Read the book: «Wild about Harry»

1

Amy Ryan was safe in her bed, drifting in that place where slumber and wakefulness mesh into a tranquil twilight, when she distinctly felt someone grasp her big toe and wriggle it.

“Amy.”

She groaned and pulled the covers up over her head. Two full years had passed since her handsome, healthy young husband, Tyler, had died on the operating table during a routine appendectomy. She couldn’t be hearing his voice now.

“No,” she murmured. “I refuse to have this dream again. I’m waking up right now!”

Amy’s toe moved again, without orders from her brain. She swallowed, and her heart rate accelerated. Quickly, expecting to find eight-year-old Ashley’s cat, Rumpel, at the foot of the bed playing games, she reached out and snapped on the bedside lamp.

A scream rushed into her throat, coming from deep inside her, but she swallowed it. Even though Tyler was standing there, just on the other side of her blanket chest, Amy felt no fear.

She could never be afraid of Ty. No, what scared her was the explicit possibility that she was losing her mind at thirty-two years of age.

“This can’t be happening,” she whispered hoarsely, raising both hands to her face. From between her fingers, she could still see Tyler grinning that endearing grin of his. “I’ve been through counseling,” she protested. “I’ve had grief therapy!”

Tyler chuckled and sat down on the end of the bed.

Amy actually felt the mattress move, so lifelike was this delusion.

“I’m quite real,” Tyler said, having apparently read her mind. “At least, real is the closest concept you could be expected to understand.”

“Oh, God,” Amy muttered, reaching blindly for the telephone.

Tyler’s grin widened. “This is a really lousy joke,” he said, “but I can’t resist. Who ya gonna call?”

Amy swallowed and hung up the receiver with an awkward motion of her hand. What could she say? Could she dial 911 and report that a ghost was haunting her bedroom?

If she did, the next stop would not be the Twilight Zone, it would be the mental ward at the nearest hospital.

Amy ran her tongue over dry lips, closed her eyes tightly, then opened them again, wide.

Tyler was still sitting there, his arms folded, charming smile in place. He had brown curly hair and mischievous brown eyes, and Amy had been in love with him since her freshman year at the University of Washington. She had borne him two children, eight-year-old Ashley and six-year-old Oliver, and the loss of her young husband had been the most devastating experience of Amy’s life.

“What’s happening to me?” Amy rasped, shoving a hand through her sleep-rumpled, shoulder-length brown hair.

Tyler scratched the back of his neck. He was wearing slacks and a blue cashmere cardigan over a tailored white shirt. “I look pretty solid, don’t I?” He sounded proud, the way he used to when he’d won a particularly difficult case in court or beaten a colleague at racquet ball. “And let me tell you, being able to grab hold of your toe like that was no small feat, no pun intended.”

Amy tossed back the covers, scrambled into the adjoining bathroom and frantically splashed cold water on her face. “It must have been the spicy cheese on the nachos,” she told herself aloud, talking fast.

When she straightened and looked in the mirror, though, she saw Tyler’s reflection. He was leaning against the doorjamb, his arms folded.

“Pull yourself together, Amy,” he said good-naturedly. “It’s taken me eighteen months to learn to do this, and I’m not real good at sustaining the energy yet. I could fade out at any time, and I have something important to say.”

Amy turned and leaned back against the counter, her hands gripping the marble edge. She sank her teeth into her lower lip and wondered what Debbie would make of this when she told her about it. If she told her.

Your subconscious mind is trying to tell you something, her friend would say. Debbie was a counselor in a women’s clinic, and she was working on her doctorate in psychology. It’s time to let go of Tyler and get on with your life.

“Wh-what did you want to—to say?” Amy stammered. She was a little calmer now and figured this figment of her imagination might give her an important update on what was going on inside her head. There was absolutely no doubt, as far as she was concerned, that some of her gears were gummed up.

Tyler’s gentle gaze swept her tousled hair, yellow cotton nightshirt and shapely legs with sad fondness.

“An old friend of mine is going to call you sometime in the next couple of days,” he said after a long moment. “His name is Harry Griffith, and he runs a multinational investment company out of Australia. They’re opening an office in Seattle, so Harry will be living here in the Puget Sound area part of the year. He’ll get in touch to offer his condolences about me and pay off on a deal we made the last time we were together. You should get a pretty big check.”

Amy certainly hadn’t expected anything so specific. “Harry?” she squeaked. She vaguely remembered Tyler talking about him.

