Charon's Crossing

Was he supposed to take this woman's life in place of Catherine's?

He looked down into her eyes. Her head was tilted back; he could see the pulse racing in the shadowed hollow of her throat. She was frightened, even more than she had been on the beach. And well she might be. She was his to do with as he liked, to torment or to destroy...

His throat constricted. As a boy, his uncle had dumped him in an orphanage. It had been an ugly, brutal place and he had escaped it within a year, running off to Boston, talking his way into a berth as cabin boy and thus into a career at sea.

But first he'd had to endure those twelve months in the orphanage. It hadn't been easy. The place was run by the Reverend Silas Wickett, a narrow-lipped, bloodless man who raised his helpless young charges on a diet of unflinching piety, daily whippings and thin gruel. The bounty of the countryside—sweet apple cider, brown bread thick with honey, and mutton stewed until it fell from the bone—was reserved for

the reverend's own table.

Matthew had quickly learned how to survive. He raided the pantry for raw potatoes and withered apples and dug for wild onions beside the creek in early spring. And he set snares for the cottontails that lived in the meadow behind the orphanage and learned how to roast them over a smokeless fire.

Then, one autumn evening, he'd come upon a snare which held not a dead rabbit but a live one. The tiny creature had been caught by the leg; it had stared at him through wide, liquid eyes, eyes filled with terror. And in that moment, he had hated himself and hated the rabbit, for he had known then that he would not be able to kill it...

Kathryn cried out as he grabbed her and shook her like a rag doll. Then he flung her from him.

"Damn you," he snarled.

She cried out as he began to shimmer. By the time he had become a column of spiraling silver light, her face was buried in her hands. She sensed to look at him now might be to court death.

Eventually, she peeped out between her fingers and mercifully found herself alone.

* * *

The morning sun was not just hot, it was hell. It beat down on Kathryn like the fist of a giant determined to bring her to her knees. Her shorts and shirt were soaked, most of her nails were broken, and she knew that by this evening her back would feel as if it were broken, too.

She sighed and wiped her forearm across her sweaty forehead.

All in all, she felt better than she had in days.

There was nothing like work to clear your mind of cobwebs. It had taken her most of a sleepless night to remember that, but once she had, she was home free.

First thing this morning, she'd crossed her fingers, opened up her computer and plugged it into an electric outlet. At first, nothing had happened. Then the hard drive had hummed, the screen had brightened, and she'd been in business.

For a couple of hours, anyway. Someplace around ten o'clock, the power had gone out and her computer screen had gone dark.

Well, that was life on Elizabeth Island. Not that it mattered. Work, any kind of work, was what was important. It was the great panacea.

Elvira, Hiram's wife, had turned up bright and early at the back door and immediately set out to wage what she insisted would be a one-woman war against dirt. So Kathryn had decided to direct her energies at the overgrown rose garden.

It had been an inspired decision, even better than the time she'd spent on the computer. She gritted her teeth as she clipped away at a rose branch with the rusty pruning shears she'd found inside the gardening shed. Ghosts? Columns of silver light? The odds were, she'd never see them again. Now that Matthew knew she wasn't his Catherine...

He was here.

So much for the odds being in her favor.

Kathryn froze, every sense on the alert. Matthew was definitely here, in the garden. She could sense his presence, just as she had in her dream.

She swung around, the clippers forgotten. Where was he? She couldn't see a sign of him anywhere.

"Matthew?"

There was no answer.

"Matthew?" Her voice rose in irritation. "Come on, you might as well show yourself. I know you're here, so what's the point in playing games?"

* * *

Matthew was there, all right. He'd been watching Kathryn work for the past few minutes, leaning back against the sturdy trunk of a tree and admiring the view. He supposed it wasn't very gentlemanly to watch a woman without her knowing it but then, he wasn't a gentleman anymore, was he?