Second Child (31 page)

Instead she saw a figure in a long white dress standing at the window, staring out into the quickly gathering darkness. She gasped, her hand automatically going to her breast as her heart fluttered at the strange vision in the room.

The figure turned, and for a moment Cora felt as if her legs would give way beneath her.

In the flickering glow of an oil lamp, a face appeared—a face as pale as death—framed by long blond hair that dropped almost to the eerie figure’s waist.

Instinctively, Cora reached out to steady herself against the doorjamb. And then, as the strange specter picked up the oil lamp and moved toward her, she recognized the face.

“Melissa?” she asked.

The figure stopped moving and its head tipped slightly.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“I’m going to the dance,” Melissa replied.

Cora’s eyes narrowed slightly, for there was something odd about Melissa’s voice. It wasn’t that it didn’t sound like Melissa—just that it was different.

“The dance?” Cora repeated. “But didn’t the boys come for you an hour ago? I heard the car—”

“I wasn’t ready,” Melissa said. “But now it’s time.”

Melissa moved toward her once more, and instinctively Cora drew back slightly, for again there had been that strange note in Melissa’s voice.

Melissa brushed past her, but instead of turning toward the bright pool of light around the attic door, she went the other way, toward the long-disused servants’ stairs.

Cora followed close behind her, and a moment later Melissa started down the steep flight that led eventually to the kitchen. “Melissa? Are you all right?” Cora asked when they were downstairs. Melissa was standing quite still, her eyes scanning the kitchen, her expression oddly puzzled. As Cora spoke, she turned once more, and this time she smiled. But it wasn’t quite Melissa’s smile, just as the voice with which she spoke wasn’t quite Melissa’s voice.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Isn’t it a perfect night?”

Cora took a step toward her. “Something’s wrong,” she said. “You don’t sound right. And what are you got up as? My Lord, you’re pale as a ghost—”

And suddenly she understood. It was the costume party! And Melissa was going as D’Arcy. The tension in Cora’s body broke and she chuckled softly. “Well, aren’t you a sight, though. All got up in that dress. When I first saw you, I almost fainted dead away. My goodness, I hope nobody sees you on the beach tonight. You’d scare the life
right out of them.” She moved closer to Melissa and held out her arms, but instead of accepting Cora’s embrace, Melissa moved toward the door.

“Don’t,” she breathed. “It’ll get wrinkles in my beautiful new dress.” Setting the flickering oil lamp on the counter, she smiled once more at Cora, then stepped out the back door into the night.

Cora, nonplussed by Melissa’s last words, hurried to the door. New dress? What was she talking about? The dress was ancient. And her voice!

It hadn’t sounded like Melissa’s voice at all. It had sounded older, somehow. And curiously toneless. She came to the back door and peered out into the darkness. Melissa, already halfway across the lawn, had all but disappeared from sight, and all Cora could see of her was an indistinct blur of white floating against the black background of the night. She hesitated for a moment, wondering what to do.

Should she call Mrs. Holloway at the Barnstables’?

She discarded the idea instantly, knowing what her mistress’s reaction would be to being called away from a party simply because Melissa was acting strange.

She would be furious, and she’d take it out not only on her, but on Melissa, too.

Besides, maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with Melissa at all.

Maybe she’d just been using her imagination, and was trying to act the way D’Arcy herself might have that night when she’d gone to a dance at the club. In her mind, Cora ran over the details of the legend she’d heard for the first time nearly fifty years ago, when she’d originally come to Secret Cove.

If it was true that D’Arcy Malloy had really lived in this house, then the room in the attic might well have been hers. And she was supposed to have been seventeen or eighteen that night almost a hundred years ago.

Cora smiled now as she remembered Melissa’s face. With the pale makeup, the makeup that had given her face that strange ghostly cast, she might have passed for seventeen.

And her voice had taken on a more mature tone as well.

Yes, that was it.

Melissa, caught up in the spirit of the costume, was playing the role of D’Arcy as well as wearing the clothes.

And she’s doing a pretty good job of it, too, Cora added to herself as she went back to her work. She sure fooled me—for a minute I’d have sworn she really
was
D’Arcy.

