Now, as she parked the Opel in the four-car garage attached to Barnaby Manor, she wondered exactly what else had transpired between her and Ben Groves. She felt, inexplicably, as if some new and special relationship had begun, now quite fragile, but perhaps soon to blossom and flower…
By quarter past five o'clock — with a good deal of time remaining until dinner — she had showered, dried her hair, inspected her tan in the mirror and dressed. Still full of energy, despite the work that had gone into the day's sailing and despite the energy the heat of the sun had taken out of her, she wasn't satisfied to read or to relax to music in her room.
Downstairs, Fritz and Grace were at work in the kitchen. Though both were polite, neither was a particularly fascinating conversationalist. Neither her aunt nor her uncle were about, and Ben Groves had not returned from Calder. The house lay heavy, cool and quiet, as if it were asleep and must not be awakened.
She went outside to the steps by the sea, and walked carefully downward to the beach, where everything was beautifully golden in the late afternoon sunlight.
Far out to sea, a tanker wallowed southward, noiseless at this distance, like some immense, ancient animal that should have been long extinct.
Watching the huge tanker, Gwyn was reminded of the way that Jack Younger had followed her in his fisherman's launch only the day before, and she knew that she had, without realizing it, come here to the beach in hopes of meeting him once more and getting a chance to give him a piece of her mind.
However, though the time seemed right, not a single fishing boat lay on the swell in either direction.
Gwyn took off her shoes — white canvas sneakers — and walked into the frothing edge of the surf. She wriggled her toes in the rapidly cooling water, stirred up milky clouds of fine sand, and kicked at stranded clumps of darkening seaweed.
When she had walked nearly a mile, no longer charged with so much undisciplined energy, she stopped at the water's edge and faced directly out to sea, watching the creamy clouds bend toward the liquid, cobalt horizon.
She had built up a tremendous appetite and was looking forward to one of Grace's hearty meals, then to a couple hours of reading in her room, and early to bed. She knew that, tonight, she would sleep like a rock, without any strange dreams. She bent down and put on her shoes, turned to go back to Barnaby Manor — and was rooted to the spot by what she saw behind her.
As if following in her footsteps, her double stood no more than a hundred feet away. She was wearing that many-layered white dress that billowed prettily in the sea breeze and gave her an ethereal look, as if she did not belong in this world. And perhaps she did not…
Gwyn took a step toward the pale apparition, then stopped suddenly, unable to find sufficient courage to continue.
The other Gwyn, the Gwyn in white, remained where she was — though her own stillness did not appear to be founded in fear.
Despite the steady susurration of the sea wind — which fluffed the stranger's golden mass of hair into an angelic nimbus all around her head — and despite the rhythmic sloshing sound of the waves breaking on the beach, the scene was maddeningly quiet. The air was leaden, the sky pressing down, each second an eternity. It was the sort of silence, filled with unknown fear, that one usually found only in remote graveyards or in funeral parlors where a corpse lay amid flowers.
To break this disquieting quiet, Gwyn cleared her throat — somewhat surprised at the noise she made, and in a voice cut through with a nervous tremor, she asked, “Who are you?”
The other Gwyn only smiled.
“Ginny?” Gwyn asked.
She hated to say that. But she could not help herself.
“Hello, Gwyn,” the apparition replied.
Gwyn shook her head, looked down at the sand, trying desperately to dispel the vision. But when she looked up again, she found, as she had expected she would, that Ginny remained exactly where she had been, in her white dress, yellow hair fluttering.
“I'm seeing things,” Gwyn said.
“No.”
“Hallucinations.”
“And are you hearing things too, Gwyn?” the double asked, smiling tolerantly.
“Yes.”
The apparition took several steps toward Gwyn, cutting the distance between them by a fourth. She smiled again and said, in a comforting voice, “Are you afraid, Gwyn?”
Gwyn said nothing.
“You haven't any reason to be afraid of me, Gwyn.”
“I'm not.”
“You are.”
Gwyn said, “Who are you?”
“I've told you.”
“I don't believe—”
“Have you a choice?”
“Yes,” Gwyn said. “I'll ignore you.”
“I won't let you do that.”
Gwyn looked out to sea, searching for some possibility of help. She would even have welcomed the sight of Jack Younger in his launch, his whitened hair, his deep tan… But there were still no boats nearby — only the tanker which steadily dwindled on its trip southward. Already, it was little more than a dot against the darkening sky.
“Gwyn?”
She looked back at the — specter.
“How can you deny me, Gwyn?”
Gwyn said nothing.
“I am your sister, after all.”
“No.”
A tern flew overhead, screeching, and disappeared into the ragged face of the cliff.
“Besides,” the other said, in a tone of mild reproof, “I've come such a long, long way to see you.”
“From where?”
“From the other side.”
Gwyn shook her head violently: No. No, no, no! She could not allow herself to go on like this. She could not stand here and listen to — and even converse with — a ghost. That was insanity. If she let this go on much longer, she would slip right past the edge, into madness. And once that had happened, not even Dr. Record could do anything to give her a normal life again. She would be, until the ends of her days, completely out of touch with all that was real…
“I've missed you,” the other said.
Gwyn bit her lips, felt pain, knew she was not dreaming, but wished ardently that she were.
“Talk to me, Gwyn.”
Gwyn said, “If you are who you profess to be — then, you should look like a twelve-year-old girl and not like a grown woman.”
“Because I died when I was twelve?”
“Yes.”
“I could have chosen to approach you, from the start, as a child, as the Ginny that you remember. However, I felt that you would be more likely to accept me if I came to you like this. You could see, then, that I was not just a hoaxer, but your twin.”
“If changing your form is so easy as you indicate,” Gwyn said, measuring each word carefully, trying to conceal the worst of her fear, “then become a child for me now, right here.”
The other shook her head woefully, smiled sadly and said, “You've got the wrong idea about the powers of a ghost. We aren't shape-changers of such ability as you think; we can't perform tricks like that quite so easily.”
“You're no ghost.”
“What am I, then?”
Indeed, what? Gwyn had no ready answer, but she said, “You're much too substantial to be a ghost.”
“Oh, I'm quite substantial,” the other agreed. “But ghosts always are. You think of them as being transparent, or at least translucent, made of smoke and such stuff; that's what your superstitions tell you to believe. In reality, when we step into the world of the living, we take on flesh as apparently real as yours — though it is not real and can be abandoned at will, without trace.”