Fear to Tread Page 4

  “Okay.” She looked down at the card as if she were memorizing the number, looking away from those eyes. “Detective Black.”

  “Lucas,” he corrected. “Or you know, if you ever just want to go for a drink or a coffee, that would be fine, too.” Her true reaction must have shown on her face because he flushed red. “Or not. Yeah…sorry. Bad idea.”

  “I have your card,” she said, holding it up. “If I think of anything, I’ll call.”

  “Yep.” His expression had flattened, and the warmth had left his eyes. “You do that.”

  “I will.” She was putting on her sweetie magnolia voice, she suddenly realized. “Good-bye.” She waved and smiled and ducked inside, pushing the door shut hard behind her.

  Chapter Six—Nate and Sylvia, 4B

  Still clutching the knob, Laura leaned her forehead against the door, taking a deep breath.

  “Are you all right?” The woman’s voice from the stairs behind her was so unexpected, she almost screamed for the second time that morning. “Oh honey, I’m sorry,” the woman said as she spun around. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “It’s okay,” Laura said, making herself smile. The woman was older than she was, probably in her late forties or early fifties with streaks of silver-white in her curly black hair. But she was beautiful. Her hair fell past her shoulders, and her eyes were a rich, luminescent green. Her creamy skin was barely lined around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, as if she smiled a lot, and Laura could see no trace of make-up. Right now, she looked worried. “I’m fine,” Laura promised.

  The woman smiled. “I’m not sure I believe you.” She offered a delicate, blue-veined hand with intricate silver rings on every finger. “I’m your neighbor, Sylvia Berman. I live in—“

  “4B,” Laura said with her. “I’m Laura.” She shook Sylvia’s hand, and a comforting warmth flowed through the connection between them. “I got the brownies. Thank you so much.”

  “You’re so welcome.” She looked past Laura to the street door, worry coming back into her eyes. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Yeah, I was just a little spooked.” She looked back at the door, too, feeling a shiver. “Apparently a homeless woman was murdered in our alley last night.”

  “Murdered?” Sylvia was still holding her hand. Now she started backing up the stairs, drawing Laura with her.

  “Did you or your husband hear anything?” Laura said. “There’s a detective outside.”

  “No, we didn’t hear a thing,” Sylvia said, cutting her off. “Come on. Let me make you some tea.”

  Caleb looked out the window of his apartment at the city below, the usually-gray streets still glittering white under their frosting of snow. His body felt strangely heavy—tired, he realized, bemused. He reached under his thick sweater to rub his shoulder where the succubus had clawed him. The gashes were almost healed, but the joint still ached. His night in a mortal body had taken its toll.

  He went to his desk and flipped on all three monitors before collapsing into his rolling leather chair. His apartment was the entire top floor of what had once been a factory near the docks. The floors were bare, scraped wood, and most of the walls were windows. A few shabby chairs and a couch were set in a semi-circle to one side, and the computer set-up took up the center of the front wall. The rest of the room was filled with rows and rows of bookshelves, millennia of dispassionate research into the human condition. Every shelf was stuffed full, and loose books and papers were scattered in piles across the floor.

  He pulled the wireless keyboard into his lap and tapped out a name. The center screen filled with links: Jacob Ross, Artist. The man he had pretended to be had been born in Vidalia, Georgia, home of the sweet onion. He had been educated at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Since coming to the city in his early twenties, he had become steadily more successful as a painter, no household name but important, a talent collectors knew and watched. The angel clicked a thumbnail labeled “Gifts of the Magi.” The right-hand screen filled with the image of a pretty but frazzled-looking woman in a ragged housedress and apron with a baby on her hip. She was standing on the steps of a rundown shack in what looked like a swamp—the background was all gnarled, dark trees hung with Spanish moss. A gleaming white Cadillac was parked in the black dirt yard, and three men in suits were walking toward the woman, one white, one black, one Asian. The white magus was holding out an open briefcase full of cash. The black one carried a large, obviously full department store shopping bag. The Asian carried a human skull with a crown of gold-plated thorns hidden behind his back. The baby, dressed in nothing but a sagging diaper, was hiding his face against his mother’s shoulder, and her face was fearful and sad. Caleb smiled, touching the screen before he clicked the image away.

