Susan Napier - Phantom Lover

Her confusion turned to dawning horror.

Frantically she tugged open the stubborn bottom drawer of her desk and sorted through the sheaf of letters, carefully filed by date. Most of the envelopes were typed, addressed to Miss H. Sheldon at Rural Delivery, Kowhai Hill.

Her hands shaking, Honor opened some at random, scanning the opening lines.

The later, passionate letters were headed ‘Darling’, the rest were teasing salutes to ‘M’Lady’, a reference to the whimsical valentine card addressed to ‘My Lady of the Moonlight’ that had arrived by special delivery the day after the St Valentine’s Ball in nearby Evansdale, which Honor had helped organise for a children’s charity. She had been one of the hostesses and had introduced and been introduced to so many new people that night that all their names and faces had intermingled in her hazy recollection. She couldn’t remember an Adam at all but there was no doubt from the handwritten rhyme inside his card, referring to roses and moonlight and ladies in distress, that he had known exactly who she was.

After all she had been pretty distressed that night, desperately fighting off the summer flu that she had later succumbed to, wandering the small memorial gardens in the moonlight while the dancing went on inside the adjacent community hall, trying to rid herself of a murderous headache that had refused to respond to the pills she had swallowed.

She had finally dozed off on a cramped park bench, waking an hour or so later to find herself tucked under a light rug in the back seat of her car, a sheaf of deep red roses lying on the seat beside her—obviously illegally picked in the gardens. Since there had been any number of hefty farming friends at the ball who could have performed the kindly deed she hadn’t thought twice about it until she had received the stranger’s valentine the next day. Then she had been curious, and yielded to the temptation of the implicit and very untraditional invitation of a post-office box number on the flap of the envelope.

She pulled out more letters until she had gone through them all and then began stuffing them haphazardly back into their envelopes, trying to control her rising panic at the awful realisation:

Not once in all their correspondence had he actually addressed her as ‘Honor’! And her own trademark signature—a large, dramatic H with the other letters of her name an illiterate scrawl that she had fondly imagined was dashingly sophisticated—that too could have easily been misread.

‘Honor?’

Her head snapped up. A yawning figure appeared in the doorway, her delicate, willowy figure clothed in the merest excuse for a nightgown, her long blonde hair spilling in disarray across her slender shoulders.

Honor’s heart sank into her practical shoes at the sight of her guest. She could hear fate laughing like a drain in her ear.

‘You’re up early, Helen. It’s only eleven o’clock.’

Her sarcasm went completely over her beautiful sister’s head. ‘Is it? I’d better get a move on, then. My flight leaves at three and Trina is taking me to lunch at the Regent before she zips me out to the airport.’

Her sister got lunches with her New Zealand agent at the best hotel in town and a lift to the airport in a limo, Honor ate cheese sandwiches in her kitchen and drove an ageing Volkswagen. And God forbid that she offer to farewell her sister at the airport. Helen hated to feel ‘emotionally pressured’, dismissing Honor’s ready sensitivity as ‘mawkishness’. That about summed up the differences in their lifestyles—and their personalities, Honor thought ruefully.

Honor had spent her teenage years watching with a mixture of awe and pity as her older sister clawed her way up through the fiercely competitive ranks of struggling models to achieve world-class status. She sincerely admired Helen for enduring the stresses and brutal rigours of maintaining herself at a constant peak of physical perfection from the age of sixteen, when she had won her first beauty competition, to her current graceful approach to thirty. But envy had no part in that admiration. Having seen the knife-edge of uncertainty on which Helen’s ego was constantly balanced, Honor had pitied her with the complacency of someone who knew how much of an illusion effortless beauty was, how false the glamour of her world really was.

She looked down at the letter clenched in her hand. No, she hadn’t envied her sister at all.

Until now.

‘Helen...’ Her voice trailed off. Did she really want to know? She gritted her teeth. She had no choice. He was talking about meeting her, for goodness’ sake!

‘What?’ Helen yawned again, stretching the tall, lithe body, sculpted taut by diligent daily aerobics and rigid dieting. Helen might eat at the best hotels, but she only ever tasted their salads!

‘Remember last time you stayed with me—you know when we had the Valentine’s Day Ball?’ Honor had been so busy helping to organise what was touted as being the rural social event of the year that she had forgotten to arrange a partner for herself and by then all her male ‘mates’ were spoken for. When Helen had arrived for an unexpected few days’ visit it had seemed a great idea for her sister to use the extra ticket. Who better to help create the necessary glitter for the event than a top international model?

‘Mmm.’ Helen sounded faintly wary, probably worried that Honor was going to request another charity appearance.

‘Do you remember meeting anyone called Adam?’ Honor held her breath, although she knew it was a forlorn hope. As soon as she had seen that wretched ‘Helen’ she had known ...

‘Adam?’ Her sister’s vivid green eyes narrowed in thought, accentuating their perfect almond shape.

‘Adam Blake.’

‘Adam...Adam. No, I don’t think so.’ Helen shrugged cheerfully. ‘You know what I’m like with names, darling.’

Honor did know. Unless people had the potential to be useful to her career Helen tended to operate on the principle out of sight, out of mind.

‘Are you sure? Do moonlight and roses and ladies in distress ring any bells?’ she persisted doggedly.

To her shock her sophisticated sister pinkened. Honor had never seen her blush before and now she knew why. That creamy pale, unmade-up skin flushed unevenly, in blotchy patches.

‘Helen?’ Her voice was sharper than she had intended. ‘You do know who I’m talking about, don’t you?’

‘Not really. God, I’m dying for a coffee.’

‘What does “not really” mean?’ Honor scrambled up to follow her sister out into the tiny kitchen, watching with a jaundiced eye as Helen began puttering about on the bench-top. The only time her sister came even close to looking ungraceful was when she pretended to be domestic.

‘It means that maybe I do and maybe I don’t. I never asked who he was, although come to think of it he might have said that his name was Adam...’

‘ Who said?’

‘Just someone who helped me out that night. I got into an awkward situation and he happened along at the right time, that’s all.’

That’s all ? Honor wasn’t fooled by her sister’s casualness.

It took another half-hour and two cups of bitter black coffee to extract the story from her sister, and it was every bit as painful as Honor had known it would be.

Some time just after midnight, Helen had got into an undignified tussle with an overheated and over-inebriated admirer whom her customary haughtiness had failed to freeze off. When she had ducked out of the hall to escape his attentions he had followed, leaping amorously upon her in the rose-garden, tearing the bodice of her dress just in time for some amateur celebrity-hunter with a camera to get a couple of supremely compromising shots.