Dream Lake (Friday Harbor 3)

“Spark?”

The ghost smiled slightly. “That’s the word they used for kissing.”

Alex sort of liked that. Sparks … kisses … creating fire.

“Emma was out of my league,” the ghost continued. “Smart, classy, rich family. She could be headstrong at times—but she had the same sense of kindness as Zoë. She would never hurt anyone if she could help it. When Mr. Stewart hired me to install the stained-glass window, his wife told all three daughters to keep out of my way. Don’t socialize with the handyman. Emma ignored her, of course. She sat and watched me work, asking questions. She was interested in everything. I fell for her so hard, so fast … It was like I’d loved her before I’d even met her.

“We met in secret all through the summer and part of autumn—we spent most of our time at Dream Lake. Sometimes we’d take a boat out to one of the outer islands and spend the day. We didn’t talk much about the future. The war was going on in Europe but everyone knew it was just a matter of time until we got into it. And Emma knew I was planning to enlist. After basic training, the Army Air Corps could turn a civilian with no flight experience into a qualified pilot in a couple of months.” He paused. “Early November in ’41—this was before Pearl Harbor—Emma told me she was pregnant. The news hit me like an anvil, but I told her we’d get married. I talked to her father and asked for his consent. Although he wasn’t exactly thrilled about the situation, he wanted the wedding to happen as soon as possible, to avoid scandal. He was pretty decent about it. It was the mother who I thought might kill me. She believed Emma was lowering herself by marrying me, and she was right. But there was a baby on the way, so no one had a choice. We set the wedding date for Christmas Eve.”

“You weren’t happy about it,” Alex said.

“Hell, no, I was terrified. A wife, a baby … none of that had any connection to who I was. But I knew what it was like to grow up without a father. There was no way I’d let that happen to the baby.

“After Pearl Harbor, every guy I knew headed to the local recruiting office to sign up. Emma and I agreed that I’d hold off enlisting until after the wedding. A few days before Christmas, Emma’s mother called and told me to come to the house. Something had happened. I knew it was bad from the sound of her voice. I got there just as the doctor was leaving. He and I talked on the front porch for a few minutes, and then I went upstairs to Emma, who was in bed.”

“She’d lost the baby,” Alex said quietly.

The ghost nodded. “She started bleeding in the morning. Just a little at first, but it got worse hour by hour, until she had a miscarriage. She looked so small in that bed. She started crying when she saw me. I held her for a long time. When she quieted down, she took off the engagement ring and gave it to me. She said she knew I hadn’t wanted to marry her, and now that the baby was gone, there was no reason. And I told her she didn’t have to make any decisions right then. But for a split second I was relieved, and she saw that. So she asked me if I thought I would be ready for marriage someday. If she should wait for me. I told her no, don’t wait. I said even if I made it through the war and came back, she would never be able to count on me. I told her love didn’t last—she’d feel the same way about some other guy, someday. I even believed it. She didn’t argue with me. I knew I was hurting her, but I thought it would spare her a lot more pain in the future. I told myself it was for her own good.”

“Cruel to be kind,” Alex said in agreement.

The ghost barely seemed to have heard him. After a contemplative silence, he said, “That was the last time I ever saw her. When I walked out of that bedroom and headed to the stairs, I passed by this window. The glass had changed. The leaves had disappeared, and the sky had darkened, and a winter moon had appeared. An honest-to-God miracle. But I couldn’t let myself think about what it meant.”

Alex couldn’t understand what the ghost thought was so appalling and shameful in such a confession. He’d acted honorably in offering to marry Emma when circumstances had merited. There had been nothing wrong about breaking off the engagement after the miscarriage—Emma had hardly been left alone and destitute. And Tom was going to enlist anyway.

“You did the right thing,” Alex volunteered. “You were honest with her.”

The ghost looked at him with a flare of incredulous anger. “That wasn’t honesty. It was cowardice. I should have married her. I should have made sure that no matter what happened, she would have always known that she meant more to me than anything else in the world.”