Jeff Barnstable twisted the key and listened to the Porsche’s powerful engine leap into life. He gunned the motor a couple of times, dropped the transmission into low, and released the hand brake. Popping the clutch, he stamped down on the accelerator and the tires emitted a satisfying shriek as they lost their traction for a second. The car shot forward, accelerating rapidly as it roared up the drive toward the highway. He was doing nearly fifty when he came to the tight curve that would take him onto the road skirting the cove, and when he spun the wheel, all four wheels suddenly tore loose from the pavement. Instantly, he corrected his steering and the tires caught again. He slowed down as he came to the main highway, turned and headed down the road that led around the cove and eventually into the village. He came around another tight curve, then gunned the engine once more as he hit a long straightaway, the speedometer peaking at eighty-five before he began to slow for the turn into the Holloways’ long driveway. Less than two minutes after he’d left the club, he stopped the car on the gravel drive in front of the house. Leaving the engine idling, he ran up the steps to the porch and rang the bell.

When nothing happened, he rang again, then heard Cora Peterson’s muffled voice calling out from inside the house. “Hold your horses. I’m coming.” The porch light came on and the door opened. Cora looked out at him, opened the door wider, but said nothing.

“Is Melissa here?” Jeff asked. “I came to pick her up.”

Cora pursed her lips. “Pick her up?” she repeated. “Well, you’re a little late, aren’t you?”

Jeff felt a flush of heat in his face and hoped it didn’t show in the light on the porch. “I-It took me longer to get ready than I thought,” he said. “Then I had to get the car from Brett.”

Cora’s eyes moved to the Porsche. “Since when are you old enough to drive?” she asked.

“I have a learner’s permit,” Jeff told her. “Besides, all the kids drive around here. The cops don’t care.”

Cora’s brows rose. “Maybe they don’t, if they don’t catch you,” she retorted. “Anyway, I guess it don’t matter, since Melissa’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean?”

“She left maybe five or ten minutes ago. All dressed up in her costume.” She eyed Jeff suspiciously. “She didn’t act like she was expecting to be picked up.”

Jeff swallowed nervously, wondering if he should try to catch up with her. If she got to the club and he wasn’t with her …

But it was all right. When he’d left his house, his mother’s party had still been going, and people had just started leaving for the club. He still had time to get the car back and then go find Melissa.

“Which way did she go?” he asked.

Cora shrugged. “How should I know? I s’pose she was taking the trail. I don’t think she’d want to go on the beach and risk getting her dress all dirty.”

“Okay,” Jeff said, starting back down the steps. “I’ll find her.”

Leaving the door open, Cora stepped out on the porch. “Well, you get rid of the car first. I don’t want my girl running around in a car with anybody that doesn’t know how to drive.”

“I know how,” Jeff called back, sliding once more behind the wheel of the Porsche. He put the little car in gear, let the clutch out, and slowly went on around the circular drive until he was back to the driveway itself. Then, just to show off, he hit the gas pedal hard, and a satisfying rain of gravel shot up from the car’s rear. Laughing as Cora shook her fist at him, he raced up the driveway toward the main road.

Melissa, eyes wide and unblinking, moved along the trail, her skirt raised so she wouldn’t get the hem of her dress dirty. The strange feelings that had begun to come over her when she’d first put on the dress—then grown stronger
as Teri began to change her face with the makeup—held her firmly in their grasp now.

She wasn’t Melissa at all anymore. She’d sent Melissa to sleep somewhere deep inside her, and it was D’Arcy who was now on her way to the dance.

Everything looked strange to her. She’d barely recognized Cora, and when she’d gone through the kitchen, it appeared different, too. It had looked older than she’d remembered it, and the icebox had disappeared. There was something new in its place—a big white box, made out of metal. And the lights in the kitchen had been brighter, too.

She’d been glad to get out of the house and into the more familiar darkness outside, and she’d started for the trail through the woods immediately. In the woods everything was the same as she remembered it. The path felt soft and spongy beneath her feet, and the twists and turns were the same as they’d always been.

