Selected praise for

LINDA LAEL MILLER

“It doesn’t get better than this.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on Deadly Gamble

“The Last Chance Café delivers powerful romance flavored with deep emotional resonance.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews

“Linda Lael Miller provides a terrific western romance.”

—The Best Reviews on McKettrick’s Choice

“Miller’s intimate knowledge of the wild west sweeps you into a story as realistic as it is romantic. She paints a brilliant portrait of the good, the bad and the ugly, the lost and the lonely, and the power of love to bring light into the darkest of souls. This is western romance at its finest.”

—Romantic Times BOOKreviews on The Man From Stone Creek

There and Now

New York Times Bestselling Author

Linda Lael Miller

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Go back in time with New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller

THERE WAS NO TURNING BACK

Seeking refuge, Elisabeth McCartney returned to her centuries-old family home, never dreaming stepping over the threshold would take her one hundred years into the past-and into the sweet, sensual embrace of Dr. Jonathan Fortner. He wants forever, but she knows forever is the one thing they don’t have. Because even if she can prevent the tragedy she knows will strike him, they are separated by two worlds, denied by destiny.

Unless love can find a time of its own.

The daughter of a town marshal, Linda Lael Miller is a New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author of more than one hundred historical and contemporary novels, most of which reflect her love of the West. Raised in Northport, Washington, the self-confessed barn goddess now lives in Spokane, Washington. Linda hit a career high in 2011 when all three of her Creed Cowboys books—A Creed in Stone Creek, Creed's Honor and The Creed Legacy—debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

Linda has come a long way since leaving Washington to experience the world. “But growing up in that time and place has served me well,” she allows. “And I'm happy to be back home.” Dedicated to helping others, Linda personally finances her Linda Lael Miller Scholarships for Women, which she awards to those seeking to improve their lot in life through education. More information about Linda and her novels is available at www.LindaLaelMiller.com. She also loves to hear from readers by mail at P.O. Box 19461, Spokane, WA 99219.

For Darlene Layman, the best darn secretary ever,

and her very nice husband, Lloyd.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter One

Elisabeth McCartney’s flagging spirits lifted a little as she turned past the battered rural mailbox and saw the house again.

The white Victorian structure stood at the end of a long gravel driveway, flanked by apple trees in riotous pink-white blossom. A veranda stretched around the front and along one side, and wild rose bushes, budding scarlet and yellow, clambered up a trellis on the western wall.

Stopping her small station wagon in front of the garage, Elisabeth sighed and let her tired aquamarine eyes wander over the porch, with its sagging floor and peeling paint. Less than two years before, Aunt Verity would have been standing on the step, waiting with smiles and hugs. And Elisabeth’s favorite cousin, Rue, would have vaulted over the porch railing to greet her.

Elisabeth’s eyes brimmed with involuntary tears. Aunt Verity was dead now, and Rue was God only knew where, probably risking life and limb for some red-hot news story. The divorce from Ian, final for just a month, was a trauma Elisabeth was going to have to get through on her own.

With a sniffle, she squared her shoulders and drew a deep breath to bolster her courage. She reached for her purse and got out of the car, pulling her suitcase after her. Elisabeth had gladly let Ian keep their ultramodern plastic-and-smoked-glass furniture. Her books, tapes and other personal belongings would be delivered later by a moving company.

She slung her purse strap over her shoulder and proceeded toward the porch, the high grass brushing against the knees of her white jeans as she passed. At the door, with its inset of colorful stained glass, Elisabeth put down the suitcase and fumbled through her purse for the set of keys the real-estate agent had given her when she stopped in Pine River.

The lock was old and recalcitrant, but it turned, and Elisabeth opened the door and walked into the familiar entryway, lugging her suitcase with her.

There were those who believed this house was haunted—it had been the stuff of legend in and around Pine River for a hundred years—but for Elisabeth, it was a friendly place. It had been her haven since the summer she was fifteen, when her mother had died suddenly and her grieving, overwhelmed father had sent her here to stay with his somewhat eccentric widowed sister-in-law, Verity.

Inside, she leaned back against the sturdy door, remembering. Rue’s wealthy parents had been divorced that same year, and Elisabeth’s cousin had joined the fold. Verity Claridge, who told fabulous stories of ghosts and magic and people traveling back and forth between one century and another, had taken both girls in and simply loved them.

Elisabeth bit her lower lip and hoisted her slender frame away from the door. It was too much to hope, she thought with a beleaguered smile, that Aunt Verity might still be wandering these spacious rooms.

With a sigh, she hung her shoulder bag over the newel post at the base of the stairway and hoisted the suitcase. At the top of the stairs were three bedrooms, all on the right-hand side of the hallway. Elisabeth paused, looking curiously at the single door on the left-hand side and touched the doorknob.

Beyond that panel of wood was a ten-foot drop to the sun-porch roof. The sealed door had always fascinated both her and Rue, perhaps because Verity had told them such convincing stories about the world that lay on the other side of it.

Elisabeth smiled and shook her head, making her chin-length blond curls bounce around her face. “You may be gone, Auntie,” she said softly, “but your fanciful influence lives on.”

With that, Elisabeth opened the door on the opposite side of the hallway and stepped into the master suite that had always been Verity’s. Although the rest of the house was badly in need of cleaning, the real-estate agent had sent a cleaning crew over in anticipation of Elisabeth’s arrival to prepare the kitchen and one bedroom.

The big four-poster had been uncovered and polished, made up with the familiar crocheted ecru spread and pillow shams, and the scent of lemon furniture polish filled the air. Elisabeth laid the suitcase on the blue-velvet upholstered bench at the foot of the bed and tucked her hands into the back pockets of her jeans as she looked around the room.

The giant mahogany armoire stood between two floor-to-ceiling windows covered by billowing curtains of Nottingham lace, waiting to receive the few clothes Elisabeth had brought with her. A pair of Queen Anne chairs, upholstered in rich blue velvet, sat facing the little brick fireplace, and a chaise longue covered in cream-colored brocade graced the opposite wall. There was also a desk—Verity had called it a secretary—and a vanity table with a seat needle-pointed with pale roses.

Pushing her tousled tresses back from her face with both hands, Elisabeth went to the vanity and perched on the bench. A lump filled her throat as she recalled sitting here while Verity styled her hair for a summer dance.

With a hand that trembled slightly, Elisabeth opened the ivory-inlaid jewel box. Verity’s favorite antique necklace, given to her by a friend, lay within.

Elisabeth frowned. Odd, she reflected. She’d thought Rue had taken the delicate filigree necklace, since she was the one who loved jewelry. Verity’s modest estate—the house, furnishings, a few bangles and a small trust fund—had been left to Elisabeth and Rue in equal shares, and then the cousins had made divisions of their own.

Carefully, Elisabeth opened the catch and draped the necklace around her neck. She smiled sadly, recalling Verity’s assertions that the pendant possessed some magical power.

Just then, the telephone rang, startling her even though the agent at the real-estate office had told her service had been connected and had given her the new number.

“Hello?” she said into the receiver of the French phone sitting on the vanity table.

“So you made it in one piece.” The voice belonged to Janet Finch, one of Elisabeth’s closest friends. She and Janet had taught together at Hillsdale Elementary School in nearby Seattle.

Elisabeth sagged a little as she gazed into the mirror. The necklace looked incongruous with her Seahawks sweatshirt. “You make it sound like I crawled here through a barrage of bullets,” she replied. “I’m all right, Janet. Really.”

Janet sighed. “Divorce is painful, even if it was your own idea,” she insisted quietly. “I just think it would have been better if you’d stayed in Seattle, where your friends are. I mean, who do you know in that town now that your aunt is gone and Rue is off in South Africa or Eastern Europe or wherever she is?”

Through the windows, Elisabeth could see the neighbor’s orchard. It was only too true that most of her friends had long since moved away from Pine River and her life had been in Seattle from the moment she’d married Ian. “I know myself,” she answered. “And the Buzbee sisters.”

Despite her obvious concerns, Janet laughed. Like Elisabeth, she was barely thirty, but she could be a real curmudgeon at times. “The Buzbee sisters? I don’t think you’ve told me about them.”

Elisabeth smiled. “Of course, I have. They live across the road. They’re spinsters, but they’re also card-carrying adventurers. According to Aunt Verity, they’ve been all over the world—they even did a joint hitch in the Peace Corps.”

“Fascinating,” Janet said, but Elisabeth couldn’t tell whether she meant it or not.

“When you come down to visit, I’ll introduce you,” Elisabeth promised, barely stifling a yawn. Lately, she’d tired easily; the emotional stresses and strains of the past year were catching up with her.

“If that’s an invitation, I’m grabbing it,” Janet said quickly. “I’ll be down on Friday night to spend the weekend helping you settle in.”

