The Charmers: A Novel(20)

A sudden breeze rustled the curtains, slid softly across my cheek, over my closed lids. A faint scent filtered into the room, sweet as summer grasses and damask roses.

I sat up, still clutching the letter. The scent was gone and the breeze had disappeared as suddenly as it had come.

I looked at the envelope. I knew I could not open it here, in this room. I must take it with me, go somewhere that did not hold memories and secrets, or else leave it for some other time when I felt freer—safer.

Yet curiosity held me captive. I told myself that later I would find out who had written it, who had sealed this envelope, who had decided to spill her secrets. It had to be a woman; this was not the act of a man. Men would have spoken about what they felt, shared their affairs, their indifference, or their love.

I smoothed down the duvet, plumped up the pillows, took the painting and the blue envelope, and walked from the room, closing the door firmly behind me, shutting out, I believed, the spirit-of-place, or the person that inhabited it still.





15

The second attempt on my life, after the car crash, came that night.

My bedroom was, of course, once Jerusha’s. I doubted it looked much different than when she’d occupied it: the same wide bed, certainly big enough for two, with the lavishly rose brocade–padded headboard that still bore a faint dent where her famous red hair had rested against it. No doubt she had bound it up for the night in a chignon, and no doubt with glamorous tendrils curling softly over her forehead and cheeks because, even defeated, Jerusha would have retained the remnants of her spirit and her beauty.

I stuck a tack into the plaster wall and hung the painting next to the bed, which I’d piled with fine, white-cotton pillows, plus a small square one made from satin that I always used under my face to prevent wrinkles. I don’t know yet whether this works but I’d been assured from whomever I bought it that it would. I live in hope.

The night was warm, muggy in fact, hinting of a storm, the faint rumbles of which had echoed all evening long, though the sky remained a clear deep blue. Probably just a storm over the sea somewhere, I’d thought, paying it no heed, until later when I was awakened, I thought, by the clatter of hard rain against the open french doors and the sudden surge of cool air on my body, clad only in my usual short blue satin nightshirt.

I always wear these nightshirts, alone or with someone, in any country hot or cold. Once I make up my mind about something, that is it: a nightshirt, a house, a man. As well as a cat, a dog, and a songbird. All of whom now share this room with me and one of whom, the dog, was growling softly, up and alert, claws digging into my calf through the Italian six-hundred-thread-count sheet. Trust me, the Villa Romantica lacked for nothing, especially if it was expensive. And now I saw it certainly did not lack for men.

I lay stiff as a board, unable to move a finger to save myself as he stepped from my balcony and through those open french doors. I was alone in the house. Panic shivered up and down my suddenly icy spine. Then I remembered young Verity was sleeping in the next room, though Alfred was far away in his own cottage near the entrance, where the gatekeeper had lived with his wife and family in Jerusha’s day.

The cat yowled, leaped off my chest, and fled under the bed. The canary remained silent in its cage, which was draped with a black silk cloth to remind the bird it was in fact nighttime and not singing time. The damn creature would sing at the drop of a hat.

I remained frozen to my spot, but it appeared it was not me the intruder was interested in. I felt his eyes on me though, as he stood by the windows, no doubt checking if I was awake, and which I had already determined it was better not to be. Unless he came at me with a knife or a weapon, in which case I would bloody well fight for my life. But then anger fizzled suddenly out of nowhere, rage, in fact, and I lost my cool. I sprang upright.

“Who the f*ck are you and what are you doing in my house?” I yelled, sending the dog into a frenzy of yaps as it ran under the bed. The cat had already fled, and the canary bird, thinking morning had come early, began to sing. I could have strangled it.

He turned to look at me. I looked back at him. Over six feet tall, a black ski mask hiding his face, wide shoulders under whatever black long-sleeved garment he was wearing, dark sneakers, and a shiny steel gun, which was currently pointed at my chest.

“Jesus,” I mumbled, in a voice so strangled with fear I wondered where it came from. “Take whatever you want. Please. Then just go. I won’t do anything, say anything, I won’t even call the gendarmes, the FBI, anyone.”

He approached the bed and stood over me, the gun still aimed at my chest. I wished I were under the bed with the cat. The cat gave a cautious meow. The intruder put out a hand and touched it gently.

A gentle man with a lethal weapon, I did not know what to make of this though I did know how frightened I was. I could not even think of how to escape, how to get myself off that bed, across the room, and through that door where I could call for help. But call who? No one was here. Of course, there was Verity, no doubt sleeping the sleep of the gods, exhausted by her misadventures, as I was myself. Or at least I had been until my night visitor appeared.

I struggled upward against Jerusha’s padded rose brocade headboard, thinking as I did so that if he shot me here it would ruin that poor woman’s lovely bed. Her history would go with it, there’d maybe be a mention in the tabloids of the “once owned by then-famous-celebrity Jerusha.” Not much of a legacy. I believed she deserved better and I suddenly decided to try to give that to her.