The Lost Night (4 page)

She listened carefully but there was nothing in his voice to tell her his opinion of the HE lifestyle. Her short experience in the mainstream world had taught her to expect either disapproval or prurient curiosity about the sexual practices in the Community—often a combination of both. But if Harry felt either disdain or a lurid interest, he hid it well.

“That’s right,” she said. “Amberella was one of the few things I took with me when I left the Community.”

Harry glanced at her charm bracelet. She smiled.

“Well, the doll and my bracelet,” she amended.

“When did the dust bunny show up?”

“Just a few days ago. I fed her
a couple of times. She brought me some small stones. The next thing I knew she had more or less moved in. I keep Amberella on the mantel. Darwina saw her and went straight for her.”

Harry studied Amberella with an amused expression. “That’s a fancy dress for a doll.”

“She’s wearing her Restoration Ball gown. There were dozens of outfits you could buy for Amberella, but this one and the wedding gown were the dresses that every little girl wanted most. I knew I was probably only going to get one, so I chose the ball gown because of the little crystals sewn on it.”

Darwina chortled happily and waved the doll. Harry took a closer look at the figure. His brows rose.

“The crystals aren’t plastic. They’re the real deal, aren’t they?” he asked.

“My parents decided that if I was going to get an Amberella doll it should have some educational and enlightening aspects. Mom spent a whole day removing the original plastic crystals and replacing them with genuine stones.”

“How did you talk your folks into giving you the doll?” Harry asked.

“Oh, I was subtle, believe me. In the end they managed to convince themselves that Amberella would be a good way to expose me to the ways of the Unenlightened.”

Laughter gleamed in Harry’s eyes. “The idea being to build up your immunity against the outside world?”

“Yep.”

“I take it that didn’t work out well for you?”

“Nope. It just made me all the
more determined to go mainstream. I wanted to live the Amberella lifestyle.”

Harry watched her with knowing eyes. “That didn’t work out for you, either.”

It wasn’t a question.

“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t fit into either world now.”

“Maybe that’s why you wound up here on Rain-shadow.” Harry regarded her with a thoughtful expression. “A lot of folks who settle on the island don’t seem to fit in anywhere else.”

“So true.” Time to shift the conversation, she thought. “I take it you never got dinner?”

“No. But I’ll survive.”

“Nonsense.” She went briskly toward the kitchen. “I made some lasagna. Plenty of leftovers. I’ll heat some up for you.”

“I’m not going to turn down that offer.” He followed her and stopped in the kitchen doorway, looking around with interest. “This is nice. Cozy or something.”

“This cottage belonged to my aunts.” She opened the refrigerator and took out the foil-covered pan of cold lasagna. “Most of the furniture and dishes belonged to them.” She started to close the refrigerator and paused, noticing the partially empty bottle of white wine and two bottles of beer on the bottom shelf. “I’ve got some chardonnay and some beer.”

“I could use a beer.” He took the bottle she offered and glanced at the label. “This looks like Slade’s brand.”

“It is. He and his fiancée, Charlotte, came to dinner the other evening. Slade brought the beer. Charlotte and I drank the chardonnay. Have you
met Charlotte? She runs Looking Glass Antiques, which is just down the street from my shop.”

“I met her yesterday. Slade introduced us.” Harry propped one shoulder against the doorframe, swallowed some beer, and watched her go about the task of reheating the lasagna in the rez-wave oven. “They seem like a well-matched couple.”

“They are but they didn’t go through a matchmaking agency. They found each other here on Rainshadow. They’re going straight for a full Covenant Marriage.”

There was a sudden chill in the kitchen. Rachel glanced over her shoulder. Harry’s expression had not changed. It was still all hard planes and angles, still politely unreadable. But a curious stillness seemed to have enveloped him. She knew that she had inadvertently stumbled into forbidden territory.

“No Marriage of Convenience to test the waters first?” he asked.