Tyler nodded. “We met when we were kids. We were both part of the exchange student program—he lived here for six months, and then I went down there and stayed with Harry and his mom for the same amount of time.”

A lump had risen in Amy’s throat, and she swallowed it. Yes, Harry Griffith. Tyler’s mother, Louise, had spoken of him several times. “This is crazy,” she said. “I’m crazy.”

Her husband—or this mental image of her husband—smiled. “No, babe. You’re a little frazzled, but you’re quite sane.”

“Oh, yeah?” Amy thrust herself away from the bathroom counter and passed Tyler in the doorway to stand next to the bed. “If I’m not one can short of a six-pack, how come I’m seeing somebody who’s been dead for two years?”

Tyler winced. “Don’t use that word,” he said. “People don’t really die, they just change.”

Amy was feeling strangely calm and detached now, as though she were standing outside of herself. “I’ll never eat nachos again,” she said firmly.

Ty’s gentle brown eyes twinkled with amusement. When he spoke, however, his expression was more serious. “You’re doing very well, all things considered. You’ve taken good care of the kids and built a career for yourself, unconventional though it is. But there’s one area where you’re really blowing it, Spud.”

Amy’s eyes brimmed with tears. During the terrible days and even worse nights following Tyler’s unexpected death, she’d yearned for just such an experience as this. She’d longed to see the man she’d loved so totally, to hear his voice. She’d even wanted to be called “Spud” again, although she’d hated the nickname while Tyler was alive.

She sniffled but said nothing, waiting for Tyler to go on.

He did. “There are women who can be totally fulfilled without a man in their lives. Give them a great job and a couple of kids and that’s all they need. You aren’t one of those women, Amy. You’re not happy.”

Amy shook her head, marveling. “Boy, when my subconscious mind comes up with a message, it’s a doozy.”

Tyler shrugged. “What can I say?” he asked reasonably. “Harry’s the man for you.”

“You were the man for me,” Amy argued, and this time a tear escaped and slipped down her cheek.

He started toward her, as though he would take her into his arms, then, regretfully, he stopped. “That was then, Spud,” he said, his voice gruff with emotion. “Harry’s now. In fact, you’re scheduled to remarry and have two more kids—a boy and a girl.”

Amy’s feeling of detachment was beginning to fade; she was trembling. This was all so crazy. “And this Harry guy is my one and only?” she asked with quiet derision. She was hurt because Tyler had started to touch her and then pulled back.

“Actually, there are several different men you could have fulfilled your destiny with. That architect you met three months ago, when you were putting together the deal for those condos on Lake Washington, for instance. Alex Singleton—the guy who replaced me in the firm, for another.” He paused and shoved splayed fingers through his hair. “You’re not cooperating, Spud.”

“Well, excuse me!” Amy cried in a whispered yell, not wanting the children to wake and see her in the middle of a hallucination. “I loved you, Ty. You were everything to me. I’m not ready to care for anybody else!”

“Yes, you are,” Tyler disagreed sadly. Quietly. “Get on with it, Amy. You’re holding up the show.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, willing Tyler to disappear. When Amy looked again and found him gone, however, she felt all hollow and broken inside.

“Tyler?”

No answer.

Amy went slowly back to bed, switched out the light and lay down. “You’re losing it, Ryan,” she muttered to herself.

She tried to sleep, but images of Tyler kept invading her mind.

Amy recalled the first time they’d met, in the cafeteria at the University of Washington, when she’d been a lowly freshman and Tyler had been in his third year of law school. He’d smiled as he’d taken the chair across the table from Amy’s, and she’d been so thoroughly, instantly besotted that she’d nearly fallen right into her lime Jell-O.

After that day, Amy and Tyler had been together every spare moment. Ty had taken her home to Mercer Island to meet his parents at Thanksgiving, and at Christmas he’d given her a three-carat diamond.

Amy had liked Tyler’s parents immediately; they were so warm and friendly, and their gracious, expensive home practically vibrated with love and laughter. The contrast between the Ryans’ family life and Amy’s was total: Amy’s father, one of the most famous heart surgeons in the country, was a distant, distracted sort of man, totally absorbed in his work. Although Amy knew her dad loved her, in his own workaholic way, he’d never been able to show it.

The free-flowing affection among the Ryans had quickly become vital to Amy, and she was still very close to them, even though Tyler had been gone for two years.

Alone in the bed where she and Tyler had once loved and slept and sometimes argued, Amy wept. “This isn’t fair,” she told the dark universe around her.

