Touch Me in the Dark Read online

  Although he was still leery of letting her stay in this house, how could he go on urging her to leave when the image of her stirred him so strongly? Artists had a right to be selfish, didn’t they?

  Perhaps his fixation about the tragic anniversary revealed more about his psyche than about any real danger, Ian reflected. Returning to his sketchpad, he let the images flow.

  And they did, freely.

  “I think I’m in love.”

  Sharon gazed at her three-month-old niece. Lisa’s chubby limbs flailed, throwing her against the crib’s pink bumpers in an unsuccessful attempt to roll over.

  “I’m definitely in love,” she confirmed. “She’s adorable.”

  Yesterday’s illness had left almost no trace except for sore stomach muscles and dreams that she couldn’t quite remember. Greg seemed unaffected by the virus, and Karly had urged them to keep their plans to visit.

  “My daughter’s a determined little thing. I hope I’m not spoiling her.” Karly set a plate of oatmeal cookies on a table in the baby’s brightly decorated room. Greg helped himself to a handful.

  For a former free spirit, Karly had turned remarkably domestic. First the smell of lemon polish in the air, now homemade cookies. She’d even stenciled teddy bears on the nursery wall.

  Nearly three years ago, when Karly and Frank married outdoors in a gazebo overlooking the ocean, her sister had sworn never to become a housewife. And for a while she hadn’t. Strikingly beautiful with long dark hair and a slim build, Karly had continued singing with a band and pursuing a recording career. Her husband, a computer programmer, had supported her ambitions.

  But the hoped-for recording contract hadn’t materialized and Frank suffered a layoff followed by months of struggle to build up a consulting business. Rents had soared and, just when Karly decided to take a job teaching music, she unexpectedly became pregnant.

  Sharon wished she’d been here to help, especially when complications forced her sister to stay in bed for weeks. Preoccupied with the fallout from Jim’s death, however, she’d been able to do little except give pep talks by phone.

  Matters seemed to have improved. Karly clearly adored her baby and Frank had more work than he could handle. Even so, Sharon sensed tension beneath the surface. She respected her sister’s right to privacy. All the same, she hoped eventually Karly would feel comfortable enough to confide.

  The baby made a gurgling noise. Greg eyed his cousin dubiously. “Can’t she talk?”

  “Maybe in another year.” Karly draped an arm around his shoulders. “Don’t you wish you knew what she was thinking? She sure does make funny faces.”

  “It’s gas,” Sharon teased, and laughed at her sister’s outraged expression.

  Greg’s attention span had reached its limit. His next question was, “Does she have any good toys?”

  “Not for your age group, but you can use Frank’s remote-control car as long as you don’t bump the furniture. He never has time for it any more, anyway.” Karly went to fetch her husband’s plaything.

  Greg settled on the nursery floor with the toy, to Lisa’s fascination. Sharon hoped this would be the start of a long and loving relationship between the pair.

  The two women moved into the living room, leaving the door open so they could hear if the baby cried. Karly had decorated with blond Scandinavian furniture and bright prints. “Babies can be exhausting. How’re you holding up?”

  “I don’t mind.” Karly plopped onto the couch. “Most of the time.”

  Sharon took the recliner. She tried very hard not to act nosy, for all of thirty seconds. “What’s wrong?”

  Sticking out her long legs, Karly crossed them atop the coffee table. At twenty-seven, she’d tamed her once-frizzy brown hair but her movements remained coltish. “I guess I’ve got cabin fever.”

  “Have you thought about teaching music part-time?” Sharon remembered the sense of confinement from when she’d stayed home, until Greg entered preschool. Not that she regretted a minute.

  Still, she was anxious to meet with the director of her new school and take over her class. Teaching meant waking up each morning excited about the possibilities for her students.

  Karly grimaced. “Who has the energy? I’ve hardly slept in months. Lisa wakes up two or three times a night and Frank’s exhausted from working so much.”

  “He’s probably trying to make up for lost time.” Sharon knew the couple had emptied their savings account during the pregnancy.

