Haunt Me Still Read Free Page B

apart was that she returned it. A month later, she’d abruptly left stage and screen to marry him. From that day forward, her disappearance from the world’s stage had been more mysterious and complete than any other since Greta Garbo’s.
    Yet here she was, shaking my hand with an amused look on her face. “I’ve been looking forward to this moment for a long time,” she said, her voice just as I remembered it from films and interviews, husky for a woman, with a honeyed golden timbre. “I saw your Cardenio . And your Hamlet .”
    The plays I’d directed at London’s Globe Theatre.
    Disbelief jangled through my bones. Janet Douglas had been in the audience at the Globe, and nobody noticed? In London, tabloid capital of the universe?
    But then, nobody seemed to be noticing her here, either. I glanced around. Not a single diner or waiter appeared to have registered her presence, needling our table with sidelong glances and surreptitious whispers.
    And then I saw that I was wrong. From a booth across the room where he sat alone, one man gazed steadily in our direction. I’d noticed him as I walked in; an impression of height and dark hair had made me think, for a fleeting instant, that he was Ben. I’d stopped and glanced back, but his face was thin, with a long, patrician nose and eyes so pale they might have been silver; he was nobody I knew. Now he sat staring in our direction, a half smile playing on his mouth, but there was no amusement in his eyes—only something feral and hungry that had nothing to do with food.
    If Lady Nairn noticed, she gave no inkling of it. “Thank you for coming such a long way, on an old woman’s whim.”
    I smiled, thinking of Athenaide’s acid tongue: A jaunt, not a journey.
    “I’d like you to meet my granddaughter. Lily MacPhee. Though perhaps I should say I want her to meet you.” She spread her hands in mock dismay. “fifteen going on twenty-five. She’s at rehearsal at the moment, but I’m to walk up and collect her after dinner…. She’s had a hard year of it, as have I. Her mother—my daughter, Elizabeth—and dad were killed in a car crash six months ago.”
    A jagged sorrow ripped through the universe. I laid my spoon down; it was shaking. “I lost my parents at about her age,” I said carefully. What was wrong with me? That grief was fifteen years old, yet it had washed over me with the raw intensity of newness.
    Lady Nairn nodded. “Athenaide told me. It’s one reason I pushed for this meeting.”
    “And the other?”
    She sighed. “It’s been a gloomy year in the Nairn household. Our own annus horribilis, I suppose. I also lost my husband recently.”
    It dawned on me that she was wearing her black silk dress as if it were armor. “I’m sorry,” I said.
    Those famous turquoise eyes grew bright, but she did not look away. “It’s not well known, but Angus—my husband—spent his life collecting all kinds of flotsam and jetsam to do with…well, with the Scottish Play.”
    Macbeth, she meant. In the theatrical world, there was a strong taboo against naming it. The Scottish Play, the Plaid Play, even MacDaddy and MacBeast, it was called—but somehow it surprised me that forty years after she’d walked away from the theater, the worldly woman sitting across from me would indulge in the old superstition.
    “He was fascinated by both the historical king and Shakespeare’s play,” she went on. “Anything to do with the story. Including, I’m afraid, me.” She glanced down with a self-deprecatory smile. When she raised her eyes again, though, they were dark with worry. “I sometimes wonder whether the curse is clinging to me.”
    I frowned. In the theater, the spiraling evil of Shakespeare’s witch-haunted tragedy is held to be so strong that it cannot be contained by the frail walls of the stage but spills over into reality. By long tradition, it may not be quoted within a theater beyond what is necessary for rehearsal and performance. Even the