With the morning, however, came a sense of buoyant optimism. It seemed only natural to Amy that she’d had a vivid dream about Tyler; he was the father of her children and she’d loved him with her whole heart.

She was sticking frozen waffles in the toaster when Oliver and Ashley raced into the kitchen. During the school year she had trouble motivating them in the mornings, but now that summer had come, they were up and ready for day camp almost as soon as the morning paper hit the doorstep.

“Yo, Mom,” Oliver said. He had a bandanna tied around his forehead and he was wearing shorts and a T-shirt with his favorite cartoon character on the front. “Kid power!” he whooped, thrusting a plastic sword into the air.

Ashley rolled her beautiful Tyler-brown eyes. “What a dope,” she said. She was eight and had a lofty view of the world.

“Be careful, Oliver,” Amy fretted good-naturedly. “You’ll put out someone’s eye with that thing.” She put the waffles on plates and set them down on the table, then went to the refrigerator for the orange juice. “Look, you two, I might be home late tonight. If I can’t get away, Aunt Charlotte will pick you up at camp.”

Charlotte was Ty’s sister and one of Amy’s closest friends.

Ashley was watching Amy pensively as she poured herself a cup of coffee and joined the kids at the table.

“Were you talking to yourself last night, Mom?” the child asked in her usual straightforward way.

Amy was glad she was sitting down because her knees suddenly felt shaky. “I was probably just dreaming,” she said, but the memory of Tyler standing there in their bedroom was suddenly vivid in her mind. He’d seemed so solid and so real.

Ashley’s forehead crumpled in a frown, but she didn’t pursue the subject any further.

Fortunately.

After Amy had rinsed the breakfast dishes, put them into the dishwasher and driven the kids to the park, where camp was held, she found herself watching for Tyler—waiting for him to come back.

When she’d showered and put on her best suit, a sleek creation of pale blue linen, along with a matching patterned blouse, she sat on the edge of her bed and stared at the telephone for what must have been a full five minutes. Then she dialed her best friend’s number.

“Debbie?”

“Hi, Amy,” Debbie answered, sounding a little rushed. “If this is about lunch, I’m open. Twelve o’clock at Ivar’s?”

Amy bit her lower lip for a moment. “I can’t, not today…I have appointments all morning. Deb—”

Debbie’s voice was instantly tranquil, all sense and sound of hurry gone. “Hey, you sound kind of funny. Is something wrong?”

“It might be,” Amy confessed.

“Go on.”

“I dreamed about Tyler last night, and it was ultra-real, Debbie. I wasn’t lying in bed with my eyes closed—I was standing up, walking around—we had an in-depth conversation!”

Debbie’s voice was calm, but then, she was a professional in the mental health field. It would take more than Amy’s imaginary encounter with her dead husband to shock this woman. “Okay. What about?”

Amy was feeling sillier by the moment. “It’s so dumb.”

“Right. So tell me anyway.”

“He said I was going to meet—this friend of his—Harry somebody. Who names people Harry in this day and age? I’m supposed to fall in love with this guy, marry him and have two kids.”

“Before nightfall?” Debbie retorted, without missing a beat.

“Practically. Ty implied that I’ve been holding up some celestial plan by keeping to myself so much!”

Debbie sighed. “This is one that could be worked out in a fifteen-minute segment of the Donahue show, Ryan. You’re a healthy young woman, and you haven’t been with a man since Ty, and you’re lonely, physically and emotionally. If you want to talk this out with somebody, I could give you a name—”

Amy was already shaking her head. “No,” she interrupted, “that’s all right. I feel foolish enough discussing this with my dearest friend. I don’t think I’m up to stretching out on a couch and telling all to some strange doctor.”

“Still—”

“I’ll be all right, Deb,” Amy broke in again, this time a little impatiently. She didn’t know what she’d wanted her friend to say when she told her about Tyler’s “visit,” but she felt let down. She hung up quickly and then dashed off to her first meeting of the day.

Amy often marveled that she’d made such a success of her business, especially since she’d dropped out of school when Tyler passed the bar exam and devoted herself entirely to being a wife and mother. She’d been totally happy doing those things and hadn’t even blushed to admit to having no desire to work outside the home.

After Tyler’s death, however, the pain and rage had made her so restless that staying home was impossible. She’d alternated between fits of sobbing and periods of wooden silence, and after a few weeks she’d gone numb inside.

One night, very late, she’d seen a good-looking, fast-talking man on television, swearing by all that was holy that she, too, could build a career in real estate trading and make a fortune.

