Maidenstone Lighthouse by Sally Smith O' Rourke Read Free Book Online Page B

summer weekend for us, a concert on Saturday, picnicking in the park on Sunday afternoon, with lots of lovemaking in between. I had been hanging around the office, waiting for his call—Bobby always called from his last stop, to tell me when he’d be “wheels down” at LaGuardia, where the company’s planes were based.
    But that last phone call never came.
    Instead, late on Thursday afternoon, a somber-looking young company executive in an equally somber gray summer-weight suit had appeared at my office, where I was impatiently coaxing the final details of a large estate appraisal out of Damon.
    I felt my whole life draining away as the nervous oil company emissary haltingly informed me that Bobby’s plane was overdue and “presumed down somewhere in the Indian Ocean.” The plane had only one passenger onboard, having dropped off the other two company executives for a short meeting before the long return flight to the United States.
    The man had kept on talking, relating a bewildering array of technical details about bad weather in the area, the massive air-sea search that had already begun by several cooperating nations and the U.S. Navy destroyer that had been dispatched from the American base on the remote island of Diego Garcia. But I had absorbed little or none of it.
    All I knew was that Bobby was gone…
    I awoke with a start, bitter tears of anguish and regret streaming down my cheeks. The wonderful dream of Bobby had turned suddenly into a horrible nightmare.
    And then I realized that I was not alone in the turret bedroom.

Chapter 7
    D ressed all in white and shimmering with a faint fluorescent glow, she stood motionless beside the casement window farthest from my bed. Her back was turned to me and she was holding aside one of the sheer lace curtains, gazing intently through the rain-streaked glass into the black and forbidding night beyond.
    At first I thought I was imagining her, the way children sometimes imagine they can see the figures of animals in the puffy white clouds of a summer’s day.
    Limned by the faint blue light of the fairy lamp and half-hidden by the shadow of Damon’s wardrobe, she looked like a creature of pure imagination. The simple, flowing lines of her diaphanous gown merged seamlessly into the folds of the sheer floor-length curtain in her hand. And she stood as still and as silent as a sculpture of palest Carrera marble.
    Stunned by the eerie sight before me, I felt my mouth go dry. The blood was pounding in my temples as I slowly sat up and stared, half-expecting her slender form to vanish among the deep, lurking shadows beside the wardrobe.
    But she remained standing precisely where she was, one bare white arm raised nearly to her cheek, slender fingers clutching the transparent fabric of the intricately patterned lace curtain.
    Despite the dim lighting, I seemed to see her with exceptional clarity. A luxuriant cascade of raven hair interwoven with narrow strands of pink satin ribbon fell down her back to below the waist. A chain of cunningly hand-sewn rosebuds decorating the bodice of her dress precisely matched the shade of the ribbon in her hair.
    As I continued to stare at the apparition before me I realized that the garment she wore was not a dress at all but an elaborate nightgown, such as a new bride might wear to her wedding bed. And though her face was completely hidden from my view, I somehow knew that she was beautiful, and too young to have died.
    Several more seconds passed and still she had not moved. I hardly dared to breathe as a frantic argument raged within my head. The logical part of my brain was insisting that there must be some perfectly rational explanation for what I was seeing. But my foolish emotional side—the part of me that regularly conjured up all of those impossible daydream fantasies of Bobby’s miraculous return—said I was looking at a spirit.
    I didn’t know then whether I even believed in such