In the Blink of an Eye Read online

  Kent is lugging a video camera with a tripod, an EMF meter, a motion sensor, and a Trifield Natural Meter.

  Tonight, when they get down to business, they’ll be wearing their khaki photographer’s vests with clips and pockets for the rest of their equipment, including an infrared night scope, flashlights with extra batteries, lanterns, candles and matches, a first-aid kit, and a cell phone in case of an emergency. Miranda hasn’t encountered one since she started investigating paranormal activity almost a decade ago, but when you’re prowling around remote locations in the dead of night, you never know what might happen.

  They set off down Summer Street, heading away from the busy commons area and auditorium.

  They only arrived in Lily Dale an hour earlier, having risen at dawn to make the nine-hour drive from Boston in Kent’s aging Jeep. This is their first stop on a summer-long paranormal research tour that will take them to the West Coast and back on a carefully mapped route. With any luck, their findings will yield them enough material for a book collaboration. Not that either of them is an experienced author, but spiritualism seems to be a hot topic at the dawn of the new millennium. With any luck, they’ll earn enough money from an advance and royalties to quit their day jobs and become full-time paranormal investigators.

  “This place is charming,” Miranda says, reaching up to shove a strand of rust-colored hair from her eyes. As usual, she’s pulled her unruly shoulder-length mop back with a hastily fastened barrette at the nape of her neck; as usual, the wiry curls are desperate to escape confinement.

  “Yeah, charming in broad daylight,” Kent agrees. “But tonight, we’ll see what pops out of all this frilly gingerbread woodwork.”

  “If the rain holds off. Because I feel it coming,” she says, as the wind gusts, rustling the leaves overhead.

  “So do I. We should pick up a newspaper and check the weather report.”

  “You read my mind,” she says with a smile.

  She and Kent have been working together for several years now, as founding members of the New England Ghost Society. They had originally been introduced to each other by an elderly widow, Mrs. Bird, who was convinced that (A) her sprawling ancestral home harbored spirits, and (B) Miranda and Kent would make a good couple.

  She was wrong on both counts.

  Despite numerous nocturnal visits to the supposedly haunted Back Bay Town House, Miranda never found anything other than a lonely old lady desperate for company and the opportunity to regale someone with tales about her family’s colorful past.

  When Miranda finally concluded that her client’s home was free of supernatural activity, the disappointed Mrs. Bird swiftly rebounded into a matchmaking mode. She insisted that Miranda come to lunch one day at her Commonwealth Avenue home to meet a fellow paranormal investigator who had also recently proclaimed the house free of spirits.

  Miranda went along with the blind date with minimum reluctance. At that point, she was still trying to work things out with her ex-husband, but she figured it couldn’t hurt to meet someone who shared her interest in psychic phenomena.

  Michael certainly didn’t share the interest. In fact, that was part of the reason their marriage had foundered. The other part had to do with a buxom female bartender named Cassie, who later became the new Mrs. Cleary before the ink was dry on the divorce papers.

  But as Miranda keeps assuring Kent and her therapist, she’s long over Michael. Meanwhile, she remains grateful to Mrs. Bird—now dearly departed—for the introduction to Kent.

  Miranda’s first thought, upon meeting him, was that he isn’t her type. Tall, lanky, bespectacled and bearded, he has an owlish, scholarly look. Miranda, the youngest child in a large, fun-loving Irish-Catholic family, has always been attracted to rowdy, redheaded, green-eyed men like her ex. A lot of good that has done her—but she still can’t seem to help herself, even now, despite Kent’s constant warnings to steer clear of blarney-spouting good-time Charlies—and Patricks and Seans.

  Miranda’s second thought—after realizing at that long-ago luncheon that she wasn’t the least bit attracted to Kent Gilman—was that apparently, the feeling was mutual.

  Miranda’s oldest brother, Declan, had abandoned the seminary in favor of a live-in relationship with another man, and she had met enough of their friends over the years to pick up on the signals Kent Gilman was sending across Mrs. Bird’s damask-covered, candlelit table. Clearly, Miranda noted, this particular man wasn’t interested in dating women.