Amy had enough money to last a lifetime, between Tyler’s life insurance and savings and her maternal grandmother’s trust fund, but the idea of a challenge, of building something, appealed to her. In fact, on some level it resurrected her. Here was something to do, something to keep her from smothering Ashley and Oliver with motherly affection.

She’d called a toll-free number and ordered a set of tapes and signed up for a seminar, as well.

The tapes arrived and Amy absorbed them. The voice was pleasant and the topic complicated enough that she had to concentrate, which meant she had brief respites from thinking about Tyler. Under any other circumstances, Amy would not have had the brass to actually do the things suggested by the tapes and seminar, but all her normal inhibitions had been frozen inside her, like small animals trapped in a sudden Ice Age.

She’d started buying and selling and wheeling and dealing, and she’d been successful at it.

Still, she thought miserably as she drove toward her meeting, Tyler had been right, she wasn’t happy. Now that the numbness had worn off, all those old needs and hurts were back in full force and being a real estate magnate wasn’t fulfilling them.

Harry Griffith smiled grimly to himself as he took off his headphones and handed them to his copilot, Mark Ellis. “Here you are, mate,” he said. “Bring her in for me, will you?”

Mark nodded as he eagerly took over the controls, and Harry left the cockpit and proceeded into the main section of the private jet. Often it was filled with business people, hangers-on and assorted bimbos, but that day Harry and Mark were cutting through the sky alone.

He went on to the sumptuous bedroom, unknotting his silk tie with one hand as he closed the door with the other. He’d had a meeting in San Francisco, but now he could change into more casual clothes.

With a sigh Harry pulled open a few drawers and took out a lightweight cable-knit sweater and jeans, still thinking of his friend. He hadn’t been present for Ty’s services two years before. He’d been in the outback, at one of the mines, and by the time he’d returned to Sydney and learned about Tyler’s death, it was three weeks after the fact.

He’d sent flowers to Tyler’s parents, who’d been like a second mother and father to him ever since his first visit to the states, and to the pretty widow. Harry had never seen Amy Ryan or her children, except on the front of the Christmas cards he always received from them, and he hadn’t known what to say to her.

It had been a damn shame, a man like Tyler dying in his prime like that, and Harry could find no words of comfort inside himself.

Now, however, he had business with Tyler’s lovely lady, and he would have to open this last door that protected his own grief and endure whatever emotions might be set free in the process.

Harry tossed aside his tie and began unfastening his cuff links. Maybe he’d even go and stand by Tyler’s grave for a while, tell his friend he was a cheeky lot for bailing out so early in the game that way.

He pulled the sweater on over his head, replaced his slacks with jeans, then stood staring at himself in the mirror. Like the bed, chairs and bureau, it was bolted down.

Where Tyler had been handsome in an altar-boy sort of way, Harry was classically so, with dark hair, indigo-blue eyes and an elegant manner. He regarded his exceptional looks as tools, and he’d used them without compunction, every day of his life, to get what he wanted.

Or most of what he wanted, that is. He’d never had a real family of his own, the way Tyler had. God knew, Madeline hadn’t even tried to disguise herself as a wife, and she’d sent the child she’d borne her first husband to boarding school in Switzerland. Madeline hadn’t wanted to trouble herself with a twelve-year-old daughter, and Eireen’s letters and phone calls had been ignored more than answered.

Harry felt sick, remembering. He’d tried to establish a bond with the child on her rare holidays in Australia, but while Madeline hadn’t wanted to be bothered with the little girl, she hadn’t relished the idea of sharing her, either.

Then, after another stilted Christmas, Madeline had decided she needed a little time on the “the continent,” and would therefore see Eireen as far as Zurich. Their plane had gone down midway between New Zealand and the Fiji Islands, and there had been no survivors.

Harry had not wept for his wife—the emotion he’d once mistaken for love had died long before she did—but he’d cried for that bewildered child who’d never been permitted to love or be loved.

Later, when Tyler had died, Harry had gotten drunk—something he had never done before or since—and stayed that way for three nightmarish days. It had been an injustice of cosmic proportions that a man like Tyler Ryan, who had had everything a man could dream of, should be sent spinning off the world that way, like a child from a carnival ride that turned too fast.

“Mr. Griffith?”

Mark’s voice, coming over the intercom system, startled Harry. “Yes?” he snapped, pressing a button on the instrument affixed to the wall above his bed, a little testy at the prospect of landing in Seattle.

“We’re starting our descent, sir. Would you like to come back and take the controls?”

