Haunted (6 page)

She turned, looking at him with eyes like liquid chocolate. The light cast red and purple highlights into her gleaming black hair and her tongue poked out to wet her lips. "Yes, David?"

Suddenly, he became dizzyingly aware of her perfume and, for an instant, he lost his question in a testosterone haze. The fragrance, familiar and erotic, stirred an embarrassing physical reaction. Down boy! he ordered
.

"Ah, I wanted to ask you a little more about this young man, Eric." He tilted his head toward the parlor, where Amber continued to explore. "In private."

"Certainly," she said, all business.

"Is
there any chance he might… bother… my daughter?"

Her eyebrows lifted in brief surprise, then she smiled thinly and patted his arm. "What a good father you are! But you have nothing to worry about. Eric seems to have the mental capacity of a ten-or twelve-year-old
."

And the gonads of a twenty-year-old-
-what a combination! He almost blurted out the thought. A dozen more comments occurred to him, all centering around Theo's ignorance concerning twelve-year-old boys. But he said nothing, remembering all the times Melanie accused him of being too protective of his daughter. He suspected she might be right--besides, he reassured himself, Amber usually brought home intellectual or artistic types, boys who read books instead of Cliff Notes, or took art classes instead of drooling over comic books. And if a young man was tall and thin with dark hair and glasses, she seemed to like him even more. A slow-witted handyman with a blond name like Swenson wasn't likely to fit the bill in any way.

What the hell am I thinking? He was fixating on a man he hadn't even met yet. On top of that, he trusted Amber and she knew how to take care of herself.
Theo’s perfume is making me crazy. Finally, he said, "Theo, at twelve, all I could think about was the opposite sex." Just like now.

"You must have been a very precocious little boy." Theo slowly rewet her lips.

"Perhaps. At any rate, I'll trust your judgment and give Eric a try. After all," he couldn't help adding, "it's not like I won't be here to keep an eye on things."

"You won't be sorry, I promise," Theo said warmly.

Her renewed friendliness unnerved him and her perfume seemed to envelop him. He couldn't understand why he couldn't keep his mind out of his pants. "These insets are amazing," he said, forcing himself to cross to the short back wall and examine the built-in china cabinets. If you looked closely, you saw that the tile-like squares of stained glass which bordered the clear glass doors did not contain pink, red, and blue flowers, but human bodies, erotically entwined in subtle but endless daisy chains around each cabinet door. Here I am worrying about my daughter, and I bring her into the porno palace of all time.

"You're an overprotective daddy," Theo said, as if she could read his mind
. She came up behind him and touched a finger to one of the glass squares.

Embarrassed, he turned away from the stained glass.

"Melanie always told me that, too," he said.

"Melanie?" She sounded slightly taken aback.

"My ex."

"Wife?"

"Almost."

"Your decree isn't final yet?"

"No, she's my ex-girl—I mean ex-significant other," he corrected. "We were going to get married, but..." Why am I telling you this? Because I'm as nervous as a cat, that’s why. "What kind of perfume are you wearing?" he asked suddenly. As soon as the words left his mouth, he prayed she wouldn't take them as a come-on.

"Obsession."

Obsession in a haunted house, he thought, amused. How appropriate.

"I'm surprised you noticed," she was saying. "I only
put on a little dab, early this morning." She cocked her head at him. "Is something wrong, David?"

"No, no. Maybe it's not your perfume I'm noticing. It smells more like f
lowers. I can't quite place it, but it's something familiar."

"Probably flowers..." She sniffed
. "I don't smell anything."

"It's faded away." It occurred to him suddenly that the scent might be part of the haunting and, despite his standing as a good skeptic, the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end
.

"Dad?" Amber entered the room, her smile disintegrating
when she saw how close Theo stood to him. "What are you doing in here?"

"Just looking around," David replied, happy that she had joined them. A pressure valve seemed to have been released the moment she walked into the room. "This is the original dining table, hon. Theo had it refinished for us."

"The table they found all those bodies on?" Amber asked, watching Theo. The right corner of her mouth curled up with restrained amusement.

"Yep." David noticed that the flowery scent had dissipated completely.

"You're joking," Theo said. "Aren't you?"

"Not at all." David pointed, warming to the subject. "Just there, in the middle, under the lamp, you can see some deep gouges."

"A maniac with a meat cleaver did it," Amber supplied.

"Amber, please."

"Sorry, Dad." She crossed to the china cabinets and frankly studied the glass insets. "Boy, these are dirtier than the ones in the living room."

"That's called the parlor, dear," Theo said.

"Whatever." Amber shrugged indifferently.

"If they bother you, kiddo, we can cover them or something."

"Nah. You really have to look to see what they are anyway." She grinned. "When you first said this house had really dirty windows, Dad, I thought you meant we had to wash them." Fixing Theo with a frank stare, she said, "So, let's see the rest of the house, Mrs. Pelinore."

"Certainly, dear. By the way, it's Ms., not Mrs., but in Red Cay, we're all good friends, so please call me Theo."

Amber looked supremely unimpressed.

"Let me show you the rest of the first floor," Theo said, leading them into a long tunnel of a kitchen. At the far end was a walk-in pantry, and a screened-in breakfast room that gave an illusion of width to the L-shaped kitchen. Stepping out onto the porch, David was pleased to see that the workmanship on the painting and screen replacement
equaled that in the other rooms. A row of Monterey pines obscured the view of what lay beyond, their limbs scrabbling like fingers against the screen as fog sifted, wraithlike, through the branches. The muted crashing of waves and tang of seawater in the air reminded him how close the house was built to the southern cliffs.

