As for Linc, I was attuned to him enough now that I knew he’d set off on a long walk around the grounds. His room wasn’t in the main house. When I closed my eyes, I could lock into him and almost feel what he was feeling. This had always happened to me when I was around someone for a while. With a bit of concentration, I could almost blend into that person.
With love, the feeling was even stronger. Like spinning a dial, I could tell where my loved ones were and what they were doing. Right now my daughter and my niece were in the sunshine and they were flying. No, swinging. Some boy was pushing them. I could feel Michael Taggert nearby. It was his son who was pushing the girls on the swings. The girls missed me, they missed all their family, but they were all right. They were getting the two k’s that I’d long ago seen were necessary for children: Kissin’ and Kookin’. Love and food.
I “spun the dial” so to speak and tuned in to my father. At the moment he was yelling at someone who was yelling back at him. I didn’t feel any danger and didn’t think he needed my help. It was difficult for me to control things from so far away, but my connection to my father was so strong that I could do it.
My mother seemed to be driving one—or was it two?—men insane with lust. Since she’d become a movie star I never felt her having sex anymore. As a child, I’d had to sing, dance, even stick my head underwater, in order to keep from feeling her in bed with men. By the time I’d met Adam, even if I was, technically, a virgin, I was far, far from being virginal.
As I did every hour I was awake, I tried to find Adam and his sister. I could feel them, they were alive, but they were trapped somewhere. As I did many times a day, I sent a message to Adam telling him I loved him and was trying to find him. Under normal circumstances, he could hear my mind-words, but I didn’t think he could now. Now he was blocked from me.
I homed in on Linc and smiled. He was running now and working hard to channel his lust somewhere else.
Once I’d ascertained that everyone was all right, I kept wandering about the big house. I found a door that I knew concealed a staircase that went down to the basement but it was locked. I wonder if the fire marshal knows about this? I thought. Wonder if I should tell him?
I came to a door that had beveled glass panes in it and I could see sunlight. When I turned the knob and the door opened, I was joyous.
Looking through the trees I could see three long buildings, nearly hidden in the shadows of the trees. As I approached them I had to stop for a moment and calm myself. Slave quarters. The buildings had been slave quarters. Not much of the original buildings were left but there was enough that the ghosts of the slaves could hang on and remain. I knew that there was an old slave cemetery behind the buildings but Delphia had had many of the markers removed because she didn’t want the guests being reminded of the bad times.
I walked toward the buildings where I knew Linc was staying but it wasn’t easy. Spirits were all around me. They knew I could sense them so they were running toward me and begging for my help. None of them were very strong, not strong enough, angry enough or full of enough hate to form themselves into bodies that could be seen.
But I could feel them, feel their tears, feel their confusion, feel their anger—and hear their thoughts.
“I served her for years but she threw me out,” one female spirit said. She’d been too pretty and the mistress had been worried that her new husband would like the slave better so she’d sent the girl to the fields. She’d died soon afterward and she was still angry and confused.
There were several women crying for children who had been taken away from them and sold. There were some ghosts of men who were crying in frustration because they were helpless to protect the people they loved.
I stopped walking and told them, “Ssssh, be still. It’s over. You’re at peace now.” They calmed somewhat but I knew it was temporary. When I had time I would look into it to see what could be done to give these poor souls peace. Would that mean setting the slave cabins on fire? If the spirits didn’t have an anchor, could they find the freedom of release?
When the spirits were calmer, they pulled back. They were still with me, still following me, but they were now content to wait. Wait for what? I wondered and couldn’t help shuddering. Wait until I went to bed, then descend on me in full force so I couldn’t sleep? When I sent them a message saying I’d not listen to any spirit who pestered me while I was in the house, they backed away farther.
Good, I thought, smiling. I’d always had a way with spirits. Just give them what they want so they could get the peace they craved. Only a few times had I run into bodiless bad spirits. For the most part evil spirits attached themselves to a person as soon as they’d demolished the body they had. Evil had an awful lot of power.
“What are you doing down here in the Quarters?” Linc asked as soon as he saw me. When I knew there were no cameras or microphones hidden anywhere, I started to speak, but instead looked at Linc. He was wearing big, clunky training shoes, socks, red boxing shorts and nothing else. With sweat running down his bronze body he was a sight to behold! He didn’t know it, but there were four women, former slaves, hanging around him, their lust for Linc as strong as his for me had been. No wonder the poor guy was going crazy!
“What are you grinnin’ at?” he asked as he rubbed a towel over his sweaty chest.
“Nothing. Where did you pick up the accent?”
There was a porch along the front of the building and Linc sat on the rail. “I guess it’s bein’ down here. It’s almost like I can hear the slaves who lived here.”
When I started to say something, he interrupted me. “If you’re about to say somethin’ that verifies my creepy feelin’s, don’t.”
“I was just about to say that I have a question for anybody in this room.” The four women around Linc did not take their attention from him and give it to me. In fact, I felt them moving closer to him, as though to keep me away from him. He was theirs alone. When Linc swatted at what he thought was a bug on his shoulder, I coughed to hide my smile.