Elisabeth smiled, looking around the perfectly furnished room. There wasn’t going to be a tremendous amount of “settling in” to do. And although she wanted to see Janet, she would have preferred to spend that first weekend alone, sorting through her thoughts and absorbing the special ambiance of Aunt Verity’s house. “I’ll make spaghetti and meatballs,” she said, resigned. “Call me when you get to Pine River and I’ll give you directions.”

“I don’t need directions,” Janet pointed out reasonably. “You were married in that house, in case you’ve forgotten, and I was there.” Her voice took on a teasing note. “You remember. Rue and I and two of your friends from college were all dressed alike, in floaty pink dresses and picture hats, and your cousin said it was a shame we couldn’t sing harmony.”

Elisabeth chuckled and closed her eyes. How she missed Rue, with her quick, lethal wit. She drew a deep breath, let it out, and made an effort to sound cheerful so Janet wouldn’t worry about her any more than she already did. “I’ll be looking for you on Friday, in time for dinner,” Elisabeth said. And then, after quick good-byes, she hung up.

With a sigh of relief, Elisabeth crossed the room to the enormous bed, kicked off her sneakers and stretched out, her hands cupped behind her head. Looking up at the intricately crocheted canopy, she felt a sense of warm well-being wash over her.

She would make a list and shop for groceries later, she promised herself. Right now she needed to rest her eyes for a few moments.

She must have drifted off, because when the music awakened her, the spill of sunlight across the hooked rug beside the bed had receded and there was a slight chill in the air.

Music.

Elisabeth’s heart surged into her throat as she sat up and looked around. There was no radio or TV in the room, and yet the distant, fairylike notes of a piano still teased her ears, accompanied by a child’s voice.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star how I wonder what you are….”

Awkwardly, Elisabeth scrambled off the bed to pursue the sound, but it ceased when she reached the hallway.

All the same, she hurried downstairs.

The small parlor, where Aunt Verity’s spinet was kept, was empty, and the piano itself was hidden beneath a large canvas dust cover. Feeling a headache begin to pulse beneath her right temple, Elisabeth checked the big, old-fashioned radio in the large parlor and the portable TV set on the kitchen counter.

Neither was on.

She shoved her hands through her already-mussed hair. Maybe her friends were right to be concerned. Maybe the divorce was affecting her more deeply than she’d ever guessed.

The thing to do, she decided after a five-minute struggle to regain her composure, was to get her purse and drive into Pine River for groceries. Since she’d left her shoes behind, she started up the rear stairway.

An instant after Elisabeth reached the second floor, the piano music sounded clearly again, thunderous and discordant. She froze, her fingers closed around Aunt Verity’s pendant.

“I don’t want to practice anymore,” a child’s voice said petulantly. “It’s sunny out, and Vera and I are having a picnic by the creek.”

Elisabeth closed her eyes, battling to retain her equilibrium. The voice, like the music, was coming from the other side of the door Aunt Verity had told so many stories about.

As jarring as the experience was, Elisabeth had no sense of evil. It was her own mental state she feared, not the ghosts that supposedly populated this old house. Perhaps in her case, the result of a broken dream had been a broken mind.

She walked slowly along the highway, gripped the doorknob and rattled it fiercely. The effort to open the door was hopeless, since the passage had been sealed long ago, but Elisabeth didn’t let up. “Who’s there?” she cried.

She wasn’t crazy. Someone, somewhere, was playing a cruel joke on her.

Finally exhausted, she released her desperate hold on the knob, and asked again plaintively, “Please. Who’s there?”

“Just us, dear,” said a sweet feminine voice from the top of the main stairway. The music had died away to an echo that Elisabeth thought probably existed only in her mind.

She turned, a wan smile on her face, to see the Buzbee sisters, Cecily and Roberta, standing nearby.

Roberta, the taller and more outgoing of the two, was holding a covered baking dish and frowning. “Are you quite all right, Elisabeth?” she asked.

Cecily was watching Elisabeth with enormous blue eyes. “That door led to the old part of the house,” she said. “The section that was burned away in 1892.”

Elisabeth felt foolish, having been caught trying to open a door to nowhere. She managed another smile and said, “Miss Cecily, Miss Roberta—it’s so good to see you.”

“We’ve brought Cecily’s beef casserole,” Roberta said, practical as ever. “Sister and I thought you wouldn’t want to cook, this being your first night in the house.”

“Thank you,” Elisabeth said shakily. “Would you like some coffee? I think there might be a jar of instant in one of the cupboards….”

“We wouldn’t think of intruding,” said Miss Cecily.

Elisabeth led the way toward the rear stairway, hoping her gait seemed steady to the elderly women behind her. “You wouldn’t be intruding,” she insisted. “It’s a delight to see you, and it was so thoughtful of you to bring the casserole.”

From the size of the dish, Elisabeth figured she’d be able to live on the offering for a week. The prospective monotony of eating the same thing over and over didn’t trouble her; her appetite was small these days, and what she ate didn’t matter.

In the kitchen, Elisabeth found a jar of coffee, probably left behind by Rue, who liked to hole up in the house every once in a while when she was working on a big story. While water was heating in a copper kettle on the stove, Elisabeth sat at the old oak table in the breakfast nook, talking with the Buzbee sisters.

She neatly skirted the subject of her divorce, and the sisters were too well-mannered to pursue it. The conversation centered on the sisters’ delight at seeing the old house occupied again. Through all of it, the child’s voice and the music drifted in Elisabeth’s mind, like wisps of a half-forgotten dream. Twinkle, twinkle…

Trista Fortner’s small, slender fingers paused on the piano keys. Somewhere upstairs, a door rattled hard on its hinges. “Who’s there?” a feminine voice called over the tremendous racket.

Trista got up from the piano bench, smoothed her freshly ironed poplin pinafore and scrambled up the front stairs and along the hallway.

The door of her bedroom was literally clattering in its frame, the knob twisting wildly, and Trista’s brown eyes went wide. She was too scared to scream and too curious to run away, so she just stood there, staring.

The doorknob ceased its frantic gyrations, and the woman spoke again, “Please. Who’s there?”

“Trista,” the child said softly. She found the courage to touch the knob, to twist her wrist. Soon, she was peering around the edge.

There was nothing at all to see, except for her bed, her doll-house, the doorway that led to her own private staircase leading into the kitchen and the big, wooden wardrobe that held her clothes.

At once disappointed and relieved, the eight-year-old closed the door again and trooped staunchly back downstairs to the piano.

She sighed as she settled down at the keyboard again. If she mentioned what she’d heard and seen to Papa, would he believe her? The answer was definitely no, since he was a man of science. He would set her down in his study and say, “Now, Trista, we’ve discussed this before. I know you’d like to convince yourself that your mother could come back to us, but there are no such things as ghosts. I don’t want to hear any more of this foolishness from you. Is that clear?”

She began to play again, dutifully. Forlornly.

A few minutes later, Trista glanced at the clock on the parlor mantel. Still half an hour left to practice, then she could go outside and play with Vera. She’d tell her best friend there was a ghost in her house, she supposed, but only after making her swear to keep quiet about it.

On the other hand, maybe it would be better if she didn’t say anything at all to anybody. Even Vera would think Trista was hearing things just because she wanted her mama to come back.

“Twinkle, twinkle,” she muttered, as her fingers moved awkwardly over the keys.

“My, yes,” Roberta Buzbee went on, dusting nonexistent crumbs from the bosom of her colorful jersey print dress. “Mama was just a little girl when this house burned.”

“She was nine,” Miss Cecily put in solemnly. She shuddered. “It was a dreadful blaze. The doctor and his poor daughter perished in it, you know. And, of course, that part of the house was never rebuilt.”

Elisabeth swallowed painfully, thinking of the perfectly ordinary music she’d heard—and the voice. “So there was a child,” she mused.

“Certainly,” Roberta volunteered. “Her name was Trista Anne Fortner, and she was Mama’s very best friend. They were close in age, you know, Mama being a few months older.” She paused to make a tsk-tsk sound. “It was positively tragic—Dr. Fortner expired trying to save his little girl. It was said the companion set the fire—she was tried for murder and hanged, wasn’t she, Sister?”

Cecily nodded solemnly.

A chill moved through Elisabeth, despite the sunny warmth of that April afternoon, and she took a steadying sip from her coffee cup. Get a grip, Elisabeth, she thought, giving herself an inward shake. Whatever you heard, it wasn’t a dead child singing and playing the piano. Aunt Verity’s stories about this house were exactly that—stories.

“You look pale, my dear,” Cecily piped up.

The last thing Elisabeth needed was another person to worry about her. Her friends in Seattle were doing enough of that. “I’ll be teaching at the Pine River school this fall,” she announced, mainly to change the subject.

“Roberta taught at the old Cold Creek schoolhouse,” Cecily said proudly, pleased to find some common ground, “and I was the librarian in town. That was before we went traveling, of course.”

Before Elisabeth could make a response, someone slammed a pair of fists down hard on the keys of a piano.

This time, there was no possibility that the sound was imaginary. It reverberated through the house, and both the Buzbee sisters flinched.

