heard you.”

Alex’s temples were throbbing painfully in time to his heartbeat. He felt vaguely nauseous. “The guys on your vineyard crew … does one of them have short black hair, wears a retro flight jacket?”

“Brian’s got dark hair, but it’s kind of longish. And I’ve never seen him in that kind of jacket. Why?”

Alex rose to his feet and went to the window. He flicked at the mesh with a snap of his fingers, jolting the bee off the screen. It flew away with a sullen buzz.

“You okay?” he heard Sam ask.

“I’m fine.”

“Because if there’s anything you want to talk about—”

“No.”

“Okay,” Sam said with a careful blandness that annoyed him. Darcy often used the same tone. Like she had to walk on eggshells around him.

“I’m going to finish up here and take off in a few minutes.” Alex went to the worktable and began to measure a length of trim.

“Right.” But Sam lingered at the doorway. “Al … you been drinking lately?”

“Not enough,” he said with vicious sincerity.

“Do you think—” “Don’t give me shit right now, Sam.”

“Got it.”

Sam stared at him without bothering to disguise his concern. Alex knew he shouldn’t have been chafed by the signs that his brother actually cared for him. But any sign of warmth or affection had always caused him to react differently from most people—it provoked an instinct to turn away, close up. People could either deal with it or get lost. It was who he was.

He kept his face expressionless and his mouth shut. For all that he and Sam were brothers, they knew practically nothing about each other. Alex preferred to keep it that way.

After Sam left the parlor, the ghost turned his attention back to Alex.

At the moment when he and Alex had been able to look at each other, the ghost had been shocked by an awareness, a connection opening, so that he could perceive everything the man felt … bitterness, a desire for numb oblivion, a seething lonely need that nothing could satisfy. It wasn’t that the ghost felt all these things himself … it was more an ability to browse through them, like titles in a bookstore. Nonetheless, the intensity of the perception had startled the ghost, and he had backed off.

And apparently he had become invisible again.

Dark-haired, wearing a flight jacket …
Is that what I look like?
What else had Alex seen?
Do I look like someone you know? Maybe someone in an old photograph? Help me find out who I am.

Thrumming with frustration, the ghost watched Alex install the rest of the door casings. Each strike of the hammer reverberated through the air. He hovered near Alex, the connection between them fragile but palpable. He had a sense of the slow corrosion of a soul that had never stood a chance, never enough caring, never enough hope or kindness or any of the things necessary to build a decent foundation for a human being. Although Alex was certainly not someone he would have chosen to be attached to—put more plainly, to
haunt
—the ghost didn’t see an alternative.

Alex organized Sam’s tools and picked up the power drill that needed to be repaired. As he left, the ghost accompanied him to the threshold of the front door.

Alex walked out to the front porch. The ghost hesitated. On impulse, he moved forward. This time there was no disintegration, no fragmenting of consciousness. Instead, he was able to follow Alex.

Outside.

Walking to the drive where his car was parked, Alex felt an itchy, stinging impatience that had no identifiable source. His senses were uncomfortably heightened, the sun too strong for his eyes. The smell of cut grass and violets was nauseatingly sweet in his nostrils. Letting his gaze drop to the path in front of him, he noticed something odd. By some trick of the light, two shadows extended from his feet. Motionless, he watched the two silhouettes on the path. Was it possible that one of them had moved slightly while the other stayed still?

He forced himself to walk. Giving in to delusions, talking aloud to apparitions, was going to land his ass in lockdown rehab. Darcy would have seized on any excuse to shut him away. So would his brothers, for that matter.

Deliberately he turned his mind to the prospect of going home. Darcy had left to go apartment-hunting in Seattle, which meant the house was empty. He would be able to get loaded in peace. It sounded good. So good, in fact, that the car keys shook a little in his hand.

As Alex got into the BMW, the shadow slipped inside with him, and settled across the passenger seat like an empty pillowcase. And together they went home.

Three

This was the irony: after years of longing to escape the house at Rainshadow Road, a few weeks spent in Alex Nolan’s company had been enough to make the ghost want to go back. But there was only so far that the ghost could drift before he encountered the parameters of yet another invisible prison. He was stuck with Alex. He could occupy another room, or glide several yards away, but that was it. When Alex left his ultramodern house at Roche Harbor, the ghost found himself being towed along like a balloon on a string … or more aptly, a helpless fish caught on the end of a line.

Women often approached him, drawn by the dark glamour of his good looks. But Alex was a distant and unsentimental man. His sexual needs were occasionally satisfied by Darcy, who was now living in Seattle but sometimes came to visit even though they had agreed to a legal separation as a prelude to divorce. They had conversations in which words nicked like razor blades, followed by sex, the one form of connection they had ever managed. Darcy had told Alex that all the things that made him a terrible husband were also the things that made him great in bed. Whenever they started going at it, the ghost prudently removed himself to the farthest room in the house and tried to ignore Darcy’s ecstatic screams.

Darcy was greyhound-lean and beautiful, her hair black and straight. She radiated a diamond-hard confidence that would have made it impossible to pity her, except that the ghost had noticed signs of vulnerability … feathery sleepless lines around her mouth and eyes, brittle fractures in her laughter, all caused from the knowledge that her marriage had become less than the sum of its parts.

The ghost accompanied Alex around his on-spec residential development in Roche Harbor—something the ghost had heard him refer to as a pocket neighborhood. A grouping of well-tended houses, arranged around a green lawn commons and a cluster of mailboxes. People didn’t necessarily like Alex, but they respected his work. He was known for running a tight operation and finishing a project on schedule, even in a place where subcontractors tended to work on island time.

