Dream Lake (Friday Harbor #3)(80)

The one thing Zoë couldn’t delude herself about was Emma’s condition, which was going downhill. Recently the home-care nurse, Jeannie, had given her some cognitive tests: word repetition, and drawing clock faces on pieces of paper, and simple coin-counting games. Emma scored significantly lower on the same tests she had taken a month earlier. More distressing was that Emma had lost the awareness of hunger, as well as what constituted a balanced meal. Had Jeannie and Zoë not been there to remind her, she might have gone days without eating, or gotten herself something like corn chips and yellow mustard for breakfast.

It worried Zoë to realize that her grandmother, always so impeccably groomed, no longer seemed to notice or care if her hair had been brushed or her nails had been filed. Justine came at least twice a week to take Emma to the salon or to the movie theater. Alex sometimes kept Emma occupied after dinner while Zoë cleaned the kitchen or took a bath. He played cards with Emma, grinning at her flagrant cheating, and he had even put on music and danced with her while she criticized his foxtrot technique.

“Your foot-turn is too late,” Emma complained. “You’re going to trip me. Where did you learn to dance?”

“I took lessons at a place in Seattle,” Alex said as they crossed the room to the melody of “As Time Goes By.”

“You should get your money back.”

“They worked miracles,” he told her. “Before the lessons, the way I danced looked like a pantomime of washing my car.”

“How long did you go?” Emma asked dubiously.

“It was an emergency weekend crash course. My fiancée wanted me to be able to dance at our wedding.”

“When did you get married?” Emma demanded testily. “No one told me about that.”

Although he’d talked to her about his marriage to Darcy, Alex realized she had forgotten. He said in a matter-of-fact tone, “It’s over now. We’re divorced.”

“Well, that was fast.”

“Not fast enough,” he said ruefully.

“You should marry my Zoë. She can cook.”

“I’m not marrying again,” he said. “I was terrible at it.”

“Practice makes perfect,” she told him.

That night, as Alex stayed at the cottage and held Zoë while she slept, he finally figured out what the sweetly painful chest-clutching sensation was, the one that had plagued him since he’d first met her. It was happiness. And it made him exquisitely uncomfortable. He’d heard about certain addictive substances that if you did it once, you’d already done it more than once. That was the nature of his attraction to Zoë—instant, full-blown, no hope of recovery.

Three days after Sam and Lucy’s breakup, Alex stopped by Rainshadow Road to pick up some tools he’d left there. A delivery truck followed him along the drive, and parked in front. Two guys proceeded to unload a huge flat crate. “Someone’s gotta sign for this,” one of them told Alex as they carried the crate up the front steps. “It’s insured up the ass.”

“What is it?”

“Stained-glass window.”

From Lucy, Alex surmised. Sam had told him that Lucy had been making a window for the front of the house. The one that Tom Findlay had installed so long ago had been broken and removed, and replaced with a single pane. Sam had said something about Lucy coming up with the design during her stay at Rainshadow Road, some image she’d seen in a dream.

“I’ll sign for it,” Alex said. “My brother’s out in the vineyard.”

The delivery guys laid the massive window on the floor and partially uncrated it to make certain no damage had occurred in transit. “Looks okay,” one of them said. “But you find anything after we’re gone, hairline cracks or somethin’, call the number on the bottom of the receipt.”

“Thanks.”

“Good luck,” the guy said affably. “Gonna be a bitch to install.”

“Looks like it,” Alex replied with a rueful smile, signing for the package.

The ghost stood beside the window and stared down at it, transfixed. “Alex,” he said in a peculiar voice. “Take a look.”

After the delivery guys left, Alex went to glance at the window, which featured a winter tree with bare branches, a gray and lavender sky, and a white moon. The colors were subtle, the glass layered and fused to give it an incandescent 3D effect. Alex didn’t know much about art, but the skill that had gone into this window was obvious. It was masterful.

His attention returned to the ghost, who was utterly still and silent. The entrance hall had turned chilly in spite of the summer heat. It was sorrow, so raw that Alex felt his throat and eyes sting. “Do you remember this?” he asked the ghost. “Is it like the one you put in for Emma’s father?”

The ghost was too upset to speak. He responded with a single nod. More sorrow, filling the air until every breath was an icy scourge. He was remembering something, and it wasn’t good.

Alex took a step back, but there was nowhere to go. “Cut it out,” he said gruffly.

The ghost pointed to the second floor, and gave Alex a beseeching stare.

Alex understood instantly. “All right. I’ll install it today. Just … no drama.”

Sam came into the house. To Alex’s disgust, his lovelorn brother wasn’t nearly as interested in the window as he was in the question of whether Lucy had included a note with it. Which she hadn’t.