Very slowly, Elisabeth set her coffee cup on the counter. “Excuse me,” she said when she was able to break the spell. The spinet in the parlor was still draped, and there was no sign of anyone.

“It’s the ghost,” said Cecily, who had followed Elisabeth from the kitchen, along with her sister. “After all this time, she’s still here. Well, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Elisabeth thought again of the stories Aunt Verity had told her and Rue, beside the fire on rainy nights. They’d been strange tales of appearances and disappearances and odd sounds, and Rue and Elisabeth had never passed them on because they were afraid their various parents would refuse to let them go on spending their summers with Verity. The thought of staying in their boarding schools year round had been unbearable.

“Ghost?” Elisabeth croaked.

Cecily was nodding. “Trista has never rested properly, poor child. And they say the doctor looks for her still. Folks have seen his buggy along the road, too.”

Elisabeth suppressed a shudder.

“Sister,” Roberta interceded somewhat sharply. “You’re upsetting Elisabeth.”

“I’m fine,” Elisabeth lied. “Just fine.”

“Maybe we’d better be going,” said Cecily, patting Elisabeth’s arm. “And don’t worry about poor little Trista. She’s quite harmless, you know.”

The moment the two women were gone, Elisabeth hurried to the old-fashioned black telephone on the entryway table and dialed Rue’s number in Chicago.

An answering machine picked up on the third ring. “Hi, there, whoever you are,” Rue’s voice said energetically. “I’m away on a special project, and I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone this time. If you’re planning to rob my condo, please be sure to take the couch. If not, leave your name and number and I’ll get in touch with you as soon as I can. Ciao, and don’t forget to wait for the beep.”

Elisabeth’s throat was tight; even though she’d known Rue was probably away, she’d hoped, by some miraculous accident, to catch her cousin between assignments. “Hi, Rue,” she said. “It’s Beth. I’ve moved into the house and—well—I’d just like to talk, that’s all. Could you call as soon as you get in?” Elisabeth recited the number and hung up.

She pushed up the sleeves of her shirt and started for the kitchen. Earlier, she’d seen cleaning supplies in the broom closet, and heaven knew, the place needed some attention.

Jonathan Fortner rubbed the aching muscles at his nape with one hand as he walked wearily through the darkness toward the lighted house. His medical bag seemed heavier than usual as he mounted the back steps and opened the door.

The spacious kitchen was empty, though a lantern glowed in the center of the red-and-white-checked tablecloth.

Jonathan set his bag on a shelf beside the door, hung up his hat, shrugged out of his suitcoat and loosened his string tie. Sheer loneliness ached in his middle as he crossed the room to the stove with its highly polished chrome.

His dinner was congealing in the warming oven, as usual. Jonathan unfastened his cuff links, dropped them into the pocket of his trousers and rolled up his sleeves. Then, taking a kettle from the stove, he poured hot water into a basin, added two dippers of cold from the bucket beside the sink and began scrubbing his hands with strong yellow soap.

“Papa?”

He turned with a weary smile to see Trista standing at the bottom of the rear stairway, wearing her nightgown. “Hello, Punkin,” he said. A frown furrowed his brow. “Ellen’s here, isn’t she? You haven’t been home alone all this time?”

Trista resembled him instead of Barbara, with her dark hair and gray eyes, and it was a mercy not to be reminded of his wife every time he looked at his daughter.

“Ellen had to go home after supper,” Trista said, drawing back a chair and joining Jonathan at the table as he sat down to eat. “Her brother Billy came to get her. Said the cows got out.”

Jonathan’s jawline tightened momentarily. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told that girl…”

Trista laughed and reached out to cover his hand with her own. “I’m big enough to be alone for a few hours, Papa,” she said.

Jonathan dragged his fork through the lumpy mashed potatoes on his plate and sighed. “You’re eight years old,” he reminded her.

“Maggie Simpkins is eight, too, and she cooks for her father and all her brothers.”

“And she’s more like an old woman than a child,” Jonathan said quietly. It seemed he saw elderly children every day, though God knew things were better here in Pine River than in the cities. “You just leave the housekeeping to Ellen and concentrate on being a little girl. You’ll be a woman soon enough.”

Trista looked pointedly at the scorched, shriveled food on her father’s plate. “If you want to go on eating that awful stuff, it’s your choice.” She sighed, set her elbows on the table’s edge and cupped her chin in her palms. “Maybe you should get married again, Papa.”

Jonathan gave up on his dinner and pushed the plate away. Just the suggestion filled him with loneliness—and fear. “And maybe you should get back to bed,” he said brusquely, avoiding Trista’s eyes while he took his watch from his vest pocket and frowned at the time. “It’s late.”

His daughter sighed again, collected his plate and scraped the contents into the scrap pan for the neighbor’s pigs. “Is it because you still love Mama that you don’t want to get another wife?” Trista inquired.

Jonathan went to the stove for a mug of Ellen’s coffee, which had all the pungency of paint solvent. There were a lot of things he hadn’t told Trista about her mother, and one of them was that there had never really been any love between the two of them. Another was that Barbara hadn’t died in a distant accident, she’d deliberately abandoned her husband and child. Jonathan had gone quietly to Olympia and petitioned the state legislature for a divorce. “Wives aren’t like wheelbarrows and soap flakes, Trista,” he said hoarsely. “You can’t just go to the mercantile and buy one.”

“There are plenty of ladies in Pine River who are sweet on you,” Trista insisted. Maybe she was only eight, but at times she had the forceful nature of a dowager duchess. “Miss Jinnie Potts, for one.”

Jonathan turned to face his daughter, his cup halfway to his lips, his gaze stern. “To bed, Trista,” he said firmly.

She scampered across the kitchen in a flurry of dark hair and flannel and threw her arms around his middle. “Good night, Papa,” she said, squeezing him, totally disarming him in that way that no other female could. “I love you.”

He bent to kiss the top of her head. “I love you, too,” he said, his voice gruff.

Trista gave him one last hug, then turned and hurried up the stairs. Without her, the kitchen was cold and empty again.

Jonathan poured his coffee into the iron sink and reached out to turn down the wick on the kerosene lantern standing in the center of the table. Instantly, the kitchen was black with gloom, but Jonathan’s steps didn’t falter as he crossed the room and started up the stairs.

He’d been finding his way in the dark for a long time.

Chapter Two

Apple-blossom petals blew against the dark sky like snow as Elisabeth pulled into her driveway early that evening, after making a brief trip to Pine River. Her khaki skirt clung to her legs as she hurried to carry in four paper bags full of groceries.

She had just completed the second trip when a crash of thunder shook the windows in their sturdy sills and lightning lit the kitchen.

Methodically, Elisabeth put her food away in the cupboards and the refrigerator, trying to ignore the sounds of the storm. Although she wasn’t exactly afraid of noisy weather, it always left her feeling unnerved.

She had just put a portion of the Buzbee sisters’ casserole in the oven and was preparing to make a green salad when the telephone rang. “Hello,” she said, balancing the receiver between her ear and shoulder so that she could go on with her work.

“Hello, darling,” her father said in his deep and always slightly distracted voice. “How’s my baby?”

Elisabeth smiled and scooped chopped tomatoes into the salad bowl. “I’m fine, Daddy. Where are you?”

He chuckled ruefully. “You know what they say—if it’s Wednesday, this must be Cleveland. I’m on another business trip.”

That was certainly nothing new. Marcus Claridge had been on the road ever since he had started his consulting business when Elisabeth was little. “How are Traci and the baby?” she asked. Just eighteen months before Marcus had married a woman three years younger than Elisabeth, and the couple had an infant son.

“They’re terrific,” Marcus answered awkwardly, then cleared his throat. “Listen, I know you’re having a rough time right now, sweetheart, and Traci and I were thinking that…well…maybe you’d like to come to Lake Tahoe and spend the summer with us. I don’t like to think of you burrowed down in that spooky old house….”

Elisabeth laughed, and the sound was tinged with hysteria. She didn’t dislike Traci, who invariably dotted the i at the end of her name with a little heart, but she didn’t want to spend so much as an hour trying to make small talk with the woman, either. “Daddy, this house isn’t spooky. I love the place, you know that. Who told you I was here, anyway?”

Her father sighed. “Ian. He’s very worried about you, darling. We all are. You don’t have a job. You don’t know a soul in that backwoods town. What do you intend to do with yourself?”

She smiled. Trust Ian to make it sound as if she were hiding out in a cave and licking her wounds. “I’ve been substitute teaching for the past year, Daddy, and I do have a job. I’ll be in charge of the third grade at Pine River Elementary starting in early September. In the meantime, I plan to put in a garden, do some reading and sewing—”

“What you need is another man.”

Elisabeth rolled her eyes. “Even better, I could just step in front of a speeding truck and break every bone in my body,” she replied. “That would be quicker and not as messy.”