“Not to be insensitive”—Alex began, and scowled at the ghost’s humorless laugh—“but you probably would have died in the war anyway. So it’s not like you would have gotten any more time together.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” the ghost asked in disbelief. “I loved her. And I failed her. I failed both of us. I was too much of a coward to take a chance. Some men go their whole lives dreaming of being loved like that, and I threw it away. And all my chances to make it right went smashing down to the ground along with me and that airplane.”

“Maybe you were lucky. Have you thought of that? If you’d lived through the war and made it back to Emma, you might have ended up with a lousy marriage. The two of you might have ended up hating each other. Maybe you were better off the way things turned out.”

“Lucky?” The ghost looked at him with horror, fury, disgust. He stood and wandered aimlessly around the landing. A couple of times he paused to glance at Alex as if at some mildly repellent curiosity. Eventually he stopped in front of the window and said in a hostile tone, “I guess you’re right. It’s better to die young, and avoid all the miserable, messy business of loving other people. Life is pointless. Might as well get it over with.”

“Exactly,” Alex said, resenting the moralizing. After all, he was willing to make his choices and pay for them, just as the ghost had. It was his right.

Staring at the window, with all its flourishing colors, the ghost said with quiet malevolence, “Maybe you’ll be lucky like I was.”

Twenty-two

“Maybe you’ll be lucky like I was.”

Although Alex hadn’t wanted to admit it, the words had bothered him more than the ghost would have suspected. He knew he’d been a jerk, telling the ghost that he might have been better off dying young. It was all kinds of wrong to say something like that, even if it was what you believed.

The thing was, Alex wasn’t entirely sure what he believed anymore.

Introspection had never been his strong suit. He’d grown up thinking that if you expected nothing and then got nothing, you wouldn’t be disappointed. If you didn’t let someone love you, you’d never have your heart broken. And if you looked for the worst in people, you’d always find it. Those beliefs had kept him safe.

But he couldn’t help remembering a line in that grief-stricken letter Emma had typed so long ago … something about her prayers being trapped like bobwhites beneath the snow. The ground-roosting birds, sleeping in a tight circle in winter, welcomed the falling snow that covered them with a layer of insulation. But sometimes the snow iced over, trapping them in a hard shell that they couldn’t escape from. And they starved and suffocated and froze to death. Unseen, unheard.

There were times he had felt like Zoë was breaking through the layers of protection. She had given him some of the few moments of happiness he’d ever known in his life. But he would never be able to inhabit the feeling fully because of the unshakable conviction that it wouldn’t last. And that meant Zoë was a danger to him. She was a weakness he couldn’t afford.

He was different from his brothers, who were both more easygoing, more comfortable with giving and receiving affection. From what he remembered of their sister Vickie, she had been like that, too. But none of them had still been living at home when their parents had sunk to the worst of their alcoholism. None of them had been neglected for days or weeks at a time in a silent house. None of them had been given cups of booze to keep them quiet on weekends.

Despite his own issues, Alex couldn’t find it in himself to begrudge Sam’s newfound happiness. Sam had gotten back together with Lucy. He had told Alex that the relationship was serious, and he was going to marry Lucy someday. Their plan was that Lucy would accept the year-long art grant in New York, and she and Sam would maintain a long-distance relationship until she came back to Friday Harbor.

“So it’ll be convenient to have you move in at Rain-shadow Road,” Sam told Alex. “I’m going to go to New York at least once a month to visit Lucy, while you keep an eye on things for me.”

“Anything to get rid of you,” Alex said, unable to hold back a smile as Sam gave him a jubilant high five. “Jeez. A little too happy. Can you bring it down a notch? Just so I can stand being in the same room with you?”

“I’ll try.” Sam poured some wine for himself and looked askance at Alex. “Want a glass?”

Alex shook his head. “I’m not drinking anymore.”

Sam gave him a brief, arrested glance. “That’s good.” He began to set aside his wine, but Alex gestured for him to keep it.

“Go ahead, I’m fine.”

Sam took a sip of wine. “What made you decide to stop?”

“I was getting too near the invisible line.”

