Twilight Hunger. Maggie Shayne
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thing up there other than cobwebs and dust. Exploring more of the ramshackle house had been an experiment in procrastination, not an act of curiosity. If her own work had been going anywhere, she never would have bothered poking around this aging, sagging house at all.
And that would have been a crying shame.
She ran through the hallway, between walls of crumbling plaster, the lath beneath it visible in places, to the next set of stairs. These were wider, but not in much better repair than anything else around the place. The third step from the top was missing a board, and she skipped it automatically and trotted the rest of the way down as the phone kept on ringing.
If it were another lawyer or bill collector, she thought breathlessly, she would hunt them down and kill them.
The wide staircase emptied itself into a huge room that must have been glorious once, a century or so ago. Now it was filled with nothing but heartbroken echoes and a tangle of bare wires sticking out of the domed ceiling, where some magnificent chandelier must have once been. Beyond that room, through a pair of double doors, was her room. Her … office. For the moment, at least. But only until she earned back her fortune and returned to L.A. in triumph.
Pretty much the opposite of the way she had left.
Her heart was pounding from exertion by the time she got that far, and she was out of breath, slightly dizzy, and pressing one hand to her chest. Ridiculous for a twenty-year-old woman to tire so easily, but there it was. She had never been healthy, and she knew she wasn’t ever going to be. But at least her condition hadn’t begun to worsen yet. It was too soon. She had so many things to do.
Finally Morgan snatched up the telephone, which was as antiquated as the rest of the place. The handset weighed at least two pounds, she guessed, and the rotary dial seemed to mock her high-tech tastes.
If her “hello?” sounded irritated, it was because she was dying to read more of those journals up in the attic, to find out more about their author. She might be on the verge of admitting that she was a talentless hack, but she still knew good writing when she read it, and what she had been reading upstairs was good writing. Painfully good.
“Morgan? What took you so long? I was getting worried.”
Her irritation fled at David Sumner’s familiar voice. Her honorary uncle—a title she’d stopped using long ago—was the only person who hadn’t turned his back on her when she had gone from spoiled rich girl to penniless orphan in a matter of hours. He was the one person she didn’t mind hearing from just now.
“Hey, David,” she said. “I was just. exploring. This place is huge, you know.”
“No, I don’t know, never having laid eyes on it. You sound a little out of breath.”
“Two flights of stairs will do that.”
She noticed his hesitation. He tended to worry about her far more than he should.
“How is the place, anyway?” he asked at length.
“It’s a wreck,” she told him, her tone teasing, partly because she was trying to ease his mind and partly because she enjoyed teasing him. “Which serves you right for buying it sight unseen. Who does stuff like that?”
She could almost see his puckered face, the laugh lines around his eyes, his balding head. David had been her best friend for as long as she could remember. “A friend of the family,” her parents had always called him. But it had seemed to Morgan that he’d barely tolerated the family.
Of course, he had known the truth about her parents all along. She had only learned it recently, through tabloid headlines and courtroom vultures.
“I bought it for the location, and you know it,” David told her. “And I trust my real estate guru on such matters. The building is coming down, anyway.”
“Yes, it is,” Morgan said. “As we speak.”
He was quiet for a moment. “That bad, huh?”
She could have slapped herself. Sometimes she could be such a self-centered little … “It’s not,” she said quickly. “I was joking.” She looked around her at the room she had chosen to inhabit. It had been somebody’s library or study once upon a time.
She thought of the little boy she had been reading about and wondered if it had ever been his. In his older years, perhaps, when he had decided to write his memoirs.
From the corner of her eye, she saw him. A dark, broad-shouldered form bent over the desk, with a quill pen in his long, graceful hand. Her heart jumped, and she caught her breath and turned toward him. But there was nothing. No man, no form, no quill pen. Just her computer with its electric blue screen. Whatever she had seen was there and then gone. A vision. A thought form. A little overactivity of her imagination, perhaps.
A shiver worked its way up her spine, but she shook it away.
“Describe it to me,” David was saying.
“What?” she asked, dragging her eyes away from the old desk.
“The house. Describe it to me.”
She flicked her gaze toward the desk again. No one there. Sighing, she tried to comply with David’s request. “It must have been incredible once. The scrollwork around the fireplace mantle is worn and faded, but lavish. I think it’s hardwood. You’re going to want to take that entire piece out before you tear it down. And there’s hand-tooled casing that borders every one of the tall windows. This place has … I don’t know. Something.”
“It’s far from what you’re used to, though,” David said.
“Yeah, well, it’s not Beverly Hills, and we aren’t having movie stars over for poolside parties … but I wouldn’t be getting any work done that way, would I?”
“And are you? Getting any work done?”
Morgan looked at the glowing blue screen of her computer—which had only escaped the notice of the estate lawyers because it had been with her at UCLA when her parents had been killed and the true state of their finances revealed. They were broke, and so far in debt Morgan could barely wrap her mind around the actual numbers. She hadn’t been able to make sense of it, at first. Her father was a successful director, her mother an actress who had reached her zenith a decade ago and had been doing smaller roles lately, but who had still seemed content with her life.
Or so Morgan had thought. She soon learned she had been living in a bubble. The level of cocaine in her parents’ systems the night of the accident was so high the coroner wondered how they had even managed to drive.
They’d been addicts, their entire lifestyle a lie.
The house and everything in it had been sold to pay off a portion of their accumulated debt, and Morgan had to drop out of school. Her tuition had already been months overdue. And apparently her friends were as shallow as David had always tried to tell her they were, because once the truth came out, they had abandoned her like last year’s wardrobe, while those she had always considered beneath her seemed secretly amused by her troubles. The last few days on campus, she had found tabloid pages tacked to bulletin boards in every hall, screaming about the secret, drug-infested life of the famous couple who seemed to have had it all. The nightmare behind the fairy tale, and the poor little rich girl left to pick up the pieces.
She had run from L.A. with her tail between her legs, with nowhere to go and nothing left besides the things she managed to take with her. She’d pulled into David’s driveway with nothing but her Maserati—the registration in her name, thank God—and the stuff she had crammed into its minuscule trunk. He was her last hope, and she had half expected him to turn away from her in disgust, just like all the rest.
But he hadn’t turned away. He’d helped her sell the car, buy a modest used one and pocket the difference. When she said she needed a hideaway where she could go to lick her wounds, he told her she could use this place in Maine, free of charge, for as long as she needed to.
Which