“Very funny,” Marcus said, but there was a grudging note of amused respect in his tone. “All right, baby, I’ll leave you alone. Just promise me that you’ll take care of yourself and that you’ll call and leave word with Traci if you need anything.”

“I promise,” Elisabeth said.

“Good.”

“I love you, Daddy—”

The line went dead before Elisabeth had completed the sentence. “Say hello to Traci and the baby for me,” she finished aloud as she replaced the receiver.

After supper, Elisabeth washed her dishes. By then, the power was flickering on and off, and the wind was howling around the corners of the house. She decided to go to bed early so she could get a good start on the cleaning come morning.

Since she’d showered before going to town, Elisabeth simply exchanged her skirt and blouse for an oversize red football jersey, washed her face, scrubbed her teeth and went to bed. Her hand curved around the delicate pendant on Aunt Verity’s necklace as she settled back against her pillows.

Lightning filled the room with an eerie light, but Elisabeth felt safe in the big four-poster. How many nights had she and Rue come squealing and giggling to this bed, squeezing in on either side of Aunt Verity to beg her for a story that would distract them from the thunder?

She snuggled down between crisp, clean sheets, closed her eyes and sighed. She’d been right to come back here; this was home, the place where she belonged.

The scream brought her eyes flying open again.

“Papa!”

Elisabeth bolted out of bed and ran into the hallway. Another shriek sounded, followed by choked sobs.

It wasn’t the noise that paralyzed Elisabeth, however; it was the thin line of golden light glowing underneath the door across the hall. That door that opened onto empty space.

She leaned against the jamb, one trembling hand resting on the necklace, as though to conjure Aunt Verity for a rescuer. “Papa, Papa, where are you?” the child cried desperately from the other side.

Elisabeth pried herself away from the woodwork and took one step across the hallway, then another. She found the knob, and the sound of her own heartbeat thrumming in her ears all but drowned out the screams of the little girl as she turned it.

Even when the door actually opened, Elisabeth expected to be hit with a rush of rainy April wind. The soft warmth that greeted her instead came as a much keener shock.

“My God,” she whispered as her eyes adjusted to a candlelit room where there should have been nothing but open air.

She saw the child, curled up at the very top of a narrow bed. Then she saw what must be a dollhouse, another door and a big, old-fashioned wardrobe. As she stood there on the threshold of a world that couldn’t possibly exist, the little girl moved, her form illuminated by the light that glowed from an elaborate china lamp on the bedside table.

“You’re not Papa,” the child said with a cautious sniffle, edging farther back against the intricately carved headboard.

Elisabeth swallowed. “N-no,” she allowed, extending one toe to test the floor. Even now, with this image in front of her, complete in every detail, her five senses were telling her that if she stepped into the room, she would plummet onto the sun-porch roof and break numerous bones.

The little girl dragged the flannel sleeve of her nightgown across her face and sniffled again. “Papa’s probably in the barn. The animals get scared when there’s a storm.”

Elisabeth hugged herself, squeezed her eyes tightly shut and stepped over the threshold, fully prepared for a plunge. Instead, she felt a smooth wooden floor beneath her feet. It seemed to her that “Papa” might have been more concerned about a frightened daughter than frightened animals, but then, since she had to be dreaming the entire episode, that point was purely academic.

“You’re the lady, aren’t you?” the child asked, drawing her knees up under the covers and wrapping small arms around them. “The one who rattled the doorknob and called out.”

This isn’t happening, Elisabeth thought, running damp palms down her thighs. I’m having an out-of-body experience or something. “Y-yes,” she stammered after a long pause. “I guess that was me.”

“I’m Trista,” the girl announced. Her hair was a dark, rich color, her eyes a stormy gray. She settled comfortably against her pillows, folding her arms.

Trista. The doctor’s daughter, the child who died horribly in a raging house fire some seventy years before Elisabeth was even born. “Oh, my God,” she whispered again.

“You keep saying that,” Trista remarked, sounding a little critical. “It’s not truly proper to take the Lord’s name in vain, you know.”

Elisabeth swallowed hard. “I k-know. I’m sorry.”

“It would be perfectly all right to give me yours, however.”

“What?”

“Your name, goose,” Trista said good-naturedly.

“Elisabeth. Elisabeth McCartney—no relation to the Beatle.” As she spoke, Elisabeth was taking in the frilly chintz curtains at the window, the tiny shingles on the roof of the dollhouse.

Trista wrinkled her nose. “Why would you be related to a bug?”

Elisabeth would have laughed if she hadn’t been so busy questioning her sanity. I refuse to have a breakdown over you, Ian McCartney, she vowed silently. I didn’t love you that much. “Never mind. It’s just that there’s somebody famous who has the same last name as I do.”

Trista smoothed the colorful patchwork quilt that covered her. “Which are you?” she demanded bluntly. “My guardian angel, or just a regular ghost?”

Now Elisabeth did laugh. “Is there such a thing as a ‘regular ghost’?” she asked, venturing farther into the room and sitting down on the end of Trista’s bed. At the moment, she didn’t trust her knees to hold her up. “I’m neither one of those things, Trista. You’re looking at an ordinary, flesh-and-blood woman.”

Trista assessed Elisabeth’s football jersey with a puzzled expression. “Is that your nightdress? I’ve never seen one quite like it.”

“Yes, this is my—nightdress.” Elisabeth felt light-headed and wondered if she would wake up with her face in the rain gutter that lined the sun-porch roof. She ran one hand over the high-quality workmanship of the quilt. If this was an hallucination, she reflected, it was a remarkably vivid one. “Go to sleep now, Trista. I’m sure it’s very late.”

Thunder shook the room and Trista shivered visibly. “I won’t be able to sleep unless I get some hot milk,” she said, watching Elisabeth with wide, hopeful eyes.

Elisabeth fought an urge to enfold the child in her arms, to beg her to run away from this strange house and never, ever return. She stood, the fingers of her right hand fidgeting with the necklace. “I’ll go and make some for you.” She started back toward the door, but Trista stopped her.

“It’s that way, Elisabeth,” she said, pointing toward the inner door. “I have my own special stairway.”

“This is getting weirder and weirder,” Elisabeth muttered, careful not to stub her toe on the massive dollhouse as she crossed to the other door and opened it. “Let’s see just how far this delusion goes,” she added, finding herself at the top of a rear stairway. Her heart pounded so hard, she thought she’d faint as she made her way carefully down to the lower floor.

She wouldn’t have recognized the kitchen, it was so much bigger than the one she knew. A single kerosene lantern burned in the center of the oak table, sending up a quivering trail of sooty smoke. There were built-in cabinets and bins along one wall, and the refrigerator and the stove were gone. In their places were an old-fashioned wooden icebox and an enormous iron-and-chrome monster designed to burn wood. The only thing that looked familiar was the back stairway leading into the main hallway upstairs.

Elisabeth stood in the middle of the floor, holding herself together by sheer force of will. “This is a dream, Beth,” she told herself aloud, grasping the brass latch on the door of the icebox and giving it a cautious wrench. “Relax. This is only a dream.”

The door opened and she bent, squinting, to peer inside. Fortunately, the milk was at the front, in a heavy crockery pitcher.

Elisabeth took the pitcher out of the icebox, closed the door with a distracted motion of one heel and scanned the dimly lit room again. “Wait till you tell Rue about this,” she chattered on, mostly in an effort to comfort herself. “She’ll want to do a documentary about you. You’ll make the cover of the Enquirer, and tabloid TV will have a heyday—”

“Who the hell are you?”

The question came from behind her, blown in on a wet-and-frigid wind. Elisabeth whirled, still clutching the pitcher of cream-streaked milk to her bosom, and stared into the furious gray eyes of a man she had never seen before.

A strange sensation of being wrenched toward him spiritually compounded Elisabeth’s shock.

He was tall, close to six feet, with rain-dampened dark hair and shoulders that strained the fabric of his suitcoat. He wore a vest with a gold watch chain dangling from one pocket, and his odd, stiff collar was open.

For some confounding reason, Elisabeth found herself wanting to touch him—tenderly at first, and then with the sweet, dizzying fury of passion.

She gave herself an inward shake. “This is really authentic,” Elisabeth said. “I hope I’ll be able to remember it all.”

The stranger approached and took the endangered pitcher from Elisabeth’s hands, setting it aside on the table. His eyes raked her figure, taking in every fiber of the long football jersey that served as her favorite nightgown, leaving gentle fire in their wake.

“I asked you a question,” he snapped. “Who the devil are you?”

Elisabeth gave an hysterical little burst of laughter. The guy was a spirit—or more likely a delusion—and she felt a staggering attraction to him. She must be ‘round the bend. “Who I am isn’t the question at all,” she answered intractably. “The question is, are you a ghost or am I a ghost?” She paused and spread her hands, reasoning that there was no sense in fighting the dream. “I mean, who ya gonna call?”

The man standing before her—Elisabeth could only assume he was the “Papa” Trista had been screaming for—puckered his brow in consternation. Then he felt her forehead with the backs of four cool fingers.

