Dreams of Fire (Maple Hill Chronicles Book 1) (4 page)

“You’re welcome, dear. Lily will be glad to know it suits you. It’s so nice to know you live only twenty minutes away! You must come visit when you have a chance.”

“I will, Grandma. You’ll have to come over when I get settled and see the place.”

“I’m sure it will look lovely. It’s been such a long time since I was last in that house.”

“You’ve been here before?” Marianne was surprised.

“Yes, a long, long time ago. It was quite an elegant home inside and out.”

“It needs quite a bit of work to become ‘elegant’ again. I would love to come visit you.”

“If you come tomorrow, you’ll just catch me. I’m going to be away for a few days visiting an old friend.”

“I’ll come tomorrow for sure. My place won’t be ready for visitors for a while. But maybe I’ll have a housewarming party.”

“That would be splendid! See you tomorrow, dear.”

Marianne hung up, still smiling. Grandma had the ability to make her feel warm and loved whenever she talked to her. She sighed. It was time to go home and face some boxes before bedtime.

The walk down Primrose and Violet was shady and cooler now with late sunlight streaming through the trees, and she paused at her gate to look at her new house. The shadows hid the need for a paint job and softened the overgrown vegetation. She could picture it with roses and clematis and warm light glowing out of the windows. Maybe next year. Robins sang their evening songs, and the air smelled rich and fragrant with earthy green garden smells. It was a beautiful, peaceful place, and Marianne was determined to make things work out somehow.

The house was dim when she entered, and she put down the two grocery bags to grope for a light switch. The overhead in the living room cast a wan light over a small mountain of boxes. “Oscar! I’m home!” she called.

She went down the left hand hallway through the pantry and into the kitchen, switching on lights as she went. Plunking the bags on the counter, she called him again. It was strange. Usually he came running when she got home. Maybe he was just nervous about being in a new place. “Oscar kitty, where are you?” She peered into the bedroom and the office, leaving a blazing trail of light behind her. Finally she found him in the bathroom, snoozing in his carrier in the tub.

“Hey, mister! There you are. Not a very homey place with all these boxes, is it? Let’s eat some dinner then we can unpack some things before bed, okay?” She knelt down and stroked his head and scratched him under the chin right where he liked it. She began to feel a little vibrato purr under her fingers.

Marianne put away her purchases, leaving out the salads. Oscar came trotting into the kitchen promptly at the sound of the lid being pulled off the cat food. She joined him, sitting on the kitchen floor. From that perspective, she contemplated color schemes from the three sample palettes laid out on the floor around her. The ceilings were high. She was going to have to borrow a ladder from someone. Maybe a neighbor would be willing to lend her one? Perhaps she could introduce herself tomorrow evening after people got home from work.

She wanted to unpack and get rid of these boxes, but if she was going to paint, that wasn’t a good idea. The floor in here was pretty dirty, and there was dust everywhere. Maybe clean everything first, then paint, then unpack. It was a really good thing she didn’t have pressing deadlines at the moment.
 

She polished off both salads and gathered Oscar into her arms for some quality kitty time. He sat in her lap, twelve pounds of solid tabby, purring loudly and rubbing his head on her hands. When she put her hands down, he butted his head against her chin. After a bit, she urged him off her lap and cleaned up their respective dishes.

Wandering down the hall to her bedroom, she looked at the stacks of boxes piled everywhere, the unmade bed, and closet doors ajar. It wasn’t particularly inviting, so she found the boxes with sheets and blankets and towels and set about making the bed and making the bathroom homier. The evening sun streamed in the western window and added to the heat inside. There was no air conditioning in the house, only central heating, she recalled. Curtains might help. She earnestly hoped the house cooled down overnight.

With the bed made and the boxes pushed against the walls so she could get around without tripping, the room looked a little better. Tomorrow she would deal with putting the rest of the house in order.
 

There had been no time to hook up cable or Internet service, so she was temporarily out of entertainment. But she found her bedside clock/radio and brought it into the living room. She spun the tuner to a classic rock station and turned it up to fill the heavy silence as she pushed some more boxes around in the living room. She’d wanted to put the sofa in front of the fireplace but realized that might not work. Whoever had designed the house had made a straight path between the front door and the hallway right past the fireplace. She supposed that she could set the sofa back from the pathway and still use it but couldn’t see how it would work yet. She stood with her back to the fireplace and tried to imagine how things would look.
 

