Divine Evil by Nora Roberts Page B

porch, or veranda, as her mother had called it, had open latticework at the eaves and long, slender columns. The porch swing, where she had spent so many summer evenings, was still there, at the end of the porch. Her father had always planted sweet peas nearby so that their spicy fragrance would reach out to you as you glided and dreamed.
    Emotions, both pleasant and painful, choked her as she set the key in the old brass lock. The door opened with a creak and a groan.
    She wasn't afraid of ghosts. If there were any here, they would be friendly. As if to welcome them, she stood in the dark for a full minute.
    She turned on the hall light and watched it bounce and glare off the freshly painted walls and polished oak floor. Blair had already arranged for the house to be readied for new tenants, though he hadn't suspected that the tenant would be his sister.
    It was so odd to see it empty. Somehow, she'd thought she would step inside and find it exactly as it had been, unchanged by the years-as if she'd walked home from school rather than returned after a long journey into adulthood.
    For a moment she saw it as it had been, the pretty drop-leaf table against the wall holding a green glass bowl full of violets. The antique mirror over it, its brass frame gleaming. The many-armed coatrack in the corner. The long, slender oriental carpet over the wide-planked floor. The little hodgepodge shelf that held her mother's collection of porcelain thimbles.
    But when she blinked, the hall was bare, with only a lone spider silently building a web in the corner.
    Clutching her purse, she moved from room to room. The big front parlor, the den, the kitchen.
    The appliances were new, she noted. Sparkling and ivory against the navy ceramic counters and the sky blue floor. She did not step out onto the terrace-she wasn't ready for that-but instead turned and walked down the hall to the stairs.
    Her mother had always kept the newel post and railing polished to a gleam. The old mahogany was smooth as silk with age-countless palms and youthful bottoms had brushed over it.
    She found her room, the first off the hall to the right, where she had dreamed the dreams of childhood and adolescence. She had dressed for school there, shared secrets with friends, built her fantasies, and wept away her disappointments.
    How could she have known that it would be so painful to open the door and find the room empty? As if nothing she had ever done within those walls had left a mark? She turned off the light but left the door open.
    Directly across the hall was Blair's old room, where he had once hung posters of his heroes. Superman to Brooks Robinson, Brooks to John Lennon. There was the guest room her mother had furnished with eyelet lace and satinpillows. Granny, her father's mother, had stayed there for a week the year before she had died of a stroke.
    Here was the bath with its pedestal sink and its soft green and white checkerboard tiles. Throughout their teens she and Blair had fought over possession of that room like dogs over a meaty bone.
    Going back into the hall, she turned into the master bedroom, where her parents had slept and loved and talked night after night. Clare remembered sitting on the pretty pink and lavender rug, watching her mother use all the fascinating bottles and pots on the cherry vanity. Or studying her father as he'd stared into the cheval mirror, struggling to knot his tie. The room had always smelled of wisteria and Old Spice. Somehow, it still did.
    Half-blind with grief, she stumbled into the master bath to turn on the faucet and splash her face with water. Maybe she should have taken it a room at a time, she thought. One room a day. With her hands pressed on the sides of the sink, she looked up and faced herself in the glass.
    Too pale, she thought. Shadows under her eyes. Her hair was a mess. But then, it usually was since she was too lazy for hairdressers and almost always chopped away at it herself. She'd lost an earring