His touch heated Elisabeth’s skin and sent a new shock splintering through her, and Elisabeth fairly leapt backward. Hoping it would carry her home to the waking world, like some talisman, she brought the pendant from beneath her shirt and traced its outline with her fingers.

“What is your name?” the man repeated patiently, as though speaking to an imbecile.

Elisabeth resisted an impulse to make a suitable noise with a finger and her lower lip and smiled instead. She had a drunken feeling, but she assured herself that she was bound to wake up any minute now. “Elisabeth McCartney. What’s yours?”

“Dr. Jonathan Fortner,” was the pensive answer. His steely eyes dropped to the pendant she was fiddling with and went wide. In the next instant, before Elisabeth had had a chance even to brace herself, he’d gripped the necklace and ripped it from her throat. “Where did you get this?” he demanded, his voice a terrifying rasp.

Elisabeth stepped back again. Dream or no dream, she’d felt the pull of the chain against her nape, and she was afraid of the suppressed violence she sensed in this man. “It—it belonged to my aunt—and now it belongs to my cousin and me.” She gathered every shred of courage she possessed just to keep from cowering before this man. “If you’ll just give it back, please….”

“You’re a liar,” Dr. Fortner spat out, dropping the necklace into the pocket of his coat. “This pendant was my wife’s—it’s been in her family for generations.”

Elisabeth wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. This whole experience, whatever it was, was getting totally out of hand. “Perhaps it belonged to your—your wife at one time,” she managed nervously, “but it’s mine now. Mine and my cousin’s.” She held out one palm. “I want it back.”

He looked at her hand as though he might spit in it, then pressed her into a chair. Her knees were like jelly, and she couldn’t be sure whether this was caused by her situation or the primitive, elemental tug she felt toward this man.

“Papa?” Trista called from upstairs.

Dr. Fortner’s lethal glance followed the sound. He stood stock still for a long moment, then shrugged out of his coat and hung it from a peg beside the door. “Everything is all right,” he called back. “Go to sleep.”

Elisabeth swallowed the growing lump in her throat and started to rise from the chair. At one quelling glance from Dr. Fortner, however, she thought better of it and sank back to her seat. She watched with rounded eyes as her reluctant host sat down across from her.

“Who are you?” he asked sternly.

He was a remarkable man, ruggedly handsome and yet polished, in a Victorian sort of way. The sort Elisabeth had fantasized about since puberty.

She tried to keep her voice even and her manner calm. “I told you. I’m Elisabeth McCartney.”

“All right, Elisabeth McCartney—what are you doing here, dressed in that crazy getup, and why were you wearing my wife’s necklace?”

“I was—well, I don’t know what I’m doing here, actually. Maybe I’m dreaming, maybe I’m a hologram or an astral projection….”

His dark eyebrows drew together for a moment. “A what?”

She sighed. “Either I’m dreaming or you are. Or maybe both of us. In any case, I think I need Aunt Verity’s necklace to get back where I belong.”

“Then it looks like you won’t be going anywhere for a while. And I, for one, am not dreaming.”

Elisabeth gazed into his hard, autocratic face. Doubtless, the pop-psychology gurus would have something disturbing to say about the irrefutable appeal this man held for her. “You’re probably right. I don’t see how you could possibly have the sensitivity to dream. Alan Alda, you definitely aren’t. It must be me.”

“Papa, is Elisabeth still here?”

The doctor’s eyes scoured Elisabeth, then softened slightly. “Yes, Punkin, she’s still here.”

“She was going to bring me some warm milk,” Trista persisted.

Jonathan glowered at Elisabeth for a moment, then gestured toward the pitcher. She stumbled out of her chair and proceeded to the wall of cupboards where, with some effort, she located a store of mugs and a small pan.

She poured milk into the kettle, shaking so hard, it was a wonder she didn’t spill the stuff all over the floor, and set it on the stove to heat. She glanced toward the doctor’s coat, hanging nearby on a peg, and gauged her chances of getting the necklace without his noticing.

They didn’t seem good.

“If you want that milk to heat, you’ll have to stoke up the fire,” he said.

Elisabeth stiffened. The stove had all kinds of lids and doors, but she had no idea how to reach in and “stoke” the flames to life. And she really didn’t want to bend over in her nightshirt. “Maybe you could do that,” she said.

He took a chunk of wood from a crude box beside the stove, opened a little door in the front and shoved it inside. Then he reached for a poker that rested against the wall and jabbed at the embers and the wood until a snapping blaze flared up.

Elisabeth, feeling as stirred and warm as the coals at the base of the rejuvenated fire, lifted her chin to let him know she wasn’t impressed and waited for the milk to heat.

Dr. Fortner regarded Elisabeth steadily. “I’m sure you’re some kind of lunatic,” he said reasonably, “though I’ll be damned if I can figure out how you ended up in Pine River. In any case, you’ll have to spend the night. I’ll turn you over to the marshal in the morning.”

Elisabeth was past wondering when this nightmare was going to end. “You’d actually keep me here all night? I’m a lunatic, remember? I could take an ax and chop you to bits while you sleep. Or put lye down your well.”

By way of an answer, he strode across the room, snatched the pan from the stove and poured the milk into a mug. Then, after setting the kettle in the sink, he grasped Elisabeth’s elbow in one hand and the cup in the other and started toward the stairs, stopping only to blow out the lamp.

The suitcoat, Elisabeth noticed, was left behind, on its peg next to the door.

He hustled Elisabeth through the darkness and up the steep, narrow, enclosed staircase ahead of him. Her knees trembled with a weird sort of excitement as she hustled along. “I’m not crazy, you know,” she insisted, sounding a little breathless.

He opened the door to Trista’s room and carried the milk inside, only to find his daughter sleeping soundly, a big, yellow-haired rag doll clutched in her arms.

A fond smile touched Jonathan Fortner’s sensual mouth, and he bent to kiss the child lightly on the forehead. Then, after setting the unneeded milk on the bedstand, he motioned for Elisabeth to precede him into the hallway.

The fact that she’d originally entered the Twilight Zone from that door was not lost on Elisabeth. She rushed eagerly through it, certain she’d awaken on the other side in her own bed.

Instead, she found herself in a hallway that was familiar and yet startlingly different from the one she knew. There was a painted china lamp burning on a table, and grim photographs stuck out from the walls, their wire hangers visible. The patterned runner on the floor was one Elisabeth had never seen before.

“It must have been the beef casserole,” she said.

Dr. Fortner gave her a look and propelled her down the hall to the room next to the one she was supposed to be sleeping in. “Get some rest, Miss McCartney. And remember—if you get up and start wandering around, I’ll hear you.”

“And do what?” Elisabeth said as she pushed open the door and stepped into a shadowy room. In the real world, it would be the one she and Rue had always shared during their visits.

“And lock you in the pantry for the rest of the night,” he replied flatly.

Even though the room was almost totally dark, Elisabeth knew the doctor wasn’t kidding. He would lock her in the pantry, like a prisoner. But then, all of this was only happening in her imagination anyway.

He pulled back some covers on a bed and guided her into it, and Elisabeth went without a struggle, pursued by odd and erotic thoughts of him joining her. None of this was like her at all; Ian had always complained that she wasn’t passionate enough. She decided to simply close her eyes and put the whole crazy episode out of her mind. In the morning, she would wake up in her own bed.

“Good night,” Dr. Fortner said. The timbre of his voice was rich and deep, and he smelled of rain and horses and pipe tobacco.

Elisabeth felt a deep physical stirring, but she knew nothing was going to come of it because, unfortunately, this wasn’t that kind of dream. “Good night,” she responded in a dutiful tone.

She lay wide awake for a long time, listening. Somewhere in the room, a clock was ticking, and rain pattered against the window. She heard a door open and close, and she imagined Dr. Fortner taking off his clothes. He’d do it methodically, with a certain rough, masculine grace.

Elisabeth closed her eyes firmly, but the intriguing images remained and her body began to throb. “Good grief, woman,” she muttered, “this is a dream. Do you realize what Rue will say when she hears about this—and I know you’ll be fool enough to tell her, too—she’ll say, ‘Get a life Bethie. Better yet, get a shrink.’”

She waited for a long time, then crept out of bed, grimacing as she opened the door. Fortunately, it didn’t squeak on its hinges nor did the floorboards creak. Holding her breath, Elisabeth groped her way down the hall in the direction of the main staircase.

So much for your threats, Dr. Fortner, she thought smugly as she hurried through the large parlor and the dining room.

In the kitchen, she stubbed her toe trying to find the matches on the table and cried out in pain before she could stop herself. The fire was out in the stove and the room was cold.

Elisabeth snatched the coat from the peg and pulled it on, cowering in the shadows by the cabinets as she waited for Jonathan Fortner to storm in and follow up on his threat to lock her in the pantry.

When an estimated ten minutes had ticked past and he still hadn’t shown up, Elisabeth came out of hiding, her fingers curved around the broken necklace in the coat’s pocket. Slowly, carefully, she crept up the smaller of the two stairways and into Trista’s room.