It was nearly full dark outside now, and only the light from the overhead fixture lit the room, making shadows everywhere. The silence was broken only by the forlorn, small sound of the little radio. She was used to the constant noise of traffic outside as well as the muffled voices, footsteps, bumps and bangs of other people living in the building around her. The quiet was disconcerting and got on her nerves. She really hadn’t thought about this when she’d imagined living in the country.

She suddenly remembered Oscar’s fright upstairs and the unexplored basement below her feet. She was in a little island of light between two unknown, foreboding floors. Her belly did a few anxious flip-flops. What if the basement and attic were full of old junk? She’d have to spend hours cleaning it out. Much worse, what if there was a body hidden under all of it? Sometimes the house felt creepy enough to have a dead, shriveled corpse in the rafters. She shivered.

“Oh, this is stupid! I don’t want to be afraid in my own house!” She got up and went to the kitchen for some more ice cream. She took the whole pint back to the sofa and tucked her feet up on the cushions. Oscar jumped up and joined her.

“There you are. Want some?” She offered him some ice cream, which he sniffed and disdained. “Cherry vanilla not your flavor, huh?” He seemed perfectly at ease for now. She stroked his beautiful fur till he curled up next to her and began washing himself. At least Geoffrey was no longer there to make her feel bad about eating the whole pint. She wasn’t fat, but he always treated her as if she would blow up if she ate cookies and ice cream. His family was inclined to overeating and heaviness, not hers. Her mom was not fat, and her dad hadn’t been when he was alive.

Marianne stared moodily at the mess in the living room and steadily emptied the pint container one bite at a time. Their marriage hadn’t been perfect, but it had worked. They’d met in college when their futures had been bright, his in business and hers in historic research. He was so handsome and charismatic. She’d been amazed that he’d wanted to spend time with her. She hadn’t thought of herself as particularly pretty, but he’d made her feel special. They’d truly enjoyed each other’s company, and when he asked her to marry him, she’d been overjoyed. They’d moved to the city and made a life together each having promising careers and spending their free time seeing shows and taking trips into the country for romantic getaways. The first couple of years had been a little tight financially. For some reason Geoffrey’s parents had insisted he do everything on his own. When things were too tight, her mom’s discreet financial help had filled the gap.

For a long while, she’d been content, and she’d attributed her lack of joy to a tough work schedule or local politics or the war in the Middle East, rather than something closer to home. Marianne had dutifully played her part, making a million meals, washing a million clothes, and gradually spending less and less time with him having any kind of fun. Geoffrey took care of all their finances and gradually took over their social lives as his career at the retail company had soared, and he’d needed to entertain or travel or stay late. Eventually, he’d made six figures at his company, but his habit of self-promotion turned into outright denigration of her. She’d lost herself along the way, becoming subsumed by his needs.

The only thing he’d let her do entirely for herself was to take classes at Columbia and earn her doctorate. He must have figured it added to his prestige, she thought resentfully. After that, when she wanted something, he’d frown and talk her out of it, calmly and reasonably. Eventually, she quit trying.

When she was a little girl, she’d sometimes had dreams that came true. The earliest one she could remember was in third grade. She’d woken up one morning feeling elated after a dream but couldn’t recall the details. Later that day, her teacher told her that her artwork was to be featured on the winter concert program cover. When she was twelve, she dreamt her Grandmother Selene was crying at a funeral. She dreamt about the funeral twice more over the next week and then her mom told her that Grandpa Clare had died of a heart attack. Her own father had died of pneumonia when she was little, and she barely remembered him. Mercifully, she hadn’t had any anticipatory dreams about losing him. It was hard enough that she’d grown up without him.

Her dreams scared her at first, but over time she learned to tell the difference between those that were random and those that were likely to be harbingers of events to come or things that were happening somewhere else. Those kinds repeated themselves until she got the message. Sometimes she wondered if the true dreams were messages from her own subconscious about things observed but ignored. Maybe her dreams were similar to the way a camera records bits of background that go unnoticed until a closer viewing of the actual picture. In reality, most of her dreams hadn’t come true. As she grew older, they grew fewer and farther apart.

