From Darkest Seas Read online

  From Darkest Seas

  A Through The Veil Novel

  Rosalind Chase

  Under Hill Press

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Excerpt From Lot’s Wife

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  It's the smell. That’s the worst part. Greg Owens had thought it would be the pictures on the wall. He’d thought it would be the way her face gazed out at him from behind the glass. Christmas two years ago. Laurie’s thirtieth birthday dinner four years ago. Their honeymoon, fourteen years ago. Greg is sunburnt and Laurie is smiling from under a wide-brimmed straw hat.

  He had thought it would be the pictures and he had been wrong.

  No, instead it’s the smell of her clothes.

  Nearly one year later, Laurie’s smell still clings to every bit of fabric she touched and now Greg lives in fear that the scent will suddenly evaporate. He’ll come into the bedroom and he’ll open the dresser and there will be nothing.

  Greg pulls a dress from the closet. He had loved this dress. Loved the way the cream fabric caught the light, loved the way the lavender flowers tendriled round Laurie’s curves. Loved the way it blew in the breeze and exposed the soft flesh of Laurie’s legs.

  Now, he holds the dress to his nose. He inhales old books, old leather. A hint of fresh bread. The smell of Laurie.

  He is thinking about bagging them. About sealing them somehow. Individually. Maybe he could take them out, one item, once a month, and that would preserve the smell. Maybe if he seals up each of her dresses and each of her coats in their own plastic tubs he can create some kind of schedule…

  Knock knock knock.

  Greg shakes himself back to the present. Back to this time. This space. His bedroom. His and Laurie’s. No, his. Only his. But not for long.

  The knocking comes again and he ambles over to the window and looks down to the stoop. It’s Tiana Perez. Her auburn hair whips back and forth in the May breeze and she’s trying to gather it into the ponytail she usually wears. Greg watches until she finally manages to run down all the errant strands and shove them through an elastic from her wrist. He sees the red mark the band has bit into her skin. A circle just under her wrist bone. Tiana has always had lovely hands, Greg thinks. Too lovely for police work. She shouldn’t be frisking thugs and bagging evidence, he’s always thought. But, just the same, he can’t stop staring at that red circle. At her.

  As if she knows he’s there, watching her, Tiana looks up. Straight at him. And she smirks. She almost always smirks. Like she isn’t sure how to do a real smile. Except Greg knows she does. He’s one of the few people who’s seen it. She gestures for him to come downstairs and he obeys.

  “I thought you weren’t leaving til June,” she says. When he opens the door she barrels past him, not waiting for an invitation into the living room.

  She stands in the center of a trifecta of box piles. Donate. Trash. Keep. But he moves to hover over a fourth pile. Laurie’s books. Books about myth, magic, legend. Books about history. Books about people. She was a professor and she bought books like she lived on them, like they sustained her.

  Once, when he asked her what she’d take if the house caught fire, it wasn’t their passports or their birth certificates which, she said, could be replaced. It was the photo album she made their first year together and all the books from the shelf above her desk.

  Greg half smiles as he looks into the box containing those books. He’s planning on donating them to the library.

  Tiana crosses and uncrosses her arms and her leather jacket squeaks a little at the movement as she waits for an answer to a question she hasn’t really asked. Why is he leaving sooner than he planned?

  “It’s the buyer’s job,” he finally says. “The start date got bumped up and I said he could come early. I didn’t want him to have to leave his family back in Seattle while he came and stayed in some expensive hotel.”

  She nods, her ponytail bobbing up and down.

  She was a skater girl at one time, Greg remembers suddenly. She has a ragged scar on her hip from careening into a guardrail when she was sixteen. He saw it once when he rode in an ambulance with her. When she hadn’t been wearing a vest and took a bullet in her side. She’d been back on duty faster, he thought, than she ought to have. But, then again, he could never tell Tiana Perez what to do.

  “Owens—” she starts but falters. She takes a few steps toward the kitchen.

  Before he was promoted to detective, Greg had been a decent cook. He had made his mom’s chicken parm every Friday night and Laurie had loved it. But then the hours got longer and longer. Time seemed to jumble up and twist in on itself until suddenly he realized he hadn’t used the kitchen for anything but the coffee maker in months. And then years.

  “I came to see if you needed some help,” Tiana says, her hands on her hips now.

  Greg hates to admit he’s ever even noticed Tiana’s hips. Especially now. But here she is, standing between the living room and the kitchen, with her fingers drumming against her backside.

  “I don’t,” Greg mumbles.

  “You don’t have to do this alone,” Tiana says. “I can help you. I moved all the time growing up. Military brat, remember? I’m a savant-level packer.”

  “Tiana—”

  “I could get this whole house boxed up, catalogued, and labeled in two days flat.”

  “You—really?”

  “Yeah. Really. Then you can go off to your mystical mountain adventure and write your memoirs or whatever people do when they’ve taken early retirement.”