There she stood beside the bed for a moment, seeing quite clearly now that her eyes had adjusted again, looking down at the sleeping child. Trista was beautiful and so very much alive. Tears lined Elisabeth’s lashes as she thought of all this little girl would miss by dying young.

She bent and kissed Trista’s pale forehead, then crossed the room to the other door, the one she’d unwittingly stumbled through hours before. Eyes closed tightly, fingers clutching the necklace, she turned the knob and stepped over the threshold.

For almost a full minute she just stood there in the hallway, trembling, afraid to open her eyes. It was the feel of plush carpeting under her bare feet that finally alerted her to the fact that the dream was over and she was back in the real world.

Elisabeth began to sob softly for joy and relief. And maybe because she missed a man who didn’t exist. When she’d regained some of her composure, she opened the door of her own room, stepped inside and flipped the switch. Light flooded the chamber, revealing the four-poster, the fireplace, the vanity, the Queen Anne chairs.

Suddenly, Elisabeth was desperately tired. She switched off the lights, stumbled to the bed and fell onto it face first.

When she awakened, the room was flooded with sunlight and her nose itched. Elisabeth sat up, pushing back her hair with one hand and trying to focus her eyes.

The storm was over, and she smiled. Maybe she’d take a long walk after breakfast and clear her head. That crazy dream she’d had the night before had left her with a sort of emotional hangover, and she needed fresh air.

She was passing the vanity table on her way to the bathroom when her image in the mirror stopped her where she stood. Shock washed over her as she stared, her eyes enormous, her mouth wide open.

She was wearing a man’s suitcoat.

Her knees began to quiver and for a moment, she thought she’d be sick right where she stood. She collapsed onto the vanity bench and covered her face with both hands, peeking through her fingers at her reflection.

“It wasn’t a dream,” she whispered, hardly able to believe the words. She ran one hand down the rough woolen sleeve of the old-fashioned coat. “I was really there.”

For a moment, the room dipped and swayed, and Elisabeth was sure she was going to faint. She pushed the bench back from the table and bent to put her head between her knees. “Don’t swoon, Beth,” she lectured herself. “There’s a perfectly logical explanation for this. Okay, it beats the hell out of me what it could be, but there is an answer!”

Once she was sure she wasn’t going to pass out, Elisabeth sat up again and drew measured breaths until she had achieved a reasonable sense of calm. She stared at her pale face in the mirror and at her startled blue eyes. But mostly she stared at Dr. Jonathan Fortner’s coat.

She put her hand into the right pocket and found the necklace. Slowly lifting it out, she spread it gently on the vanity table. The necklace was broken near the catch, but the pendant was unharmed.

Elisabeth pulled in a deep breath, let it out slowly. Then, calmly, she stood up, removed Dr. Fortner’s coat and proceeded into the bathroom.

During her shower and shampoo, she almost succeeded in convincing herself that she’d imagined the suitcoat as well as the broken necklace. But when she came out, wrapped in a towel, they were where she’d left them, silent proof that something very strange had happened to her.

With a lift of her chin, Elisabeth dressed in gray corduroy slacks and a raspberry sweater, then carefully blew her hair dry and styled it. She took the necklace with her when she went out of the room, but left the suitcoat behind.

In the hallway, her eyes locked on the door across the hall. She tried the knob, but it was rusted in place, and the plastic seal that surrounded the passage was unbroken.

“Trista?” she whispered.

There was no answer.

Elisabeth went slowly down the back staircase, recalling that there had been two of them in her “dream.” She ate cereal, coffee and fruit while staring at the kitchen table, fetched her purse, got into her car and drove slowly along the puddled driveway toward the main road.

The house still needed cleaning, but Elisabeth’s priorities had been altered slightly. Before she did anything else, she meant to have the necklace repaired.

Chapter Three

“It should be ready by Friday morning,” said the clerk in Pine River’s one and only jewelry store, dropping Aunt Verity’s necklace into a small brown envelope.

Elisabeth felt oddly deflated. She didn’t know what was happening to her, but she suspected that the antique pendant was at the core of things, given Aunt Verity’s stories, and she didn’t want to let it out of her sight. “Thank you,” she said with a sigh, and left the shop.

After doing a little more shopping at the supermarket, she drove staunchly back to the house, changed into old clothes, covered her hair with a bandanna and set to work dusting and sweeping and scrubbing.

She’d finished the large parlor and was starting on the dining room when the doorbell sounded. Elisabeth straightened her bandanna and smoothed her palms down the front of her frayed flannel shirt, then answered the rather peremptory summons.

Ian was standing on the porch, looking dapper in his three-piece business suit. His eyes assessed Elisabeth’s work clothes with a patronizing expression that made her want to slap him.

Ironic as it was, he seemed to have no texture, no reality. It was as though he were the other-worldly being, not Jonathan.

“Hello, Bethie,” he said.

She made no move to invite him in. “What do you want?” she asked bluntly. Her ex-husband was handsome, with his glossy chestnut hair and dark blue eyes, but Elisabeth had no illusions where he was concerned. To think she’d once believed he was an idealist!

He patted the expensive briefcase he carried under one arm. “Papers to sign,” he said with a guileless lift of his eyebrows. “No big deal.”

Reluctantly, Elisabeth stepped back out of the doorway. Since she didn’t feel up to a sparring match with Ian, she didn’t state the obvious: if Ian had left his very profitable seminars and taping sessions to deliver these papers personally, they were, indeed, a “big deal.”

She saw his gaze sweep over the valuable antique furnishings as he stepped into the main parlor. Had his brain been an adding machine, it would have been spitting out paper tape.

“Your father called,” he said, perching in a leather wing chair near the fireplace. “He’s been worried about you.”

Elisabeth kept her distance, standing with her arms folded. “I know. I talked to him.”

Ian sighed and opened the briefcase on his lap, taking out a sheaf of papers. “I’m concerned about your inheritance, Bethie,—”

“I’ll just bet you are,” she interjected, holding her shoulders a little straighter.

He gave her a look of indulgent reprimand. “I have no intention of trying to take anything from you,” he told her, shaking a verbal finger in her face. “It’s just that I have questions about your ability to manage your share of the estate.” He looked around again at the paintings, the substantial furniture and the costly knickknacks. “I don’t think you realize what a bonanza you have here. You could easily be taken in.”

“And your suggestion is…?” Elisabeth prompted dryly.

“That you allow my accountant to run an audit and give you some advice on how to manage—”

“Put the papers back in your briefcase, Ian. Neither Rue nor I want to sell this place or anything that’s in it. Besides that, Rue’s father had everything appraised soon after the will was read.”

Ian’s chiseled face was flushed. Clearly he was annoyed that he’d taken time away from his motivational company to visit his hopelessly old-fashioned ex-wife. “Elisabeth, you can’t be serious about keeping this cavernous, drafty old house. Why, you could live anywhere in the world on your share of the take….”

Elisabeth walked to the front door and opened it, and Ian followed, somewhat unwillingly. Not for one moment did she believe the man had ever had her best interests at heart—he’d been planning to file for changes in the divorce agreement and get a piece of what he called “the take.”

“Goodbye,” she said.

“I’m getting married next Saturday,” he replied, almost smugly, as he swept through the doorway.

“Congratulations,” Elisabeth answered. “You’ll understand if I don’t send a sterling-silver pickle dish?” With that, she shut the door firmly and leaned against it, her arms folded.

Her throat thickened as she remembered her own wedding, right here in this marvelous old house, nearly a decade before. There had been flowers, old-fashioned dresses and organ music. Somehow, she’d missed the glaring fact that Ian didn’t fit into the picture, with his supersophistication and jet-set values.

In retrospect, she saw that Ian had always been emotionally unavailable, just like her father, and she’d seen his cool distance as a challenge, something to surmount with her love.

After a few years, she’d realized her mistake—Ian didn’t want children or a real home the way she did, and he cared far more about money than the ideals he touted in his lectures and books. Furthermore, there would be no breaching the emotional wall he’d built around his soul.

Elisabeth had quietly returned to teaching school, biding her time and saving her money until she’d built up the courage to file for a divorce and move out of Ian’s luxury condo in Seattle.

With a sigh, she thrust herself away from the door and went back to her cleaning. The road to emotional maturity had been a painful, rocky one for her, but she’d learned who she was and what she wanted. To her way of thinking, that put her way out in front of the crowd.

Carefully, she removed Dresden figurines and Haviland plates from the big china closet in the dining room. As she worked, Elisabeth cataloged the qualities she would look for in a second husband. She wanted a gentle man, but he had to be strong, too. Tall, maybe, with dark hair and broad shoulders—

Elisabeth realized she was describing Jonathan Fortner and put down the stack of dessert plates she’d been about to carry to the kitchen for washing. Her hands were trembling.

He’s not real, she reminded herself firmly. But another part of her mind argued that he was. She had his suitcoat to prove it.