Two years ago she had a series of unusual dreams. They implied that Geoffrey had destroyed a colleague’s work in order to get promoted. Unhappy but unwilling to rock the boat, Marianne did her best to dismiss them. Eventually they went away, and she helped him celebrate his promotion with a fancy dinner at an exclusive restaurant in the city.

Then, last year a new set of vivid nighttime visions plagued her. She dreamt repeatedly that she was lying in bed next to Geoffrey, but there was another person lying between them, facing away from her. Upon awakening, she’d find only Geoffrey. The vision recurred until one night Geoffrey’s body was intertwined with the interloper’s. Marianne’s dream self shook the shoulder of the person between them. The stranger’s head rotated on her neck to face Marianne, grinning with kiss-swollen lips. Marianne screamed and flung herself backwards.
 

She awoke with a jerk, her heart pounding. She must have made a noise because Geoffrey was staring at her in the semi darkness, sleepy and irritated at being woken. “What’s the matter?”

Shaken she asked, “Who is she? Who are you sleeping with?”
 

“What? What are you talking about?” He sat up straighter.

“I dreamt you were with someone else,” she insisted. “Who is it?”

A look of panic crossed his handsome features momentarily, and he said, “No one, baby. Only you. You having funny dreams again? You did that in college, and the shrink said they were the product of an overactive imagination. You’re just stressed.”

The reminder of that unpleasant experience in college woke her the rest of the way with a jolt and stopped her tongue. In their senior year at college she’d made the mistake of telling him she had dreamt he was conspiring with a professor to overlook blatant plagiarism on his undergrad thesis and emerge with an A in the class, to boot. He’d looked scared and then dragged her to student counseling. After one session in which Geoffrey had talked a lot, and the young counselor had tried to convince her she was making things up to get attention, she’d never mentioned her ability to dream true again. Rumors at the end of the semester hinted that she’d been right.

Last year, though, the nightmare had upset her so much she’d just blurted it out, although she wished she hadn’t said anything. She might not have had to live through six months of hell.

A month later, during Geoffrey’s office Christmas party, she’d seen him fondling Sandra, his buxom coworker, in his darkened office. He’d tried to deny it, but Marianne had gotten mad and not given in. He became more and more bullying, first reading her electronic and postal mail then trying to buy her back with expensive gifts. Any time she tried to stand up to him, he’d get furiously angry, intimidating her, and she’d back down, cry, and apologize. For a while she just wanted things to return to the old way when he loved her. He insisted she not mention his indiscretion to anyone they knew, which seemed crazy to her since everyone seemed to know already. At last she could stand it no longer and demanded a divorce.
 

In the end, he agreed to a generous settlement, so he wouldn’t look bad to his boss and the rest of the company. He hinted to everyone that it was Marianne’s desire to grow and move on, not his indiscretion that drove the proceedings. Privately, he continued to intimidate her or buy her silence with sudden gifts.

She moved out of their posh apartment on the Upper West Side and into a much cheaper place. When the ink on the divorce papers was dry, she thought it was over and done. Within a week he began turning up at their old haunts, sometimes with Sandra, sometimes alone. It began to feel like he was following her everywhere, mocking her with his new relationship and his success. She stopped going to the familiar places and sought out new ones, but he’d turn up there too after a few days. The dreams started again with a shadowy figure relentlessly pursuing her no matter where she went and waking her with a growing sense of fear.

When an old client turned her down for a new contract for vague reasons, she suspected somehow Geoffrey had been involved. He was going to harass her until she gave up or cracked up. Her mom had been sympathetic and finally told her she was going to have to get a restraining order against Geoffrey to get him off her back. The enormity of having to go that far just seemed too much. As an alternative, her mother had suggested visiting her Grandma Selene for a while just to get some breathing room. Grandma had told her about this place in Maple Hill and made arrangements with her old friend, Lily Thomas. Flight seemed better than more battles with her ex and an uncertain outcome.