  She later learned that he, too, was merely humoring the hopeful Mrs. Bird, who to her dying day believed that her ploy was a success and that Miranda and Kent were partners in more than just ghost busting.

  And no wonder. They are definitely soul mates—just not the romantic kind.

  They now share an apartment in a two-family house in south Boston, within blocks of Miranda’s family home. They’re both educators—Miranda a fourth-grade teacher in the city’s public school system; Kent an instructor at a local community college. And they both have a crush on their downstairs neighbor, a rugged personal trainer who seems to have no idea that either of them even exists.

  Then there’s their part-time work as certified ghost hunters. During the school year, they limit their activity to occasional weekend investigations at the request of home owners who are convinced, as Mrs. Bird was, that their houses are haunted. But during the summer months, Miranda and Kent have taken on more complex projects.

  Last year, they spent all of July on Nantucket, documenting paranormal activity at a local whaling museum at the request of the curators.

  The summer before, Miranda and Kent spent most of their time on the Cape, investigating haunted centuries-old cemeteries.

  The cross-country tour is Miranda’s idea. In the wake of another shattered romance—this one with her sister Maureen’s husband’s cousin, Tom—she’s anxious to get out of the old neighborhood for a while and lick her wounds.

  The book is Kent’s idea. Like countless academics before him, he originally intended to become a writer. As far as he’s concerned, a coauthored nonfiction parapsychology title is a stepping stone to the great American novel.

  “Check out that cottage garden,” Kent comments, as they pass a pretty blue house fronted, like most on the block, by a medium’s shingle. “I would love to do something like that in front of our place.”

  “Kent, we live in a rental,” Miranda points out, glancing at the colorful beds of blooms in front of the porch. “Besides, we travel in the summer. You aren’t around to take care of a garden.”

  “A cottage garden is basically carefree, Miranda. It’s supposed to look cluttered and chaotic, filled with cosmos and sweet peas and morning glory vines . . .”

  As he continues talking about flowers, quoting a horticultural article he read in a recent issue of Martha Stewart Living, Miranda’s gaze shifts to the next house on the block.

  There is no medium’s shingle here. Nor is there a garden, unless you count the few dandelions dotting the overgrown grass in front of the porch. Someone has taken care to paint the place in period colors—dark yellow with maroon and green trim—but the paint isn’t fresh. An atmosphere of abandonment hovers about the place.

  Abandonment, and something else.

  Miranda stops walking, her practiced eye drawn to a sweeping tree tucked into the small backyard, in a patch of lawn just behind the porch.

  “What’s the matter?” Kent asks, stopping beside her and following her stare.

  “That tree,” Miranda says. “There’s something about it”

  “It’s not a tree,” Kent informs her. “It’s almost two stories high, but technically, it’s a shrub. A lilac.”

  As he speaks, car tires crunch on gravel behind them.

  Miranda turns to see a red sedan pulling up at the curb in front of the house. She glimpses a handsome, dark-haired man at the wheel and a small blond child in the back seat. The car has California plates.

  “Come on, Miranda,” Kent says.<
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  She looks again at the towering lilac branches.

  A chill steals over her, despite the weight of Kent’s sweater.

  “I want to come back here later,” she tells Kent in a low voice. “There’s something about that tree.”

  “Shrub,” he corrects.

  “Whatever. We need to check that out.”

  “Just the shrub? Or the whole yard? Or the house? Because we’ll need to get permission from the owners if you want to—”

  “I know, I know,” she says impatiently, cutting him off.

  Of course she knows how it works. They can’t just go trespassing on private property in the middle of the night.

  She glances back up at the Victorian structure, and then at the newcomers, who don’t appear to notice her as they prepare to get out of the car.

  “Let’s go,” Miranda tells Kent with a shiver. “We’ll come back after dark and see if anything’s happening by that tree.”

  Something tells her they won’t be disappointed.

  Chapter Three

  THE HOUSE IS more ramshackle than Paine remembers.

