Susan Napier - Phantom Lover

Her question was quietly ignored. ‘You refused to tell me what your call was about, except that you had written Adam Blake some letters and that you wanted to talk to him about them.’

‘It was personal,’ she said stubbornly, feeling herself begin to blush as she remembered the rather garbled conversation she had engaged in before quickly hanging up, obviously thwarting the trace on the call that the stonewalling she had received had been designed to permit.

She had hoped to be able to avoid the risk of humiliation in person but, her phone call having failed so miserably, she had been left with no honourable choice but to cycle the fifteen kilometres from her home at Kowhai Hill to the address of the Blake homestead. If her car hadn’t been held hostage for the past week by the local mechanic who was waiting for a vital spare part she might have driven and thereby perhaps avoiding any necessity to skulk .

‘So you’ve already said. But I think that your very presence here establishes the fact that whatever it is is no longer a purely personal matter,’ it was pointed out with inescapable logic.

‘I don’t see why I should be treated like a criminal just because I went visiting uninvited,’ Honor said sullenly. They would probably laugh themselves sick when she told them. Either that or charge her with wasting valuable police time.

‘Extortion is a crime,’ the constable intoned sternly.

‘Extortion!’ Honor’s beautifully distinctive voice creaked like an old rusty gate, her green eyes widening in horror.

‘Extortion,’ confirmed the DI heavily. ‘Or blackmail, if you want to put it in its more common emotive term.’

Blackmail?

Oh, hell !

Suddenly what had been merely an embarrassing misunderstanding took on hideously serious complications.

Honor’s truculent resistance crumbled. She squeezed her eyes tight shut to combat the sinking realisation that she really wasn’t going to escape without giving a very thorough account of her actions to the police.

And all because of that damned Shakespearean sonnet she had mooned over this morning!

DARLING,

Is it thy will thy image should keep open

My heavy eyelids to the weary night?

Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,

While shadows, like to thee, do mock my sight?

The idea that her ordinary self could engender such wild longings in a man that he couldn’t sleep at night was so bizarre that Honor’s green eyes glowed with amused delight.

She picked up the cup of tea that she had just brewed for herself when she had heard the postman’s whistle, and carried her precious letter over to the comfortable chair behind the untidy desk that served to designate part of the lounge of her small cottage as an office. She settled down in her familiar sprawl, a jean-clad leg slung over one padded chair arm, and scanned the rest of the Shakespearean sonnet, down to the last, jealous couplet:

For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,

From me far off, with others all-too-near.

She couldn’t help smiling. Others? There were certainly no ‘others’ in the sense that the sonnet suggested. The small community of Kowhai Hill, tucked in below the Waitakare Ranges just north-west of Auckland, wasn’t exactly bulging with eligible males, and those she did come into contact with generally knew her too well to suffer any sleeplessness on her account. For one thing she was distressingly plain. For another, her reputation was as spotless as her name.

‘Good old Honor’ was a mate, someone with whom a local lad could be seen having a drink at the pub without being accused of unfaithfulness by his girlfriend or wife, a woman whose social life consisted largely of group outings or happily ‘making up the numbers’ at dinner parties where she could be relied upon to fit in, regardless of the age or diversity of the company.

Except to Adam. To Adam she was someone quite different: a woman enticing in her mystery, challenging in her intellect, desirable in her elusiveness.

Honor’s smile had disappeared by the time she reached the bottom of the page, its place taken by a vivid blush. Adam’s prose might not have the unique beauty of Shakespeare’s poetry, but it was none the less powerful stuff, a passionate outburst of feeling that was lyrical in its erotic intensity.

Although she had never met him in person, in eight months of correspondence Honor had formed a mental picture of a warm, witty and literate man whose love of writing cloaked a personal shyness that made him quite content to pursue their acquaintance entirely through correspondence.

Their letters had been a lively exchange of ideas about books, places, philosophies and world events rather than mundane personal details. Although she had learned that he was thirty-five, owned his own development company and lived on Auckland’s North Shore, that was about the extent of her knowledge of his physical existence outside his letters.

But with the last six letters, her cosy conclusions about him had been exploded. Not only had they arrived weekly instead of at the usual monthly intervals, they were so joltingly different in emotional tenor that Honor would have thought they were penned by someone else if she hadn’t recognised Adam’s distinctive handwriting.

At first Honor had not known how to reply. What did you say to a man who suddenly told you that you were the only thing that gave his life hope and meaning and that your letters were his lifeline? When he begged you to believe that he had fallen wildly in love for the first time in his life? That although he had never had you, except in his illicit imagination, he missed you savagely in his heart, his arms, his bed...?

She had been amused. And enchanted. Apprehensive and intrigued. And...yes, in spite of herself, seduced ...

So, after the second letter, she had gathered her own courage and replied according to the dictates of her wayward heart rather than her sceptical head. Amazingly the words had flowed out of her pen as if they had been in there all along, awaiting the perfect moment to escape the repression of her earnest common sense. No one ever fell in love through the post, for goodness’ sake! She didn’t even know what he looked like!

‘All my love, Adam’.

She sighed as she reached the end of the second, sizzling page. Unlike his other letters, which often ran to nine or ten pages, these passionate outpourings were invariably as short as they were hot and sweet.

She began to fold the delicate, onion-skin sheets along the sharp crease-lines only to discover that there was a third sheet, stuck to the second by some of the ink which had run along the edges.

Carefully she peeled it free and froze as a name leapt out at her from the few hastily scrawled lines.

I know we’re not supposed to meet but if I don’t get to see your beautiful face soon, my darling, courageous Helen...touch the soft spun gold of your hair...make love to your lush mouth and delicate body the way I’ve dreamed of these last months I’ll go mad! Please come to me... Don’t put me through the agony of having to wait any longer. I need you...

Helen?

Helen !

Honor bolted upright in her chair.

Beautiful face?

Spun gold hair !

She swivelled her head to stare at her reflection in the blank grey computer screen which sat on her desk. By no stretch of the imagination could the unruly brown curls that tumbled around her shoulders be described as spun gold. Or the oval face sprinkled with freckles and rendered stern by the thick straight brows be considered beautiful. Her nose, rather pink from the spring cold that she was just shaking off, was the only thing about her that was glowing. And no one in his or her right mind would call her sturdy figure ‘delicate’...