THE GHOST
Chapter Fourteen
Five years ago, the buzz around Hilary Semper's high school in Highland Park was about the hot new substitute teacher who'd joined the district. The grapevine already had him pegged: six feet tall, buzzed brown hair, a golf pro who'd given up the tour because of an injury. Loud, confident, funny. Married once, divorced quickly, now unattached. In a school where most of the teachers were twenty-something blondes looking for a husband, this was big news.
Hilary herself had no interest. It wasn't that she'd had no relationships in her life. She had fallen in love at least twice, but in both cases she'd realized that she was dating someone who wanted a wife, not a partner. In those days, she had tried to change herself into more of what a man was looking for, but she'd eventually decided that love wasn't worth pretending to be someone else. She knew she intimidated men with her brains. She knew she was outspoken to the point of driving people away. If the man didn't exist who could live with that combination of qualities, so be it.
She was the only one of six Semper siblings who hadn't walked down the aisle. Two had divorced and remarried; three had marriages that had barely survived the arrival of children. They all looked at Hilary at holiday gatherings and asked her in amazement why she wasn't married yet. They weren't amused when she asked them why they were.
In truth, she did want to get married. She wanted to be in love. She wanted kids. If a relationship came, she would throw herself into it. If it never happened, she wasn't going to cry about it or spend time regretting what she hadn't found. She simply went about her life, without wasting her time hunting for a man who might never show up.
Her family, who already looked at her strangely for staying single, hadn't understood her choice to go into teaching, either. She'd graduated from Northwestern summa cum laude with a major in finance. Brokerages and banks in Chicago and New York had dangled six-figure salaries in front of her, and she'd turned them all down. Instead, she did what she'd always said she would do, teach math and dance to high schoolers. It wasn't the road to riches, although her own expenses were low, and she'd invested well. Her loud criticism of everything that was wrong with public schools didn't win her any fans among the school district or the teachers' union, but her students loved her. She loved them, too. She was exactly where she thought she wanted to be in life.
Then Mark Bradley became a substitute teacher in her school.
She'd already prepared herself not to like him. The more the naive young teachers swooned over him, the more she'd steeled herself to meet an egotistical womanizer who was overly impressed with his looks. He worked in the district for six months before she got him as a sub. She did what she did with every sub for her class — meet him in advance to go over lesson plans for an hour and a half, map out what she wanted him to do, and provide him with bios on the strengths and weaknesses of every student. All that for two days while she attended an education conference in New Orleans. Most subs groaned at her thoroughness, and few did what she directed them to do in her classroom. She expected that Mark Bradley — English and art major from the University of Illinois, former pro golfer — would be among the worst, with little interest in what she wanted from her math students. She'd already leaped to the conclusion that he was nothing more than a dumb jock.
She knew — because he told her so later — that she'd been rude and condescending to him. She'd barely looked at him, although even a glance was enough to realize that he really was as attractive as the other teachers had said. If he wanted an opening with her, she wasn't prepared to give him one — and she doubted that an ex- athlete pursued by most of the cute twenty-somethings at school would have much interest in a tall, pushy teacher in her mid-thirties, with a handful of stubborn extra pounds on her frame.
Mark surprised her. He kept his ego and his jokes firmly in check when they met and listened to her instructions and took detailed notes. He had a brain and the same kind of passion for kids that she did. When she returned to school after her two-day conference, she was shocked to discover that Mark had followed her guidelines precisely and kept the classes on pace with her lesson plans. She was less surprised that half her girls had already fallen in love with him and were begging her to bring him back.
Later that week, when she did a post-mortem with him in the cafeteria, he waited until the very end of their conversation before asking her out to dinner.
She had to admit to herself that she was intrigued and a little aroused. Even so, she wasn't stupid, and she had no interest in a date where his only objective was sex. So with her usual bluntness, she'd asked him why he wanted to go out with her. It wasn't exactly a great way to launch a relationship, but it was a great way to cut one off in its tracks. He surprised her again.
'When I golfed, I never liked to play it safe and lay up,' Mark told her. 'I always went for the green. I figured it wasn't worth it to settle for second best.'
If any other man had tried that line with her, she would have written it off as hollow flattery, but she saw something different in Mark Bradley. Sincerity. It was a quality she prized more than just about anything else, and she had been let down by enough people in her life to believe she could recognize it when she saw it. Mark was a man who meant what he said, who didn't pretend to be someone else for the world. That was her own philosophy, too.
She decided that Mark Bradley was worth the risk. One night. No sex. No strings. She didn't expect it to lead to anything deeper, which was her way of managing her expectations. She certainly never expected that not even two years later, she would be married, and she and Mark would be leaving the Chicago area for the kind of idyllic life they both thought they craved. Moving someplace quieter and emptier. Moving someplace where the roads were lonely and tree-lined and the rest of the world was far away. Giving up old dreams for new dreams. Living in isolation.
That was how it had all started. Five years ago.
Now those dreams were dying.
The calendar said winter was over, but no one had told the weather gods in Wisconsin. The wind off the bay was raw. Snow was expect overnight. The only sign of spring was the expanded schedule on the Northport car ferry, which meant that they could now come and go from the island mostly at will. During the three deepest months of winter from January to March, they were forced to spend weekday in a small rental cottage near Fish Creek, and they could only retreat to their real home on the weekends. Hilary would be glad to sleep in their own bed every night.
Mark was silent as they drove along the southwest coast of Washington Island toward their home. It had been a long day, flying into Chicago from Florida and driving north for four hours along the coast of Lake Michigan to Door County. They'd barely made the last island ferry at dusk. They were both exhausted and wanted to do nothing more than sleep.
He drove them along the main road leading through town, which was a generous description of the rural community on Washington Island. There were a handful of shops and restaurants, most of them on the west side, widely separated by farmlands and trees. The island itself was flat as a board, barely thirty-five square miles, with dense forest over most of the land and rough water on all sides. Anything that was sold here had to be shipped over from the mainland, and as a result there wasn't much more than the bare necessities for the residents, particularly in the off season. The prices were high. Most people waited and did their main shopping once a month at the far southern end of the county in Sturgeon Bay, which was the closest thing the peninsula had to a real city, unless you wanted to travel another forty miles to Green Bay.
They drove past the island's old watering hole, Bitters Pub, and Hilary saw the owner of one of the handful of local motels standing next to his pickup truck with a bottle of beer in his hand. She knew him; he knew them. That was the way it was on an island populated by fewer than seven hundred people. He didn't wave or smile. Instead, he watched their Camry pass, and his face was graven with hostility as he tilted the bottle to his lips. She knew that word had already spread among the locals about what had happened in Florida.
