“Hello, darling,” her father said in his deep and always slightly distracted voice. “How’s my baby?”
Elisabeth smiled and scooped chopped tomatoes into the salad bowl. “I’m fine, Daddy. Where are you?”
He chuckled ruefully. “You know what they say—if it’s Wednesday, this must be Cleveland. I’m on another business trip.”
That was certainly nothing new. Marcus Claridge had been on the road ever since he had started his consulting business when Elisabeth was little. “How are Traci and the baby?” she asked. Just eighteen months before Marcus had married a woman three years younger than Elisabeth, and the couple had an infant son.
“They’re terrific,” Marcus answered awkwardly, then cleared his throat. “Listen, I know you’re having a rough time right now, sweetheart, and Traci and I were thinking that…well…maybe you’d like to come to Lake Tahoe and spend the summer with us. I don’t like to think of you burrowed down in that spooky old house….”
Elisabeth laughed, and the sound was tinged with hysteria. She didn’t dislike Traci, who invariably dotted the i at the end of her name with a little heart, but she didn’t want to spend so much as an hour trying to make small talk with the woman, either. “Daddy, this house isn’t spooky. I love the place, you know that. Who told you I was here, anyway?”
Her father sighed. “Ian. He’s very worried about you, darling. We all are. You don’t have a job. You don’t know a soul in that backwoods town. What do you intend to do with yourself?”
She smiled. Trust Ian to make it sound as if she were hiding out in a cave and licking her wounds. “I’ve been substitute teaching for the past year, Daddy, and I do have a job. I’ll be in charge of the third grade at Pine River Elementary starting in early September. In the meantime, I plan to put in a garden, do some reading and sewing—”
“What you need is another man.”
Elisabeth rolled her eyes. “Even better, I could just step in front of a speeding truck and break every bone in my body,” she replied. “That would be quicker and not as messy.”
“Very funny,” Marcus said, but there was a grudging note of amused respect in his tone. “All right, baby, I’ll leave you alone. Just promise me that you’ll take care of yourself and that you’ll call and leave word with Traci if you need anything.”
“I promise,” Elisabeth said.
“Good.”
“I love you, Daddy—”
The line went dead before Elisabeth had completed the sentence. “Say hello to Traci and the baby for me,” she finished aloud as she replaced the receiver.
After supper, Elisabeth washed her dishes. By then, the power was flickering on and off, and the wind was howling around the corners of the house. She decided to go to bed early so she could get a good start on the cleaning come morning.
Since she’d showered before going to town, Elisabeth simply exchanged her skirt and blouse for an oversize red football jersey, washed her face, scrubbed her teeth and went to bed. Her hand curved around the delicate pendant on Aunt Verity’s necklace as she settled back against her pillows.
Lightning filled the room with an eerie light, but Elisabeth felt safe in the big four-poster. How many nights had she and Rue come squealing and giggling to this bed, squeezing in on either side of Aunt Verity to beg her for a story that would distract them from the thunder?
She snuggled down between crisp, clean sheets, closed her eyes and sighed. She’d been right to come back here; this was home, the place where she belonged.
The scream brought her eyes flying open again.
“Papa!”
Elisabeth bolted out of bed and ran into the hallway. Another shriek sounded, followed by choked sobs.
It wasn’t the noise that paralyzed Elisabeth, however; it was the thin line of golden light glowing underneath the door across the hall. That door that opened onto empty space.
She leaned against the jamb, one trembling hand resting on the necklace, as though to conjure Aunt Verity for a rescuer. “Papa, Papa, where are you?” the child cried desperately from the other side.
Elisabeth pried herself away from the woodwork and took one step across the hallway, then another. She found the knob, and the sound of her own heartbeat thrumming in her ears all but drowned out the screams of the little girl as she turned it.
Even when the door actually opened, Elisabeth expected to be hit with a rush of rainy April wind. The soft warmth that greeted her instead came as a much keener shock.
“My God,” she whispered as her eyes adjusted to a candlelit room where there should have been nothing but open air.
She saw the child, curled up at the very top of a narrow bed. Then she saw what must be a dollhouse, another door and a big, old-fashioned wardrobe. As she stood there on the threshold of a world that couldn’t possibly exist, the little girl moved, her form illuminated by the light that glowed from an elaborate china lamp on the bedside table.
“You’re not Papa,” the child said with a cautious sniffle, edging farther back against the intricately carved headboard.
Elisabeth swallowed. “N-no,” she allowed, extending one toe to test the floor. Even now, with this image in front of her, complete in every detail, her five senses were telling her that if she stepped into the room, she would plummet onto the sun-porch roof and break numerous bones.
The little girl dragged the flannel sleeve of her nightgown across her face and sniffled again. “Papa’s probably in the barn. The animals get scared when there’s a storm.”
Elisabeth hugged herself, squeezed her eyes tightly shut and stepped over the threshold, fully prepared for a plunge. Instead, she felt a smooth wooden floor beneath her feet. It seemed to her that “Papa” might have been more concerned about a frightened daughter than frightened animals, but then, since she had to be dreaming the entire episode, that point was purely academic.
“You’re the lady, aren’t you?” the child asked, drawing her knees up under the covers and wrapping small arms around them. “The one who rattled the doorknob and called out.”
This isn’t happening, Elisabeth thought, running damp palms down her thighs. I’m having an out-of-body experience or something. “Y-yes,” she stammered after a long pause. “I guess that was me.”
“I’m Trista,” the girl announced. Her hair was a dark, rich color, her eyes a stormy gray. She settled comfortably against her pillows, folding her arms.
Trista. The doctor’s daughter, the child who died horribly in a raging house fire some seventy years before Elisabeth was even born. “Oh, my God,” she whispered again.
“You keep saying that,” Trista remarked, sounding a little critical. “It’s not truly proper to take the Lord’s name in vain, you know.”
Elisabeth swallowed hard. “I k-know. I’m sorry.”
“It would be perfectly all right to give me yours, however.”
“What?”
“Your name, goose,” Trista said good-naturedly.
“Elisabeth. Elisabeth McCartney—no relation to the Beatle.” As she spoke, Elisabeth was taking in the frilly chintz curtains at the window, the tiny shingles on the roof of the dollhouse.
Trista wrinkled her nose. “Why would you be related to a bug?”
Elisabeth would have laughed if she hadn’t been so busy questioning her sanity.