Sam seemed to understand what he meant. “I’m glad,” he said sincerely. “You look better. Healthier.” A deliberate pause. “Looks like going out with Zoë Hoffman has its benefits.”

Alex frowned. “Who told you that?”

Sam grinned. “This is Friday Harbor, Alex. A supportive close-knit community where we all live to know the sordid personal details of each other’s lives. It would be easier to list who hasn’t told me. You’ve been seen out with Zoë about a hundred times, you’ve been remodeling her cottage, your truck has been parked in her driveway overnight … I hope you didn’t think any of this was a secret.”

“No, but I didn’t figure on everyone being so damn interested in my private life.”

“Of course they are. It’s no fun to gossip about something that’s not private. So about you and Zoë—”

“I’m not talking about it,” Alex informed him. “Don’t ask me how the relationship is going, or where it’s headed.”

“I don’t care about that stuff. All I want to know is how hot the sex is.”

“Mind-blowing,” Alex said. “Orgasms on a cellular level.”

“Damn,” Sam said, looking impressed.

“All the more amazing in light of the fact that there’s usually an old lady in the house, and a cat howling outside the door.”

Sam laughed quietly. “Well, you’ll have a chance at some time alone with Zoë next week. I’m going to New York for a few days to help Lucy settle into her new apartment. So if you’ve moved your stuff here by then …”

“It’ll take me half a day at most,” Alex said. Hearing a text message alert from his phone, he pulled it from his back pocket. It was from his real estate broker, who had recently been approached with a potential offer for Alex’s Dream Lake parcel. Although Alex had said he wasn’t interested in selling—he wanted to develop the land himself—the Realtor had insisted that this offer was worth considering. The buyer, Jason Black, was a video game designer for Inari Enterprises. He was looking for a place to build some kind of a learning community retreat. The project would be huge, with several buildings and facilities. Whoever built it would make good money. “And here’s the interesting part,” the Realtor had told Alex. “Black wants it all built LEED certified, with all the latest environmental and energy-saving requirements. And when I told his broker that you were accredited and you’d had experience building green-certified homes … well, now they’re interested in talking to you. There’s a chance you could sell the property with the stipulation that you’d be hired as the builder.”

“I like working on my own,” Alex had said. “I don’t want to sell. And the idea of having to answer to a video game geek—how do I know he’s not a flake?”

“Just meet with him,” the Realtor had pleaded. “We’re not just talking good money, Alex. We’re talking sick money.”

Glancing at his brother, it occurred to Alex that Sam might be familiar with the game company. “Hey, do you know anything about Inari Enterprises?”

“Inari? They just came out with Skyrebels.”

“What’s that?”

“What rock have you been living under? Skyrebels is the fourth installment in the Dragon Spell Chronicles.”

“How could I have missed that?” Alex wondered aloud.

Sam continued with enthusiasm. “Skyrebels is the most played game out there. They sold over five million in the first week of release. It’s a role-playing open world format that features nonlinear emergent play, and it’s got this incredible graphic fidelity with self-shadowing and motion blur—”

“In English, Sam.”

“Let’s just say it’s the biggest, best, coolest time waster of a game ever known to man, and the only reason I don’t play it twenty-four hours a day is because I occasionally need to take a break for food or sex.”

“So have you heard of Jason Black?”

“One of the top game creators of all time. Kind of mysterious. Usually a guy in his position speaks at a lot of gaming industry events and award shows, but he keeps a low profile. He has a couple of front men to do appearances and speeches for him. Why are you asking?”

Alex shrugged and said vaguely, “Heard he might want to buy property on the island.”

“Jason Black could afford to buy the entire island,” Sam assured him. “If you have a chance to do anything associated with him or Inari, take it and run.”

“Is it a game like Angry Birds?” Zoë asked a few days later, when Alex told her about Skyrebels.

“No, this is an entire world, like a movie, where you can explore different cities, fight battles, hunt for dragons. There’s a potentially unlimited number of scenarios. Apparently you can take time out from the main quest to read books from a virtual bookshelf or cook virtual meals.”

“What is the main quest?”

“Damned if I know.”