  It sounds both wonderful and heart-shakingly terrible to think of Tiana in this house. To think of her carefully packing Laurie’s things, humming as she always did when she was lost in thought, writing down every dress and necklace, every bra and shoe.

  “I think I’m just going to call some movers, Tiana.”

  “What? Seriously?”

  “Yeah. It’s just…”

  His voice doesn’t break and he is proud of himself for that. He’s spent years learning how to tamp down whatever part of him felt peeled apart when his emotions crept too close to the surface.

  “It’s okay,” Tiana says, taking two steps forward to meet him. She sweeps her hand down his arm; her touch is warm and firm. “I just want you to know you don’t have to do this alone. Understand?”

  “Yeah. I understand.”

  “Ok. I’ll get out of your hair.” She turns and starts toward the door and Greg watches as she fishes her keys out of her back pocket. He is surprised to feel a smile tug at the corners of his mouth suddenly, as he is reminded of the first time he met the haughty, snarky, too-eager-to-prove-herself traffic cop.

  “Where you gonna stay?”

  “What?”

  “If the buyers are coming a month early, where are you gonna go? You need a place? You can crash on my couch if you need to, Owens.”

  “Thanks, Tiana,” he says. “But when I called the owner of the new house, the caretaker said to come on ahead. He said I could stay in the carriage house until they have ev
erything boxed up.”

  “Carriage house?” Tiana raises a dark eyebrow. “Swank.”

  “Not really. It’s just old. The house has been in the family for a hundred years or something. The owner’s great grandmother originally bought it… or built it. I’m actually not sure.”

  Greg shakes his head, runs his hand, absently, through the too-long back of his hair. He hasn’t had a haircut since Laurie died. Laurie had always been the one to do it. Ever since they were in college and too broke for barber visits. He’d trimmed her glorious honey-colored locks as well. Any time it got past her mid-back. And he’d always hated throwing even a strand of the hair away. Laurie had always laughed at that. It’s just hair. No, it was her hair.

  The last few years she’d been doing it herself.

  “Have you met them? The owner?”

  “No,” Greg says, remembering where he is when Tiana shifts from foot to foot and the loose board he’s always meant to fix squeaks with the movement.

  “No, I haven’t met her. I’ve talked to the caretaker on the phone. A nice older guy, I think. He seemed to indicate the owner’s some kind of recluse.”

  “A recluse who’s selling and moving out of her beloved ancestral home?”

  Greg shrugs.

  “You two should get along great.”

  Chapter 2

  Greg’s old Pontiac rumbles up the gravel road. The windows down, the scent of the forest, of the nearby lake, engulfs him. In every direction, there is green. Green rhododendrons with soft pink flowers, green ferns, green trees with green moss growing up their trunks. Green canopy. Green floor. Only the rocky gray path tells him where he should go. Otherwise, he would be completely lost in a place like this.

  Good, he thinks. He wants to get lost. Isn’t that the whole point?

  He finally crests the hill and the road narrows as it veers to the right and down. Greg can see the roof of the house. All brown-shingled sharp angles adorned with intricate trim. It could be a doll’s house. A fairy tale house. The sort of house where a witch might cook up spells and potions and children.

  Greg continues his roll down the steep gravel drive and watches as a man steps out from behind a neatly-pruned bush full of bright, orange roses.

  “Howdy!” the man says, waving to Greg through the windshield with a pair of bright shears in his hand. He is a big man. All muscles and bulk and, though his ragged baseball cap shades his face, Greg still clearly sees the man’s wide, gregarious smile and sun-kissed cheeks.

  This must be Harvey, the caretaker.

  “We didn’t expect you till later this evening,” Harvey says, taking a handkerchief out of his jeans pocket and mopping at the back of his neck. The man’s hands are sunburned and rough and strong-looking.

  “Took me less time to get here than I’d thought. The drive up from Charleston isn’t as bad as I’d remembered.”

  “When’s the last time you came up to the mountains?”

  “When I was a teenager, I guess. My parents used to bring me on vacation and then later they sent me up here for summer camp.”

  “To Bittersweet?”

  “Yeah. Camp Bear Paw on the other side of the lake.”

  “Oh yeah? That’s somethin’ else.”

  “But if you’re not ready for me I can always—” Greg starts but Harvey waves him to stop then pulls off his cap to reveal a wavy mop of nearly all white hair. It had probably once been red, Greg realizes, as a shimmer of strawberry blonde shifts in the breeze. And, as a cloud passes before the sun and Greg gets a better look at the man, he finally catches a glimpse of the deep wrinkles in Harvey’s forehead and long crow’s feet trailing away from cool green eyes. In spite of all the muscle and size, Harvey must be in his mid-sixties, at least.

  “It’s no problem at all,” Harvey says. “I can take you on over to the carriage house and we’ll get you squared away.”

  “Sure,” Greg says.

  Harvey eases his huge body into Greg’s car and they shamble past a tall locust tree and a pale, sickly looking rose bush, and a wild jumble of peonies and hollyhocks and a ton of other flowers Greg couldn’t possibly name. They circle behind the lopsided Victorian lake house that will be Greg’s in just over a month and wind around a little vegetable garden and between another cluster of peonies before finally stopping at the two story carriage house which, in color and style, perfectly matches the main house.

