The rhododendron didn't offer any opinions on what those reasons might be.
It would have been something he could have dismissed rather easily if it had been the only sighting. Unfortunately, he'd just about run off the road on his way home from the store thanks to the same delusion. He'd been innocently driving along when he'd glanced in his rearview mirror and seen those same black orbs attached to a beanie hat floating quietly in midair in his backseat.
All right, so he was driving an old Wagoneer that hadn't been washed all that often. It hauled stuff for him, and that's all he cared about. It was possible, he supposed, that some dust particles left over from his last trip to the dump had coagulated into a beanie-and-mouse-ear configuration. It was possible that the sun had reflected off something else and cast a shadow where you wouldn't have thought one should be.
It was also possible that his first conclusion was right and his mind was really starting to go.
He turned away and let himself into his house before he did anything else stupid, like discuss his hallucinations further with a plant. He dropped his keys on the entry hall table and walked back to his kitchen. Could an ultra-unhealthy meal of eggs, spicy sausage, and extremely processed cheese spread cure delusionary states? He wasn't sure, but he was willing to try.
He emptied his groceries onto the counter, pulled out a frying pan, and dumped his sausage into it. He turned the burner up to high and listened with satisfaction to the sound of saturated fat sizzling happily. This was the life for him. Uncomplicated. Unfettered. Uncluttered by visions of things that belonged in theme park gift shops.
Thomas tilted the pan to roll the sausages to one side, then cracked a handful of eggs into the freed-up space. With what the immediate future held in store for him, who knew when he might get a decent meal again?
He turned the heat down, then began to walk around the kitchen, looking out the windows at the sea rolling ceaselessly against the shore and enjoying the smell of a late breakfast filling his kitchen. The more he prowled through the kitchen, though, the more unsettled he began to feel. He supposed it had a great deal to do with the fact that he was standing in a house he'd built with his own two hands, yet he planned to leave it behind and spend a year in a strange, foreign land.
He shoved aside the temptation to speculate further on the condition of his mental state.
The feeling of nostalgia, however, was a very unfamiliar one. He'd never been prone to it before. He'd always done what he needed to do, then moved on without a backward glance.
His education was proof enough of that. He'd gotten his degree in history at twenty, decided it wasn't for him, then moved on to law school. Three years and a degree later, he'd dumped that idea as well. He hadn't wanted to teach either history or law. He hadn't been able to stomach the thought of spending his days litigating either. He'd walked away from both degrees without remorse.
He'd turned to the stock market with hopes of making enough money to do whatever he wanted to without worrying about funds. In two very hectic years, he'd parlayed a fifty-thousand-dollar loan from his disgustingly wealthy grandmother into five million. He'd paid her back with interest and by a month of being her packhorse through France, then he'd taken the rest, rounded up a number of other serious investors, and started his own brokerage firm. Nine years later, he'd sold that firm and added the price of that sale to his already staggering list of assets.
He'd moved on to create an elite securities management firm, but it was at that point that he'd decided he'd had enough. He still owned the company, but he'd given over the day-to-day running of it to a college buddy. After all, it was just money. He'd made buckets of it, and what did he have to show for it?
Nothing.
Well, except his house. Looking back on it now, he wondered how he'd managed to build a house in Maine, yet run a multimillion-dollar business in Manhattan at the same time. He'd spent every weekend, holiday, and vacation day for three years commuting north to work on his house, that's how. Standing there now, just the thought of it made him want to go take a nap.
If he'd been a nap-taking kind of guy, which he most definitely was not.
Of course, his life hadn't been all business—not by a long shot. Even early on, he'd always surrounded himself with trustworthy partners who had left him free to pursue his true passion, the one that made his father roll his eyes and his mother wring her hands.
Mountains.
Short ones, steep ones, tall ones, ice-covered ones; he didn't care. As long as he could climb them, he was happy. And when he wasn't climbing, he was either training to climb or working like a fiend to make enough money so he'd have time to climb.
All of which left him wondering why in the world he was putting his entire life—his house and his mountains—on hold to chase after something that seemed less like an obsession and more like Fate.
He finished his prowl by winding up where he started. He reached over and jiggled the pan, then turned to look at his refrigerator. It was fairly uncluttered as far as fridge fronts went, but there, in unmistakable clarity, were the two things that had utterly changed his life.
One was a picture of a castle. His sister had taken the photograph last Christmas, well after he'd bought the place, sight unseen. He'd noticed the auction in the New York Times a couple of years before that. Apparently, some titled Brit had been dumping some of his assets, and the castle had come up on
