Midnight Whispers (Cutler 4)

"If you try hard enough, you can imagine yourself falling into the sky, into the stars," he said.

"Gavin," I whispered, turning to him. "I want you to . . . I mean, I love you, I really do, but I keep thinking about Luther and Charlotte and what happened and what could happen to us."

"I know. It's all right," he said. "After all, I'm the one who's supposed to be the realist, right? I'm supposed to be the sensible one who knows we can't live in a dreamworld forever. Only, when I'm with you, Christie," he said, turning to face me, "I want to throw all logic and reality away and live in dreams. I don't care about anything else."

"You'd better care, Gavin Longchamp. I've been depending on you to be the sensible one up until now."

He laughed.

"Okay," he said. "I'll be anything you want me to be." He sat up. "We'd better get dressed and go back," he said, looking out over the water.

Silently, we dried our bodies and put on our clothes. Then Gavin took my hand and we started up the gravel pathway toward the house. At the top of the hill, we turned and looked back at the lake. It seemed unreal, more like a mirror than a body of water. For a while the trees, the stars, every cloud passing lazily above it was captured and locked in its reflection. That was the way the lake held onto its memories, I thought. And now it had the memory of us as well: two young people struggling to understand a world that could be so beautiful and so cruel. Forever and ever the lake would hear our laughter and recall our warm desire in the lap of its waters

. Perhaps it heard our heartbeats.

Gavin lifted the lantern so the light would fall ahead of us. We followed the finger of illumination that pointed our way back to the house, both of us still clinging to that cocoon of titillation. The memory of our bodies tingling took its good time to fail back into the vault behind our hearts. Both of us were in such a daze, neither of us noticed the strange vehicle parked in the driveway until we were practically on top of it.

"Whose car is this?" Gavin wondered aloud and lifted the lantern so the light would wash the darkness off all of it. Neither of us recognized the car.

"I don't know, Gavin."

"Whoever it is has come some distance," he said, nodding toward the license plates. "They're from Maryland."

"Jefferson," I said, suddenly afraid for him. "Let's get inside quickly."

We hurried up the walk and the front steps, practically charging into the house. The moment we walked into the entry way, I heard familiar laughter and then the laughter of a stranger, a man. It was coming from the sitting room on the right.

Gavin and I stepped into the doorway and Aunt Fern turned toward us, her hands on her hips, her face molded into her characteristic smirk. Her tall, blond boyfriend sat on the sofa with his legs crossed, smoking coolly, the corners of his mouth lifted so sharply they cut into his cheeks. Charlotte was sitting on a hassock, her hands clasped and pressed against her chest, a look of worry on her face, and Luther stood by the chair behind her looking very unhappy, his face ashen.

"Aunt Fern!" I finally cried.

"Well, well, well, if it isn't the princess and her little prince," she said, stepping toward us. Her eyes drank us in quickly from head to toe and came back to our faces sharply. She saw the towels in my hand. "And where were you two?" she demanded.

"We went for a swim," Gavin said quickly. Her smirk folded into a licentious smile and she turned to her boyfriend.

"Hear that, Morty, they went for a swim." Her boyfriend's smile duplicated her own. "Skinny dipping is more like it. My, my, my, what have you two been up to?"

"Nothing," Gavin said sharply. "We just went for a swim."

"Sure." Her smile disappeared and was quickly replaced by a sharp, hard glare. "I wasn't born yesterday, you know. You two might fool everyone else, but don't think for a moment you can pull the wool over these eyes. They've seen too much."

"That's for sure," her boyfriend quipped, smiling. He had a very nasal-sounding voice. Now that I took a longer look at him, I saw his eyes were rather close together and his lips were thin and long under a sharp nose. I thought of all the men Aunt Fern had had as boyfriends, this man was the least attractive. He had big ears and a long neck and his cheeks sank in like the cheeks of an old man.

"Shut up, Morty," she replied without taking her eyes off us. Then she smiled again. "Morty and I were on our way to Florida to Morty's beach house when I had an idea you two might have come here, and decided we should take a side trip. Sure enough, I was right.

"You two have got everyone wringing their hands back home, you know. Uncle Philip even made a personal visit to see me because he thought you might have come to me. Fat chance of that, I told him. So," she said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other and bringing her hands to her hips again, "why'd you run away?"

I would never tell her the truth, I thought. If anything, she might just laugh. It was the sort of thing she would be happy to hear.

"Never mind," she said quickly. "You don't have to tell me why. I can see it written on both your faces," she said, looking from Gavin to me and back to Gavin. "You've gone beyond spin the bottle."

"That's not true," Gavin said sharply, his face turning crimson.

"Don't tell me what's true and what's not, Gavin," she snapped, a small, tight and cold smile meeting his challenge. "We're both Longchamps. I know what's in our blood. Anyway," she said, relaxing, "you don't have to worry. I'm not about to tell Philip anything. Unless," she said, nodding, "you make me."

"Then he doesn't know we're here?" I said, breathing relief.

"No. And I don't think he's smart enough to figure it out," she added. "So," she said, looking around. "This is quite a hideaway. Auntie Charlotte has been telling me about her redecorating," she added and laughed. Her boyfriend laughed too. "Who knows, Morty. This might take off and become thé