Charon's Crossing (A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Novel) (51 page)

At least, it had.

Strange, how her tastes had changed.

Sitting in the living room of Beverly's apartment on a late spring afternoon, she found herself admiring what she'd once thought of as clutter. Not very long ago, she'd have found the antique silk shawl flung across the baby grand in the corner pretentious, the Duncan Phyfe table crowded with tiny porcelain dogs unattractive, the Empire sofa facing the pair of Mies van der Rohe chairs just plain out of place.

She didn't, not anymore. Instead, she took pleasure in the richly furnished rooms, even in the turrets and the gargoyles of the building itself. She saw now that these things had their own beauty and were soothing not just to the eye but to the soul.

Kathryn sighed, put down the copy of
Vanity Fair
she'd been pretending to read, and walked out onto the little balcony that overlooked the park. It was probably all those weeks of living in the ruined splendor that was Charon's Crossing that had changed her attitude towards what she'd once thought of as out-of-date clutter.

Not that she thought about Charon's Crossing very much anymore.

She had, at first. For weeks after the explosion and fire that had reduced the mansion to rubble, she really hadn't been able to think about much of anything else. It was as if the explosion, and the subsequent fire, had burned themselves into her brain.

She saw the flames shooting into the black sky over and over again, heard herself screaming Matthew's name.

The nights had been the worst. Asleep, she'd had no control over the images; they'd swooped down on her like visions out of Hell. It was always the same. She saw the house, and her car driving away from it. She saw Matthew, going to the cellar.

Don't
she'd say in the dream,
oh God, please, please, don't!

Hush, sweetheart,
he'd whisper, and then Charon's Crossing would explode in terrible, agonizing slow motion and she'd shoot upright in bed, screaming and screaming, until Beverly came rushing in from her bedroom across the hall, switched on the lights and took her in her arms.

"It's all right, darling," her mother would croon, rocking her as if she were a child instead of a grown woman. "Don't think about it anymore."

She hadn't, after a while. Weeks of therapy had done the job. She knew now that what she'd remembered about Charon's Crossing wasn't true. The house had been real, and the fire.

But not Matthew. He had never existed. He had been a creation of her own imagination.

"Stress," Dr. Whalen had told her, "stress, Kathryn. It can do amazing things to the human psyche."

"You don't understand," Kathryn had insisted, at the beginning. "Matthew was real!"

"His journal was real," the psychiatrist had said gently. "I've no doubt you found it, read it, and absorbed it. Your mind did the rest."

Gradually, she had come to realize that the doctor, and Beverly, were right. There were no such things as ghosts. How could she have ever thought there were? She'd regained her appetite. She'd begun to sleep through the night even though she knew she sometimes still dreamed without ever remembering the dreams. Why else would she so often awaken with tears in her eyes and a lump in her throat?

Kathryn looked down at her hands, wrapped around the balcony railing. The knuckles were white and sharp. She forced herself to take a deep breath and deliberately loosened her grip on the railing.

She was having a bad time today. She kept thinking about Charon's Crossing. About Matthew. No, no, that wasn't right. How could you think about a man you'd never known? Dr. Whalen would say she was obsessing on a dream image she'd created.

Of course she was. But it was an image so exciting and wonderful that no real man would ever be able to take its place...

Kathryn shut her eyes tight. "Stop it," she whispered.

What was the matter with her today?

Just last week, Dr. Whalen had given her a clean bill of health. Sessions on the couch, three times a week, coupled with medication, had done the job.

"It's graduation day," the doctor had said, and smiled. "We're going to reduce our sessions together to once a week and lower your dosage of medication. You're going to be fine," she'd said, patting Kathryn's hand, "absolutely as good as new."

And I am, Kathryn thought firmly, as good as new and maybe better.

For the first time in years, she and Beverly had a positive relationship. Beverly had been her rock since the night of the explosion, the only one who'd been able to get through to her as the pillar of fire touched the sky.

Kathryn had no recollection of what had happened. She knew only that she'd raced back towards the flames through the night, that sirens had wailed, that people had surrounded her and held her down as she clawed and fought to go to Matthew.

"He's burning," she'd screamed, "Matthew, Matthew, my love..."

She remembered a sea of faces—Amos and Hiram and endless others, and then one face, Dr. Simpson's, and the sharp, cold prick of a needle.

"No," she'd said, "no, please..."

Beverly's arms had closed around her.

"It's all right, Kathryn," she'd said, and Kathryn had tried to tell her that it wasn't, that Matthew was trapped somewhere inside that hellish inferno...

And then she'd tumbled into a bottomless well.

The days had passed in a blur of light and dark. She knew now that she'd been heavily sedated. Still, she remembered asking Beverly the same question each time she'd surfaced.

"Is he dead?" she'd whisper, and her mother would kiss her forehead and tell her that everything was going to be fine.

Eventually, she'd stopped asking. The periods of light had increased until they'd outweighed the dark. Beverly had taken her back to New York via charter flight.

There'd been no real question of Kathryn going back to her own apartment. She'd been too ill. Once she'd started to get better, she'd known she could never walk into those dreary rooms where she'd first dreamed of Matthew. And it took no great genius to figure out that one gurgle from the ancient hot water pipes in the Greenwich Village walk-up would have sent her screaming into the street.

It was the hot water heater that had caused the explosion that had destroyed Charon's Crossing. Not the heater, exactly; the propane tank. The safety valve had failed, somehow; the gas had ignited...

"A terrible, terrible accident," she'd heard Beverly whisper over the phone to a friend.

