Lovers and Strangers (7 page)

"Is it a hologram?" she asked, awed.

"A what?"

"The woman in the mirror. Is she some kind of hologram?"

Jack felt an icy finger slither down his spine. "What woman?" he asked softly.

"That woman," Faith said, lifting her hand to point at the mirror.

"Describe her," Jack demanded softly, still seeing only the reflections of Faith and himself. "What does she look like?"

"She's wearing a long pale dress, like a heavy satin slip. And she's looking at me like... I don't know, like she's staring into my soul, I guess. It's kind of eerie. She's so beautiful and she looks so sad. No... No, she's smiling now." Faith took a half step forward, reaching out as if to touch the image she saw in the mirror, and then stopped. "Oh, she's gone." She stepped back to where she had been, trying to bring the image back into focus. "How do I get her to come back?" She shifted her gaze, seeking Jack's in the mirror as she asked the question. He was staring at her with a strangely intent expression on his face, one she couldn't even begin to read.

If anyone else had told him what she just had, Jack thought, he'd have said they were pulling his leg. But Faith was too ingenuous, her reaction too real and honest for it to be an act. She actually thought she'd seen something besides their reflected images in the old mirror.

"Jack?"

"I didn't think God-fearing Christians believed in ghosts."

"Ghosts?" Faith's first thought was that he was teasing her, but she didn't know him well enough to tell. He didn't
look
as if he were teasing but... She turned around to face him, as if direct eye-to-eye contact would make things clearer. "Are you telling me that wasn't a hologram? That it was a... Oh, come on." Faith shook her head at the absurdity. "A ghost?"

"I take it you haven't heard the legend of the woman in the mirror, then?"

Faith decided he
must
be teasing her. "No." She smiled, perfectly willing to be teased—by him. "What legend?"

"Back in 1930 or thereabouts, a young starlet was found floating, facedown, in the swimming pool. Drowned," he clarified. "Apparently, nobody saw what happened. At least, nobody ever admitted it if they did. The police never determined whether it was an accident or—" he hesitated slightly over the word but only someone as attuned to him as Faith would have noticed it "—suicide or murder. The case is unsolved to this day. According to some, it's her ghost that haunts the Wilshire Arms." He shrugged. "Of course, others say that the ghost is a completely different woman."

"So that's what you're saying I saw in the mirror? A ghost?"

"I don't know." Jack's eyebrow slid up. "Did you?"

Faith shook her head. "I don't believe in ghosts," she said firmly. "And yet..." She glanced back over her shoulder at the mirror. "I can't deny I did see—" her gaze came back to meet his "—something."

"Hell, maybe it was a hologram," Jack said, willing to be convinced of it himself. A hologram was a lot easier to believe in than a ghost. "Or some other kind of optical illusion. A lot of Hollywood technicians lived in the Wilshire Arms back in its heyday. One of them might have rigged up a tricky bit of movie magic that only works when you're standing in exactly the right spot and the sun is shining through the windows at exactly the right angle and it's the second Saturday of the month under a full moon. Or something. As a theory, it's kind of farfetched, I'll admit, but..." He shrugged.

"But not so farfetched as the alternative," Faith finished for him.

"No," he agreed. "Not so farfetched as the alternative." His gaze wandered back over her head to the mirror again, his eyes speculative now. "I'll have to ask Mueller about it the next time I see him. If anyone would know if the mirror is rigged, he would. If he'll admit it," he added softly, as if speaking to himself.

Carl Mueller, he suddenly remembered, was the one who'd first told him about the legend, some twenty-five years ago. He'd reminded him of it—warned him of it, really—on the day Jack had moved back into apartment 1-G, seeming to relish in making it sound as eerie and mysterious as possible. No, Jack decided, frowning, Mueller wouldn't admit to the possibility of the mirror's being rigged. He liked being the keeper of the legend too much.

"Jack?"

"What?" Jack blinked, bringing Faith back into focus. She was standing right in front of him, her face turned up to his. Jack took a careful step back. "Sorry," he said, apologizing for his momentary distraction. "You have to get going, don't you? And I have to get back to work."

Faith took the hint. "I'll see you tomorrow, then," she said, turning toward the door as she spoke. "At one o'clock sharp."

"Tomorrow at one," Jack agreed and ushered her to the door.

After she had gone, he came back to stand directly in front of the mirror, trying to imagine what kind of movie trickery could possibly account for what she thought she'd seen in its silvery depths. Offhand, he couldn't think of any existing technology that could have produced such an effect, especially not any technology that had been available back in the thirties. He took a step back, then forward, to the left and right. Nothing happened. He ran his fingers over the elaborate scrolls and rosebuds decorating the heavy pewter frame, searching for wires... something...
anything
that might account for the appearance of the lady in the mirror. There was nothing. He tried lifting it down from the wall but it was stuck fast. And, yet, there were no nails, no screws, no hooks that he could see.

"Super Glue?" he murmured, his eyebrow askew as he stepped back to stare at the mirror.

Hell, he didn't know why he was wasting his time looking, anyway. He knew it wasn't a hologram; holograms didn't work that way. And it sure as hell wasn't a ghost, either; there was no such thing as ghosts. Most probably, Faith
had
heard about the supposed lady in the mirror from someone, despite what she'd said to the contrary, and had innocently hallucinated the whole thing. But if that was the case, he thought, she'd been very sangfroid about being singled out by the mysterious lady.