  Another biography of the artist mentioned Laura by name just below its description of the cancer that had killed him. She was described as an artist and illustrator, but there was no link. A brief new search produced a handful of links, about half of which applied to his Laura Ross—or rather, Jake’s Laura Ross. Most just identified her as Jake’s wife, but two were more interesting. One gave a brief biography—born in Savannah, educated there with her future husband—and showed a black and white photograph of one of her paintings, a dragon curled around a long-haired damsel in modern dress with marks of some kind up and down her arms—scars or track marks; in the grainy photograph it was impossible to tell. The other link led to an online bookstore listing for a children’s fairytale book. The cover showed a princess dancing madly in a pair of flaming shoes. Smoke curled up from her delicate feet to frame her joyful, frantic face. “Illustrated by Laura Ross,” the book description read. Both images were artful and disturbing, the work of a haunted, inventive imagination. But neither held the same spark as Jake’s painting, and neither showed the soul he had read in Laura’s letters. His eyes focused again on the face of the doomed princess, and he thought of the desperate joy in Laura’s eyes the moment she had first seen him the night before. With a distinctly human shudder, he shut down both screens.

  Laura found herself spending the rest of the day in the Berman apartment. Sylvia made her a real breakfast of eggs, sausages and toast with butter and honey to go with her tea, refusing to listen when Laura insisted she wasn’t hungry. Laura took the first few bites just to be polite, then suddenly she was ravenous. She ate every bite, scraping the plate with the crust of her toast—her first real meal in more than a week. “I’m sorry,” she said through a mouthful, suddenly embarrassed. “This is just so good.”

  “Don’t you dare be sorry,” Sylvia said. “Here, have some more toast.”

  The two women sat at a bentwood table in cozy, cushioned chairs. Laura told Sylvia about moving to the city from Savannah right after her marriage, about Jake’s art, about her own illustration work, about Jake’s huge, friendly, overbearing Catholic family back home, about her own dead parents—briefly on this subject, barely touching it. Sylvia never tried to pry more out of her. She just listened, refilling the teacups. She explained that her husband, Nate, was a professor of comparative religion at a nearby university. She said the two of them had met in Ireland many, many years before. “At an ashram, if you can believe it. The guru had talked some farmer into letting him set up on his farm,” she said, laughing. “Chicken tika and soda bread, meditating with the sheep. It was lovely, actually.” She described herself as a housewife and said her great passion, besides Nate, was gardening. The tiny apartment looked like a well-tended jungle with lush plants on every available surface.

  For lunch, Sylvia made thick sandwiches of cold roast chicken piled high with arugula and herbs she’d grown in the kitchen under their own bank of artificial lights. “It was cancer, wasn’t it?” she said, arranging the sandwiches on pretty china plates.

  “What?” Laura was pouring iced tea. For a moment, she could plausibly pretend she hadn’t heard.

  “Your husband, Jake.” Sylvia took a step closer and put a hand o
n her arm. “He died of cancer, didn’t he?”

  “Oh…yeah.” Laura concentrated on plucking two sprigs of fresh mint. “Yeah, he did.” She garnished each glass with focused care. “Do you mind if we don’t talk about it?”

  “Of course not.” Sylvia gave her arm a pat then picked up the plates. “Let’s eat in the living room. There’s a CD I want you to hear.” She led her to a pair of rustic-looking rockers set in the deep bay window, surrounded by lush, trailing vines. “Nate and some of his friends have a jazz band—the Wizards of Rhythm.” She laughed. “Bless them, but they stink.”

  The shadows in the room had grown long when Sylvia said Nate would be home soon. Laura looked at the clock. It was after four. The day seemed to have evaporated. “The three of us should go to dinner,” Sylvia said. “Have you tried the new Thai place on the corner?”

  “No, I haven’t.” She and Jake had bickered playfully about trying it when the sign had first gone up. She loved Thai food; he hated—had hated it. “I should go.” She suddenly realized she was wearing the same plaid flannel pajama pants and sweatshirt she had thrown on when she first woke up that morning. She hadn’t even brushed her hair or her teeth all day. “I’ve imposed on you enough.”

