The Demon Lover Read Free Page B

it was still private property.
    I turned to leave. The wind picked up, lifting the green pollen from the porch floor and blowing it into little funnels around my feet as I hurried down the steps, which groaned under my boot heels. The vines that were twisted around the porch columns creaked and strained. A loose trailer snapped against my arm as I reached the ground, startling me so much that I stumbled. I caught my balance, though, and hurried down the front path, slowing only because I saw how slippery it was from the moss growing between the stones. When I reached the hedge I turned around to look back at the house. It gave one more sigh as the wind stopped, its clapboard walls moaning as if sorry to see me go, and then it settled on its foundation and sat back, staring at me.
    TWO
     
    “W ho owns the house across the street?” I asked later, while having afternoon tea with Diana Hart on the porch. Diana, a slim, copiously freckled woman in her fifties, shifted in her wicker rocker.
    “What house?” she asked, her large brown eyes widening. She wore her chestnut brown hair so closely cropped that it accentuated the size of her eyes.
    I pointed across the street even though the house wasn’t visible. “The one behind the overgrown hedge. A pretty yellow Queen Anne with green trim. It has a very unusual stained-glass fanlight over the front door.”
    “You went up to the door?” Diana asked, setting down her delicate china cup in its matching saucer. Milky tea sloshed over the brim.
    “The house looked empty …” I started to explain.
    “Oh yes, no one’s lived there for more than twenty years. Not since Dahlia LaMotte’s cousin died.”
    “Dahlia LaMotte, the novelist?” I asked.
    “Oh, you’ve heard of her?” Diana had her head down while she added more sugar to her tea. I could have sworn she’d already put in two teaspoons, but then she had quite the sweet tooth, as evidenced by the pink frosted Victoria sponge cake and chocolate-chip scones spread out over the wicker table in front of us. “I thought her books had gone out of fashion long ago.”
    Diana was right about that. Dahlia LaMotte had written a half dozen bodice-ripper romances at the turn of the twentieth century—the kind of books in which a young girl loses her parents and then finds herself at the mercy of an overbearing Byronic hero who locks her up in a Gothic tower and makes threats against her virginity until he is reformed by her love and proposes honorable marriage. Obviously influenced by Ann Radcliffe and the Brontës, her books were avidly read in the beginning of the twentieth century, but then fell out of favor. They’d been reprinted in the sixties when authors like Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt made Gothic romance popular again. You could still find copies of those reprints—tattered paperbacks featuring nightgown-clad heroines fleeing a looming castle on their covers—on the Internet, but I hadn’t had to buy them there. I’d found them hidden behind the “good books” on my grandmother’s bookshelves, a dozen books all with the name Emmeline Stoddard written on their flyleaves, and devoured them the summer I was twelve—which was another theory of where the shadow man of my dreams had come from: reading all those steamy Dahlia LaMotte books!
    “I’m interested in the intersection of fairy tales and the Gothic imagination,” I said primly—a primness ruined by the blood that rose to my cheeks at the memory of a particularly salacious scene in my favorite Dahlia LaMotte book, The Dark Stranger . “I knew she lived in upstate New York, but I didn’t know she lived here.”
    “Oh yes, we’ve had quite a number of famous authors in Fairwick. Dahlia was the daughter of Silas LaMotte, who made his fortune in shipping tea from the Far East. He built Honeysuckle House in 1893 for his wife and daughter. He planted Japanese honeysuckle all around it because his wife, Eugenia, loved the smell of it. Sadly, Eugenia