Loudly, firmly, I said, “Has anyone seen a man around here? He’s tall, about six feet three inches, and he has a little black beard like this.” I drew an imaginary line down my chin, then made a little beard at the tip.
Suddenly, the whole room went still and in the next second there wasn’t a spirit in the room or outside of it. Every one of them had run back to wherever it was they hid.
“Did something just happen?” Linc asked, and when I looked at him his aura was a nice reddish blue. He was ready for sex but he could also wait. With four randy, bodiless spirits taken away from him, he could cope with life again.
I shrugged, not answering because I was putting out feelers as to where the spirits had retreated. The graveyard, I thought. Back to their unmarked graves.
“I haven’t seen a man like that.”
“What man?” I asked.
“The one you just asked me about. Six three. Remember? You know, don’t you, that he’s probably only about five eight. He just looks tall to you.”
“Ha ha,” I said. “I wasn’t talking—” I stopped because I couldn’t tell Linc who I’d been talking to. Long ago I’d found out that people got very upset about ghosts. “Are you ready for dinner?”
“A shower, shave and I’ll be there. Looking forward to the séance?”
I shrugged as I headed for the door. Who was the man I’d seen, the ghost-man, and why had the slave-spirits been afraid of him? “Linc,” I said, “tonight at dinner, I want you to eat just what I do. If I turn down something, I want you to turn it down, too. Understand?”
“You think they drug the food?”
“There sure are a lot of people sleeping this afternoon and I think people who are mildly drugged would be more likely to see what they’re supposed to see. I’ll see you in the dining room,” I said, then went back to the main house. All the way there I kept looking for the spirit-man I’d seen earlier, but I didn’t see anyone, not even slave-spirits. The
y had run away and hidden.
I looked at my watch, my beautiful watch that my dear husband had given me. I had a mere ten minutes to get ready for dinner. I had on a pink Chanel suit that ought to keep people from thinking I looked like a hillbilly.
At that thought I took a deep breath. I’d rather sleep in the middle of the unmarked graveyard and be pestered all night by unhappy spirits than go to dinner with a bunch of rich women with too much time on their hands. I’d only met one of them, Mrs. Hemmings, but I was sure all of them were going to be just like her.
Linc
Chapter Eight
I WAS SO NERVOUS WHEN I MET DARCI OUTSIDE THE dining room that I wished I’d called a taxi and had it take me to the nearest Dairy Queen. Maybe it was that I was in disguise, or maybe I felt this way because I’d been relegated to what had once been the slave quarters. In spite of a pep talk from Darci, I wanted to run away as soon as I saw that old battle-ax Delphia coming down the hall, half a dozen sleepy-eyed women behind her. The women were all dressed in terrifically expensive designer clothes and their jewelry would have filled a wheel barrow, but they looked only partially awake.
When Delphia saw me, her dried-up old face turned thunderous and it didn’t take a psychic to know what her problem was. She didn’t want me at the dinner table. I don’t know what was wrong with me but I felt like shufflin’ away ’cause I was gettin’ too uppity.
Darci ran forward and said something, or did something, because five minutes later Miss Pinch-faced Delphia walked into the dining room without a glance in my direction. I guess that meant it was all right for me to eat dinner with the white folks. I couldn’t help it; I turned and started to go back to “where I belonged.”
Darci caught my arm. “What’s wrong with you?” she hissed. The women were filing into the dining room, too zonked-out to even look at us.
I ran my hand over my face. “I don’t know, but like I want to live, I want to go back to the Quarters.”
“Oh,” Darci said flatly, then looked behind me. “Get out of here,” she said under her breath,“or I’ll sic…” She hesitated, then her face lit up. “Devlin. I’ll sic Devlin on you.”
The instant she said the name I felt better. Taking a deep breath, I scrunched up my eyes and made my hands into fists. “Okay, so tell me what that was all about. I. Am. Prepared.”
“There are four drop-dead gorgeous women, all former slaves, who want you to go back to the cabins so they can…so they can, uh, play with you. I told them Devlin—that’s the name of the ghost I saw earlier—would get them if they didn’t leave you alone.”
I thought for a moment, then opened one eye. “How gorgeous?”
“Halle Berry?”
“Yeah?”
“A dog compared to these four.”
At that I spun on my heel and started for the door that led outside, but Darci caught my arm. “Come on. You have all night for them. Right now we have dinner and a séance.”
As we stepped through the doorway of the dining room I nearly panicked. The two sisters, Narcissa and Delphia, sat at opposite ends of a long table. Between them on each side were three women and an empty chair. All six guests were of the type I greatly dislike: overdressed, overly made-up, stiff-postured and expressionless. I started to turn away, but Darci held on to my arm like a little shark. I knew that if I left I’d have to carry her with me.
“Come on,” she whispered. “You’re an actor, so act.”
As I took my place across from her, I smiled at the women and they blinked back at me blankly. Even Mrs. Hemmings, now wearing a necklace that probably cost more than I made last year, was looking at me as though she’d never seen me before. And to think! Just a short while ago I’d had my hands all over her body, sinking them into soft white dough that—
I looked at Darci. “Halle Berry, huh?”
