Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Olivia’s legs turned wobbly, and she had to sit down again.
Closing her eyes, she lowered her head to her arms as they rested on the table.
It was happening—she was losing her mind.
What else could this be? Should she call a doctor?
Or maybe drive up to the nearest mental institution and check herself in, the way that girl in the book had?
Or what if there was another explanation?
What if something strange really was happening to her?
It had started with her nightmare where she witnessed the death of a man who was tossed off his own boat. Somehow, seeing his death had established a link between them. And now he had come to her home to haunt her.
Oh sure. Perfectly logical. Yet she couldn’t stop wild thoughts from circling in her mind. The only good thing was that the headache she’d experienced out on the walk seemed to have evaporated.
Her lips firmed. She couldn’t just sit here with her head on her arms. And she couldn’t leave her workshop unlocked. She had too many valuable pieces in there for her to leave them unprotected.
Finally, she stood up, straightened her shoulders, and turned toward the door.
With her teeth gritted, she forced herself to step outside and march down the walk, watching her step so that she didn’t trip again.
It was tempting to look around, but she kept her gaze down.
She hadn’t seen anything before. Why would she see anything now?
Still, she couldn’t banish the feeling of something closing in around her.
She’d had a keyless entry mechanism installed on the workshop door.
All she had to do was run her hand down the electronic pad until a little picture of a lock appeared.
When she saw it, she pressed the icon, and the device clicked.
As soon as the door was locked, she headed back to the house—to the sunroom.
She should be working, of course. She had the chest to finish and scores of orders to fill. And she wanted to sketch out the design for the tea cart. But she knew that anything she did would not be her best. How could she hold a pencil or her paintbrush steady when her hand was shaking?
No, work was out of the question. But she couldn’t simply sit in the sunroom—her mind circling round and round like a dog finding a comfortable spot to settle.
Glancing at the clock, she saw it was well after lunchtime, but the idea of trying to choke anything down made her stomach roil.
No, she had to find something else to do. But what? She had promised herself that she would organize all the stuff in the mudroom closet. Tackling it now would settle her.
Throwing open the closet door, she stood with her hands on her hips, looking at all the stuff she had tossed there to be sorted later. With a jerky motion, she pulled out a pair of boots and set them aside. They hadn’t felt comfortable in years. She might as well pitch them.
After retrieving a couple of large plastic garbage bags, she began sorting items—those she wanted to put back into the closet and those that would go to an organization that regularly sent out trucks for donations.
While she worked, she found a song running through her head.
That often happened when she was doing a mindless, repetitive job.
Now she realized she had fixed on “Hotel California,” by the Eagles.
Oh great, a song about a guy who goes into a supernatural hotel.
When he tries to leave, he finds out he’s trapped there.
With a sigh, she kept sorting items, knowing that the song was going to stick with her until she was done.
The closet project lasted several hours. On a tear, she brought another bag upstairs and started pulling out clothes she knew she would never wear.
Next, she did forty minutes of weights and the treadmill in her home gym.
Finally, she was hungry enough to eat something. Cooking wasn’t one of her talents, but there were plenty of upscale restaurants and delis in Frederick where she could stock the fridge with gourmet carryout.
She reached for a carton of chicken salad and another of sesame noodles. While she ate, she enjoyed a playlist she’d made for herself, everything from the beautiful duet from the Pearl Fishers to James Taylor and Taylor Swift.
By the time she’d eaten, she felt better.
Except that she still wasn’t sure that she could get any work done tomorrow.
But she did have several pieces that needed to go to a cute little shop in Saint Stephens, one of the tourist towns on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Although she often hired someone to take orders out of town, she decided to do this one by herself.
Maybe a change of scenery would do her good.
After dinner, she debated sitting in front of the TV for a while.
But probably she should go to bed if she was driving across the Bay Bridge in the morning.
That long, high structure always made her feel like she was going to plunge through a guardrail into the bay.
No, she’d better be rested and in good shape when she tackled it.
Upstairs, as she went through her nighttime ritual, she fought to dispel the notion that the man from the brick walk had somehow followed her into the house.
But she’d made him up, she told herself. He was over. Done. She was going to hang on to her sanity now.
Still, when she pulled her T-shirt over her head and unhooked her bra, she felt goose bumps pepper her arms and chest.
Glancing at the medicine cabinet, she briefly wondered if she should take an over-the-counter sleep aid, then decided that might make things worse.
She pressed the heels of her hands against her closed eyelids. Did people who were going crazy know it? Or was some evil force operating on her—offering her what she’d secretly wanted all her life?
Right. She hadn’t considered that angle. Maybe this wasn’t coming from a damaged mind. Maybe this was like what happened to people in horror movies. Only this wasn’t a movie, she quickly assured herself. This was real life.
Thinking that the observation hadn’t done her any good, she turned off the bedside lamp and slipped under the covers.
At first, she lay rigidly in bed, waiting.
When nothing happened, she relaxed fractionally.
Because she was exhausted from emotional stress and all the frantic work she’d done, sleep enveloped her, and she knew nothing else until she heard the clock strike a half hour downstairs.
Which half hour? She didn’t know because they all had the same one-tone bong. When she turned her head toward the window, all she saw was pitch blackness.
She stopped worrying about the time when the experience from her workshop repeated itself. In the same way the realization had crept over her before, she knew that she wasn’t alone.
Oh Lord. He was here again. The last time they met, his arms had been around her.
This time, although he didn’t touch her, she was sure he was standing in her darkened bedroom, looking down at her.
Well, why not? If he could come into the workshop, he could come into the house.
Whoever or whatever he was, no locks were going to stop him.
