Erika (7 page)

“I can’t correctly pronounce my words now. Do you really want me to drink more?”

“Trust me, sip.”

Shanna sipped, coughed, felt like she was on fire from throat to toes.

Templeton smiled. “You really are inexperienced. The second sip should be smoother.”

It was. But now she was a bit woozy. “I thought he was going to kill the man.”

Templeton, now back to back with her whirled around. “What did you say?”

“At Hawk’s mansion we helped stop a robbery. But the one thief…Hawk shot him once and then he stood over him and fired a second shot. I hit his arm just in time to deflect his aim. Hawk had the gun to the man’s head…He said he used the gun to scare the thief into a confession. Well he certainly did. But God, Templeton, what if he actually intended to kill the man? Hawk changed in his mansion into something I don’t understand. It was like he was possessed. Does that sound crazy?”

Templeton held her in his arms. “I don’t know Shanna. Maybe there is such a thing as possession. Hawk sounds dangerous. Perhaps you should not be around him too often.”

* * * *

Whether Shanna fell asleep or passed out Templeton didn’t know. One second she was moving, the next, she was a dead weight on his right shoulder. He shifted his body to pick her up.

In his bedroom the wish for a third arm didn’t happen. He discovered holding Shanna with one arm while folding back bed covers so she could be slid between the sheets would try even a sober man.

His groin surged. How many times had he looked at Shanna fully clothed, to imagine her naked, his to possess? He removed her thigh high stiletto boots. The moment they met at the race track she was like a gorgeous, erotic magnet to him. He slowly removed her blouse. Superb breasts invited him to fulfill his sexual desire. He removed her mini-shorts. She was naked.

God, I’m so hard it hurts. I should wake her up and enter her paradise. I really should.

He forced himself from the bedroom.

Chapter Twelve

Hawk dreamed.

“Erika, where are you?”

“I’m in the tapestry room. Come to me.”

Naked he hurried the hallways of Inessa Mansion until he reached his destination.

“I’m here.”

Erika was dressed in red huntsman clothes with her hair done up in a hundred curls. She was just as he remembered her, slim, delicate, ravishingly desirable.

With passion flaring, Hawk and Erika ripped away her clothing and wrapped themselves in each other’s arms.

“Oh, Hawk, it’s been ages since we’ve been intimate.”

“When have we? I don’t remember. I’ve been dreaming about you for years. I must know the truth now before I go mad, or perhaps madder.”

Erika sighed. “Very well, my love. You shall know the truth. Close your eyes.”

A minute dragged by before he heard a voice.

“Open your eyes, Hawkins.”

His mother was frail and ballerina beautiful.

“Today Hawkins, as I promised I’m going to show you my favorite dolls. Follow me to their cases.”

They walked three steps to a huge glass hutch. It was packed solid with dolls of every description. She opened it.

“This is my Victorian Christening Doll, Hawkins. Notice how beautiful the white dress is and its embroidery.”

The Christening Doll was an artist’s love affair with ruffles and scallops and a silver rattle. It was solid porcelain with a beautifully hand painted pink and white complexion.

“Now, Hawkins, it’s almost bed time for you so I’m going to show you only one more doll for now. Look at this one.”

She was three feet of rich porcelain. He immediately loved her and said so.

His mother laughed. “I knew you would, Hawkins. Because I feel this doll and I are alike. She loves as strongly as I do and forever.”

When his mother was killed in the drive by shooting along with three other people while shopping and walking the city’s busy streets, he was sixteen. Immediately his father declared all her dolls and personal items were to be forever stored away. They were, except for the one doll he stole when the servants doing the storage work weren’t looking.

Three months later his father put him in an institution for a very long week. He was then taken back to Inessa Mansion where he spent two days watching servants pack things away, including him. That’s how he felt, packed away to the new mansion. Years of helping him get back to being normal began. Now he was twenty three. There was still something wrong with him, according to his father, Dr. Tyler, and how about the whole world?

On his fourteenth birthday his mother gave him the doll. He played with, talked to, slept with and made love to her. He took her to school, the store, the bathroom, movie theaters in the nearby city, everywhere. He was never without her, until his horrible fifteenth birthday.

His father was gone. Together they walked to the tapestry room.

As he danced with her the hours sped by. They waltzed and talked, laughed and joked. He rubbed his penis against her vaginal area. The feel of her hardened him. He began disrobing her when the head butler, Walters was his name, interrupted.

“Forgive me, sir. Your father has just phoned with special instructions. I am to report to him when I see you playing with a certain doll. I am to take it from you.”

“My father should mind his own business, Walters. Go away. We want to be alone.”

“I’m afraid he won’t do that, sir. He gave me strict orders. I must obey them.”

“Go away, Walters. We want privacy. Don’t we, my darling?”

“I must have the doll this instant.”

“You can’t have her, Walters. She’s mine, forever. Don’t come near me. I will fight you if you do.”

Walters came closer. “I’m going to take the doll now. Your father must be obeyed. He will be here in two days.”

Walters grabbed. Hawk fought with all his strength to save her. But Walters wrenched her from his grasp and in a fit of anger dashed her against the tapestry wall. She hit head first. The mansion lights blinked. A gust of wind rushed through the mansion coupled with agonized screams from Hawk, and something else. An essence, a life force, a deity, the power of love, emerged from the doll to settle deep inside the tapestries. Mere seconds later, as insanity rushed through his body Hawk picked up the first heavy object he could grasp and beat Walters again and again and to death.

His mother found him holding the shattered doll. His was caked with Walter’s blood. She took him to his room and had him step into the shower with his clothes still on. Later, when he was alone he undressed, threw his soggy clothing into a corner, toweled himself dry, crawled into bed and slept for twelve hours.

