Shadows At Sunset - Anne Stuart [37]
Rachel-Ann had almost made it to the foot of the stairs when she smelled it. The scent of Ted Hughes’s imported cigarettes, mixed with a trace of Brenda’s French perfume. It was a combination of smells like no other, and there were times when Rachel-Ann woke with the scent of them in her nostrils and felt comforted.
And then she’d remember who and what they were.
She glanced nervously over her shoulder as she started up the stairs, but there was no sign of them, just the telltale trace of perfume, the lingering hint of tobacco. She should have brought Rico back with her. He would have come, she knew it. He stared at her too much not to want her. If she’d brought him back to the old house the ghosts wouldn’t dare come closer, and for a night she wouldn’t have to be afraid.
Except that in the morning, or even sooner, he’d leave. She’d kick him out, and she’d be alone again, alone with the truth of what really terrified her. Not the ghosts of Hollywood.
But her own empty life.
As usual, Jilly couldn’t sleep. It was an annoying fact of life that she’d been troubled with insomnia ever since she was fifteen years old, and nothing, not sleeping pills, not biofeedback, not meditation, had any effect on it. She could even remember when it started, and she wished she didn’t.
She’d been staying with her grandmother. She was never sure why her grandmother chose to live at La Casa when she could have lived almost anywhere. It was only recently that Jilly had decided she’d lived there for the express purpose of keeping her son away.
Jilly’s parents had divorced in the late seventies, and for some reason Jackson had maintained custody of the children. In retrospect Jilly couldn’t figure out why he bothered—he never paid attention to any of them except Rachel-Ann. She’d assumed it was simply spite on his part, that Edith Walker Meyer had dared to leave him.
But when Edith had died in a car accident up near San Simeon Jackson had simply shipped his three children off to live with his mother at La Casa de Sombras. Jackson and Grandmère had a strained, hostile relationship at best, but Julia Meyer was one of the few people who got her way with him. She’d gotten his children for a few, important years, and she’d manipulated the legal system enough to keep La Casa out of his greedy hands for as long as possible. The house had remained empty for more than a decade after the murder-suicide. Then her grandmother had moved in, dispossessing the squatters who’d taken up residence, sinking far too much money against the inevitable decay of time. She’d lived there for a number of years in the early 1980s, pouring her energy and her money into the place, and when the three children had gone to stay with Grandmère, as she liked to be called, even though she didn’t have a drop of French blood in her, it had become the first real home Jilly had ever known.
Jilly had fallen in love with La Casa the first time she’d seen it. She’d always thought of it as Sleeping Beauty’s castle, surrounded by tangled growth, magic inside. While Dean had busied himself at school and Rachel-Ann had simply seemed unnerved by the place, young Jilly had thrown herself into Grandmère’s restoration projects with a full heart, looking for something, anything, to expend her love and energy on.
She’d lived there from age twelve to age seventeen, when she’d been sent off to college, and they’d been some of the best years of her life. Until the night at the swimming pool.
It had been a liability even back then. All the chemicals in the world hadn’t been able to keep it clear, and Grandmère had been ready to give up on it. But Jilly had been young, thoughtless, and the summer days in L.A. were