His tone of voice was a little too neutral. Rachel wondered at the undercurrents in the atmosphere, but it would be rude to inquire. She had discovered that when it came to the subject of Covenant Marriages versus Marriages of Convenience, people in the mainstream world often held strong opinions.

Dissolving a Covenant Marriage was a legal nightmare, not to mention prohibitively expensive for all but the very rich. The laws had changed somewhat recently, but divorce was still a devastating scandal that destroyed careers and ruined social status. Those who went through a divorce were considered unmatchable
by legitimate matchmaking agencies.

Because it was so difficult to get out of a CM, many people favored a trial Marriage of Convenience. MCs had legal standing and some legal protections but they could be terminated by either party at any time—unless there were offspring. A baby automatically converted an MC into a full Covenant Marriage. Family was the most important social institution on Harmony and it was reinforced with all the power of law and custom.

“No,” she said aloud. “No MC for Slade and Charlotte. They are very certain of their decision. They’re also in a hurry.”

“Yeah, I got that impression yesterday when Slade told me that he and Charlotte are leaving Rainshadow tomorrow for a week. They’re going to Frequency City so that Slade can do the meet-the-relatives thing.”

“I don’t think Slade is looking forward to a weeklong round of family events but he’ll do anything for Charlotte,” Rachel said.

The oven pinged. She opened the door and reached inside with a pair of hot pads. She placed the pan on the counter and used a spatula to carve out a large square of the fragrant, steaming lasagna. She set the lasagna on a plate and carried it to the kitchen table.

Darwina scuttled in from the living room, Amberella clutched in one paw, bounced up onto the wide window ledge next to the glass jar filled with rainstones, and chortled hopefully.

Rachel gave her a stern look. “You already had dinner. If you don’t watch out, we’re going to have to
buy you a dust-bunny-sized treadmill.”

Darwina eyed the lasagna pan with an assessing gaze.

“Okay, okay,” Rachel said. “But don’t blame me if you don’t end up with a figure like Amberella.”

She cut another smaller square of the lasagna, positioned it on a saucer, and placed the saucer on the window ledge. Darwina set Amberella aside and settled in to devour the lasagna.

Harry pulled out a chair and sat down. “This looks great. Thanks. I didn’t realize how hungry I was until it dawned on me that I might not get dinner tonight. Funny how a little thing like that concentrates the attention.”

Rachel took the chair across from Harry and watched him dig into the meal. It was surprisingly satisfying to see him enjoy something she had prepared with her own hands.

“This is great,” he said around a mouthful.

“I’m glad you like it.” She smiled. “I consider lasagna to be an excellent example of a harmonically balanced dish.”

“Yeah?” Harry raised his brows. “What constitutes a harmonically balanced dish?”

“Equal parts meditation and exercise.”

“Meditation and exercise?” he repeated politely.

She winced. “Sorry. It’s supposed to be a joke. I was taught that cooking is to be done in a spirit of active meditation. But after a high-calorie dish like lasagna it will be necessary to exercise. Hence the harmonic balance is maintained.”

Harry forked up
another bite. “Got it. An example of Harmonic Enlightenment humor.”

She propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her palm. “Not exactly sparkling wit, is it? But, then, we’re not really known for our sense of humor.”

“Is that so?” Harry’s eyes glinted a little. He put down the fork and drank a little more beer. “I hadn’t heard that.”

“During my short stay in the mainstream world I discovered that there are a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings about the Community.”

“Such as?”

She flushed. She was not about to bring up the misconceptions about HE attitudes toward sex, at least not while he was eating her lasagna.

“Never mind,” she said. “You know, I’ve got a picture of the original Harry Sebastian in my shop. I sell a lot of prints as souvenirs. You look just like your ancestor. But I’ll bet you get that a lot.”

“Let’s just say that when I walked down the main street of Shadow Bay yesterday a couple of kids wanted to know if I was the ghost of Harry the Pirate.”

“Can’t blame them. According to the legends, he never made it off the island after he buried his treasure. They say his ghost walks the Preserve at night.”