Two days later his father arrived. He immediately took complete control. Money smoothed away the murder to where newspapers printed it as Unknown Robbers Kill Inessa Mansion’s head butler.

Hawk turned on the cold shower. A cascade of icy water pelting his body didn’t help. He stood under the freezing liquid for ten minutes. He grabbed a towel. Where was that doll now? He was quite certain no one had found her. As he donned his clothes he remembered how he kept her in a storage trunk hidden in a secret room behind his clothes closet. My God!

He ran to the closet, swung its doors open and kicked its back panel open. The room was small with no furniture except a dust laden trunk His fingers tore at the cold metal locks, worked them open and lifted back the lid. He quickly rummaged through some discarded clothing. She was there!

Passion soared through him. “I love you Erika,” he shouted.

“And I love you, Hawk,” she replied.

Chapter Thirteen

After breakfast Shanna and Templeton sat close. Both were warm, comfortably clothed in T-shirts and jeans. Their feet were bare. Shanna made sure hers teased Templeton’s. He seemed to not notice her playfulness as he opened a picture album. He tenderly touched a photograph of his wife.

“We were married at eighteen and heading for college. There were a lot of hard times. We managed to laugh about most of them. Money was scarce. At times nonexistent. We subsisted on cheap TV dinners, macaroni, and a pizza parlor specializing in all you can eat nights. To this day I can hardly stomach those three foods.”

He sipped his coffee for a few seconds. “We had a fire in the gut dream which kept us going. It wouldn’t let us give up college to find what we considered to be ordinary work. We believed in education. We wanted to become teachers. We told each other it would be our profession until we could no longer pick up a piece of chalk to write on the board.”

“The day came when we finally received our sheepskins, and we rushed hand in hand toward what we knew would be our future. We were lucky. Sara and I were hired by the same school district in less than a month after our graduation.

“By year three I couldn’t take anymore. I became tired of having to deal with administrators and teachers who had evidently pissed all their intelligence down the school toilets. I quit and became a policeman. If I hadn’t Sara would still be alive.”

For a moment he sipped more coffee. “Sara was a very bad driver. On the sixth year of her teaching career, on a wintry night with black ice on every road I was on duty in a patrol car. Her school was scheduled to have their Christmas program and the damn fool principal refused to cancel it. I phoned Sara. I begged her to ask the teachers living next door to drive her to school. She said she would. But she didn’t. And by all that’s holy my patrol car was in the vicinity and told to investigate. It was a head on collision with a road sander. Sara had just a spark of life left in her. But that spark refused to be nurtured into a flame. It left her body sixteen days, seven hours, three minutes later.”

Shanna sobbed. He didn’t attempt to stop her. He knew he couldn’t. It would be better for her to cry away her sadness.
If only I could.
“I closed our Eugene house and moved to Portland. I took up race car driving. In my own crazy way I believe if a driver knows how to react in every driving emergency then these expensive, haphazardly thrown together hunks of tinfoil we call automobiles might not kill so many of us. I still blame myself for Sara’s death. Right now, if you weren’t here I would most likely be passed out on the bed, or maybe down on the floor. I’ve been quite suicidal on the race track. But because we have openly declared our love for each other, I feel different in ways I thought had left me forever.”

He sipped the last of his coffee. Shanna poured him more. He put his cup down and wrapped his arms around her. Their lips met in a fierce, bruising kiss. Passion levels soared.

“I love you Shanna. But I can’t face the death that might happen to the next woman I ask to be my wife. I should never have confessed my love for you, although I’m glad I did. It may never go anywhere. It may even end.”

“That will never happen, you big lug. You couldn’t drag me away from you with a bulldozer.”

He kissed her again, stood and walked to a window. For several minutes he gazed at the raging rainstorm, the crashing lightning bolts, while sipping his coffee.

“When you moved to Portland, did you become a private investigator immediately?”

Templeton turned from the window.

“No. For a brief while I was a policeman here. When a man loses everything he loves…I had my treadmill of hard drinking. I was often late reporting for duty. The final straw came for the police department when they discovered I was going out on watch with no bullets in my police automatic. I was asked to turn my badge and gun in and leave. It was then I became a private investigator. Strangely, in spite of my inadequacy, my business has thrived.”

Templeton walked back to the couch to sit close to Shanna. He wrapped her in his arms and kissed her strikingly beautiful nose. “At the racetrack you took my breath away. I fell in love with you exactly sixty seconds after we met. At first I denied that love. I can’t anymore. You’re just too wonderful to be around.”

Chapter Fourteen

Hawk was a murderer. It didn’t bother him. Walters wanted to take Erika to his father. He hurt her. He hurt Walters, killed him just as he would anybody that hurt Erika or tried to kidnap her. She was his forever.

He donned his military clothes, quickly grabbed a half dozen ammunition clips and an assault rifle along with a .44 Magnum and the Contender. Stuffing what he could into a back pack he sneaked out the mansion’s private back door. Erika was tucked away under his military long coat and her secret self walked beside him.

“I love you so much, Hawk. It was awful being with you only in your dreams. When we finally met in the tapestry room I was able to emerge for no more than an hour until you released my main essence from the trunk. Now here I am with you.”

“You’re so beautiful, Erika. Your scar is about gone.”

“Good. I want to always look gorgeous for you.”

“You’re already gorgeous enough for me. Now I’m going to show you how good I am with weapons.”

“Oh, all right, if you must. I’m not fond of guns. They make too much noise.”

They walked arm in arm off the mansion’s main grounds to where Connors waited.

“I still don’t understand why I’m the only one who can see you, Erika. And during our lovemaking I felt everything you were feeling. I fail to understand that, too.”