It was obvious to everyone on the island, however, that Alex drank too much and slept too little, and eventually it was all going to catch up with him. Before long his health would deteriorate just like his marriage. The ghost fervently hoped that he wasn’t going to have to watch the erosion of this man’s life.

Trapped in Alex’s sphere, the ghost was impatient to visit Rainshadow Road, where big changes were happening to the rest of the Nolan family.

A few days after the ghost had left Rainshadow Road, the phone had rung at an unusually late hour. The ghost, who never slept, had gone into Alex’s room as the bedside lamp was turned on.

Rubbing his eyes, Alex had said in a sleep-thickened tone, “Sam. What is it?”

As Alex listened, his expression hadn’t changed, but his face went skull-white. He had to swallow twice before asking, “Are they sure?”

As the conversation had continued, the ghost gathered that the Nolans’ sister, Victoria, had been involved in a car wreck. She had died on the scene. Since Victoria had never married, nor had she ever revealed the father of her child, her six-year-old daughter, Holly, had just been orphaned.

Alex had hung up the phone and stared blindly at the bare wall, his eyes dry.

The ghost had felt a mixture of shock and sorrow, even though he had never met Victoria. She had died young—the cruelty of that, the unfairness of such loss, struck a chord of compassion. The ghost had wished for the luxury of tears, the relief of them. But as a soul without a body, he didn’t have the ability to cry.

Apparently neither did Alex Nolan.

Out of the tragedy of Victoria Nolan’s death, something remarkable had happened: Mark was granted custody of her daughter, Holly, and the two of them moved in with Sam. The three of them were now living together at the house on Rainshadow Road.

Prior to Holly’s arrival, the atmosphere in the house had resembled nothing so much as a football locker room. Laundry was done only when all other clothing options had been exhausted. Mealtimes were scattershot and hasty, and there was rarely anything in the fridge beyond half-empty bottles of condiments, a six-pack of beer, and the occasional leftover pizza in a grease-spotted box. Doctor’s visits were something that happened only if you needed stitches or a defibrillator.

But somehow Mark and Sam had managed to make room in their lives for a six-year-old girl, and that act of compassion had changed everything. The junk-food-loving bachelors had started to read nutrition labels as if it were a matter of life or death. If they couldn’t pronounce an ingredient, it was banned. They learned new words like “rickets” and “rotavirus,” and the names of at least a half-dozen Disney princesses, and how to use peanut butter to remove a wad of gum from long hair.

Before long, the brothers discovered that when you opened your heart to a child, it also left you open to other people. In the year after Holly had first come to live with them, Mark fell in love with a red-haired young widow named Maggie, and all his long-held prejudices against the idea of marriage collapsed like wet toast. After the August wedding, Mark, Maggie, and Holly would live in their own house on the island, and Sam would have Rainshadow Road back to himself again.

It seemed only a matter of time before Sam, too, would decide to take a chance on love. His fears were understandable—the Nolan parents, Jessica and Alan, had demonstrated to their four children that the seeds of failure and destruction were sown at the beginning of every relationship. If you loved someone, sooner or later you would reap a bitter harvest.

After a nasty legal battle, Alex and Darcy had agreed on terms that would allow their legal separation to be converted to a divorce. She cleaned him out financially, winning most of their assets, including the house. At the same time, the economy took a downturn and the real estate market plummeted. The bank had foreclosed on Alex’s Roche Harbor development, and put his plans for developing property at Dream Lake on indefinite hold.

Alex drank until he had acquired the young-old look of someone burning out too early. He wanted numbness. Oblivion. The ghost could only surmise that as the youngest child of alcoholic parents, Alex’s survival had depended on detachment. If you never felt anything or trusted anyone, if you denied every need or weakness, you couldn’t be hurt.

Every day eroded Alex a little more. How much longer, the ghost wondered, before there was nothing left of him?

With his Roche Harbor project gone and his other development at a standstill, Alex spent most of his time working on the vineyard house at Rainshadow Road. Some of the rooms had been so damaged by water leaks that he’d had to gut and rebuild them, starting with new subflooring. Recently he’d installed silk-screened reproduction wallpaper in the living room, after hand-cutting the panels and border from a master roll. Although Sam had tried to pay Alex for the work, Alex had refused. He knew his brothers didn’t understand why he’d taken such an interest in the place. Mostly it was to assuage his conscience—or what was left of it—over not having volunteered in the past to help raise Holly. There was no way in hell Alex was going to have anything to do with taking care of a child. However, making the house safe and comfortable while she lived there was something he could do, something he was good at.

It was midsummer, and the crew at Rainshadow vineyard was busy tending the vines and pruning leaves to expose more of the ripening grapes to the sun. Alex arrived in the morning to do some work in the attic. Before heading upstairs, he went to the kitchen with Sam for some coffee.

Scents of the previous evening’s meal—chicken soup flavored with sage—lingered in the air, subtle but comforting. An antique glass bell jar covered a pale wedge of cheese on the counter.

“Al, why don’t you let me fry you a couple of eggs before you start working?” Sam asked.

Alex shook his head. “Not hungry. Just want coffee.”

“Okay. By the way … I’d appreciate it if you’d keep the noise level down today. I’ve got a friend staying here, and she needs rest.”

Alex scowled. “Tell her to take her hangover somewhere else. I have some trim work to do.”

“Do it later,” Sam said. “And it’s not a hangover. She was in an accident yesterday.”

Before Alex could reply, the doorbell rang. It was one of those old-fashioned rotary mechanical bells that worked with a turnkey.