  “Not at all.” Sylvia smiled, and again Laura felt her warmth, the simple goodness coming off of her in waves. Her eyes in the failing light were an almost glowing green, the color of summer leaves in sunlight. “Come back whenever you want, sweet girl. We’ve been worried sick about you.”

  “I’m fine.” It was a lie, but she thought the day with Sylvia had helped. And the night with Jake’s ghost.

  “You’re not. Of course you’re not.” Sylvia hugged her gently, delicate arms enfolding her with the lightest squeeze. She closed her eyes, stiffening, absorbing and resisting the strange woman’s warmth at the same time. “But you will be.”

  The daylight was fading fast as Caleb emerged again on the street. He kept looking into the faces of humans as he passed them, making eye contact. They all looked so anxious, so fearful, so full of fragile life. What had Laura thought when she woke up this morning? What was she doing now? With a glance at the setting sun, he walked faster, headed for the cemetery.

  Chapter Seven—In the Garden of the Dead

  By the time Laura left the apartment, the sun had set into a cold, purple twilight. The snow on the sidewalk had been packed into a pebbled, grungy sheet of ice. But inside the cemetery, it was drifted white and virtually untouched. She sank in almost to the tops of her boots even on the path, and the moonlight glowed like silver all around her, even under the trees. Jake’s small marker was almost completely covered. She got soaking wet digging it out with her hands, but she didn’t mind. She felt sad but serene, at peace in the beautiful night.

  She took a postcard out of her pocket. The picture on it was one of Jake’s paintings from before he got sick, a dove with wings outspread with an arrow piercing its breast. She took off her glove and took out a ballpoint pen. “Dearest Jake,” she wrote. “The weather is beautiful. Wish you were here. With all my love forever, Laura.”

  She hadn’t brought whiskey or the icon candle, but she had Jake’s lighter in her pocket, a heavy silver one that had belonged to his grandfather. She ran a fingertip over the wings etched into the silver before she lit it up.

  In the flare of the tiny flame, she saw a man standing in the shadows of a willow tree, watching her. “Hi,” she said, raising the light.

  He looked as surprised to be seen as she was to see him. “Hi,” he said back, stepping out of the shadows. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “It’s okay.” He should have been freezing, the way he was dressed—slacks and a sweater with an open overcoat. But he seemed perfectly comfortable, perfectly at ease. “You aren’t—you didn’t disturb me.” She let the lighter go out and slipped it into her pocket before offering her hand. “I’m Laura.”

  “Hi Laura.” He wasn’t wearing gloves, but his hand was pleasantly warm. “I’m Caleb.” His accent was strange, nothing foreign she could identify, but too precise to be American.

  “Hi Caleb.” She could still see him clearly by the moonlight. “This is Jake—my husband, Jake. His grave…he died a little more than a week ago.”

  “I’m sorry.” He seemed to mean it; his eyes turned sad. “He must have been young.”

  “Yeah, he was.” She looked down at the postcard in her hand. “Excuse me.” She knelt down on the grave and lit it, letting it burn as they watched. He didn’t seem surprised at all; he just stood there beside her as it burned. “He had cancer.” She didn’t stop to wonder why she was telling him any of this, why it should seem so natural that this stranger should be with her. She felt immediately at ease with him much as she had with Sylvia. Kindness seemed to radiate out from him, an inner light that glowed in his eyes and on his skin in the snowy blue moonlight. “It started in his lungs and went to his liver.”

  “I’m so sorry, Laura.”

  “Thanks.” Tears welled in her eyes, but she smiled, looking up at him. “You’re really sweet.”

  “Not really,” he said, smiling back. “Or not always.” He offered her his hand and helped her up.

  “So why are you here?” she asked. “Do you have family buried here, too?”

  He paused before he answered, seeming to choose his words carefully. “I do see family here,” he said. “And friends. I visit sometimes.”

  “I’ve been coming every night.” Usually handsome men made her nervous. Jake had joked that if he’d had a decent haircut and a shave when they’d met, she never would have talked to him at all. “I’ve been writing him letters.” Her eyes met his, and she stopped. What was she doing, telling these things to a perfect stranger? Sylvia was her neighbor at least; she knew where she lived. This Caleb could be anyone. “It’s probably silly.”

