Haunt Me Still Read Free

fine-china crackling of very fair skin in old age. Awash in moonlight, with her hands thrust deep into the pockets of her jacket, a gauzy scarf at her neck, and hair of the palest gold swept up in a graceful french twist, she seemed to be shining with a light of her own.
    “It’s one of the Sidlaws,” she mused, staring out the window at the hill that dominated the landscape. A strangely shaped hill sitting apart from its fellows, capped with a turret-like top. “ Law, from Old English hlaew, meaning hill, mountain, or mound, and also the hollow places inside them, like caves or barrows. And sid, from the Gaelic sidhe ”—which she pronounced like “she.” “The Good folk,” she said without turning. “The fairies…It’s a fairy hill.”
    She was tall, taller than me, and still imposing—not someone you expected to hear musing about fairies.
    She shrugged slightly, as if brushing off my thoughts. “People have disappeared from it, from time to time. Caught up by the Good folk riding out on one of their hunts and swept off to feast in enchanted halls where time passes differently, and the golden air is laced with laughter and song. Most never return. Those who do come back touched. Fairy-stricken, as it’s said around here. That’s what the old legends say, at any rate.” She glanced around. “Not the gossamer-winged flower mites the Victorians liked to draw, mind you. The Scottish fairies, I’m talking about. Sometimes confused with the weird sisters or with witches—but not hags, as Shakespeare makes them. In Scotland, the fairies are bright and beautiful and fey. Dangerous.”
    It struck me suddenly that standing there silvered with moonlight, she looked like one of them herself.
    “We have one rule in this house. Don’t go up the hill alone. ”.
     
    I’d met her for the first time earlier that evening. It was Athenaide who engineered it, of course; who else?
    Athenaide Dever Preston was a small, white-haired woman with an outsized personality more in keeping with the expanse of her ranch than with the diminutive scale of her person. The ranch encompassed a wide swathe of southwestern New Mexico; she lived there in an improbable palace modeled on Hamlet’s Elsinore, concealed within a ghost town by the name of Shakespeare. Since the death of her cousin rosalind Howard, once my mentor at Harvard, Athenaide had decided that I needed a family and that she was the best candidate for the job.
    That morning, the phone had pulled me from a deep blanket of sleep in my flat in London.
    “I have a friend who wants to meet you,” she said. “Athenaide?” I’d croaked, sitting up. I peered at the clock. “It’s five A.M .”
    “I don’t mean at this instant, mija . Tonight. Dinner. Are you busy?”
    All week, I’d been looking forward to a rendezvous with Chopin at my piano, a velvety glass of cabernet, and maybe later some mindless TV. But I owed Athenaide more than I could ever count up. “No,” I said reluctantly.
    “Not even with the redoubtable Mr. Benjamin Pearl?”
    I swallowed hard against a pang of irritation. Ben Pearl and I had met two years before, trying to outrun a killer while tracking down one of Shakespeare’s lost plays—an experience that might as well have been a lightning bolt fusing us together. At first, we’d met whenever we could, with a fizz and sparkle that felt like champagne and fireworks. For a week or ten days, we’d be as inseparable as we were insatiable. But then one career or the other would come calling, pulling us down separate paths. In the end, the strain was too great. Six months earlier, we’d parted ways for good, but Athenaide stubbornly refused to absorb that fact.
    “Ah, well,” she clucked. “As some bright young thing once said, the course of true love never did run smooth. Now write this down: Boswell’s Court, off Castle Hill.”
    I was halfway through scribbling out the address when I stopped. London had no Castle Hill that I knew of.