But then, through the trees, she got a glimpse of the Cove Club. Like the kitchen in the house a few minutes ago, its lights were brighter than she remembered—almost as bright as day.

She moved on, and a few minutes later came to a bend in the trail she didn’t recognize. The trail had a new fork, and above her was the road. She gazed uncertainly at the other fork for a moment, but had no idea where it might lead. But if she went up to the road, the club was no more than a three-minute walk away.

Jeff slowed the car down, steering into the last curve before the short straightaway leading to the coast road. Suddenly, in the glow of the headlights, a figure clad in white appeared along the side of the road. For a split second the memory of the story of D’Arcy leaped into his mind, but then he realized it had to be Melissa, on her way to the club.

He slowed the car, expecting her to turn around any second, but when she didn’t, an idea came into his head. If he killed the lights and crept up on her, then blasted the horn …

He reached down and turned off the headlights, then
slowed the car even further, until the idling engine was almost silent. Finally, when he was no more than ten feet behind the pale figure by the side of the road, he blasted the horn, and as the figure jumped and spun around to face him, switched the lights back on.

And gaped.

It wasn’t Melissa at all.

Instead, he saw a ghostly face staring at him, a face framed with straight blond hair hanging almost to her waist.

The memory of the ghost story flooded back to him once again, and without thinking, Jeff jammed his foot to the floorboard and the powerful engine roared back to life. The car leaped forward, its wheels screaming against the pavement. Jeff’s eyes left the road ahead to stare into the rearview mirror.

The grotesque figure in white still stood by the side of the road, staring at him.

His eyes flicked away from the image in the mirror and then widened in horror as he saw the safety rail of the coast road looming ahead of him, no more than twenty yards away.

A scream of terror building in his throat, his foot left the accelerator and smashed down on the brake pedal. The tires screamed once more as the wheels locked under the force of the brakes, and the car sloughed around, all its traction gone.

A moment later the Porsche slammed into the metal guardrail.

The force of the blow ripped the rail loose from the concrete pilings to which it was attached.

The car shot out over the edge of the cliff, seemed to Jeff to hover there for a single agonizing second, then dropped downward.

It turned as it fell, and for a moment Jeff stared straight down at the rocks that seemed to be rushing up at him. And then the car struck the rocks, and Jeff felt the windshield explode into his face.…

Melissa, snapped awake by the blare of the Porsche’s horn, stared at the car as it shot through the barrier and disappeared
over the cliff. For a moment she was stunned, uncertain of where she was or how she had gotten there.

The last thing she really remembered was being in her room, putting on the wig and staring at herself in the mirror.

Staring at the image that hadn’t quite been her own.

But now, as she began to come fully awake once more, she knew whose image it was she’d seen.

It had been D’Arcy’s image.

Tonight, as she put on the dress, the makeup, and the wig, D’Arcy had come to her, unbidden.

D’Arcy had come to her, and sent her to sleep.

She gazed numbly at the twisted wreckage of the barrier and tried to remember what had happened.

But there was nothing there. Only the memory of the noise that had awakened her, and the image of the car racing away from her.

A black car.

A black car like Brett Van Arsdale’s.

Gasping, she pulled up her skirt and ran the forty or so yards to the coast road. She darted across, and stared down into the darkness below. On the rocks, just out of reach of the pounding surf, she could barely make out the wreckage of the car.

A scream welled up in her throat and she turned away, rushing toward the bright lights of the Cove Club.

Phyllis paused by the swimming pool, gazing up at the brilliantly lit clubhouse on the promontory above. She’d hated leaving the Barnstables’ party early, but in the end hadn’t been able to resist her urge to get to the dance itself and make certain all her careful plans had worked out. Now, with the strains of music drifting out the open windows to fill the warm summer evening with a gentle melody, she began to relax. At least the orchestra had arrived, and she could see a few costumed figures already moving around the dance floor. “Look,” she said to Charles, slipping her hand through his arm. “See the Japanese lanterns? I had them put on every single bulb on the chandeliers. And look at the light.”