Dark to Mortal Eyes (16 page)

“A question
what?
Okay, Rosie, go on. I can take care of myself.”

“Mr. Addison, I think it’d be wise to—”

From down the hall, the phone summoned.

“Better get that,” Marsh said. “I’ll be fine.”

With a handful of Kleenex, he wiped away the remaining smear and considered himself in the vanity’s glow. He ran his hands through his wavy hair and sighed. Nothing sticky or bruised or injured. That was a relief. His face, too, was okay. No wounds, not even a razor nick along his sometimes treacherous cheekbones.

“Okay”—he dropped the tissues in the toilet bowl—“what gives?”

Although he’d slept alone last night, he was sure the blood was not his own. Then whose? Goose bumps lifted along his arms. Pinpricks of guilt? Had he—

Hold it. Standing barefoot on this cold floor—it’s no wonder I’ve got the chills
.

See, one mystery solved. He refused to waste any more time fitting together these puzzles with missing pieces. Not that he’d forget them entirely; for now, however, they’d go into his need-more-hard-facts file. He’d blame the blood on a nocturnal spider bite. Why not? Stranger things had happened. He needed to get on with his day.

Battle positions. Nearing the seven o’clock hour.

Buttoning slacks and a brown denim shirt with the vineyard’s emblem on the pocket, Marsh cut back into the study. He slipped his feet into his Arin Mundazis and waited for the task launcher to pit him once more against his foe. In moments Steele Knight and Crash-Chess-Dummy would rumble. The royal game, may it reign, would whisk his thoughts from yesterday’s unfathomable events.

He called Rosie to assuage her concerns. “Sorry if I worried you earlier. Figure I must’ve cut myself shaving.” He forced out a laugh.

“Was a bit startling, sir. Forgive my intrusion.”

“Not at all. Thanks for caring. Guess things get dangerous when you leave me and a razor alone before the break of dawn.” Watching the intercom light fade, he felt shaken. He’d lied only for lack of solid answers.

He crouched to the floor. At his back, the computer stirred to life while he made a quick search of the carpet, certain he would locate the glass queen he’d noticed was missing last night from the chess table. He must’ve overlooked her in the dark.

Swish …

“Rosamund?” Surely the muffins weren’t already done.

Squeak …

The sound of leather creaked through the room.

Whew. What was that smell? A rank odor permeated the space and settled like a mildewed tarp over his back.

Still in a crouch, Marsh had the feeling that he was not alone. He gripped the crystal chess table and clenched his teeth. His heart drove a blow into his chest, then retreated as a hollow ache settled over him. Again that image of Kara’s porcelain neck, his black and white tie. The squares of the chessboard melded with his thoughts, gripping him with a sense of guilt.

Which he rejected. He wasn’t the only one with secrets in this house.

Please, God
, Kara had called out,
open his eyes …

What had she meant by that?

This is silly
, he told himself.
Turn around and play your chess match
.

Instead, he shut down his external senses and tried to perceive something—or someone—on a level he rarely explored. Events had propelled him toward this. The unexpected. The otherworldly.

No! What was he thinking? He didn’t believe in that stuff. With a splash of cold logic, he jarred himself back to his domain, the concrete world, which he scheduled, comprehended, controlled. Time to take charge. He gritted his jaw in combat mode, stiffened his hands into chopping implements. He dug his loafers into the rug, rose, and swiveled back toward his desk. Prepared for anything.

Well, almost anything.

Be prepared …

His father’s eagle scout motto tramped through Marsh’s head as he turned toward his chair in the study. From boyhood, Marsh had striven to follow those words, to be prepared—like his father. He had no memory of Chance Addison, knew only what his mother told him of a tall, proud man who had spoken sparingly and, after the war, laughed far too infrequently.

One day, arriving home early from middle school, Marsh had found his mother in the sitting room sifting through a box of memorabilia.

“What’re those?”

“Photos,” said Virginia. “Some of your father’s things.”

“Why don’t you ever talk about him?”

“Don’t see a need. Nothing more you should know for now.”

“Shoot, Mom, I’m thirteen. Old enough to know something at least.”

“There’s nothing to say that’ll change things. Won’t bring him back now, will it?” Virginia Addison handed him a photo in a silver frame. “That’s him. Nineteen years old and not much bigger than you, Son.” Angled in the sunlight, the picture showed Chance’s thumbs hitched into Wrangler belt loops as an elbow steadied him against a plow handle. In the background, fingers of clouds combed the ridge that would later bear his name.

“Wish my dad was still here.”

“That was just after he bought this place,” Virginia said. “He was feeling mighty proud of himself there.”

In the spring of 1941, she told him, Chance had received a modest inheritance from an aunt and purchased this colonial home on a hillside north of Corvallis. His dream was to cultivate one of Oregon’s first commercial vineyards. Instead, following the December attack at Pearl Harbor, he found himself training at nearby Camp Adair, where he met and eventually married Virginia Drake.

“I was just a farm girl. Made regular milk deliveries to the mess hall.”

“And the sparks flew, huh?”

“What do you know about that sort of thing?” She brushed off a humble wedding album, thumbed through the pages. “Sad thing is, your father and I never did have a proper honeymoon.”

“Ooh, yuck. Don’t wanna hear any of that romance junk anyway.”

His mother’s head was shrouded in memories. “Chance always said we’d take one after the war, but we never did. The vineyard was his focus. Things to be done, work on the ridge to be kept up.”

