Dreamscape (3 page)

Running her hand over the painted tail feathers, she asked, “How can I clean this without ruining it, with the TSP Zack told me about?”

“You don’t want to use
trisodium phosphate
on that. That’s mainly used in kitchens where you have food oils adding to the grime or in heavily smoked in rooms. This really isn’t that bad, a little dull but not bad. Those colors should brighten up with a mild detergent, dish soap even. I wouldn’t use anything harsher than that.”

Room by room, they talked about what needed to be done inside and out for a time. Ben was a landscaper himself, but he had an entire family steeped in the trades from electrical to plumbing and everything in between. Ben’s father had been good friends with her Pop, so as far as Lanie was concerned the entire Danowski family came with the highest recommendation. With Ben and his whole clan working on it, her house would be as good as new.

She wished the Berglunds had lived to see her dream come true. It was her pop who’d told her anything was possible, and if this house was what she wanted, then they’d see her get a good start in life so she could realize that dream. And they did. With no children of their own, the elderly couple cared for her as if she were their own flesh and blood. They sent her to college and med school, and she lived by the values they instilled. She missed them terribly, and the carriage house would become the Berglund Free Clinic in their honor. She knew they’d be proud.

All arrangements had been made. The clinic would officially open its doors in September. Fortunately for her, three people, one doctor, two nurses, and one technician from the last clinic she worked at would be following her. The hours would be long at first, but they’d hire more people eventually.

Drawing her from her reverie, Ben repeated, “So how’s the roof? It looks like the second floor gables might need a few shingles.”

“Mr. Wurley told me the roof needed only minor repairs—some new flashing on the copper cupola and shingles in a few spots where that oak limb in the yard fell and tore them loose. The bank is taking care of those as one of the conditions of sale.” So far, the foundation was sound, as was the plumbing. After Ben’s brother took a look at the wiring, she’d have a better idea if the bank would be seeing to that, too. “I told him not to bother with the carriage house roof because we’re replacing it anyway.”

She was glad the bank was covering those repairs as part of Margaret Mason’s conditions of sale. After buying the house, she had enough money left in the bank to do the basics and get the clinic open. Anything else would have to wait until she sold stocks. The thought passed her mind briefly. She always had her birth father’s company to sell if she had to, but she didn’t want to do that. It was a connection to the man she wished she’d known.

James O’Keefe was her birth father, though she’d never known him. He’d recently passed away, leaving her his entire estate, including a textile business that had been in his family for several generations. He’d also left her a letter where she learned how he’d only recently discovered her existence. Her mother never told him she was pregnant, never told him he had a daughter. Rather she’d left in the middle of the night to run off with his best friend. That relationship didn’t work out, however, and her mother had a string of men in the first nine years of Lanie’s life.

They lived with various boyfriends in trailer homes, slept on mattresses in basements and one-room flophouses. After living in a car one summer, they eventually lived in the homeless shelter at night and spent their days at the McDonald’s asking people for money for food. Those were horrible days. Many of the same kids she attended school with saw her there, and kids could be so mean at times. By then drugs and alcohol had become an issue for her mother, and Family Services stepped in and found her a foster home with the Berglunds—a home she loved with all her heart. She’d never seen her birth mother again.

Her overjoyed father’s letter explained how, through a conversation with his onetime best friend’s sister, he discovered he had a daughter. But by then it was too late. His pancreatic cancer had moved too quickly. By the time they’d found her and arrangements could be made to meet, her father had died. She was his sole heir.

At the door Ben said, “Are you sure you want to stay here tonight? You can come home with me. Jilli’s away at scout camp, you know. You can sleep in her room, and I know Janice would love to see you.”

“Thanks, but no. I’ve waited half my life for this day.” She smiled brightly. “I’m going to sleep in my
haunted
house tonight!”

Chapter 2

He’d watched the pair as they walked around the grounds with pens and paper in hand presumably making notes for repairs. While assessing the pavers that lined his walkway, she looked up at his window curiously as if seeking something. Jason frowned. Did she see him standing there?
How odd.
He could only be seen when he wanted to. And he did not yet wish to be seen.

After the man had driven away in his automobile, the woman retrieved her bags from another smaller vehicle. He watched her coming up the walkway only to take another glance his way. She was smiling.

Hmm.

Below, the front door opened and closed, so he headed there, curious about the woman who at this very moment was moving into his house. He was grateful for two things, the first being he’d no longer be alone with only an occasional mouse for company. The second, this young woman bore no resemblance to his beautiful, black-hearted wife.

He thought about her from time to time, his duplicitous wife Cathy, her lover Richard Mason, and his sister Bertha, his murderers. He spent many a night listening to their congratulatory recounting of how they’d set him up, duping him into marrying a woman who from the onset had a lover in the wings. Like the Masons, Cathy too was born and raised in the south at the time of reconstruction and was reared on tales of the glory days. Their sole purpose from the onset in taking his life was so she would inherit all.

When they met she had been such a sweet and shy little beauty, the shyness he later learned to be false. When she comforted him over the untimely death of his father, he’d been surprised by how quickly he fell head over heels for her. Though she’d never voiced it while he was alive, he was well aware of her desire to live in the affluent manner in which her parents and grandparents had lived before the war took it all away. To that end, seeking to win her timid heart and encourage the comfort that would eventually lead his wife into his bed, he gave into Cathy’s every whim. No more than two months had passed before he was compelled to offer her marriage. No more than four before he found himself dead with his spirit walking the halls.