In her workshop, he had only been an unseen presence. A feeling that he was there. On the path, she’d felt his hard contours. In the privacy of her bedroom, there was the possibility of more.
She could sense the warmth of his body. She’d thought he might be a ghost. But weren’t ghosts supposed to be cold?
Too caught up in physical awareness, she was unable to puzzle that out.
Everything about him teased her senses, yet this midnight visitor could not be real.
In the darkened bedroom, she thought of all the imagined dangers that had plagued mankind from the dawn of time.
Ghosts, demons, vampires, evil spirits. None of them seemed to fit.
Would a ghost radiate warmth? Could a demon offer her the one thing in life she had always lacked and always craved? Maybe.
Did she believe in demons?
No, that was make-believe. Supernatural beings didn’t come to the bedrooms of living women. But what about the delusions of that girl in the book? Her made-up demons had been as real to her as real life.
The hamster wheel of awful possibilities swirling in her head was interrupted by a voice. Well, not exactly a voice
Please, don’t be afraid of me.
The words were not spoken aloud but in her mind, in a deep masculine tone.
She could be dreaming again, except that she knew she was awake.
To prove that to herself, she sat up and reached for the switch on the bedside lamp. Before she could press it, a hand jerked her fingers away, and a plea hung in the air.
“Don’t.” This time, she heard the word aloud.
Acknowledging him in this new way would be taking a step further into her personal psychosis, but she did it anyway.
“Why not?”
A tortured quality seeped into his words. “You will see nothing. Better to stay in the dark.”
“Why are you here?”
“I need you.”
The despair in his voice tore at her. Another symptom of her madness. Emotional involvement with a phantom.
And that madness was going to bring her carefully constructed life crashing down around her shoulders.
“If you’re crazy, so am I.”
The weary statement left her startled and shocked in a new way.
“What? Did you read my mind?”
Even as she asked the question, she knew it was true within the confines of this weird encounter.
But if she were conjuring up an imaginary companion, why not go all the way and concoct some kind of telepathic link with him? It would give her something nobody else had—to make up for all the years she’d felt so disconnected.
She had to suppress a hysterical laugh.
You’re not inventing anything. Once again, the words were not spoken aloud. She dragged in a breath and let it out. This whole situation was way beyond the bounds of reality. Yet a part of her still struggled to deal with the encounter rationally.
“Who are you?” she whispered into the darkness. “Are you a ghost?
For the first time, his voice wavered as he whispered, “I don’t know.”
She heard his pain; more than that, she sensed it. “Why are you really here?” she demanded.
“I was drawn to you.”
“From where?”
She felt him searching for the right words.
“A great, cold nothingness where I was totally alone. More alone than I had ever been before.” His voice hitched.
“In the darkness, I saw something that pulled me forward. At first, it was only a tiny beam of light. And I knew I had to get closer. As I did, I saw it was you with your long red hair and your wonderful green eyes, and I knew I must get closer to you—or lose myself.”
Her chest tightened. She had thought she was the needy one—that she had made him up to fulfill some deeply buried craving of her own. Yet he had turned the tables on her.
More proof that she had finally gone off the deep end? Or if she couldn’t connect with other people, she would work out some kind of relationship with a phantom?
She had been sitting rigidly, propped against the pillows, the position adding to her tension.
Lie down. You might as well be comfortable.
Would following his directions be an acknowledgement that she thought this encounter was real?
Okay, why not go with it, if it fulfilled an unacknowledged need of her own? She wasn’t hurting anybody but herself by inventing an imaginary lover for her bedroom.
A lover? Was that what she was doing because she had never had a real one who made her feel fulfilled the way women in love songs and romance novels felt?
She made a dismissive sound. Was she really that needy?
In the next moment, her muddled train of thought switched back to an earlier idea.
Okay. If she had brought this phantom to her room, why not enjoy the experience while it lasted?
Couldn’t crazy people get some pleasure from their illness before the men in the white coats came to drag them to the funny farm?
With a sigh, she plumped up the pillows and lay back against them. He was still there, only much closer.
My lord, he was lying beside her. Surrendering to the situation, she moved over so that her shoulders and hips touched his. The contact set up a sexual pull toward him, yet at the same time, it was also strangely comforting.
Going with the fantasy or the psychotic break or whatever it was, she allowed herself to enjoy the sense of closeness.
It was what she had always longed for, and he was giving it to her, even if it was only a mirage.
Closing her eyes, she breathed in and out, feeling the beat of her own heart, imagining what it might be like if this visitor were real.
A shiver went through her and with it, feelings she had repressed for so long.
Sexual awareness had never been a big factor in her life, and yet she felt herself responding to this invisible man as she never had before.
She felt her body heating, and cursed the unwanted sensation.
Why now? Why with this man who wasn’t even real?
For heartbeats, she let herself build the fantasy, imagining her soulmate lying next to her—the man she had secretly wished for all her life. In the next moment, she clenched her fists.
“Stop it,” she ordered herself. “This isn’t real. It can’t be real.”
It was like building a sandcastle and watching it wash away when the tide came in.
She felt anger rising inside her, anger at herself for succumbing to this game. And anger at him. She had made him up and then pretended he was offering her something that a figment of her imagination could never give her in real life.
She knew she had been bouncing from one state of mind to the next, from fear to acceptance to sexual need, not in any particular order. None of it was entirely rational—except the fear. Now, a new determination seized her. She would not let herself sink into this madness. She would fight it.
Bent on ending the self-delusion, she let the anger infuse her words as she said, “I am not your savior. I’m not your lover.”
He didn’t answer in words, but she heard him make a desperate choking sound, like a drowning man struggling to breathe underwater.
In that moment, the dream came back to her sharp and clear in all its horror. Had that been reality? Was that what had happened to him?