  “I keep waiting for things to get back to normal. The problem is, I’m not sure what ‘normal’ is any more,” Karly admitted. “I need something to look forward to. Sometimes I feel like throwing things at Frank, except it isn’t his fault.”

  “Things will get easier when Lisa’s older.” That seemed a long time away.

  “No doubt.” Karly launched into a new subject. “How do you like the Fanning House? Isn’t it right out of The Addams Family?”

  Probably more than she realized. Then Sharon recalled Ian’s remark that the discovery hadn’t been a coincidence. “How on earth did you find the place?”

  “That’s the funny part.” Karly stretched languidly. “I was on my way to a new discount baby store when I got the strangest urge to turn down one particular street. What an incredible house! I knew you were meant to live there.”

  Sharon made a face. “Next you’ll tell me you’re getting signals from space aliens. If you start walking around with aluminum foil on your head, I’m disowning you.”

  “I think the place is exciting. We should throw a Halloween party next fall.”

  “I’d rather not. Things are weird enough already.” Sharon described her trip to the attic with Ian.

  Karly drank in every word of the tale. “You really look just like her? Maybe we’re related. Mom’s family lived around here since the early 1900s, so we could have distant cousins.”

  Sharon didn’t recall her mother mentioning any other family. Still, there could be a connection. “Do you have Mom’s scrapbook?”

  Karly jumped up eagerly. “I’ll get it from the bedroom.”

  After their father remarried, they’d divided up their mother’s memorabilia. Sharon had coveted an heirloom set of silverware, while Karly opted for the photo album. Because they were so close, neither felt she’d lost anything.

  As Sharon listened to Greg zooming the toy car around the nursery, her thoughts drifted to Ian. His kindness yesterday had melted many of her misgivings, yet he aroused disturbing feelings.

  She didn’t want to remember the touch of his mouth or imagine the rising desire as their bodies pressed together. Before meeting Jim, she’d carried on a white-hot affair with man who turned out to be dangerously unstable. She’d been lucky to escape unscathed. The last thing she needed was to repeat the experience, especially with Greg relying on her.

  Karly strolled in with a heavy album. “I wish Mom had identified people better. Do you remember a Cousin Thea? Was she Mom’s cousin?”

  “I have no idea. Did you find anyone who resembles me?” She shifted onto the couch beside her sister.

  “Not yet. We could call Dad in case he recalls anything.”

  “How likely is that?” Neither of their parents had taken much interest in family history.

  Busy with church work and charity fund-raising, Beth Ridgeman had lived in the here and now. She’d been an only child, and so, effectively, had Dad after losing his seventeen-year-old brother in a traffic accident. Sharon retained only a vague recollection of her grandparents and a great-uncle on her mother’s side, also long deceased.

  “We’re going to have to do this ourselves.” Karly leafed through the yellowing pages.

  The pictures were only partially chronological, since their mother had acquired them as elderly relatives passed on and had pasted them in as they arrived. That made figuring out who was who even harder.

  Karly pointed out a black-and-white photo that showed a stern couple wearing formal dress. “That’s Mom�
�s handwriting.”

  She’d written, “My grandparents, Leila and Joseph.”

  Sharon saw a family resemblance to the solemn-faced woman. There was no way of telling her hair color, however, and her name was Leila, not Susan.

  Karly flipped a page to a snapshot of two couples and three children playing on a beach. A baby dozed on a blanket. “They’re not so constipated-looking in this one.”

  “That’s rude!”

  “Like they’re going to care?”

  “Hey, wait.” Sharon shifted the album to her lap. She recognized her great-grandparents from the earlier photo, but who were these other people?

  Squinting at the faded, unfamiliar handwriting, she made out the names Leila and Joseph. The other couple was identified as Annamarie and Samuel Fanning.

  Fanning. That was Ian’s last name and Jody’s as well.

  Excitement mingled with uneasiness. Maybe the similarity to Susan really wasn’t a coincidence.