Didn’t she?

What with all the things that had been happening to her since her return to Pine River, Elisabeth was beginning to wonder if she really knew what was real and what wasn’t. She hurried up the back stairs and along the hallway to her bedroom, ignoring the sealed doorway in the outside wall, and marched straight to the armoire.

After opening one heavy door, she reached inside and pulled out the coat, pressing it to her face with both hands. It still smelled of Jonathan, and the mingled scents filled Elisabeth with a bittersweet yearning to be near him.

Which was downright silly, she decided, since the man obviously lived in some other time—or some other universe. She would probably never see him again.

Sadly, she put the jacket back on its hanger and returned it to the wardrobe.

By Friday morning, Elisabeth had almost convinced herself that she had dreamed up Dr. Fortner and his daughter. Probably, she reasoned, she’d felt some deep, subconscious sympathy for them, learning that they’d both died right there in Aunt Verity’s house. Her ideal man had no doubt been woven from the dreams, hopes and desperate needs secreted deep inside her, where a man as shallow as Ian could never venture.

As for the suitcoat, well, that had probably belonged to Verity’s long-dead husband. No doubt, she had walked in her sleep that night and found the jacket in one of the trunks in the attic. But if that was true, why was the garment clean and unfrayed? Why didn’t it smell of mothballs or mildew?

Elisabeth shook off the disturbing questions as she parked her car in front of Carlton Jewelry, but another quandary immediately took its place. Why was she almost desperately anxious to have Aunt Verity’s necklace back in her possession again? Granted, it was very old and probably valuable, but she had never been much for bangles and beads, and money hardly mattered to her at all.

She was inordinately relieved when the pendant was poured from its brown envelope into the palm of her hand, fully restored to its former glory. She closed her fingers around it and shut her eyes for a second, and immediately, Jonathan’s face filled her mind.

“Ms. McCartney?” the clerk asked, sounding concerned.

Elisabeth remembered herself, opened her eyes and got out her wallet to pay the bill.

When she arrived home an hour later with the makings for spaghetti, garlic bread and green salad, the moving company was there with her belongings. The two men carried in her books, tape collection, stereo, microwave oven, TV sets and VCR and boxes of seasonal clothes and shoes.

Elisabeth paid the movers extra to connect her VCR and set up the stereo, and made them tuna sandwiches and vegetable soup for lunch. When they were gone, she put on a Mozart tape and let the music swirl around her while she did up the lunch dishes and put away some of her things.

Knowing it would probably take hours or even days to find places for everything, Elisabeth stored her seasonal clothes in the small parlor and set about making her special spaghetti sauce.

Seeing her practical friend Janet again would surely put to rest these crazy fancies she was having, once and for all.

As promised, Janet arrived just when the sauce was ready to be poured over the pasta and served. She had straight reddish-brown hair that just brushed her shoulders and large hazel eyes, and she was dressed in a fashionable gray-and-white, pin-striped suit.

Elisabeth met her friend on the porch with a hug. “It’s so good to see you.”

Janet’s expression was troubled as she studied Elisabeth. “You’re pale, and I swear you’ve lost weight,” she fretted.

Elisabeth grinned. “I’m fine,” she said pointedly, bending to grasp the handle of the small suitcase Janet had set down moments before. “I hope you’re hungry, because the sauce is at its peak.”

After putting Janet’s things in an upstairs bedroom, the two women returned to the kitchen. There they consumed spaghetti and salad at the small table in the breakfast nook, while an April sunset settled over the landscape.

From the first, Elisabeth wanted to confide in her friend, to show her the suitcoat and tell her all about her strange experience a few nights before, but somehow, she couldn’t find the courage. They talked about Janet’s new boyfriend and Rue’s possible whereabouts instead.

After the dishes were done, Janet brought a video tape from her room and popped it into the VCR, while Elisabeth built a fire on the parlor hearth, using seasoned apple wood she’d found in the shed out back. An avid collector of black-and-white classics, Janet didn’t rent movies, she bought them.

“What’s tonight’s feature?” Elisabeth asked, curling up at one end of the settee, while Janet sat opposite her, a bowl of the salty chips they both loved between them.

Janet gave a little shudder and smiled. “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” she replied. “Fitting, huh? I mean, since this house is probably haunted.”

Elisabeth practically choked on the chip she’d just swallowed. “Haunted? Janet, that is really silly.” The FBI warning was flickering on the television screen, silently ominous.

Her friend shrugged. “Maybe so, but a funny feeling came over me when I walked in here. It happened before, too, when I came to your wedding.”

“That was a sense of impending doom, not anything supernatural,” Elisabeth said.

Janet laughed. “You’re probably right.”

As they watched the absorbing movie, Elisabeth fiddled with the necklace and wondered if she wouldn’t just turn around one day, like Mrs. Muir with her ghostly captain, and see Jonathan Fortner standing behind her.

The idea gave her a delicious, shivery sensation, totally unrelated to fear.

After the show was over and the chips were gone, Elisabeth and Janet had herbal tea in the kitchen and gossiped. When Elisabeth mentioned Ian’s visit and his plans to remarry, Janet’s happy grin faded.

“The sleaseball. How do you feel about this, Beth? Are you sad?”

Elisabeth reached across the table to touch her friend’s hand. “If I am, it’s only because the marriage I thought I was going to have never materialized. Like so many women, I created a fantasy world out of my own needs and desires, and when it collapsed, I was hurt. But I’m okay now, Janet, and I want you to stop worrying about me.”

Janet looked at Elisabeth for a long moment and then nodded. “All right, I’ll try. But I’d feel better if you’d come back to Seattle.”

Elisabeth pushed back her chair and carried her empty cup and Janet’s to the sink. “I played a part for so many years,” she said with a sigh. “Now I need solitude to sort things out.” She turned to face her friend. “Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Janet answered, albeit reluctantly, getting out of her chair.

Elisabeth turned off the downstairs lights and started up the rear stairway, which was illuminated by the glow of the moon flooding in from a fanlight on the second floor. The urge to tell Janet about Jonathan was nearly overwhelming, but she kept the story to herself. There was no way practical, ducks-in-a-row Janet was going to understand.

Reaching her room, Elisabeth called out a good-night to her friend and closed the door. Everything looked so normal and ordinary and real—the four-poster, the vanity, the Queen Anne chairs, the fireplace.

She went to the armoire, opened it and ferreted out the suitcoat that was at once her comfort and her torment. She held the garment tightly, her face pressed to the fabric. The scent of Jonathan filled her spirit as well as her nostrils.

If she told Janet the incredible story and then showed her the coat—

Elisabeth stopped in midthought and shook her head. Janet would never believe she’d brought the jacket back from another era. Most of the time, Elisabeth didn’t believe that herself. And yet the coat was real and her memories were so vivid, so piquant.

After a long time, Elisabeth put the suitcoat back in its place and exchanged her blouse and black corduroy slacks for another football jersey. Her fingers strayed to the pendant she took off only to shower.

“Jonathan,” she said softly, and just saying his name was a sweet relief, like taking a breath of fresh air after being closed up in a stuffy house.

Elisabeth performed the usual ablutions, then switched off her lamp and crawled into bed. Ever since that morning when she’d recovered the necklace, a current of excitement had coursed just beneath the surface of her thoughts and feelings. She ached for the magic to take her back to that dream place, even though she was afraid to go there.

It didn’t happen.

Elisabeth awakened the next morning to the sound of her clock radio. She put the pendant on the dresser, stripped off her jersey and took a long, hot shower. When she’d dressed in pink slacks and a rose-colored sweater, she hurried downstairs to find Janet in the kitchen, sipping coffee.

Janet was wearing shorts, sneakers and a hooded sweatshirt, and it was clear that she’d already been out for her customary run. She smiled. “Good morning.”

“Don’t speak to me until I’ve had a jolt of caffeine,” Elisabeth replied with pretended indignation.

Her friend laughed. “I saw a notice for a craft show at the fairgrounds,” she said as Elisabeth poured coffee. “Sounds like fun.”

Elisabeth only shrugged. She was busy sipping.

“We could have lunch afterward.”

“Fine,” Elisabeth said. “Fine.” She was almost her normal self by the time they’d had breakfast and set out for the fairgrounds in Elisabeth’s car.

Blossom petals littered the road like pinkish-white snow, and Janet sighed. “I can see why you like the country,” she said. “It has a certain serenity.”

Elisabeth smiled, waving at Miss Cecily, who was standing at her mailbox. Miss Cecily waved back. “You wouldn’t last a week,” Elisabeth said with friendly contempt. “Not enough action.”

Janet leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “I suppose you’re right,” she conceded dreamily. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the moment.”

They spent happy hours at the craft show, then dined on Vietnamese food from one of the many concession booths. It was when they paused in front of a quilting display that Elisabeth was forcibly reminded of the Jonathan episode.

