Miramont's Ghost by Elizabeth Hall
PROLOGUE
Manitou Springs, Colorado
She sat at the piano, fingers still poised over the now-silent keys. The notes of the night serenade dissipated in the cool air, ghosts of sound, lingering in the periphery of light and shadow. The sun had set. Shadows crept across the room. But Adrienne stared straight ahead, lost in a trance of remembering. The music had carried her away, to another time and another place, when she was young and in love and the future still sparkled with possibility.
Somewhere on the hillside a dog barked and jolted her from her reverie. Adrienne turned her head toward the window, filled now with the blue dark of evening. She stood and moved to the glass and stared out into the dusk.
Color faded from the sky. Stars winked in the canyons. Lights in the houses on the hillside flickered to life, bathing the windows with gold and spilling out into the streets. She could hear them—families gathering for dinner, plates clattering on the table. She could smell what they ate—garlic and tomato in the house below her, chicken with rosemary at the house across the street.
The little girl who lived in the blue house on the corner rode up and dropped her bike on the sidewalk. She turned and looked up at the castle, and for a moment, their eyes locked on one another. The girl stared for an instant longer, and then ran up the steps and in the front door of her house. Adrienne heard the screen door slam, watched as the girl raced into the amber light of the living room.
It had been many years since anyone had actually seen her, actually looked at her. Those eyes, locking on her own, sent a jolt like a bolt of lightning into the core of her being. Connection, however small, was something she hadn’t experienced in far too long.
But as soon as the little girl turned away, as soon as that connection was broken, Adrienne was flooded once more with the weight of her isolation. She thought she had managed to put all that away from her; she thought she had become adept at living with seclusion and silence. Now the force of her solitude threatened to knock her to her knees. She ached with longing—a longing she had not felt for many, many years.
The pine trees were completely black now, only silhouettes against the almost-black sky. Shades of gray filled the streets, as if all of life’s color had drained away with the setting sun. Adrienne wrapped her arms around her chest and stared at the falling darkness. Outside the window, crickets chirped. Wind rattled the leaves in the cottonwood tree. They click-click-clicked as they hit against each other. An owl hooted, his voice low and sad.
Memories of her dream came back, enveloping her like the gray of a rainy day. She was in the confessional, in a church she could neither see nor remember. The space was close and small. She watched the light, dim and dappled by the confessional screen, as it fell across her skirt and the hands resting in her lap. She could smell the onions that the priest had had for lunch. He was the priest from her childhood, Père Henri. As a child, the smell had always made her draw back and wrinkle her nose, but she remembered his voice as being deep and kind. He always listened quietly to those oh-so-innocent sins of her youth. She had pulled her sister’s hair. She had made a face at her aunt Marie. She had raised her voice to her mother. She remembered how hot and red she had become when she confessed that she had told her sister to “go to hell.” He never laughed, never minimized her sins or blew them out of proportion. He seemed to know instinctively that Adrienne was one of a handful of souls who took everything to heart. If she mentioned something, then it was because it weighed heavily on her mind.
How was it, then, that as she got older and her sins became greater, she had ceased confessing? She could not recall the last time she had stepped inside the confessional, could not recall the last time she had unburdened her heart. But waking from the dream last night, and now, as she stood at the window staring out into the dusk, she remembered how she always left that small, dark space feeling lighter. She could smile and laugh, and know as soon as she had said her five Hail Marys that all was well, that she was free to start fresh, to begin again, unshackled by guilt or shame.
And oh, how she would love to start fresh, to unburden herself of all that had happened. Because no matter how she had tried over these many years to justify her behavior, no matter how she tried to blame the situation and the circumstances that had led her to that point, the truth was that she had committed the worst of all possible sins. She had taken a life—and in fact, more than one.
She had thought, at the time, that it would end her torment, would allow her escape. But that was not the case. If anything, she was more trapped, more isolated, more haunted than before. And just a few moments ago, when she looked into the eyes of that young girl in the blue house, she felt once more the heavy burden of guilt and shame that she carried.
Adrienne looked back at the blue house. The family was sitting around the dinner table, lit up like a Norman Rockwell painting. They were laughing and talking and enjoying their evening dinner—a perfectly normal family and a perfectly normal evening. Normal. Adrienne sighed, and laid her forehead against the glass.