  Karly got excited, too. Together, they scanned the names of the children and realized one girl, Rachel, was their own grandmother. The boy must be Rachel’s brother, their great-uncle Benjamin.

  The other little girl’s name was Susan.

  A chill ran through Sharon. This was the murdered woman as a child.

  Her throat tightened. “I can’t believe it. The baby must be Jody.”

  “This is amazing!” Karly peered closer. “They had to be some kind of cousins.

  You weren’t kidding about her being practically a twin. Hold on.” Impatiently, she turned clumps of pages until reaching a picture of Sharon at almost the same age.

  From the pixyish smiles to the way the little girls’ hands rested jauntily on their hips, the two were identical. Yet they’d lived more than half a century apart.

  Sharon hugged herself. “Maybe we should stop. This doesn’t seem right.”

  “I’m not giving up now. No way!” Karly plowed ahead. When Lisa began to wail in the other room, she gratefully accepted Sharon’s offer to investigate.

  She returned after changing a diaper to find her sister triumphantly displaying a snapshot of two middle-aged women. The caption cited them as Grandma Leila and her cousin Annamarie.

  They were related. Distantly, anyway.

  I believe you were drawn here. She’d dismissed Ian’s comment as superstition. But how to explain this coincidence?

  Karly chattered on, oblivious. “If Susan’s mother was great-grandma’s first cousin, what kind of cousin was she to us?”

  “Don’t ask me. By the time you get into all the ‘twice-removeds,’ I’m lost.”

  Sharon tried to picture this sweet-faced woman locking her pregnant daughter in the attic and destroying her lover’s letters. That must have been her husband’s doing.

  Returning to the beach scene, Sharon touched the faded photograph of the girl’s face. Little Susan, her twin across time.

  At the edge of awareness, Sharon heard a subliminal hissing, like static or someone whispering. She caught words—just us, or perhaps justice.

  A shake of the head dispelled the impression. She’d read of a phenomenon that led people to believe they recognized words or objects in chaos. Since Karly showed no reaction, most likely she’d heard the heating system whistling through a vent.

  Karly was still studying the pictures. “Maybe it’s not so strange that I drove by the house and got that sense of recognition. I’ll bet Mom showed us the place when we were little. Don’t you think?”

  A rational explanation at last. “Absolutely.” Sharon supposed she ought to stop there, but her imagination wouldn’t let her. “Still, how odd that Susan and I have such a strong resemblance, considering how little DNA we share.”

  “Genes distribute themselves unpredictably.” Karly grinned. “I always knew AP biology would come in handy someday.”

  They skimmed through the rest of the album without finding any other pictures of Susan’s branch of the family. When the time came for the baby’s nap, Sharon could see despite Karly’s denials that her sister needed to rest, too. Besides, living so close, they could get together often.

  Driving home beneath lowering clouds, Sharon felt as if the house was waiting for them. Despite the excitement of discovering a hidden facet of their family, she wasn’t sure she liked the notion that it had a claim on her. She and Greg were individuals, not threads woven into some dark tapestry.

  She was still brooding as they pulled into the rear parking area.

  “Mom, look!” Greg’s frightened words snapped her reverie. “There’s a….a…” Unable to finish, he pointed wordlessly toward the second floor.

  Chapter Four

  Sharon followed his gesture to the window that marked her bedroom. It framed a dark shape that resembled a blurred face.

  “My God,” she said. “What is that?”

  The wind flung a branch at the windshield, and she blinked instinctively. When she looked back at the window, only a curved shadow remained. Slowly it faded, leaving a reflection of leaves and branches.

  “What was that, Mom?” Greg asked.

  Sharon wished she knew.

  Inside, Greg clung to her hand as they climbed the stairs. Late-afternoon half-light filtered through a high window, peopling the landing with ephemeral shapes.

  “I don’t like this place,” the boy muttered. “Especially that thing at the window. Mom?”

  “Consider this an adventure. Like a movie.” Sharon was certain they hadn’t really seen anything in the window. “The house comes with its own special effects, that’s all.”