  “Nice huh?” Harvey says.

  Greg can only nod. This quiet spot of land, right up against the lake, is exactly what he wants. Yes, it is old and a little tumbledown but he can work on that can’t he? He can spend his time fixing something up. Doing something constructive. He’s done it before, with his dad, all those years ago. And he can do it again. And maybe it will help him get back in shape. If Harvey is any indication of what caretaking for this place did to a man’s body, Greg would look like an ox in no time.

  “You got another truck coming with the rest of your stuff?” Harvey asks as he slides out of the passenger side.

  “No, just this. I had the movers put the rest in storage.”

  Harvey nods as he glances past the front seats at the few boxes Greg has jammed into the back. “Laurie’s Books,” is scrawled across the tops in black permanent marker and Greg feels a rush of bashful sadness. Why did he feel this way? Why did he drag two boxes of Laurie’s books all the way up here? Why, when he’d pulled up outside the library with the boxes ready to go, could he simply not put the car in park and take them in?

  “You want me to show you in or you wanna explore on your own?”

  “I can handle it,” Greg says. At this point, all he wants is silence.

  “Alright.” Harvey tosses the keys to Greg.

  “I’m around pretty much all the time—except Tuesday evenings and Friday nights. Rhona’s almost always here but she’s not always easy to find so you’re better off looking for me. The lake’s about twenty yards down that way, just through the trees. There’s a path past the big rock that looks like a cow. You can’t miss it. There’s no phone in the carriage house but you’re welcome to use ours.”

  He pulls a cordless phone out of his pocket. A strip of duct tape runs down the back and it looks like it’s been through hell.

  “No cell service up here,” Harvey says, waving the phone back and forth.

  “Yeah,” Greg says. It’s part of why he wanted the place.

  “See ya,” Harvey says, and trails off.

  Greg watches him head back up the path then opens the door and steps inside for a look around. The carriage house had probably been converted fifty years before as all the cabinets and tiling looked like the post-war-era house Greg grew up in. The bottom room consists of a kitchen with a tiny gas stove and living area which features what looked like an ancient horsehair sofa in the middle of a threadbare oriental rug. An iron spiral staircase leads up to a loft bedroom which holds a raw timber bed made up in white linen.

  “Not bad,” Greg says to himself, and sits down on the edge of the bed.

  He lays back across the width of it, his legs hanging over the edge, and smooths his hands over the white blanket. Harvey must have opened all the windows, he realizes. The May breeze brings in the lush afternoon birdsong and, somewhere nearby, a creek burbles.

  Greg closes his eyes.

  Laurie’s coffin is there. In the middle of the room.

  The image hits him like the low beat of a gigantic drum.

  And he is alone in the room even though he hadn’t been alone in reality. Even though no one would leave him alone.

  “It’s a book about a woman,” she had said a few days before. She was sitting on the sofa in an old t-shirt and not lying in the coffin. “She’s a stranger in a strange land and she falls in love. But she’s afraid.”

  Greg had been half listening as he took off his shoes and settled into the old, overstuffed armchair. He was exhausted. He had leaned back and closed his eyes and listened to Laurie turning the yellowed pages of her book.


  The sounds swirled away, drained into electricity and airwaves. She had been on the phone and not in front of him.

  “No, I understand. Listen, you have to do what you have to do. I’m fine, Greg,” she’d said.

  He smelled the coffee at the station, the disinfectant used to clean the floors. He heard the rumble of people in the background, the lieutenant's boots on the floor. And there were the files on his desk. The chewed ends of his pens. The photographs tacked to the wall. One. Two. Three. Four. Four blue hearts. And five was waiting.

  Five was waiting on him.

  “Ok,” Greg’s voice said. And he hated it. Hated the memory of it every time. The distraction, the lack of hesitation, the ignorance.

  “Ok. I’ll call you after. Love y—”

  But then there was the squeal. Just like every time. The squeal and the scream and the crunch of metal. The smash of glass. The explosion of air.

  The coffin.

  The drumbeat. The drumbeat of his heart.

  Greg’s lungs fill with a sudden burst of oxygen and he opens his eyes and exhales a rough burst of air. Still breathing hard and ragged, he sits up at the edge of the bed. His body drips cold sweat and his shirt clings to his back. His breath comes out in rough puffs and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand as the cool evening breeze drifts through the still-open loft window.

  It is the lake breeze, he knows. He recognizes it from so long ago. That sweet, flowery scent. That fresh, chilly damp that caresses the skin and soul.

  He rises, uneasily, to his feet and starts down the spiral stairs. It is half dark now and Greg wonders how long he has slept. The violet light of early evening casts the living area in a quiet, contemplative hue. Greg isn’t interested in the mood. He has had enough contemplation. Enough time spent mulling over his guilt. Or maybe not. Maybe there would never be enough time.