Tami Hoag - Magic

“Oh, he favored Rowena, poor homely boy-pug nose, receding chin, limp brown hair. That pretty well describes the dog too.”

“No, Addie. The ghost that was at your window. What did it look like?” Bryan asked, earning himself another glare from Rachel.

“Oooooh…” Addie shuddered. “Pasty white with black eye sockets, and it made the most horrible strangled wretching sound.”

“You say this ghost was trying to break in?” Bryan asked.

“The window is broken,” Rachel said, slightly unnerved but unwilling to admit it. She sat down on the bed beside her mother and took advantage of Addie’s confused state, wrapping an arm around her frail shoulders. She wanted the physical contact, to comfort and be comforted, whether Addie was coherent or not.

“The glass was broken from the inside,” Bryan said, examining the gaping hole in the window. Shards littered the footwide ledge outside. Carefully, he raised the window and stepped out with one foot. He looked up at the gable peak and around the ledge itself, which was ornamented by a rusting wrought iron railing that had come loose on one end. There was no evidence of Addie’s “ghoul,” just a mournful howling as the wind swept around the various turrets and gables of the old house. In the distance the ocean roared.

“I threw a rock at the ugly thing,” Addie said truculently. Her eyes narrowed with anger and suspicion. “Coming in to steal my bird cages.”

Rachel closed her eyes and sighed. She was sure there hadn’t been anything at the window except a figment of Addie’s imagination. She had read that paranoia was one of the more common effects of Alzheimer’s. The person wasn’t able to remember where she’d put something and wasn’t able to reason that no one else would want it, so she was sure people were stealing from her. Seeing and hearing things that weren’t there were also common nighttime occurrences for someone with Addie’s affliction. Knowing that, it seemed painfully obvious to Rachel what had happened.

“Well, he’s gone now,” Bryan said, climbing back inside. He had pulled a screw from the loose base of the railing and stood rubbing the clinging bits of rotted wood from the threads, a thoughtful expression on his face. “I’ll take care of this window first thing in the morning. For tonight-”

“You can sleep in my room tonight, Mother,” Rachel offered, not only eager to make her mother comfortable, but eager to score some brownie points with her as well.

Addie looked around the room with a slightly frantic widening of her eyes. This was her room. She knew where everything was-most of the time. She usually remembered how to get from this room to any other part of the house. But if she spent the night in Rachel’s bed, she would be lost, and everyone would see it.

“This is my room,” she said, her chin lifting. “I shall sleep in it if I so choose.”

“Mother,” Rachel said wearily, “please don’t be stubborn.”

“Never mind.” Bryan smiled suddenly, bending to take off his shoe. Using the heel for a hammer, he drove the tip of the rusty screw into the thick meeting rail of the window. Then he took a large, gloomy oil painting of a foundering ship off the wall and hung it so that it covered the entire lower portion of the window, blocking out the damp cool air that had flowed in through the broken glass.

“Good as new and more interesting to look at,” he said as he dug a crumpled scrap of paper out of his trouser pocket and scribbled something down.

Relieved, Addie’s shoulders relaxed as she let out a breath. She slipped out of Rachel’s loose embrace and went forward to pat Bryan’s cheek. “Good boy,” she said as if he were a dutiful spaniel.

“I know how fond you are of your room, Addie,” he said. He took her hand in his, but his gaze went meaningfully to Rachel. “We don’t want to uproot you if we don’t have to.”

“Hennessy, you’re a treasure,” Addie said.

Rachel sat on the bed, running a finger absently across her lower lip, reflecting on Bryan’s actions-both there and in the study below. She could still feel his arms around her, could still taste him. He kissed wonderfully. Whether or not she should have allowed him to kiss her, she felt stronger and less alone now than she had before.

Her mother looked relaxed and was happily fussing with the painting at the window, straightening it to her satisfaction, the incident of the ghost apparently forgotten already. Rachel’s thoughtful gaze slowly swept around the room with its garish red moiré silk wallpaper. A place for everything and everything in its place. Everything in the room was arranged just so. Not all the items seemed to belong there-like the weird assortment of smooth stones on the white linen dresser runner-but Addie apparently found comfort in having them there, just as she found comfort in being in the room itself.

“Good night, Addie,” Bryan said. His gaze was on Rachel as he crossed to the bed and took her by the hand. He smiled gently. “Come along, Rachel. We don’t want you to ruin your voice staying up late; what would Mrs. Ackerman say?”

She’d say you were a treasure, Hennessy, Rachel thought, a small ember of warmth glowing inside her, but she kept the words to herself as Bryan escorted her out of the room and down the hall.

“I’ll have a look around outside, and I’ll keep an eye on her room,” Bryan said. “But I doubt anything more will happen tonight.”

“I doubt anything happened at all,” Rachel muttered. “I wish you wouldn’t persist in encouraging these fantasies of hers.”

“What makes you think this was a fantasy?”

Rachel gave him a look. “An ill woman looks out her second-story window and sees a ghost she knows is trying to break in to steal her bird cages. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this out.”

“Well,” Bryan conceded grudgingly. “I’ll admit the bird cage thing is a little farfetched.”

They stopped outside the door of Rachel’s room, and Bryan leaned a shoulder against the frame. Rachel looked up at him pleadingly. “Don’t you see it, Bryan? She imagined there was something there, panicked, and threw a rock through the window.”

Bryan frowned, the corners of his handsome mouth cutting into the lean planes of his cheeks. He looked disappointed. “You didn’t see it, therefore it doesn’t exist? There are lots of things in this world that can’t quite be explained, Rachel. The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, but are felt in the heart.’ Helen Keller wrote that. She was blind and deaf. Just because she couldn’t see or hear the rest of the world, do you think she gave up thinking it existed?” he asked quietly.

Rachel took a breath, preparing to argue, but it occurred to her suddenly that he had changed the subject, had subtly altered the slant of the conversation so that ghosts were only a small part of it. The man was much more clever than that innocent smile of his let on.

Holding her gaze with his, he reached up into the darkness of the hall, and when he brought his hand back down, he held a tiny white flower between his thumb and forefinger. He tickled her nose with it and gave her a sweet, lopsided smile.

“Explain that, Miss Lindquist.”

Rachel laughed and batted his hand away. “You had that up your sleeve, you charlatan.”

“You’ll never know for sure, unless you get me to take my shirt off,” he said, teasing. “And I’m not that kind of boy,” he added, squaring his big shoulders and lifting his nose in the air.

“Don’t let Mother hear you say that,” Rachel said, eyes twinkling. “She’ll think you need starch in your shorts.”

“Hardly,” Bryan muttered dryly, gritting his teeth on the surge of desire that came automatically from just looking at her. He couldn’t seem to keep his gaze from wandering to the low V of her neckline. With every subtle movement she made, the silk of the old dress slid sensuously over her creamy flesh. Lord, how he envied that dress! Just the thought of touching her made his lungs hurt from lack of oxygen.