Quietly, Darci gave a little bark like a dog, then she looked around the table and said,“Excuse me, a cough.”
Minutes later, three solemn women in black uniforms appeared and served us tiny plates of cold shrimp. Following Darci’s orders, I waited for her to start eating before I did.
Ten minutes later I knew she was right about the women having been drugged because as soon as they started eating, they began to wake up. As the evening progressed, one by one, each woman declared she was very thirsty, then she downed a big glass of water. After about three glasses, a woman would excuse herself and when she returned she’d look much better.
Could Darci have done that? I wondered. Had she made the women feel thirsty and drink a lot so they’d flush the drug out of their systems?
By the time the fourth course of the dinner arrived, the women had begun to loosen up. One woman said, “Good heavens! What in the world am I wearing? I look like a traveling jewelry salesman. Who wears pearls at this hour?”
I tried to be cool as I saw several hundred grand in jewelry slip over well-cared-for heads and get tossed onto the table. I looked at Darci and saw that she was staring at Delphia, who was glowering. Narcissa, at the other end of the table, was smiling so broadly I wondered if she’d been given a few happy pills.
I had to admit, though, that I was pretty sure it was my presence that was causing the women to act up.
Okay, so I’m a ham. Can I help it? I’d grown up in a household of scholars. Years ago I heard someone say, “The only excitement in our house was when someone turned a page.” My childhood exactly. No zip guns—whatever they were and did they still exist? No gangs. No anything but bloody learning.
My parents and I had dinner together and every night I was quizzed about every word my teachers had said. All my teachers came to hate my parents. If I told my father we were studying the solar system, he’d write a twenty-one-page lesson plan for my teacher and give it to her, along with a three-foot-tall stack of books he said she needed to study. And this was in the first grade.
Some kids rebel with drugs or antisocial behavior, but not me. One day my father said he knew nothing about acting. I looked at my mother. “What do you know about acting?” I asked. “Nothing,” she said. In the fourteen years I’d lived with them I’d never heard anything that they weren’t an authority on. Fishing? My father had written three articles about how to catch salmon. He’d never touched a fishing pole in his life but he knew, in theory, all there was to know. My mother had written about crafts and music but she’d never been to a craft show, never plucked a guitar string.
That was the day I decided to become an actor.
I must have inherited something from them because I poured as much single-minded effort into acting as my parents did into their work. However, my parents and I nearly parted forever when I invited them to watch me on TV and they said no. A flat, unbreakable no.
Seems that they knew nothing about acting because they didn’t want to know about acting. Just because their only son had become an actor didn’t change their minds.
As far as I knew, my parents had never seen me perform in anything. They didn’t own a TV and if they’d ever seen a movie, I didn’t know about it.
The end result of all this was that ever since I stopped trying to impress my parents, I’d done quite well in my chosen profession. I was getting pretty sick of the Linc-is-beautiful crap, but I was doing all right.
As the dinner progressed and the women relaxed even more, I came to enjoy being the center of attention. Of course they all talked endlessly about my resemblance to Lincoln Aimes. I had fun being Lincoln Aimes pretending to be Jason Forbes pretending to be Lincoln Aimes. It was when the women started saying that I was smaller and much less muscular than Lincoln Aimes and I was about to remove my shirt to settle the matter that Delphia announced that it was time for the séance.
I glanced at Darci and she was giving me a look that said I should cool it.
That was easy to do. Sure. I had four love-starved, bodiless women hanging around me, six women looking at me like I was the only man alive, I hadn’t seen my girlfriend in two weeks, an
d I should “cool it.” Right.
At the door to the dining room, Darci clamped on to my arm and I instantly began to feel calmer. By the time we took our places around the table in the library, I could have stretched out and gone to sleep.
My tranquillity didn’t last long because the laughter I had to keep inside me over the next hour threatened to send me floating up to the ceiling.
Delphia, using that raspy voice of hers, conducted the séance. Each of the six women at the table wanted to contact someone from the spirit world. For Darci’s sake—not mine—they went around the table and, one by one, told who they wanted to contact and why. According to them, their one and only reason for wanting to contact a dead person was love. Deep, deep love.
When it came Darci’s turn she said, “I just want to know where he hid the jewels,” and everyone burst out laughing—and the way they laughed made me even more sure the women had their own nefarious reasons for trying to contact someone who was dead.
One of the stone-faced maids entered with a tray of green liqueur in tiny glasses and we each took one, but when I reached for mine, I saw Darci look at me. No, she seemed to say. Drink nothing. When I put the glass back down, untouched, I saw Delphia frown at me.
Within minutes the six women had emptied their glasses and I could see that they’d relaxed. I was sure it was so their senses would be blurred during the coming show. The lights were dimmed; we held hands. The show began.
And show it was! The best nonshow I ever saw. Delphia called on her spirit guide but nothing happened. She glanced directly at the shelf of books where I knew the disabled projector was and frowned. Maybe I should talk to her about Botox, I thought.
We were there for forty minutes, with nothing whatever happening, and I was filled with laughter. I figured that when Delphia found out what had been done to her equipment she’d know who’d done it, but I wasn’t going to ruin the evening by thinking about tomorrow.