He played the details of their courtship over and over in his mind, for what else did he have to occupy his thoughts? Cathy Ames had accepted his proposal eagerly, despite her less-than-enthusiastic response to his advances. These always met with a cool reserve he erroneously mistook for maidenly shyness. But Cathy didn’t possess a shy bone in her body. No, far from it. He’d seen them together in bed, his wife and his murderer. Seen for himself the eager way she spread her legs, the way she clutched his body to hers and treated him to a carnal knowledge that obviously developed from years of knowing. Not only did it shock his senses to see his shy wife play whore and play it well, it sickened him. What a fool he’d been. Because of that he kept to the only room they never visited—the cupola at the top of the house—and decades passed there with little concern, because time ceased to have meaning for the dead. Yes, they continued on with their merry lives, raised their foul brood, and got away with murder.

But all that changed with the last of them. Margaret, the great-granddaughter of his wife, and her accomplice had never married, and like the living, aged over time. He never minded Margaret Mason. How could he when she was as lonely as he? He appeared to her from time to time when the loneliness got the best of both of them. When she grew old, and became the last of Richard Mason’s miserable line, he eventually told her the truth of her great-grandparents’ treachery. The night she died in her sleep she called him to her side and told him she arranged her estate to his benefit as best she could. It was the least she could do after the wrong her family had done him.

Standing invisible on the stairway, he looked over his new house guest. What a pretty creature with her tight curves, porcelain skin, and lustrous raven hair. More than one hundred years had passed since a beautiful woman walked these halls, for Richard Mason sired unfortunate-looking souls who passed on their regrettable looks to each generation, including poor Margaret. Blood will out. Evil definitely had a way of marking the man’s legacy as surely as Cane himself had been marked.

Following her into the kitchen, he watched her rummage for pots. She filled them at the tap then heated the water on the stove. He leaned against the wall appraising her. In all the years of his life, and certainly all the years after, this had to be the most beautiful woman he’d laid eyes on. She wore tight clothing, far tighter than he recalled women’s clothing to be when he saw them on Margaret’s television device. In fact her blue trousers fit her like a glove. These declared her legs to be slender and shapely and her bottom delectably rounded. Her breasts sat high and firm, and he found himself imagining what she looked like unclothed. The thought surprised him. He certainly harbored no such notion when the Mason horde lived here.

Hmm.
In this fair company, he found himself still very much a man, despite being a dead one.

What a comely thing. With her long dark lashes framing eyes the shade of blue that fell somewhere between cornflower petals and a robin’s egg. Lightly arched brows, an adorable nose, and full lips a lovely shade of rose pink. When she opened a paper sack to retrieve a sandwich and apple, the sight made him hungry. No, not hungry exactly. Rather wistful. Food was such an enjoyable thing and one he sorely missed. Occasionally, in the process of eating, she licked her lips, and that simple act made his body stir.
Hmm,
he mused, how about that?

Periodically, she’d jot notes to herself on her pad of paper, and he found himself fascinated by her categories and subcategories. This woman had an exceptionally ordered mind. Her blue eyes darted around the kitchen and when she looked up at the pressed tin ceiling and smiled his head swam. Finding her even more beautiful when she smiled, he became so engrossed in watching her every move that he was actually startled when she suddenly rose from her chair, grabbed both of her valises and a paper sack from the hallway, and headed up the stairs. He could hardly credit being so mesmerized.

She passed Margaret’s room at the top of the stairs and chose his room as hers. He smiled. The sudden idea of her in his bed gave him the sensation of having a pulse. Setting her bags on the floor, she opened the window wide to air the room, presumably to limit the dust she might churn into the air when she slowly pulled the linens from the bed and set the bundle out into the hall. Taking a set of sheets and a pillow from the larger bag, she made the bed then headed to the bathroom. The master bath had been fitted with plumbing while he was alive, and refitted to modern conveniences in the last forty years. She turned on the tap. The look on her face was priceless. Then horror turned to relief as the long-sitting rust cleared the pipes and the water ran crystal clear.

The paper sack held her cleaning supplies, and she knelt beside the tub to scrub it out. The sight of her body rising and falling as she cleaned made him incredibly stiff, and he found himself imagining her thighs straddling him, his cock buried deep in her warmth as she rode him hard and fast. He sighed. He hadn’t felt a woman’s warm depths wrapped around him in a very long time. He hadn’t felt warmth of any sort.

After several trips back and forth to the kitchen, she had enough hot water mixed with the cold with which to take a tepid bath. Always the gentleman in life, he was just about to leave her to her privacy when she pulled her shirt over her head. What a sight she was with her pale porcelain skin and the faintest spattering of freckles on her shoulders.

Given her thick raven tresses and skin like fresh cream, the thought Black Irish came to mind. She took off her trousers and the small, almost insignificant pantalets. To his surprise her mound had been trimmed to the skin in the style of the French, in fact she was bare all over save for that scant downy shadow there between her thighs. The sight made his fingers itch to discover if her skin was as smooth as it appeared. Just imagining what she felt like compelled his body to stir again, and he found himself holding his breath. As if he had breath to hold. When she unclasped her brassiere and luscious breasts spilled free, to his astonishment, his cock actually got hard. He hadn’t been hard since he was alive.

She personified perfection with those lithe arms and shapely legs and lusciously rounded bottom, but especially with those lovely firm breasts. For the first time since his death, his baser desires got the better of him. His conscience made another bid to depart, but the red-blooded male he once was whispered that he stay. For after all, what harm to her sensibilities if she didn’t know he was there? In the end, his conscience lost and cock won. He stayed to watch her bathe.

Walking past him her nakedness brushed his shoulder, and to his utter amazement he actually
felt
her. What’s more, by the perplexed look she gave the bedpost she felt
him,
too.