Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
The next morning, they sat at the table sipping coffee and stifling yawns. It had been a short night, sleep-wise.
“Sorry, I don’t usually keep any milk or half-and-half on hand,” Harper said.
“It’s not a problem.”
“I drink my coffee black. I’m bitter like that.”
He gave her a crooked half smile over the rim of his coffee cup. “I know you like to think of yourself that way, but I’m not buying it. This Perles Mansion thing is a case in point: You can’t let it go. You feel compelled to fix things for people, figure things out.”
“Hard to believe the ghost tour was just one week ago, isn’t it? Also, not to dwell on it or anything, but I’m officially one full week into being forty.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“The jury’s still out. I mean, so far, I have to say, my fortieth year has been a bit…fraught.”
“My fault. If I hadn’t goaded you into going on that tour…”
“Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. How on earth did you fail to foresee that we would discover a famous painter buried alive in her garden, which might later have led to Joel’s death?”
“A shocking lack of foresight on my part,” Tariq said, downing the last of his coffee.
He stood, gathered his wallet and keys, and paused for a long moment, gazing down at her and cupping her cheek in his palm.
“Harp, I know this has been a strange week, and we’re both a bit off-kilter. But last night was…really something.”
She stood and gave him a hug, lifted her face to his, and they shared a long, searching kiss.
“I’ll see you later?” Tariq asked, his voice husky.
“I’ll call you.”
Harper had no classes on Mondays. She remembered how her father, a high school dropout who had no idea how a university worked, was shocked at how few hours his daughter actually spent in a classroom.
But college was not high school. Harper’s main job was researching, putting together cogent arguments, and adding to society’s core of knowledge—that, and publishing in peer-reviewed journals, of course, to prove herself to her colleagues, so that she wouldn’t be fired.
And that reminded her: She went out to her car and retrieved the journal from under her car seat.
Harper poured herself another cup of coffee and sat down at the table to peruse the journal.
Many of the pages were dirty, and a few leaves and twigs fell out as she opened the tome.
The contents were a strange mélange of Delilah’s handwriting, loopy and tilted to the left, and Soren Perles’s sloppy scrawl, which she recognized from the account book she had been poring over in the archive.
There were newer pages in the beginning, containing recipes and lab notes, and on many of the original pages Delilah had scribbled numerous comments—an act of desecration that would have horrified Constance Bell at the antiquarian society.
Harper continued reading. Delilah had included recipes for extracting essential oils and concentrating botanicals to treat everything from gout to gunshot wounds.
For his part, Soren Perles had been working on the science of microdosing, and kept copious notes about autopsies, including detailed anatomical drawings, many in disturbing red ink.
He would likely have included plenty of gruesome color photographs, had the technology existed.
As she read, Harper kept wondering what Asher had seen in the journal that had enraged him so. A recipe to prevent baldness (key ingredient: ground beetles)? A liniment containing chloroform to ease the pain of neuralgia?
Several pages were dedicated to deciding whether or not a person was dead.
Harper knew that, before the development of medical technology such as EEG and EKG machines, it was not easy to determine the point of no return, when the spirit had truly left the body.
Various conditions, such as comas and catatonia, could masquerade as death.
This understandably caused more than a little uneasiness among the living and led some to insist that corpses be attached to bells, which would ring in case of movement, allowing the dearly departed to be “saved by the bell.” It was also typical in the past for a body to “lie in state” for several days, allowing loved ones to say a final farewell, while ensuring that the deceased was not buried alive.
Buried alive. They were back to that.
As was often the case, Soren Perles’s journal also functioned as a kind of diary, with personal entries scattered here and there.
Delicious venison today but troubled by dyspepsia after.
Another tussle with Isabel over that accursed door.
Grand dinner in our fantastical mirror room.
The babe was born.
The babe? According to Constance Bell, neither Soren nor Isabel married or had children. Had Isabel given birth to a child? Was that what had caused her to retreat from society and burn her fine dresses?
More important, who was the father? And what had happened to the child?
Harper was not the only one to wonder such a thing. Next to this entry, Delilah had scrawled in bright red ink, and underlined twice: Find the baby!