Or maybe she just hadn't heard the whole story.

Because legend had it that anyone who saw the woman in mirror was about to be blessed with their fondest dream. Or cursed with their worst nightmare.

Chapter 3

"You can do this," Faith told herself as she approached the door to Jack Shannon's apartment with her newly purchased collapsible cart full of cleaning supplies. "You've been doing it all your life." Except that no one had ever paid her for it before. "It's not going to be any different than cleaning 2-C." Except that 2-C had been empty while she worked, if you didn't count the parrot the absent tenant wanted her to talk to while she cleaned. "There's absolutely nothing to be nervous about," she assured herself. Except that Jack Shannon—even the
thought
of Jack Shannon—made her very nervous, indeed.

In an exciting kind of way.

A way she'd never felt before.

Well, no,
she corrected mentally, always scrupulously honest with herself, even within the confines of her own head. She had felt something like this once before, a long, long time ago. At least, it had started out feeling like this. There'd been the same fluttery sense of anticipation, the same sort of butterfly nervousness that had her smoothing her hair and straightening her T-shirt when it didn't need straightening. And then it had all gone horribly wrong. And what had come after had erased the sweet feelings of schoolgirl giddiness, making everything ugly and profane. But this was different, she told herself.

The time was different.

The situation was different.

Jack Shannon was different.

Most importantly,
she
was different.

And the fact that she'd actually had the gall to pressure him into hiring her to clean his apartment proved it. She'd never pressured anyone to do anything before. She wouldn't have dared.

"Well," she said aloud. "This is the new you. And the new you is going to dare a lot of things from now on. Things the old you never even dreamed of."

Taking a deep breath, she lifted her hand to fluff her newly cut bangs, then knocked sharply on Jack Shannon's front door.

* * *

"THIS IS NEVER going to work," Jack mumbled to himself, surreptitiously watching Faith while she scrubbed his kitchen counters. "I must have been out of my mind to think it would."

It had been marginally okay when she was working in the bedroom and bathroom. It had been approaching almost fine when she disappeared for those two half hour segments of time to do whatever she'd done with his dirty clothes and linens in the basement laundry room. It had even been bearable—just!—when she was working in the living room behind him, vacuuming and dusting and rearranging his books and magazines into neat rows and piles. But now he realized that it just wasn't going to work.

He couldn't sit there at his typewriter and accomplish anything at all while she stood less than twelve feet away, in plain sight, scouring his kitchen counters with lemon-scented cleanser and a big pink sponge.

He tried to tell himself to ignore her. She was just the maid, after all. And he'd sat in front of his typewriter in dozens, probably hundreds of hotel rooms over the years, working on a story while some woman from housekeeping cleaned around him. Hell, he'd sat and worked while
mortars
exploded around him and never even looked up to see how close they were. If he could ignore mortar fire, he should be able ignore one little maid who wasn't doing a single thing to try to attract his attention.

Except... Dammit, Faith McCray didn't look anything like a maid—or cleaning woman or domestic employee or whatever the hell the politically correct term was these days—was supposed to look. And everything she did absolutely
riveted
his attention.

He'd been surreptitiously, obsessively studying her every gesture, every little nuance of her appearance, every time she came into his view. She'd done something different to her hair, he'd decided, styling it so that a new layer of feathery bangs called unnecessary attention to her huge gold-flecked eyes. And she was dressed differently, too—still plainly but with a little more of the laid-back style Southern California was known for. She'd replaced the starched white blouse of the other day with a soft yellow cotton T-shirt that subtly molded the curves of her breasts, instead of hiding them. It was neatly tucked into the waistband of a pair of old, faded and, he suspected—judging by the too tight fit across the hips and the neatly rolled hems— borrowed blue jeans.

When she bent over to put a clean plastic bag in the garbage can, he was captivated by the way those jeans clung to the curve of her bottom and the long smooth line of her thighs. When she leaned over to scrub the stains in the bottom of his kitchen sink, he was mesmerized by the movement of her breasts under the material of the plain yellow T-shirt and the flowered bib of her apron. The way she lifted her arm to brush at a stray wisp of hair with the back of her wrist fascinated him. The way she bit her lower lip and furrowed her brow when some spot needed an extra bit of elbow grease delighted him. The way she paused, every so often, to tug her yellow rubber gloves more firmly onto her hands entranced him. Even the way she wrung out the sponge, giving it a last emphatic little squeeze each time, charmed him.

And she wasn't even his type!

Jill Mickelson, the interior designer from 2-B, now
she
was his type. Sexy, sophisticated and savvy, she was just the kind of woman he'd always liked. Jill was a grown-up who'd been around the block and had no schoolgirl illusions, no unrealistic expectations, no shining innocence to be shattered by ugly truths. They'd gone out a couple of times soon after he'd moved into the Wilshire Arms. They'd shared a meal or two, a few laughs—and enough more that any fantasies he might have had about Jill Mickelson standing in his kitchen wearing nothing but an apron would be a lot more accurate than the pictures his perverted mind conjured up of Faith McCray in the same outfit.

It was sacrilege, what he was thinking.

It was depraved and twisted.

And innocent, wholesome Faith McCray would probably run out of the apartment screaming if she had any idea of what was going on in his head right now. Hell,
he
was about to rim out of the apartment screaming himself. From sheer, unadulterated frustration. And guilt.