Rendezvous at Midnight (3 page)

“What do you mean, still?” she demanded, laughing a little.

“With all that stuff on your face. I know you need it for the cameras, but I like….” He paused, reddening.

She knew he was thinking of something more intimate than cleanser. “I won’t make you tell me—yet.”

They were both smiling when they entered the first stateroom at the end of the long hallway.

The luxury suites led off a smallish lobby, very gracefully set at the head of a curving staircase that went down to one of the first class lounges. Gilded balcony rails, slightly the worse for wear from a hard year’s activity, gleamed in the light from the overhead skylight and carefully placed accent lights.

Brant McManus and the soundman, Theo Constantine, were waiting for them. “We’re ready if you are,” Brant murmured. “Do you want to do the intro?”

“Sure.” She stepped forward as if she’d been expecting to walk straight into a set. Good thing she’d done her homework. If Brant had hoped to get her off balance, he’d be disappointed.

She positioned herself at the right distance from the camera and began.

“Welcome to one of the most haunted sites in the United States. It’s not a great house, it’s not a public building, it’s not even on land. Welcome to the
Gem of the Sea
, supposedly the most haunted ocean liner in the world.”

She moved a little toward the staterooms, but Brant shook his head, so she carried on speaking. “This is a
Ghosts At Home
special, a three-day investigation into the mysteries of this beautiful ship. I’m standing outside stateroom number one, where several sightings have reported a lovely woman in a swimsuit. For once, the sighting might have a personal connection—to me.” She paused, gazing into the camera like it was a friend she was confiding her deepest personal secrets to. “The ghost could well be my mother.”

She turned away and headed for the main stateroom. Brant cut the video just as she closed the door quietly behind her.

She leaned against the door and took a deep breath.

“Trouble, honey?” Ayesha’s soft, husky tones curled around her like a touch from a favorite aunt.

Lisa sighed and opened her eyes. “Not really. You know the story, don’t you?”

“Sure I do.” Ayesha got off the stepladder and tilted her head to one side, studying her handiwork. “That should do. Remotes here, here, and here.” She indicated, with a wave of her hand, the other night vision cameras she’d adjusted. As the second resident medium for
Ghosts At Home
, she liked to position the cameras herself, facing the places where she sensed the most activity. Ayesha and Michael worked out the schedule between them beforehand. Most of the work was done before the vigils began.

“Beautiful room.” Lisa stepped away from the door as the others came in.

“Beautiful suite.”

Lisa wandered through the spacious sitting room and took a look in the bedroom, giving a low whistle. “Wow, they knew how to live, didn’t they?”

“There are three hundred and forty cabins on this ship,” Ayesha said, “and only five luxury suites.”

“Hollywood lives,” said Michael, from behind her.

“Yeah.”

The suite was decorated in white and gold, almost exclusively. The four-poster bed was fastened to the ceiling at its topmost points and gilded all the way up. Swags of white satin, tied with tasseled cords, decorated the outer part of the bed and a deep, quilted comforter lay in ordered precision on the bed. The vanity, the wardrobe, and the other furnishings were in some pale wood, gilded as brightly as anything Marie Antoinette might have owned.

Lisa couldn’t see the luxurious extravagance. She could see only the woman, sprawled in an ungainly pose on the bed, her bright scarlet blood pumping out of the hole in her head to pool on the pristine satin coverlet.

***

When she swayed, Michael rushed forward and supported her, swinging her off her feet. “I’m taking her back to her room,” he said firmly.

Ayesha stood at his elbow, staring up at him, her velvety eyes wide. “Oh yes, I saw it too,” he told her softly. “The trouble is, I think Lisa saw it as well.”

“Poor baby.” Ayesha touched Lisa softly on her upper arm, lifting it to fold across her body. “Not a good vision for your first spirit experience. I’ll take over here. You look after Lisa.”

He carried her off, cursing himself for not noticing the presence sooner.

Reaching Lisa’s suite, he glanced around to see if anyone was nearby and finding no one, he used telekinesis to open the door instead of fumbling around for the key. These doors opened with old-fashioned keys, in keeping with the period atmosphere, but to find it and then juggle Lisa and the lock would have taken too much time and might have made Lisa uncomfortable. She was coming around already. He took her through to the bedroom and laid her down on the mercifully rich cream-colored bedspread. This suite, although simpler, was far more to his taste. All that white and gold made him feel swamped in luxury.