The first Harry Sebastian was a legend in the islands of the Amber Sea and, as was usually the case with legends, very few hard facts had survived. Most historians were convinced that he was nothing more than a notorious buccaneer who had preyed on shipping and the tiny island towns
during and immediately after the lawless Era of Discord.

But here in the islands, there were those who claimed that he had been a hero—if a mercenary one—who, for a price, had protected ships and the small communities from the real pirates. It all depended on your point of view, Rachel thought.

The only aspect of the story that everyone agreed upon was that the original Harry had vanished after burying his treasure. The most popular theory was that his partner in the pirate-hunting business, Nicholas North, who had accompanied him on the treasure-burying excursion, had murdered Harry inside what was now the Preserve. According to the tales, North had not made it out of the forbidden territory, either. He was presumed to have fallen victim to the strange forces at work in the dark part of the island.

“A few minutes ago you said there were a lot of misconceptions about the Harmonic Enlightenment community,” Harry said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Well, there are a few misconceptions—or maybe I should say historical inaccuracies—in my great-grandfather’s legend.”

“Of course,” Rachel said. “It’s the nature of legends to become inaccurate over time. That’s what makes them interesting. What are some of the misconceptions about your ancestor?”

Harry took another bite of the lasagna. “Let’s start with the fact that he did not die
here on Rainshadow. His partner, North, did not murder him. Both men made it off the island after they buried the so-called treasure.”

“I sure hope you don’t go spreading that word around town. It would be very bad for business. I sell gazillions of copies of the
Tales of Harry Sebastian
to the tourists. The books are a young adult series written by a local author named Jilly Finch. She works part-time in my shop. We could both be ruined if you squelch the legend.”

“Don’t worry; legends always survive the truth.”

“Good point,” Rachel said. “So what really did happen to Harry One and Nick North?”

“The Era of Discord was almost over by the time they came ashore with the treasure. They saw the writing on the wall. The days of pirate hunting for fun and profit were coming to an end, and they had both collected a sizeable circle of enemies.”

“Not surprising. Pirating is probably the kind of business that attracts enemies.”

“Got news for you, anyone who runs a successful, highly profitable business attracts enemies sooner or later,” he said.

“Really? Do they teach that in business management school?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t go into finance or business management. I left that for others in my family. I got stuck with the same talent that Harry the Pirate had, so my options were fairly limited.”

“You mean you could be either a pirate or a pirate-hunter?” she asked lightly.

For a second or two Harry appeared to
be genuinely surprised by the question.

“How did you know?” he asked.

An effervescent sensation whispered across her senses. Her pulse kicked up a little. She cleared her throat and tried to calm her dancing energies.

“It just seemed obvious that whatever made Harry a successful pirate—and by all accounts he was
very
successful—would also have made him very good at catching other pirates. Same skill set, so to speak. It’s a matter of harmonic balance.”

“Yeah?” Harry looked intrigued.

“Well, sure. I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”

He moved one hand in a dismissive gesture. “Not to everyone. Very few people outside my family understand—Never mind. To return to my tale, Harry and Nick North quit the business, promoted the story that they had both died on Rainshadow, and slipped quietly back into normal life, or maybe I should say what passed for normal in the first years after the Era of Discord.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t have been hard for two clever men to make themselves disappear,” Rachel mused. “According to the history books, things were chaotic for a while after the battles in the catacombs ended. I suspect a lot of folks took advantage of the confusion and the lack of a paper trail to make major career changes.”

“My great-grandfather got married, started a family and what proved to be a profitable corporation. He kept a low profile but he made sure that the family business claimed most of Rainshadow under the old Exploration Laws and later he established
the Rainshadow Preserve Foundation to manage things here.”

“All that to protect what he and North had buried inside the Preserve?”

“Yes,” Harry said.

“What happened to Nicholas North?”

“Unfortunately, he did not do as well as Harry One. Started a number of businesses but they all failed. Eventually he disappeared altogether. My great-grandfather died several years ago but he told me once that he thinks North may have come back to Rainshadow to try to recover the treasure and that he didn’t make it off the island that second time.”