“Don’t look at me that way. I’m not crazy. This house is haunted.”
“Did you talk to your therapist about the ghosts?” Jilly asked.
“What, and have him think I’m crazy?” Rachel-Ann’s laugh was only slightly hysterical. “The ghosts are in this house, not in my mind. But don’t worry about it. They leave you alone for some reason. Be grateful.”
“Maybe I just don’t have enough imagination.”
“Maybe you’re just too levelheaded,” Rachel-Ann said wearily. She gave Jilly a quick hug, and the tremor in her slender arms was pathetic. “See you in the morning, darling. Not too early.”
“I’ll be glad to sit with you….”
“No need,” she said, suddenly breezy. “I’ll be fine.”
Jilly watched as her sister skirted the hallway, putting as much distance between herself and Jilly’s open bedroom door as possible. A moment later she was in her own suite of rooms, the door shut tightly behind her.
Jilly stayed where she was, wondering whether she should go after her. She hadn’t been inside Rachel-Ann’s rooms since her sister had come back from her most recent hospitalization—it was a matter of honor that she wouldn’t search for empty bottles or pill containers. Rachel-Ann said she had a way of keeping the ghosts out, and Jilly couldn’t even begin to guess what that was. Or whether it would work to keep other, more resourceful demons at bay.
She had no idea what time it was—probably after eleven. It had been a piss-poor day. She’d accomplished nothing and only managed to unnerve herself with her abortive visit to her father’s office.
And she’d met Coltrane. A treat she could have happily done without. She was going to have to find a way to either get rid of him, or get him to help her. And he didn’t look like the kind of man who made an effort to help anyone unless there was something in it for him.
She reached up and pulled the pins out of her thick hair, letting it fall down her back in a heavy mass. She’d figure out what to do about Dean and his problems in the morning. At least for tonight she could rest easy, assured that her sister and brother were safe in their own beds, and that Rachel-Ann’s specious ghosts couldn’t come into hers.
“You scared her,” Brenda said in a cross voice. “Haven’t I told you the girl’s fragile? She always has been, ever since she was a child. She reminds me in many ways of myself when I was that age.”
“Honeybunch, you died before you reached that age,” Ted said with a particular lack of tact. “And you were as fragile as an elephant in labor. The girl’s too easily spooked if you ask me.”
“She can see us.”
“So can a lot of people. They don’t turn into raving drunkards because of it,” Ted said. “Most of them figure it’s a trick of the light or something. That girl’s the only one who’s gone around the bend, and if she wasn’t so busy throwing things at us she’d realize we’re just worried about her. We’re perfectly harmless.”
“Perfectly,” Brenda murmured, leaning over to kiss him. “And besides, she shouldn’t be drinking. If we hadn’t shown up when we did she would have taken that drink instead of throwing it at us.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Ted shrugged. “She’s poured them before and then left them. It doesn’t really matter. We terrify the poor girl, and it’s not as if we can sit down and explain it to her. We’ll just have to be a little more circumspect. We don’t need to feel guilty.”
“Guilty,” Brenda said in a hollow voice. “No, we wouldn’t want that. Let’s go for a walk, darling. We can sit on the terrace and watch the stars.”
He tucked her arm in his, smiling down at her fondly. “It sounds heavenly, darling.”
“Heavenly,” Brenda echoed. A place she was never going to see. “Any place with you is heaven,” she said.
And Ted leaned down and kissed her.
4
By late the next afternoon Jilly was in a thoroughly bad mood. If Wednesday had been bad, Thursday was even worse, and the evening didn’t look like it was going to be any improvement. She’d gotten up early, as always. She’d never needed much sleep, and the ornate, swan-shaped bed was more oppressive than comfortable. For years she’d thought about buying a new mattress and box spring, but the swan bed was custom-made and of no standard size, and she couldn’t justify spending so much money on a mattress when she spent so little time there. And as Dean had callously pointed out, the mattress had to at least date from after 1951. The previous one would have been soaked with blood.
Jilly shivered, rubbing her arms in the warm evening air as she sat on the deserted terrace at La Casa. Would it have been too much to ask, to have a good day for once, just to make the ordeal of this evening easier? But no, her job wasn’t overburdened with good days, and today was one of the worst.
Working as an historic preservationist in Los Angeles was a classic exercise in futility, and she’d known that going into it. Los Angeles was based on money and power, and history and aesthetics were commodities of little value. In the three years Jilly had worked for the Los Angeles Preservation Society she’d watched landmark after landmark be turned into rubble and then transformed into Bauhaus boxes. The best she could preserve were memories.
Today was particularly bad. She’d spent the day scrambling over debris at the Moroccan Theater, snapping pictures with the digital camera, taking notes, taking measurements. In a few more days it would be gone, its last reprieve used up. And at one point Jilly sat in one of the dusty, plush velvet seats and wept, not sure if she was weeping for the building or her own life.
Dean and Rachel-Ann were gone by the time she got home in the middle of the afternoon, and chances were they wouldn’t be back until late. Just as well. Handling Coltrane was difficult enough—she didn’t want to have to worry about her siblings at the same time.
She’d showered the dust and rubble off her body, made herself a tall glass of iced tea and wandered out on the terrace to watch the sun set over the huge expanse of overgrown lawn. She loved the terrace, the old iron furniture, the flagstones, the stone columns weathered and chipped from the years, the towering palms surrounding them. But down in the middle of the lawn, some two hundred yards away, lay the dank, algae-covered pool, and Jilly could never look at it without shuddering.
It was past time to get someone in to drain it again, she thought idly. It hadn’t been used in years. As a child she’d had an unexpected dread of it, even though she spent all her free time in her friends’ pools. Maybe it was the trees looming overhead, or the odd patterns in the tiles, or maybe an excess of teenage imagination. Whatever it was, Jilly had stayed away from the pool most of her life.
When they’d inherited the house she’d had it drained, but each year it would fill again, water seeping in from a crack in the lining. There was no way she could afford to hire heavy machinery to come in and bulldoze it, so it just sat there, dank and malevolent, with only the wild tangle of rosebushes to shield it.
Jilly perched on the wide stone railing, breathing in the scent of roses mixed with the acrid perfume of exhaust from the surrounding city. There was nothing she wanted more than to climb into her huge marble bathtub