She blinked, and he made sure the first thing she saw was him, smiling reassuringly. “Hush,” he said. “You’re back in your suite. Don’t try to move for a couple of minutes. You’ll still be dizzy.”

“I didn’t faint. I never faint.”

“No, I know.” He lifted her hand and held it warmly between his own. “I saw it, too.”

She swallowed. “That…
thing
on the bed?”

He nodded, keeping her attention fixed on him. “Yeah.”

“Do you see those kinds of things all the time?”

“They’re not usually so gruesome, but yes, I do. Luckily, the real force of my psychic talent didn’t appear until puberty, otherwise I’d have been locked up for sure.”

He felt her hand tremble. “How do you stand it?”

“I’ve never seen a relative.”

She closed her eyes for a second, and when she opened them again, they were suspiciously bright. “It was her, wasn’t it? My mother?”

“Without a doubt. There was a resemblance in the face. Ayesha saw it, too.” He rubbed her hand gently. “It wasn’t a real ghost, Lisa. It was a vision, an image, that’s all. Some places retain the ability to show images, kind of like photographs. The bed must be one of them. I didn’t feel a presence, I just saw the image. It wasn’t her, just a picture of her.”

“Lying on the bed in a pool of blood.” She breathed deeply, once, then twice. “I’m okay now. I want to sit up.”

“Would you like some water?” At her nod, he reached for the unopened bottle of mineral water on the nightstand. He uncapped it and handed it to her, watching the slight tremor when she lifted it to her lips. “Wanna tell me about it? The real story? I’ve done some research, so I know something is wrong.”

She lowered the bottle, gripping it harder than necessary. “Yes, I’d like to tell you. And if you get in contact with her, you’ll know anyway, won’t you?”

He gave a wry grin. “Not necessarily. We only know what they tell us. They might not be who they seem to be, or they might deliberately lie.” Did she want him to get in touch with her mother? He put the thought aside for further consideration later.

“Well, I want to tell you anyway.” She lifted her knees and reached for her shoes, but he forestalled her, drawing off her mules and dropping them to the floor by the side of the bed. The warmth of her foot, with its sexy, high arch, beguiled him. He wanted to touch some more. So he took one foot into his lap and used his thumbs to massage it.

“Mmm.” Her low moan made him want more, but he concentrated on her feet. “Keep doing that and I’ll tell you anything you want to hear.”

“Anything? I might hold you to it. In the meantime, tell me about your mother. The reports say she was separated from your father and taking her last voyage on the ship as a masseuse. She was supposed to be marrying the occupant of suite number one, a rich politician and businessman running for mayor of New York. He found her in the suite. She’d come in from the pool and crossed the room to the shower, but she slipped and fell, hitting her head on a piece of furniture. She bled out and by the time Selhurst found her, she was dead.”

“Very concise.”

She sighed a little puff of air he wanted for himself. But he forced himself to relax, willing his erection to subside. If she moved her left foot over a little, she’d find out what this was doing to him. And he really wanted to hear her story. The real story. Several things about the case made him wonder, and the reports of ghostly activity suggested unfinished business to him. Someone hadn’t completed their journey.

“Well, it’s a reasonable version of the story. Truth is, my mother was more than a masseuse to certain select passengers. Masseuses on board these ships were pool attendants and physical training instructors, too, not the other kind of masseuse, but my mother was an exception. She’d met and married my dad on a voyage, and at the beginning, he thought he was the one and only. It was only later, about six months before she died, that he realized the truth.” Lisa sighed, but it wasn’t a happy sound this time. Michael continued to rub her feet and stayed silent. “She told him. She’d met Cory Selhurst on another voyage, and she planned to dump dad in favor of Selhurst. Dad was prosperous, but not on the Selhurst scale.”

“What about you?”

She gave a sharp laugh, no humor evident in it. “Why should she care about me? I favored my Latino father, and she was blonde and beautiful. She didn’t want me any more than she wanted my father.” He wished she wouldn’t keep her eyes closed. He felt her pain, a pang new to him, telling him Lisa didn’t usually let herself dwell on the past. “Dad met the woman I always consider my real mom about two months before my mother died, so they’d agreed to divorce. It suited both of them. But something happened. I think I know what it was.”