“Still is.”

“You do your fair share, Marsh. Yes, you do.” She took the photo from him. “Your father was a patriotic man. He loved his country, without a doubt,
but his dreams were always here on Addison Ridge. It pained him to leave it behind. He’d have done anything to get this place off the ground, but the dreams had to wait.”

Soon after their wedding, she explained, a train took Chance far from his vineyard aspirations to complete his training in the deserts of eastern Oregon, Arizona, and California. In the fall of ’44, he and the “Timberwolves” of the 104th Infantry Division had entered the conflict on European shores. Within a year, they’d fed over six thousand of their members to the voracious belly of the war, and they were but one of Camp Adair’s four divisions.

After the armistice, First Lieutenant Chance Addison was transferred to CIC (Counterintelligence Corps) on special assignment at Kransberg Castle. Near Frankfurt, Germany. His letter writing became more sporadic. He claimed his work was top-secret, that there was little he could divulge. In late ’45, having dutifully completed his task, Chance caught a cargo plane back to American soil.

Alive, yes. The same person, no.

Despite his emotional reticence, the homecoming resulted in Virginia’s pregnancy, but after nine months of numerous difficulties, the son she’d nurtured in her womb died during delivery. Umbilical cord around his neck, the army doctor told her, and the tiny body was rushed out of her sight.

She became hysterical. A male nurse gave her an injection that provided only temporary relief. When she awoke, she was alone in a heartless room beneath lights and metal mirrors.

Not even for a moment had she been allowed to hold her son.

“You never told me about this! Why?” Cross-legged in the sitting room, Marsh was overwhelmed. “I’m a teenager now, old enough to know this stuff. You mean I would’ve had a brother? What would his name have been?”

“He’s gone. Doesn’t much matter now, does it?”

“Why can’t you tell me? By this time he’d have been in college, I bet.”

Virginia rose to her knees and fluffed her calico dress. “ ’Course he would’ve. Now shush. I’ll go on if you’ll keep quiet and help set these things back in the box.”

In 1947, after a period of grieving their firstborn son, Chance and Virginia began cultivating their small vineyard. They buried their memories
beneath the tilled and fertilized soil, beneath the hours of labor and sweat poured into their grape arbors: Rieslings and Chardonnays, Gewürztraminers and fruity Müller-Thurgaus.

Children? There were none. The Addisons kept themselves occupied.

As the vineyard expanded, its reputation did likewise. Over the next decade, social events became commonplace, luring merchants, investors, Napa Valley winemakers, and county officials, plus Chance’s golfing buddies and Virginia’s bridge-playing friends with their competing bouffant hairdos. Smiles sparkled like artificial diamonds. Periodically, genuine laughter flitted through the Addison manor—though it always departed with the last guest to leave.

In 1959, coming as a surprise to all, Virginia conceived again.

Was she ready for this? A child? She and Chance were in their late thirties. How would this affect their lifestyle, schedules, social circles? Would it disrupt Addison Ridge Vineyard’s promising growth?

Most pressing, would the baby survive?

Virginia’s guilt from losing the first child weighed even heavier than the new life inside. As her belly expanded, so did her depression; she was convinced her efforts would be for naught, the pounds gained for nothing. Per doctor’s orders, she spent the last trimester on bed rest.

Then in November, following eighteen hours of labor, Marshall Ray Addison entered the world headfirst. The doctor placed the boy in his mother’s exhausted arms, and she blubbered sweet nothings to him through a grin that wouldn’t quit.

She had her baby. At last.

“And regretted every minute of it.”

“Shush, Marsh, not true, not true at all.” Virginia was sorting a stack of yearbooks. “Could never have kept this place up without you. ’Course, I never expected that we’d be on our own. I expected your doggone father to stick around longer than he did. Wasn’t meant to be, I s’pose.”

“Wasn’t there something the doctors could’ve done? Some kind of treatment?”

“Nothing that lasted. Too little too late.”

Soon after Marsh’s birth, she explained, Chance Addison started to fade.
And quickly. For years, Chance had suffered from migraines and bleeding from his ears and eyes. The army physician blamed the symptoms on his war wounds. Fifteen years earlier, in the Rhineland, Chance had scrambled through a trench to snatch up and heave away an enemy grenade, thus saving a fellow soldier’s life, but the resulting explosion had smashed him into the dirt, rendering him unconscious and temporarily deaf. The physician explained that the residual scar tissue in his ears was now tearing and rehealing—or some such nonsense. Though worried sick, Virginia was placated by the medical jargon and by government checks that appeared monthly at the post office.

But Chance knew better. His guilt demanded an outlet, and as he wasted away beneath the muddled diagnoses, he spilled his secrets onto the pages of a journal.

Marsh sat up. “What secrets?” He was almost done organizing the box. “Secrets.”

“Come on, Mom, you’re talking about my father.”

“Things from the war.” Virginia gazed off through the sitting room window. “Certain things are between a man and wife and no one else. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got to say about it.”

“Where’s his journal? Let me at least read that.”

“It’d be about useless to you. That journal’s so faded, so scribbled—looks like the tattered remains of an old pirate’s map.”

Marsh rummaged through the box of memorabilia.

“It’s not there,” she told him. “It’s not anywhere, as far as you’re concerned. That’s the way your father wanted it. His instructions were specific that you should not read it. Until …”

“Until what?”