The slender, dark-haired woman behind the plankboard counter stared at her necklace with rounded eyes and actually retreated a step, as though she thought it would zap her with an invisible ray. “Where did you get that?” she breathed.

Janet’s brow crinkled as she frowned in bewilderment, but she just looked on in silence.

Elisabeth’s heart was beating unaccountably fast, and she felt defensive, like a child caught stealing. “The necklace?” At the woman’s nervous nod, she went on. “I inherited it from my aunt. Why?”

The woman was beginning to regain her composure. She smiled anxiously, but came no closer to the front of the booth. “Your aunt wouldn’t be Verity Claridge?”

A finger of ice traced the length of Elisabeth’s backbone. “Yes.”

Expressive brown eyes linked with Elisabeth’s blue-green ones. “Be careful,” the dark-haired woman said.

Elisabeth had dozens of questions, but she sensed Janet’s discomfort and didn’t want to make the situation worse.

“What was that all about?” Janet asked when she and Elisabeth were in the car again, their various purchases loaded into the back. “I thought that woman was going to faint.”

Chastity Pringle. Elisabeth hadn’t made an effort to remember the name she’d read on the woman’s laminated badge; she’d known it would still burn bright in her mind after nine minutes or nine decades. Whoever Ms. Pringle was, she knew Aunt Verity’s necklace was no ordinary piece of jewelry, and Elisabeth meant to find out the whole truth about it.

“Elisabeth?”

She jumped slightly. “Hmm?”

“Didn’t you think it was weird the way that woman acted?”

Elisabeth was navigating the early-afternoon traffic, which was never all that heavy in Pine River. “The world is full of weird people,” she answered.

Having gotten the concession she wanted, Janet turned her mind to the afternoon’s entertainment. She and Elisabeth rented a stack of movies at the convenience store, put in an order for a pizza to be delivered later and returned to the house.

By the time breakfast was over on Sunday morning, Janet was getting restless. When noon came, she loaded up her things, said goodbye and hastened back to the city, where her boyfriend and her job awaited.

The moment Janet’s car turned onto the highway, Elisabeth dashed to the kitchen and began digging through drawers. Finding a battered phone book, she flipped to the P’s. There was a Paul Pringle listed, but no Chastity.

After taking a deep breath, Elisabeth called the man and asked if he had a relative by the name of Chastity. He barked that nobody in his family would be fool enough to give an innocent little girl a name like that and hung up.

Elisabeth got her purse and drove back to the fairgrounds. The quilting booth was manned by a chunky, gray-haired grandmother this time, and sunlight was reflected in the rhinestone-trimmed frames of her glasses as she smiled at Elisabeth.

“Chastity Pringle? Seems like a body couldn’t forget a name like that one, but it appears as if I have, because it sure doesn’t ring a bell with me. If you’ll give me your phone number, I’ll have Wynne Singleton call you. She coordinated all of us, and she’d know where to find this woman you’re looking for.”

“Thank you,” Elisabeth said, scrawling the name and phone number on the back of a receipt from the cash machine at her Seattle bank.

Back at home, Elisabeth changed into old clothes again, but this time she tackled the yard, since the house was in good shape. She found an old lawn mower in the shed and fired it up, after making a run to the service station for gas, and spent a productive afternoon mowing the huge yard.

When that was done, she weeded the flower beds. At sunset, weariness and hunger overcame her and she went inside.

The little red light on the answering machine she’d hooked up to Aunt Verity’s old phone in the hallway was blinking. She pushed the button and held her breath when she heard Rue’s voice.

“Hi, Cousin, sorry I missed you. Unless you get back to me within the next ten minutes, I’ll be gone again. Wish I could be there with you, but I’ve got another assignment. Talk to you soon. Bye.”

Hastily, Elisabeth dialed Rue’s number, but the prescribed ten minutes had apparently passed. Rue’s machine picked up, and Elisabeth didn’t bother to leave a message. She felt like crying as she went wearily up the stairs to strip off her dirty jeans and T-shirt and take a bath.

When she came downstairs again, she heated a piece of leftover pizza in the microwave and sat down for a solitary supper. Beyond the breakfast nook windows, the sky had a sullen, heavy look to it. Elisabeth hoped there wouldn’t be another storm.

She ate, rinsed her dishes and went upstairs to bed, bringing along a candle and matches in case the power were to go out. Stretched out in bed, her body aching with exhaustion from the afternoon’s work, Elisabeth thoroughly expected to fall into a fathomless sleep.

Instead, she was wide awake. She tossed from her left side to her right, from her stomach to her back. Finally, she got up, shoved her feet into her slippers and reached for her bathrobe.

She made herself a cup her herbal tea downstairs, then settled at the desk in her room, reaching for a few sheets of Aunt Verity’s vellum writing paper and a pen.

“Dear Rue,” she wrote. And then she poured out the whole experience of meeting Jonathan and Trista, starting with the first time she’d heard Trista’s piano. She put in every detail of the story, including the strange attraction she’d felt for Jonathan, ending with the fact that she’d awakened the next morning to find herself wearing his coat.

She spent several hours going over the letter, rewriting parts of it, making it as accurate an account of her experience as she possibly could. Then she folded the missive, tucked it into an envelope, scrawled Rue’s name and address and applied a stamp.

In the morning, she would put it in the mailbox down by the road, pull up the little metal flag and let the chips fall where they may. Rue was the best friend Elisabeth had, but she was also a pragmatic newswoman. She was just as likely to suggest professional help as Elisabeth’s father would be. Still, Elisabeth felt she had to tell somebody what was going on or she was going to burst.

She was just coming upstairs, having carried the letter down and set it in the middle of the kitchen table so she wouldn’t forget to mail it the next morning, when she heard the giggles and saw the glow of light on the hallway floor.

Elisabeth stopped, her hand on the necklace, her heart racing with scary exhilaration. They were back, Jonathan and Trista —she had only to open that door and step over the threshold.

She went to the portal and put her ear against the wood, smiling as Trista’s voice chimed, “And then I said to him, Zeek Filbin, if you pull my hair again, I’ll send my papa over to take your tonsils out!”

Elisabeth’s hand froze on the doorknob when another little girl responded with a burst of laughter and, “Zeek Filbin needed his wagon fixed, and you did it right and proper.” Vera, she thought. Trista’s best friend. How would the child explain it if Elisabeth simply walked into the room, appearing from out of nowhere?

She knew she couldn’t do that, and yet she felt a longing for that world and for the presence of those people that went beyond curiosity or even nostalgia.

The low, rich sound of Jonathan’s voice brought her eyes flying open. “Trista, you and Vera should have been asleep hours ago. Now settle down.”

There was more giggling, but then the sound faded and the light gleaming beneath the door dimmed until the darkness had swallowed it completely. Elisabeth had missed her chance to step over the threshold into Jonathan’s world, and the knowledge left her feeling oddly bereft. She went to bed and slept soundly, awakening to the jangle of the telephone early the next morning.

Since the device was sitting on the vanity table on the other side of the room, Elisabeth was forced to get out of bed and stumble across the rug to snatch up the receiver.

“Yes?” she managed sleepily.

“Is this Elisabeth McCartney?”

Something about the female voice brought her fully awake. “Yes.”

“My name is Wynne Singleton, and I’m president of the Pine River County Quilting Society. One of our members told me you were anxious to get in touch with Ms. Pringle.”

Elisabeth sat up very straight and waited silently.

“I can give you her address and telephone number, dear,” Mrs. Singleton said pleasantly, “but I’m afraid it won’t do you much good. She and her husband left just this morning on an extended business trip.”

Disappointed, Elisabeth nonetheless wrote down the number and street address—Chastity Pringle apparently lived in the neighboring town of Cotton Creek—and thanked the caller for her help.

After she hung up, Elisabeth dressed in a cotton skirt and matching top, even though the sky was still threatening rain, and made herself a poached egg and a piece of wheat toast for breakfast.

When she’d eaten, she got into her car and drove to town. If Rue were here, she thought, she’d go to the newspaper office and to the library to see what facts she could gather pertaining to Aunt Verity’s house in general and Jonathan and Trista Fortner in particular.

Only it was early and neither establishment was open yet. Undaunted, Elisabeth bought a bouquet of simple flowers at the supermarket and went on to the well-kept, fenced graveyard at the edge of town.

She left the flowers on Aunt Verity’s grave and then began reading the names carved into the tilting, discolored stones in the oldest part of the cemetery. Jonathan and Trista were buried side by side, their graves surrounded by a low iron fence.

Carefully, Elisabeth opened the gate and stepped through it, kneeling to push away the spring grass that nearly covered the aging stones. “Jonathan Stevens Fortner,” read the chiseled words. “Born August 5, 1856. Perished June 1892.”

“What day?” Elisabeth whispered, turning to Trista’s grave. Like her father’s, the little girl’s headstone bore only her name, the date of her birth and the sad inscription, “Perished June 1892.”

There were tears in Elisabeth’s eyes as she got to her feet again and left the cemetery.

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