By the Bay Read Online Free Page A

warm milk and a novel as a relaxer when a soft knock sounded at the front door. Cautiously she went to peer out a window that gave her a few of the steps and saw that the visitor was a tall, lean man, his face shadowy in the dim moonlight.
    Immediately she knew it was the man from the night before . Her heart raced and her breathing was hard and fast. Nobody but a fool would open the door to a stranger at this time of night.
    She heard his voice. “I waited, but you didn’ t come,” the deep voice sounded through the door.
    “I can’t,” she whispered, not sure he would hear her. “My mother is sick.”
    He seemed to hesitate. “Another time,” he finally agreed. She heard his footsteps move slowly down the walk and sagged against the locked door. How foolish to be so disappointed .
    She drank her warm milk and went to bed to lie shivering between her sheets until she finally fell asleep just before dawn.
    When Aunt Florence came to stay with Mother so she could report to the first day of her teaching assignment, she was neatly dressed and apparently self-possessed . The visitor from the night before seemed little more than a peculiarly awkward dream and the congratulated herself on her good sense in not letting him in. She didn’t mention the incident to her aunt.
    “Have a good day, Jillian,” her mother called after her as she started toward the door. Jillian smiled. Thank goodness! Her real mother was back this morning.

 
    Chapter Four
    They’d left him without water and food, intending that he die of thirst and starvation, but Philippe was a survivor. Since he was a boy he’d had to leap from one stone to another in the pathway to staying alive and though the island was little more than a bare sandy strip with little vegetation and no fresh water, he put together a makeshift raft from driftwood and bits from the occasional palm tree and floated and swam across the bay to the mainland.
    But somewhere in between in the dark shallow water of the bay he’d lost himself. The world he’d found on the other side could not be.
    He’d crept on to shore, soaked and weary, to see strange lights and buildings. Madness! It had finally come. Too tired to reason it out, he’d crept behind one of the buildings that couldn’t be there and fallen into unconsciousness, knowing that he would wake up and find it had only been an illusion.
    Instead he’d wakened only a few hours later to find night still around him and his belly grumbling with hunger. He stumbled from his hiding place, smelling the familiar moist and salt of the sea as he staggered to the bay’s edge.
    And he was still standing there, staring out to the moon-silvered bay and the island beyond, when the girl walked up to him.
    A girl! A young woman who spoke a form of English and who was here in this place where no European woman should be. She was part of the illusion, part of the dream he’d been cast into.
    As one had to be polite to a creature of his own making, he addressed her with courtesy and even escorted her back to what seemed to be her home, a magical dwelling with candlelight shining from glass windows.
    He’d spent the next day walking the town and ignoring those around him, who glanced at him in his clothing that had dried on him and his sandy and untidy hair almost as though they actually saw him and he was not a ghost haunting their streets. One or two even spoke to him, but he ignored them, not being willing to encourage such spirits.
    Like the ghost girl, they spoke a form of Eng lish and when, in desperation, he croaked a request for water to an older man with a pleasant face, he was given all the cool fresh water he could drink. When he was finished, the kindly stranger asked if he was hungry and when he nodded, the man came out again with a plate of warm food. Even though the items on the plate were unfamiliar to him, he ate hungrily, barely restraining his greed to eat slowly enough not to be disgusting or to make himself