But it hadn't been an accident! Kathryn knew what had happened, that Matthew had caused the explosion, that he'd planned it and found a way to get her out of the house, that he'd sacrificed his own existence for hers.

What had become of him? Was he gone forever? Was he trapped in that awful darkness he'd described? Was he wandering some worse hell, with Waring breathing his foul stink upon him?

"Kathryn?"

Matthew. Oh Matthew, why did you do it? I loved you. I'll always love you. I would have stayed with you forever...

"Kathryn? Darling, what are you doing out here all by yourself?"

Kathryn swung around. Her mother was standing in the doorway. She was smiling but it was a tense, worried smile.

"It's chilly out here, Kathryn. You ought to be wearing a shawl."

Kathryn swallowed hard.

"Hi," she said brightly. "Did you just get in?"

Beverly nodded. "My meeting ran a bit long. Darling, are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"You don't look fine." She frowned, came closer, and put her hand to Kathryn's forehead.

Kathryn jerked back. "Really, I'm fine."

"I just wanted to see if you have a fever. Your eyes are so bright..."

"So," Kathryn said briskly, "how did your meeting go?"

Beverly smiled. "The way I'd expected. They want me to try working in platinum. I said I'd give it a try."

Kathryn laughed. "No sacrifice too great, huh?"

"Of course, I told them we'd need a new contract, one for lots more money." She leaned her arms on the balcony railing and gazed out over the park. "I wish you'd let me send you on a little vacation, Kathryn. It would do you good."

Kathryn sighed. "We've been all through this, Mother. What I need is to get back to work, find a place of my own... get my life started. Which reminds me, I've got a terrific interview lined up for tomorrow morning, did I tell you?"

Beverly turned and leaned back against the railing. A breeze ruffled her hair, still as dark and lustrous as Kathryn's.

"You're quite sure you don't want to go back to your old job, darling? Jason keeps pleading for you to return."

"I know. It's kind of him, considering how I treated him, but it wouldn't work out. He's a dear, sweet man and I hope we'll always be friends..."

"But you don't love him."

"No. Not the way I loved... not the way a woman should love a man."

Something in her daughter's voice alerted Beverly. She reached out and took her hand.

"Are you having a bad day?" she asked gently.

Kathryn hesitated. "Yes," she said. "I keep thinking about... about..."

"Did you call the doctor?"

"Not yet."

"Well, I think you should. Perhaps you need to go on some other kind of medication."

Kathryn shook her head. "I'm sick of taking pills, Mother. I feel like a walking pharmacy as it is."

"When's your next appointment with Dr. Whalen?"

"Monday."

"Don't wait that long, please. Call her, tell her you need to see her. Talking with her might make you feel better."

"I'll call her, tomorrow, if I don't stop... if I don't feel better."

"Promise?"

Kathryn smiled and squeezed her mother's hand. "Promise."

"That's my girl."

The women were silent for a couple of minutes and then Kathryn cleared her throat.

"I know I'm not supposed to talk about-—about him."

"There was no 'him,' " Beverly said sharply. "You know that, Kathryn."

"Oh, sure. I know that. It's just a figure of speech, Mother." Kathryn licked her lips. "It's just that—that... The thing is, what happened all seemed so—so real."

"Of course it did." Beverly smiled. "What's the point in having a hallucinatory experience if you don't give it everything you've got?"

Kathryn laughed. She felt her tension easing away.

"Your father would say the same thing. I remember one time, he went off to an ashram in the Himalayas. He was determined to experience what some much-lauded swami was calling a 'mystery journey of inner discovery.' " Beverly chuckled. "Trevor came back and said no journey of discovery was worth giving up red meat, alcohol and sex, especially if you had to chant RamiDamiDoo or something like that while you worked yourself into a trance."

"You didn't go with him?"

"I was four months pregnant with you, darling. The only mystery that interested me was what was going to happen in the labor room!"

"But Father left you anyway."

"Of course. That's just the way he was, Kathryn. He didn't mean to be selfish or unkind."

"And you took him back."

Beverly sighed. "I always did, until I finally decided I just couldn't live that way anymore. No real home, no money in the bank, no future..."

Kathryn's mouth thinned. "What a relief it must have been, to have it over with."

"Not really," her mother said softly. "I still loved him. I suppose I never quite stopped loving him."

"It's too bad he didn't feel the same way."

Beverly's brows arched. "But he did, Kathryn. He loved the both of us until the day he died."

"Yeah. He loved me so much that he forgot I existed."

"He never forgot you."

"Come on, Mother. What else do you call it when a man never sends his daughter a letter or even a birthday card?"

"Actually..." Beverly cleared her throat. "Actually, he did."

"All right, maybe I'm overstating it. He sent a couple of postcards, I remember, but—"

"He sent you many letters. And gifts."

Kathryn's eyes grew wide. "What?"

"I kept them from you," her mother said in a hushed voice. "I still have them all, if you want to see them."

For a moment, Kathryn was too stunned to speak. "But—but why would you do such a thing?" she finally asked.

"I told myself it was because I wanted to keep him from being a bad influence on you." Beverly gave a deep sigh. "I've thought about it a lot lately, ever since you were ill and I—I almost lost you, and I've decided that the truth was far less noble. I think I hid Trevor's letters to punish him for having left us."

"But you said it was your decision, that you wouldn't take him back when he wanted to come back—"

"I know. But that's how I thought of it, you see, that he'd left us by choosing to search for something that was missing inside him, to live a life he knew I despised." She looked at Kathryn and smiled faintly. "I know it's crazy, but that's how I loved your father, so deeply that for a long time, my emotions ruled me instead of my head. Does that make any sense?"