  So ramshackle that even passers-by seem to stop and stare, like the couple that is now strolling off down the street. They’re weighed down with camera equipment, which can only mean one thing: they’re tourists.

  That isn’t surprising. The Lily Dale season is almost under way, and the small community is already filled with outsiders, just as it was the last time he was here.

  As Paine stands looking up at the house his daughter has inherited, he wonders what Kristin thought of the place when she visited her mother here three years ago. He knows that for most of Kristin’s life, her parents lived in a bigger Lily Dale home. When she couldn’t convince her widowed mother to give up spending her summers here, she had talked her into selling the larger home.

  But Paine recalls her being upset when Iris called to say she’d bought a new place. When he’d questioned her about the conversation, Kristin had simply said she knew the house her mother had bought and she didn’t like it.

  Now Paine can see why. The two-story frame house is hardly Kristin’s style—she favored sleek modern architecture.

  “I don’t like it here,” Dulcie says, beside him. Her small hand is warm in his, and he squeezes her fingers reassuringly.

  “It’s going to be okay, Dulcie,” he tells her, summoning a confidence he doesn’t feel. “You’re going to love the house. It’s like something out of a fairy tale.”

  Or a ghost story.

  A cold breeze stirs the towering maples overhead.

  “Tell me,” she says tersely, shivering from the chill, removing her hand from his and jamming it, with her other one, into the front pockets of her jeans.

  With a pang of guilt, he notices a threadbare spot on her knee, and that the sleeves of her red Gap Kids sweatshirt are too short. She’s worn nothing but shorts and T-shirts for months, but she’ll need warmer clothes here, despite the fact that it’s summer, and apparently she’s outgrown hers. He’ll have to take her shopping—if there’s any place to shop, that is. Looks to him as if Lily Dale is smack in the middle of nowhere. Well, there’s always the Wal-Mart about ten miles back. All she needs are a few pairs of Levi’s and—

  “Daddy,” Dulcie prods. “Tell me.”

  He takes a deep breath. “Okay, the house is painted a dark yellow shade, with maroon and dark green trim. Sounds awful, but looks nice. I bet it’s historically accurate.” He seems to remember Kristin mentioning something about the place being restored by the previous residents. “There are porches upstairs and down at the front of the house—porches with railings and spindles and lots of carved wood. There are only two windows in front on the first two floors, one on either side of the doors that lead to the porches. No shutters. The third-floor attic is shaped like a triangle, and there are scalloped shingles on that section, and there’s a round window up at the top.”

  She nods. Her eyes are closed, as they always are when he gives her descriptions. He wonders, as he often does, what she’s envisioning—how close her mental image is to reality. Hopefully not too close, in this case.

  He doesn’t tell her about the drooping foliage poking forlornly from the hanging pots on the porch, or the too-tall patch of weed-ridden lawn that fronts the house like a fringe of overgrown bangs. Anyway, he can take care of all that—spruce things up, eliminate that woebegone, abandoned ambience that hovers about the place.

  Somehow, until now, he had been picturing something completely different, having convinced himself that the dreary blur of images he had retained from his first visit were tainted by his own mourning.

  Ever since he got the phone call about Iris’s death and decided to come back to Lily Dale with Dulcie, his errant mind had conjured something bright and sun-washed and cheerful, a cozy lakefront cottage with screen doors, blooming window boxes, a flagstone path. The kind of home you might find in some other Victorian vacation spot—Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, or Cape May, New Jersey. Even nearby Chautauqua Institution, where he and Kristin met doing summer stock a decade ago.

  All the trappings of a summer resort town are here in Lily Dale—kids on bikes, small boutiques, a bandstand and gazebo, a playground, a beach.

  But there’s something else, too.

  Maybe it’s the gloomy weather.

  Maybe it’s the sorrowful cause of this repeat visit.

  Whatever the reason, Paine senses that there is a distinctly funereal aura about this ancient Queen Anne in the heart of this strange, secluded village obsessed with supernatural communication.