Amber plucked at his sleeve and he followed the women back into the house. Bookshelves and cabinets, many with their lewd stained glass insets completely intact, were abundant
. In the wide hall approaching the stairs, a floor-to-ceiling linen closet opened to a depth of five feet. Its doors were masterpieces of glass inlay, featuring life-size nudes, their fleshy bodies entwined with vines of red hibiscus and blue morning glories. Amber studied the art with interest, then noticed Theo smiling at her and immediately rolled her eyes and muttered, "Gross."

Next to that was a large laundry room and then an even larger bathroom. Here the corridor ended, but another hall led to the left and right. Toward the front of the house were two more rooms. The front one, David intended to make into his office. About twenty feet square, it had three windows gathered at the far end of the room. The west one faced the front veranda, giving him a view of callers and the lighthouse at Widow's Peak.
The northern window faced the cliffs and Red Cay, and the eastern provided a view of the road that led out the finger to the house. He would put his desk under the one facing the northern cliffs and have an instant three-way view--at least after the protective plywood was removed tomorrow.

"Look behind you," Theo said.

David turned to see a portrait of a woman hung above the fireplace at the other end of the room.

"The portrait was hidden away in one of the dormer rooms," Theo said. "She's beautiful, isn't she?"

"Yes, she is." David crossed to the portrait. A number of pieces of the original furniture remained, the stained glass was miraculously intact, and now he had a portrait, too. I'm a lucky man. He peered at the signature in the bottom left-hand corner and realized he was even luckier than he thought. It was a Jeremy Winslow, dated 1914.

"I wonder who she is," Amber said softly.

"It's Lizzie Baudey," David said with certainty. The elegant woman's coppery hair was swept up into a loose bun ornamented with a forest green plume. A few long, flaming tendrils had escaped to frame her heart-shaped face and lay, like fire, on her bare white shoulders. The green of her empire-waisted gown matched the plume, making her hair seem even redder than it was. The gown was typical of the nouveau era--the muttonchop sleeves began below the shoulder and the straight bodice was cut so low that it came dangerously close to revealing the nipples of her stylishly small breasts. Luxuriantly long ropes of pearls hung nearly to her knees and the straight skirt fell to the ankles, except in front, where the soft multi-layers of satin and chiffon were drawn up in a graceful fall of folds to reveal a curved flash of ankle and calf.

"She doesn't look very happy," Amber said
.

"You're right, she doesn't." Everything about the woman in the portrait seemed soft and sensual until you looked closely enough to see the determined set of her full lips and the sadness in her large green eyes.

"From what I've read about Lizzie Baudey, she didn't always look that way," David said. "She was a great businesswoman, but she was also one of the original party girls, at least until she fell and injured her legs. She was never able to walk again without canes. That was in 1915, and some believe her own daughter pushed her." As he spoke, he became uncomfortably aware of Theo's eyes on him. "Whether that's true or not, by the time this portrait was painted in 1914, her daughter was giving her a lot of trouble," he added.

"What kind of trouble?" Theo asked, glancing at Amber, who sullenly stared back.

The glance annoyed David, too, but he didn't say so. "You don't know the story of Christabel?" he asked.

"No, not really," Theo replied
.

"It's famous," Amber said dryly. "You can
find it in almost any book on hauntings."

"I don't read things like that," Theo said, then hesitated, perhaps realizing she might be insulting David
. "I know the house is supposed to be haunted, of course, and that Christabel was a poor, misguided girl influenced by her evil mother. I hope that her soul has gone into the light by now."

At those words, Amber poked David with her elbow, a little too hard
. He cleared his throat to cover up his reaction, both to the poke and to Theo's words. He realized that Amber was right about the realtor being a crystal-packer. "Since Lizzie and Christabel are the subjects of my next novel, I've done quite a bit of research," he began, "and I hope to uncover a good deal more information now that we're here. But I can tell you that though Lizzie might not have been a model mother-"

"She was a prostitute, David!" Theo blurted
.

The poisonous tone of her voice took David aback, but he continued on as if she hadn't interrupted, "-she was, by all accounts, a warm, loving woman."

"I'll say." Amber snickered softly.

"Christabel's father was a sort of voodoo priest in the West Indies. Actually, it was voodoo mixed liberally with black magic. Anyway, Lizzie visited there with her father when she was just out of college. She met the hungan and, shortly after, her father died
. Later, she claimed the priest cast a love spell on her, and blamed him for her father's death. At any rate, Christabel was born and Lizzie, a vital, well-educated young woman, languished on the island, a virtual prisoner. When her daughter was twelve, word came that her brother, Byron Baudey, had died, leaving her this house. She and Christabel managed to escape with the help of the captain of the boat that brought the news." He paused dramatically. "It's his headless ghost that's rumored to walk the lighthouse. As the legend goes, he was the first victim of Christabel's black magic. But she wasn't too good at it yet--the neck wasn't cleanly cut. Rather, it appeared that some huge beast had torn it off with its bare hands."

Lizzie's emerald eyes seemed to watch him from the portrait and, suddenly nervous, he cleared his throat. "Lizzie had wanted her freedom, but even more, she wanted to get Christabel away from her father. By the time they were rescued, the father had taught the girl the black arts
--he'd been instructing her since she was barely a toddler--and Lizzie knew her daughter's mind was being poisoned. By giving Christabel a fresh start, enrolling her in a good eastern boarding school, Lizzie hoped to undo the damage."

"So she came here and opened a cathouse," Theo said sarcastically.
"That makes a lot of sense.”

"Boarding schools are expensive. So is maintaining a house like this. And Lizzie had no desire to be poor, so she carefully organized and opened a business, a very classy business, I might add, that would pay those bills. She took excellent care of the women who worked for her and she carefully screened the clients before accepting them.