Time After Time (37 page)

In the meantime Jack's
great-great-grandfather, younger than Jack and just as handsome,
had turned his attention back to his canvas and was laying down a
brushstroke or two. He seemed to have settled in nicely. God only
knew what he was painting.

Liz, utterly paralyzed by
this turn of events, stared at the apparition in wide-eyed
horror.

"My God, Liz — what's
wrong?" Jack said, swiveling his head to see what she was
seeing.

"Never mind, never mind!"
she said, turning him to face her.
"Nothing's
wrong. I — I remembered
something, that's all. I left the sink on. I mean, the
stove."

Jack untangled her hand
from his hair and began lifting himself off her. "We didn't use the
stove. But I'll check—"

She grabbed his arm. "No!
Dammit! Why won't you stay where you're told?"

He stared coolly at her
hand gripping his arm, then gave her a level look. "Aren't you
mixing me up with your five-year-old?"

"No, I'm sorry, never
mind, yes, check the stove, please, yes, while I—well! Will you
just go
away?"
she demanded, turning her attention back to the
apparition.

Jack practically leaped
out of the bed, which made her say, "Please, please don't
go."

"Liz, for chrissake — this
isn't funny! What's wrong with you?"

I knew it. I knew it. He
thinks I'm Glenn Close.

"Absolutely nothing's
wrong with me. This is
not
a Fatal Attraction. Get
out
of here!" she said, interrupting
herself to yell at the artist.

Christopher Eastman was
frowning thoughtfully as he glanced first at her, then at his
canvas, apparently checking the likeness. Then he stuck the end of
the paintbrush in his mouth, switched a small spatula from his
palette hand to his right, and began blending two blobs of paint
together on the flat surface. He seemed thoroughly unbothered by
the chaos he was creating, perfectly content to be part of the
weird ménage à trois.

Very gently, Jack said,
"You know what I think? I think a nice cup of tea—"

"Oh, right!" said Liz,
furious that the apparition wouldn't evaporate the way it had the
other times. "As if a cup of tea can bring an end to this —
this
nonsense,"
she said, waving her arms in the direction of the
easel.

Exasperated, Jack said
with a dark look, "Do you want me out of here or not,
goddammit?"

She was forced to divide
her attention between Jack and the apparition. "No, no, it's not
you, Jack, really," she said as her glance darted from man to ghost
and back again. "You're just an innocent bystander—"

"Thank you very much," he
said, unflattered.

"I mean, it's not your
fault that you happened to be here right now—"

"I'd like to think I
had
something
to
do with it," he said, offended now. "What're you, the spider
woman?"

"Stop miscontruing what I
say!" she snapped. "All right. There is a connection: you're an
Eastman, which — no, no," she said, after considering it. "That has
nothing to do with it. I bought the house and found the box, and
you had nothing to do with that. I was right the first time. You're
irrelevant."

"Jesus," he said, watching
her mind play Ping-Pong with itself.

"I'm sorry," she repeated,
completely wrung out at this point. "The stove—?"

"Right," said Jack, unable
to keep wary hostility out of his voice. "I'll check on
it."

He pulled on his khakis
and, with a puzzled glance at the shuttered windows, walked out of
the bedroom. They both understood that Liz had totally lost it;
that she needed time to put herself back together again.

Not a chance,
she thought.
Not if I
had all the king's horses and all the king's men.

She jumped out of bed and
yanked the white quilt off it, wrapping the spread around herself
and muttering, "This is what happens when you go too long without
sex. The hormones overflow and go straight to your
brain."

She turned, ready to do
battle with the phantom interloper.

But there was nothing in
front of the shuttered windows. No artist, no easel, no nothing. No
snotty smile, no fierce look of concentration. Liz had a radarlike
ability to pick up arrogance in a room. There was none there
now.

Clutching the quilt to her
breast with one hand, she sliced through the air with the other,
feeling for — she didn't know what. Some kind of ghastly coldness,
maybe. She listened for the chime-sound, but the room was
silent.
Definitely gone,
she decided, relieved.

She staggered weak-kneed
to the bed and collapsed on the edge of it, then pulled her longish
cotton top over her head, wearing it like a nightshirt.
You've got to tell Jack what you've been
seeing,
she decided.
If he walks, he walks.
Heck, after
this fiasco, he'd walk if she
didn't
tell him.

What a bizarre form of
misery. It was one thing to chat casually about haunted estates;
but to have a haunting in the middle of sex, ending with the man
you love backing away from you with a fearful look on his face —
well, that had to stop.

She buried her head in her
hands at the mortifying recollection of what she must have looked
like, flailing her arms and screaming at walls. She stayed that way
a long time, with one thought uppermost:
How did I ever get
into
this mess?

She never heard Jack —
barefoot, of course — walk up the steps. He simply appeared in the
room as magically as his great-great-grandfather had done moments
earlier. In his hands Jack cradled a cup of tea.

"For you," he said,
offering Liz a flower-bedecked china cup. It was her prettiest one,
and for some reason it made the tears that had been hanging back
come rolling out.

"Hey," he said in gentle
alarm as he sat on the bed beside her, "I didn't think the sex
was
that
bad."

She smiled, despite her
pain and embarrassment, and said, "I don't suppose there's any way
in hell — on earth, I mean — that you saw him."

"'Him.' " Jack pressed his
lips together thoughtfully, then made a tisking sound of regret.
"No, I would have to say not."

Liz nodded and sipped from
her tea, searching for a discreet way to explain what had
happened.

Another sip.

And another.