She opened her eyes. Michael winced at the blankness there; the absence she forced on herself so she could tell her story. “Cory Selhurst had someone else, too. He married about a year after mom died, and his wife-to-be wasn’t on the ship that time. There’s no evidence he even met her until a few months afterward. But there was someone. Mom sent a letter to Dad from on board. It wasn’t sent until the ship reached shore, so there’s no record of it. In those days, letters were sent by telegraph. You’d give it in to the office, and they’d radio it to the shore, so there would be a record of it, but this one was paper, signed and sealed and posted in one of the boxes on the ship. That way, it got a ship’s frank. Tourists used them for postcards. Nobody’s seen it but Dad and me. Dad just wanted the case over with; he didn’t want any more enquiries, so he never produced it. In any case, it doesn’t prove anything.”

“So what does it say?”

She stared at him as if he was her lifeline, and he felt the turmoil in her head, confusion, and distress. “It says she knew Selhurst had someone else, and she planned to surprise him with her. She taunts Dad, telling him Selhurst has more money, more class and a bigger dick than him, so it’s not a nice letter. She said she’d get him, if it was the last thing she did. Dad could kiss her goodbye.”

He said what she didn’t, what they both knew. “She was found on the floor, not on the bed. Blunt force trauma. She could have been hit with something, not fallen against furniture, and forensics wasn’t as sophisticated or as thorough then as it is now. They found her on the floor, and the corner of the nightstand was bloodstained. The bed wasn’t marked.” He paused. “Rosanna Perez was murdered.”

Chapter Three

If he hadn’t said it, she would have, but Michael hated the expression his words brought to her face.

Total shock. He continued to rub her feet, trying to soothe her, and himself.

“Do you think we’ll find out who did it?”

He heard the tears in her voice but knew she wouldn’t let them fall. “Maybe. I can’t say. More important at the moment, do you want to go on with this? If I give Ayesha the word, we can ignore the spirits from this case. There are plenty of others here, by all accounts, to make the special worth doing. An engineer died in an accident in the pump room downstairs, for instance. We can make him the star.”

“Could you do that?”

“If you want.” He’d prefer it. The whole case made him uncomfortable, from the personal connection to the vague sense of uneasiness he’d felt when he’d researched it. Now he knew the cause of the feeling. Some facts just didn’t sit right. Like why would an ambitious politician want to marry a nobody? A cash-strapped masseuse? What did Rosanna offer him other women couldn’t? Michael didn’t for one moment believe it was true love, although poor Rosanna probably had. It was one of the worrying details that had made him suspect this even before they’d seen the vision. A lovely woman, golden brown hair coming loose from its pins, a neat figure dressed only in a white swimsuit, the forehead a nightmare of crushed bone and blood.

Someone must have arranged the scene, gotten rid of the ruined bedding and laid Rosanna carefully on the floor before calling for help. With a bedroom like that, there must be any number of white coverlets to replace the ruined one. It did mean they might have had help from a member of the crew, another potential witness.

Lisa lifted her head and looked at him, biting her lower lip, determination in her eyes. “No. I want to go where this weekend takes us. Don’t hold back.”

He still wasn’t sure he’d go that far. The atmosphere here was like nowhere else he’d visited, crackling with tension. Something waited for him and for Ayesha.

The tension had other effects. He’d wanted her for a while, but now the thought of holding back was almost unbearable. Michael knew part of this was the place and the time, but not all of it.

“Do you hear me, Michael?”

He nodded. “I hear you.” Not that he didn’t mean to use his own judgment. Not every spirit was a true ghost, or even well meaning. Some were evil and would do anything to confuse and upset the mortal in front of them. Just because they could. “I’m no detective, Lisa, and nothing we saw this afternoon is admissible in court. You know that, don’t you?”

She nodded yes. “I always knew it. So did Dad. But there wasn’t anything he could do. Selhurst was rich and powerful, and even if he didn’t do it, he was involved somehow because she died in his suite. She had quarters of her own. Perhaps we should go there, too.”