  Oh, well. He’s stuck here for at least the next month or two. He’ll go through Iris’s stuff, unload the property on the first interested person who comes along, and then he and Dulcie will hit the road headed back West, where they belong.

  “Come on, Dulcie, let’s go inside,” Paine says, putting a hand on her shoulder and taking a step forward.

  She doesn’t move.

  Her face is tilted up, toward the house.

  “Dulcie.”

  “I don’t want to,” she says on a sob, and presses a hand against her mouth.

  “Oh, Dulcie . . .” Paine crouches beside her and pulls her close. “I know. I miss Gram, too.” Not that they had seen Iris more than a half dozen times since Dulcie had been born.

  “No,” she says in a small voice. “It’s not that. I mean, I miss her, but . . . it’s not that.”

  A prickle runs down Paine’s spine when he sees her uneasy expression.

  He thinks back to that night more than a week ago, at home, when she awakened in the middle of the night saying Iris had been in her room . . .

  And three years ago, when she was little more than a toddler, yet old enough to articulate to him in no uncertain terms that her mommy—who was back East, helping Iris settle into the new house—had come into her room in the middle of the night.

  Paine went along with it, assuming it was nothing more than wishful thinking by a little girl who missed her mother.

  Even when Dulcie told him what Kristin supposedly said—“I love you, Dulcie, but I have to leave you now”—he didn’t think twice about it. After all, that was pretty much Kristin’s parting message to their daughter that last day at LAX, when she embraced Dulcie at the gate. Only that time, there was something tacked on the end—“I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  There was no such postscript to the supposedly imaginary message Dulcie reported to him.

  Hours later, Iris had called. Kristin was missing. Iris told him not to come East, certain her daughter was inexplicably headed back home to California and Paine and Dulcie.

  But she wasn’t.

  Days later, amidst a nightmarish blur of waiting and worrying and wondering, Paine got the other call. The one from Julia Garrity, reporting that Kristin’s lifeless, bloated body had floated to the surface of Cassadaga Lake, identified only by the clothing she had been wearing the night she disappeared.

  Numbe
d by shock and grief, Paine broke the news to Dulcie as gently as he could.

  It was she who comforted him, patting his back as he sobbed. “It’s okay, Daddy. I told you. She had to leave us. But she loves us.”

  Of course Dulcie’s vision of Kristin was a coincidental dream.

  And so was her vision of Iris on the night she had died.

  Paine chooses to believe that, because not believing it would mean that he believes in something else.

  Something utterly far-fetched.

  “Come on, Dulcie,” he says grimly. “We don’t have a choice. It’s going to rain. Let’s go inside.”

  This time, she doesn’t protest. He takes her hand and together, they walk up the front steps and across the porch. He glimpses a green VW parked at the back of the driveway. Iris’s car. That, too, now belongs to Dulcie. Maybe—if it has less mileage than his own car—they’ll keep it, drive it back home. No. It’s ancient. It’ll never make the trip. He’ll have to sell it. So many decisions to be made . . .

  A musty scent hovers around the house. It’s pungent, but not unpleasant. Like dry old wood, Paine thinks as he bends to lift a corner of the fraying mat in front of the door.

  A key is there, just as Howard Menkin said it would be. It’s supposed to fit the locks on both the front and back doors.

  Hiding a key under a mat seems to Paine like something someone would do in a vintage Frank Capra film, but Howard had insisted people do it all the time in Lily Dale.

  The door is heavy and old-fashioned, dark wood with three vertical inset panels in the bottom and a large oval pane of beveled frosted glass in the top half. He turns the tarnished brass knob with more effort than he’d expected and pushes it open, peering into the space beyond.

  “It’s okay, Dulc, come on,” he says, squeezing her hand.

  Together they step over the threshold. They’re in a foyer. The walls are covered in striped paper, the colors impossible to discern in the dim light. Paine feels for a switch beside the door. His fingers encounter a raised plate. He turns to see that it’s an antique wall switch with two vertically stacked round black buttons, the top one protruding, the other depressed. He presses the top in and the bottom one promptly pops out as an overhead light fixture illuminates.