“You can handle it,” Harry answered, removing his finger from the button. He thought of Tyler’s parents and the big house on Mercer Island where he’d spent some of the happiest times of his life. “You can handle it,” he repeated gravely, even though Mark couldn’t hear him now. “The question is, can I?”

Amy had had a busy day, but she’d managed to finish work on time to pick up Oliver and Ashley at day camp, and she was turning hot dogs on the grill in her stove when the telephone rang.

Oliver answered with his customary “Yo!” He listened to the caller with ever-widening eyes and then thrust the receiver in Amy’s direction. “I think it’s that guy from the movies!” he shouted.

Amy frowned, crossed the room and took the call. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Ryan?” The voice was low, melodic and distinctly Australian. “My name is Harry Griffith, and I was a friend of your husband’s—”

The receiver slipped from Amy’s hand and clattered against the wall. Harry Griffith? Harry Griffith! The man Tyler had mentioned in her dream the night before.

“Mom!” Ashley cried, alarmed. She’d learned, at entirely too young an age, that tragedy almost always took a person by surprise.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Amy said hastily, snatching up the telephone with one hand and pulling her daughter close with the other. “Hello? Mr. Griffith?”

“Are you all right?” he asked in that marvelous accent.

Amy leaned against the counter, not entirely trusting her knees to support her, and drew in a deep breath. “I’m fine,” she lied.

“I don’t suppose you remember me…”

Amy didn’t remember Harry Griffith, except from old photographs and things Tyler had said, and she couldn’t recall seeing him at the funeral. “You knew Tyler,” she said, closing her eyes against a wave of dizziness.

“Yes,” he answered. His voice was gentle and somehow encouraging, like a touch. “I’d like to take you out for dinner tomorrow night, if you’ll permit.”

If you’ll permit. The guy talked like Cary Grant in one of those lovely old black-and-white movies on the Nostalgia Channel. “Ah—well—maybe you should just come here. Say seven o’clock?”

“Seven o’clock,” he confirmed. There was brief pause, then, “Mrs. Ryan? I’m very sorry—about Tyler, I mean. He was one of the best friends I ever had.”

Amy’s eyes stung, and her throat felt thick. “Yes,” she agreed. “I felt pretty much the same way about him. I-I’ll see you at seven tomorrow night. Do you have the address?”

“Yes,” he answered, and then the call was over.

It took Amy so long to hang up the receiver that Oliver finally pulled it from her hand and replaced it on the hook.

“Who was that?” Ashley asked. “Is something wrong with Grampa or Gramma?”

“No, sweetheart,” Amy said gently, bending to kiss the top of Ashley’s head, where her rich brown hair was parted. “It was only a friend of your daddy’s. He’s coming by for dinner tomorrow night.”

“Okay,” Ashley replied, going back to the table.

Amy took the hot dogs from the grill and served them, but she couldn’t eat because her stomach was jumping back and forth between its normal place and her windpipe. She went outside and sat at the picnic table in her expensive suit, watching as the sprinkler turned rhythmically, making its chicka-chicka sound.

She tried to assemble all the facts in her mind, but they weren’t going together very well.

Last night she’d dreamed—only dreamed—that Tyler had appeared in their bedroom. Amy could ascribe that to the spicy Mexican food she’d eaten for dinner the previous night, but what about the fact that he’d told her his friend Harry Griffith would call and ask to see her? Could it possibly be a wild coincidence and nothing more?

She pressed her fingers to her temples. The odds against such a thing had to be astronomical, but the only other explanation was that she was psychic or something. And Amy knew that wasn’t true.

If she’d had any sort of powers, she would have foreseen Tyler’s death. She would have done something about it, warned the doctors, anything.

Presently, Amy pulled herself together enough to go back inside the house. She ate one hot dog, for the sake of appearances, then went to her bathroom to shower and put on shorts and a tank top.

Oliver and Ashley were in the family room, arguing over which program to watch on TV, when Amy joined them. Unless the exchanges threatened to turn violent, she never interfered, believing that children needed to learn to work out their differences without a parent jumping in to referee.

The built-in mahogany shelves next to the fireplace were lined with photo albums, and Amy took one of the early volumes down and carried it to the couch.

There she kicked off her shoes and sat cross-legged on the cushion, opening the album slowly, trying to prepare herself for the inevitable jolt of seeing Tyler smiling back at her from some snapshot.

After flipping the pages for a while, acclimating herself for the millionth time to a world that no longer contained Tyler Ryan, she began to look closely at the pictures.