  Greg squeezed her hand hard. “Maybe it’s a ghost.”

  “There’s no such thing.” Sharon kept her tone cheerful. “People are always seeing peculiar things that turn out to be a trick of the light. They report a UFO and then find they’ve seen an experimental aircraft.”

  “That’s right. Dad said so.” When Jim came across such items from the newspaper, he’d scoffed at people’s credulity. That her son remembered and took strength from his father pleased Sharon.

  A cold film brushed her cheek, startling her. From the corner of her eye, she watched a silvery shape float upwards. Sharon froze, struggling not to panic despite the alarm jolting through her.

  Greg spoke first, his voice free of fear. “Can I have that? Can I, please?”

  “Sure thing,” came a man’s voice from below. “Brought it back for you. Heard we had a youngster moving in.”

  Hovering on the brink of hysterical laughter, Sharon caught the Mylar balloon, which threatened to waft out of reach. It bore the words, “P.S., I Love You,” a slogan she’d heard in connection with Palm Springs.

  A balding man in aviator glasses caught up with them at the top of the steps. With his bouncy energy, he could be anywhere from his late fifties to early seventies.

  “I’m Pete Gaskell.” He pumped Sharon’s hand. “My wife Bella and I came back early from a trip. Can you believe this weather? They’ve issued flash flood warnings in the desert.”

  A woman, obviously Bella, followed him upstairs. She wore a Palm Springs sweatshirt, gold hoop earrings and eye shadow shaded pink to lavender. She grasped Sharon’s hand, turned it over and examined the palm. “You have a strong heart line.”

  What a clichéd opening. Sharon could picture Jim shaking his head in disbelief, although he’d have been too polite to do so in front of Bella.

  “Wow! You tell fortunes!” Greg squinted at his mother’s hand. “What’s a strong heart line?”

  “That means your mother is capable of loving deeply,” Bella said.

  Too deeply, Sharon thought. But that didn’t mean her new neighbor had any unusual insight. She suspected almost everyone believed himself or herself capable of deep emotions.

  “My wife used to read tea leaves, but who uses loose tea any more?” Pete’s Hawaiian shirt filled the hall with flowers, eclipsing the painting of the man half in shadow. “She prefers the Tarot, but some of the pictures frighten people, so sh
e doesn’t do that much. Want to have your palm read, boy?”

  “Well...”

  “Not just now, thanks.” Sharon wasn’t in the mood for mumbo-jumbo, even from well-meaning neighbors.

  “Of course.” A smear of red lipstick on her teeth marred Bella’s smile. “We understand.”

  “Hang on a minute, will you? We’ve got something for your son.” Pete keyed open his door and dumped two suitcases inside. “Jody told us you were moving in. Bell spotted this yesterday and decided it would make a perfect welcome gift for our new young neighbor.

  “It spoke to me,” Bella said.

  From inside one of the suitcases, Pete retrieved a rectangular box labeled “Ouija.”

  “Oo-jah?” Greg mispronounced. “Gosh, I never played this before.”

  “It’s not a game,” Pete advised. “And the name is ‘Wee-ja.’ One of the ancient mysteries. Taps right into your subconscious mind. Or maybe the universal subconscious.”

  “It reaches beyond,” said Bella.

  Greg rattled the box. “Beyond what?”

  “Beyond the world we know,” said Bella.

  Oh, great, Sharon thought. That was all she needed—people putting scary ideas into her son’s head. What did these folks use for judgment?

  Still, she didn’t want to be rude, and she hated to disappoint Greg by refusing. “That’s kind of you,” Sharon said. “But do you think this is appropriate for a child?”

  “We’re all part of the everything,” Bella said with affected vagueness. “We are all cousins under the skin.”

  Her words raised unpleasant echoes in Sharon’s mind. It wasn’t exactly reassuring to realize that these two oddballs were probably related to her in some way also. “Jody did mention that you’re her cousins.” She stopped herself from blurting out that she, too, was akin to the Fannings. That was information she preferred to handle discreetly.