Dream Lake (Friday Harbor #3)(2)

“And leave you here all alone?”

“I won’t cause any damage.”

The woman snorted. “I’m not worried about the house, Sam.”

“I’ve got my cell phone,” he said, patting his back pocket. “I’ll call if there’s a problem.” The smile lines at the corners of his eyes deepened. “You can come rescue me.”

She let out a dramatic sigh. “What exactly do you think you’re going to find in this wreckage?”

His gaze had already left hers, his attention recaptured by his surroundings. “A home, maybe.”

“This place was a home once,” she said. “But I can’t imagine it could ever be one again.”

The ghost was relieved when the woman left.

Directing the flashlight in slow arcs, Sam began to explore in earnest, while the ghost followed him room by room. Dust lay over fireplace mantels and broken furniture like gauze veils.

Seeing a torn section of shag carpeting, Sam lowered to his heels, pulled at the rug, and shone the light on the hardwood flooring beneath. “Mahogany?” he murmured, examining the dark, gluey surface. “Oak?”

Black walnut, the ghost thought, looking over his shoulder. Another discovery … he knew about flooring, how to sand and hand-scrape and tack-clean it, how to apply stain with a wad of wool fleece.

They went to the kitchen, with its alcove designed for a cast-iron stove, a few scales of broken tiles still clinging to the walls. Sam directed the beam of light to the high trussed ceilings, the cabinets hanging askew. He focused on an abandoned bird’s nest, let his gaze fall to the ancient splatters of droppings beneath, and shook his head. “I must be crazy,” he muttered.

Sam left the kitchen and went to the staircase, pausing to rub his thumb over the balustrade. A streak of scarred wood shone ruddily through the grime. Placing his feet carefully to avoid perforations of rot on the steps, he made his way to the second floor. At intervals he made a face and let out a puff of breath, as if at some noxious odor. “She’s right,” he said ruefully, as he reached the second-floor landing. “This place is nothing but a teardown.”

That sent a jolt of worry through the ghost. What would happen to him if someone razed the house to the ground? It might extinguish him for good. The ghost couldn’t conceive that he had been trapped alone here only to be snuffed out for no apparent reason. He circled around Sam, studying him, wanting to communicate but afraid it might send the man screaming from the place.

Sam walked right through him and stopped at the window overlooking the front drive. Ancient grime coated the glass, blunting the daylight in soft gloom. A sigh escaped him. “You’ve been waiting a long time, haven’t you?” Sam asked quietly.

The question startled the ghost. But as Sam continued, the ghost realized he was talking to the house. “I bet you were something to see, a hundred years ago. It would be a shame not to give you a chance. But damn, you’re going to take some serious cash. And it’s going to take just about everything I’ve got to get the vineyard going. Hell, I don’t know …”

As the ghost accompanied Sam through the dusty rooms, he sensed the man’s growing attachment to the ramshackle house, his desire to make it whole and beautiful again. Only an idealist or a fool, Sam figured aloud, would take on such a project. The ghost agreed.

Eventually Sam heard the woman’s car horn, and he went outside. The ghost tried to accompany him, but he felt the same dizzying, shattering, flying-apart sensation that always happened when he tried to leave. He went to watch from a broken window as Sam opened the car’s passenger door.

Pausing for a last glance, Sam contemplated the house slumped in the meadow, its rickety lines softened by swaths of arrowgrass and clustered pickleweed, and the bristled tangles of chairmaker’s rush. The flat blue of False Bay retreated in the distance, shimmers of tidepools beginning at the edge of fecund brown silt.

Sam gave a short nod, as if he’d decided on his course.

And the ghost made yet another discovery … he was capable of hope.

Before Sam made an offer for the property, he brought someone else to look at it—a man who looked to be about his age, thirty or thereabouts. Maybe a little younger. His gaze was cold with a cynicism that should have taken lifetimes to acquire.

They had to be brothers—they had the same heavy brown-black hair and wide mouth, the same strapping build. But whereas Sam’s eyes were tropical blue, his brother’s were the color of glacial ice. His face was expressionless, except for the bitter set of his mouth within deeply carved brackets. And in contrast to Sam’s roughcast good looks, the other man possessed a near prodigal handsomeness, his features blade-like and perfect. This was a man who liked to dress well and live well, who shelled out for expensive haircuts and foreign-made shoes.

The incongruous note in all that impeccable grooming was the fact that the man’s hands were work-roughened and capable. The ghost had seen hands like that before … maybe his own? … He looked down at his invisible self, wishing for a shape, a form. A voice. Why was he here with these two men, able only to observe, never to speak or interact? What was he supposed to learn?

In fewer than ten minutes, the ghost perceived that Alex, as Sam called him, knew a hell of a lot about construction. He started by circling the exterior, noting cracks in the substrate, gaps in the trim, the sagging front porch with its decaying joists and beams. Once inside, Alex went to the exact places that the ghost would have shown him to demonstrate the house’s condition—uneven sections of flooring, doors that wouldn’t close properly, blooms of mold where faulty plumbing had leaked.