Isabel had held her dinner parties in that mirror room, and used to stand at the window, looking out on the garden with the grand cypress tree.
As did Delilah, according to what Sigrid had said.
A whispered, barely-there thought came to Harper.
Did Delilah look into that mirror—the one that featured so prominently in her paintings—and see the tormented spirit of Isabel Perles?
And then, what? Had Isabel somehow possessed Delilah? And then…killed her?
Harper shook her head at the very idea. She believed what she taught her students: Ghost stories were merely tales we told ourselves to explain the unexplainable.
But then Sigrid’s words rang in her head: “Why are you so reluctant to believe?”
For the next hour Harper let herself fall down a rabbit hole on the internet, researching people who actually believed in such things.
They described distorted realities, disembodied voices, seeing barely-there things out of the corners of their eyes.
All were attempts of spirits to reach across the veil, according to them.
Harper had seen someone silhouetted in that window that first night. And she had seen something—or someone—in that shrouded mirror.
Try as she might, she could not deny it.
Much less explain it.
Maybe Harper really should have Sigrid do a reading for her. She didn’t believe in such things, not really. But…what could it hurt?
A glance at the clock told her she had been studying the journal for hours. Her eyes were tired from the strain of trying to make sense of the confusing cipher. The lack of sleep didn’t help.
At least this time, it wasn’t due to insomnia but to something altogether more fun. And compelling.
Last night with Tariq had been…breathtaking.
The man knew what he was doing. Her skin tingled just thinking about the feel of his lips, his hands…
But what did their night together mean? Was it a one-night thing?
A friends-with-benefits situation? The beginning of a serious romance? What did she want it to be?
Probably best to play that one by ear. The last thing she wanted was to lose Tariq’s friendship over this. It had become too valuable to her.
One thing was clear: The journal was not going to give up its secrets easily. Her chair screeched as she pushed away from the table. She needed to take a break.
“Knock knock,” Harper called out as she entered Ellen’s house. “Okay if I stash something in your safe? Also, want to go for a drive lasting seventeen miles?”
On the way to Carmel, Harper brought Ellen up to speed on what had happened with Joel and Asher at the Perles Mansion.
“Oh, that’s just awful!” Ellen exclaimed. “That poor man. And Asher Mason—you really think he might have pushed him to his death?”
“I honestly don’t know. It’s hard to believe, and yet…there’s something ‘off’ about Asher. And that house. The mirror room, in particular.”
Ellen shook her head and clucked. “What a shame, so sad for everyone concerned. Didn’t you say Alastair Highbaugh was there, as well?”
“He apparently skedaddled when he heard the arguing but came back at some point and called 911.”
“You know, I taught him in high school, many years ago. I remember he was an odd young man, didn’t have many friends. His peers used to call him Master Allie, which I don’t think he appreciated.”
Harper smiled at the thought. Highbaugh always seemed so formal, the nickname fit him perfectly.
“He was also extraordinarily devoted to his mother,” Ellen said. “I was sorry to hear she had passed. Poor man must be bumping around in that big house, all alone.”
“Isn’t he married?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“He mentioned a wife.”
“Oh really? I didn’t think so, but I could be wrong.”
They pulled up to the kiosk at the entrance to 17-Mile Drive, and Harper shelled out the twelve-dollar fee. The bored young attendant looked up from his phone long enough to take her money and hand her a glossy brochure: “Your guide to 17-Mile Drive.”
“Oooh, this will be fun,” Ellen said. “It must be thirty years since I’ve been here!”
They drove by Spanish Beach Bay and stopped to gaze out at the Restless Sea, which the brochure described as the most turbulent section of coastline in Pebble Beach.
Here, huge submerged rocks caused waves to converge and crash into one another.
They passed by China Rock, the site of a small Chinese fishing village in the late 1800s, and the Fanshell Beach Overlook, which looked out over a cove that served as a harbor seal pupping site in the spring.
“Do you know where Delilah used to live?” Harper asked.
“Not exactly, but anything in this area costs a fortune.”