Dream Lake (Friday Harbor #3)(6)

And apparently he had become invisible again.

Dark-haired, wearing a flight jacket … Is that what I look like? What else had Alex seen? Do I look like someone you know? Maybe someone in an old photograph? Help me find out who I am.

Thrumming with frustration, the ghost watched Alex install the rest of the door casings. Each strike of the hammer reverberated through the air. He hovered near Alex, the connection between them fragile but palpable. He had a sense of the slow corrosion of a soul that had never stood a chance, never enough caring, never enough hope or kindness or any of the things necessary to build a decent foundation for a human being. Although Alex was certainly not someone he would have chosen to be attached to—put more plainly, to haunt—the ghost didn’t see an alternative.

Alex organized Sam’s tools and picked up the power drill that needed to be repaired. As he left, the ghost accompanied him to the threshold of the front door.

Alex walked out to the front porch. The ghost hesitated. On impulse, he moved forward. This time there was no disintegration, no fragmenting of consciousness. Instead, he was able to follow Alex.

Outside.

Walking to the drive where his car was parked, Alex felt an itchy, stinging impatience that had no identifiable source. His senses were uncomfortably heightened, the sun too strong for his eyes. The smell of cut grass and violets was nauseatingly sweet in his nostrils. Letting his gaze drop to the path in front of him, he noticed something odd. By some trick of the light, two shadows extended from his feet. Motionless, he watched the two silhouettes on the path. Was it possible that one of them had moved slightly while the other stayed still?

He forced himself to walk. Giving in to delusions, talking aloud to apparitions, was going to land his ass in lockdown rehab. Darcy would have seized on any excuse to shut him away. So would his brothers, for that matter.

Deliberately he turned his mind to the prospect of going home. Darcy had left to go apartment-hunting in Seattle, which meant the house was empty. He would be able to get loaded in peace. It sounded good. So good, in fact, that the car keys shook a little in his hand.

As Alex got into the BMW, the shadow slipped inside with him, and settled across the passenger seat like an empty pillowcase. And together they went home.

Three

This was the irony: after years of longing to escape the house at Rainshadow Road, a few weeks spent in Alex Nolan’s company had been enough to make the ghost want to go back. But there was only so far that the ghost could drift before he encountered the parameters of yet another invisible prison. He was stuck with Alex. He could occupy another room, or glide several yards away, but that was it. When Alex left his ultramodern house at Roche Harbor, the ghost found himself being towed along like a balloon on a string … or more aptly, a helpless fish caught on the end of a line.

Women often approached him, drawn by the dark glamour of his good looks. But Alex was a distant and unsentimental man. His sexual needs were occasionally satisfied by Darcy, who was now living in Seattle but sometimes came to visit even though they had agreed to a legal separation as a prelude to divorce. They had conversations in which words nicked like razor blades, followed by sex, the one form of connection they had ever managed. Darcy had told Alex that all the things that made him a terrible husband were also the things that made him great in bed. Whenever they started going at it, the ghost prudently removed himself to the farthest room in the house and tried to ignore Darcy’s ecstatic screams.

Darcy was greyhound-lean and beautiful, her hair black and straight. She radiated a diamond-hard confidence that would have made it impossible to pity her, except that the ghost had noticed signs of vulnerability … feathery sleepless lines around her mouth and eyes, brittle fractures in her laughter, all caused from the knowledge that her marriage had become less than the sum of its parts.

The ghost accompanied Alex around his on-spec residential development in Roche Harbor—something the ghost had heard him refer to as a pocket neighborhood. A grouping of well-tended houses, arranged around a green lawn commons and a cluster of mailboxes. People didn’t necessarily like Alex, but they respected his work. He was known for running a tight operation and finishing a project on schedule, even in a place where subcontractors tended to work on island time.

It was obvious to everyone on the island, however, that Alex drank too much and slept too little, and eventually it was all going to catch up with him. Before long his health would deteriorate just like his marriage. The ghost fervently hoped that he wasn’t going to have to watch the erosion of this man’s life.

Trapped in Alex’s sphere, the ghost was impatient to visit Rainshadow Road, where big changes were happening to the rest of the Nolan family.

A few days after the ghost had left Rainshadow Road, the phone had rung at an unusually late hour. The ghost, who never slept, had gone into Alex’s room as the bedside lamp was turned on.

Rubbing his eyes, Alex had said in a sleep-thickened tone, “Sam. What is it?”

As Alex listened, his expression hadn’t changed, but his face went skull-white. He had to swallow twice before asking, “Are they sure?”

As the conversation had continued, the ghost gathered that the Nolans’ sister, Victoria, had been involved in a car wreck. She had died on the scene. Since Victoria had never married, nor had she ever revealed the father of her child, her six-year-old daughter, Holly, had just been orphaned.

Alex had hung up the phone and stared blindly at the bare wall, his eyes dry.