"Okay, here's the
problem," she blurted at last. "Christopher Eastman keeps appearing
to me, and I don't know how to get rid of him. As you were able to
tell," she added dryly, "yelling doesn't work."

Jack opened his mouth to
say something, but nothing came out.

She waited.

"My
great-great-grandfather?
You, ah,
saw him?"

"Yep."

He fluttered his hand
toward the windows. "Over there?"

"Uh-huh."

"So you're saying, what,
that you saw him. In this room. While we were — hmm. Let me ask
you
this,"
he
said, weighing his words. "When — exactly? — did he
appear?"

She chewed on her lower
lip. "I can't say
exactly.
Naturally I didn't open my eyes and look around
until, well, we were done," she added, coloring.
"Naturally."

"Oh
boy. Oh boy oh boy ...
oh
boy." Jack dropped his gaze and began rubbing his
middle finger back and forth across his forehead. Without looking
at Liz, he said, "You've seen him before, I take it?"

Relieved to be knocking
down at least one barrier of secrecy between them, Liz ticked off
the occasions: "I saw him by the longcase clock in your hall the
first time I was at East Gate. I saw him on the afterdeck of
the
Déjà Vu,
the
day I came to the shipyard to discuss the picnic. I saw him last
night, right here — I think. And of course, just now."

She smiled and added
wanly, "But that's really all."

"Oh, good," Jack said.
"Just so long as he's not a nuisance."

Unable to sit still any
longer, Jack got up and began to pace. There was nowhere to pace,
of course, so he stopped and leaned against the wall; something
about him reminded her of the artist, lounging by the
clock.

"And what makes you think
this apparition is Christopher Eastman?"

She shrugged. "Well, the
way you're holding up that wall, for one thing. He does it just
like you."

Taking that for flippancy,
Jack gave her a sharp look. She added quickly, "But besides that,
there are the letters written by Victoria St. Onge. Some of them
refer directly to him."

"You never told me
that."

"You never
asked."

"How the
hell—!"

He brought himself back
under control and said with a lawyer's precision, "I'm asking you
now. What exactly did you learn about Christopher Eastman ... in
the cache of letters ... you found in the trunk ... in your attic
... shortly after you purchased this house?"

Liz put aside her teacup
and folded her hands in her lap, like someone in a courtroom
witness box. Alas, she was partly naked; but she felt sure that
Jack wasn't aware of it. He was completely focused on hearing her
answer.

As clearly as she could,
Liz recounted the bits and pieces about Christopher Eastman that
she and Victoria had gleaned from Victoria St. Onge's lifetime of
ramblings.

Beginning with the
artist's dashing appearance at the Black and White Ball (where
Mercy St. Onge had fallen so hard for him), Liz went on to recount
the story of his confrontation with Victoria St. Onge in the studio
that used to exist where Liz's house now stood. Liz told Jack why
his great-great-grandfather had thrown Victoria St. Onge out of his
workplace: because the psychic had been snooping at some paintings
he'd made of a beautiful auburn-haired nude who turned out to be a
servant named Ophelia.

Jack said nothing, but a
dark flush passed over his cheeks. Liz interpreted the look to
mean, "Like great-great-grandfather, like
great-great-grandson."

She went on to explain how
at another date Victoria St. Onge, peeping through a folding screen
in the dining hall at East Gate, had watched as Christopher Eastman
replaced a place card at his mother's grandly set dinner table with
one that had Ophelia's name on it, and then stuck a small heart-
shaped pin in Ophelia's sand bucket instead of a gemstone favor
like everyone else got.

Jack, arms folded across
his bare chest, had been staring at the little rag rug as Liz went
through her paces. At the mention of the pin, he jerked his head
up.

"That's all she said? A
heart-shaped pin?"

Damn.
He must've remembered the pin from the painting of
Christopher's mother Lavinia in his entry hall.

Liz had no desire to ruin
Victoria's cosmic scheme to return the pin and redeem herself with
the powers that be, so she answered Jack's question as narrowly as
she could. After all, Jack didn't know that she'd found the pin in
the red lacquered box.

"Victoria St. Onge only
wrote that the pin had a small garnet in it and that it wasn't
worth very much."

Jack frowned and went back
to studying the rag rug. "I see. Go on."

Liz said, "After
Christopher left the dining room, Victoria St. Onge switched the
small gemstone party favor in her own sand bucket with the
heart-shaped pin in Ophelia's bucket."

"What? Why? If she said
herself it wasn't worth much."

Liz shrugged vaguely and
said, "She had a history of doing stuff like that — taking things
out of spite. She admitted that she wanted to get back at
Christopher for embarrassing her in front of her friends. I think
she was also a bit of a kleptomaniac. Often she had no idea why she
stole something."

"This woman sounds damned
unpleasant. Why the hell did your friend Tori assume
her
identity? Surely
there were other ones available," Jack said, not bothering to hide
his disbelief.

"It's a long story," Liz
said wearily. "Let me tell it to you some other time." The night
was catching up with her. She wanted desperately to sleep, to be
done with this waking dream turned nightmare.

But no. Jack wasn't
finished with her yet. "What else do you know," he said quietly,
"about this Ophelia?"

This Ophelia.
Fairly or not, Liz heard condescension in Jack's
voice, and she resented it.

"Two days after that
dinner party, Christopher's older brother was killed in a riding
accident," she said. "You undoubtedly know that, and that your wild
artist-ancestor was forced to grow up overnight and take control of
the family empire. In any case, his love affair with Ophelia was
put aside, and eventually he married Brunhilde. Did Brunhilde bring
a minor fiefdom to the union? I've wondered."