  “Of course it isn’t.” He sounded absolutely sincere, not like he was just being nice or keeping her distracted while he decided how to steal her purse. “If my body were here, if I had left someone behind…” He looked away from her to Jake’s grave. “I would like it if she wrote me letters.”

  “Thanks.” He sounded sure that Jake had gone on somewhere else, that he would read what she had written. “You’re not going to offer me a ride in your van, are you?

  He laughed. “No, I promise.” His smile was infectious; she couldn’t stop herself from smiling back “I’m on foot, actually. Can I walk you home?”

  For a moment, she almost said yes. That morning with Detective Black, she had felt a dozen different instinctual alarms go off every time he got near her. With Caleb, she felt calm. But weren’t serial killers sometimes supposed to have a knack for making women feel all warm and fuzzy? “No, thank you,” she said. “It’s not far.”

  “All right.” He didn’t seem disappointed, and he didn’t press. But he walked beside her to the gate, and when they reached the sidewalk, he took her hand again. “Be careful, Laura.” He leaned down and kissed her lightly on the forehead. “Good night.”

  “You too.” She should have been completely freaked out, but she wasn’t. She felt comforted and cared for, much as she had the night before when Jake had come to her as a ghost or a dream or whatever it was—she still wasn’t ready to examine it yet; she was just grateful it had happened. “Good night.”

  Chapter Eight—Jake’s Paintings

  When Laura got home, she turned off the ringer on the phone and changed into painting clothes, yoga pants and one of Jake’s old tee-shirts with her hair pulled back.

  In the studio, she cracked open a window in spite of the bitter cold. A draft knifed in and around her, giving her goosebumps, and she thought about getting a sweater, but she didn’t want to wait. All of a sudden, she needed to get this done.

  She dragged a pair of sawhorses out from under some clean towels she had never gotten around to folding and walked one of the huge canvases over and laid it across them, face up. She touched a fingertip to
a corner more from habit than necessity. It was dry; Jake had finished this one months ago, right after he was diagnosed. She smiled down at the image, Jake’s mother and sister shelling peas on the back porch of a house in flames. His mother was going to hate it. She was going to say it made her look “country.” But it was beautiful. She ran her fingertips lightly over the faces, feeling the texture, the complicated love expressed in every brushstroke. “I love you, baby,” she whispered. “I miss you.”

  She mixed the crackled-sugar powdered varnish with turpentine, the precise recipe so clear in her mind she barely thought about it. The smell as she stirred took her back to Savannah and the first tiny apartment she and Jake had shared on the second floor of an old white house near school. When it was warm, Jake had painted on the porch roof outside their living room window. Tourists passing in the square below had thought he was part of the local color, a half-naked giant in cargo shorts. He had always had paint in his hair, head and chest. She had fallen asleep every night smelling the paint on him, snuggled close to his bare skin.

  When it was cold, they had both worked in the tiny kitchen, huddled as close as they dared to the open oven door, the only source of artificial heat in the damp, Southern winter. She had worked at the kitchen table on a neat easel that she folded away every night, her canvases leaned against the bookcases that lined the living room walls. Jake had blocked the kitchen cabinets for weeks at a time; she would have to move his canvases to get to the oatmeal or the spice rack. He had gone through a triptych phase that had almost driven her out of her mind as a housekeeper. Everywhere she had looked, three images in progress had looked back.

  If she had asked her mother for money, they could have easily moved to a bigger, better place with heat and extra bedrooms. But she had refused, and Jake had never suggested she should. He had worked part-time jobs at pizza joints and tourist bars; she had worked the customer service counter at a big department store in the mall, wrapping packages and processing credit card payments, and somehow they had made ends meet. Later, after Mama had gone into the hospital, she could have just written herself a check; she’d had her mother’s power of attorney. It wouldn’t have been stealing; technically the money had all been as much hers as it was her mother’s, a shared inheritance from her grandparents and what was left of her father’s insurance. But she had never been able to stand the thought of letting her family’s legacy into her life with Jake, even as cash.