Free Fortnight of Fear by Graham Masterton

begin with; and spending weekends together with a bottle of California chardonnay; listening to Mendelssohn’s violin concertos; while Christmas approached, our first Christmas without Robbie.
    I bought Jill a silver Alfred Durante cuff watch and a leather-bound book of poems by John Keats. I left a silk marker in the page which said,
    â€œ
Love! Thou art leading me from wintry cold
,
    Lady! Thou leadest me to summer clime
.”
    She cooked wild duck for me on Christmas Day, and Robbie’s photograph watched us smiling from the chiffonier while we drank each other’s health in Krug champagne.
    I took her to bed. The white wintry light arranged itself across the sheets like a paper dress-pattern. She was very slim, narrow-hipped, and her skin was as smooth as cream. She didn’t speak; her hair covered her face like a golden mask. I kissed her lips, and her neck. Her oyster-colored silk panties had tucked themselves into a tight crease between her legs.
    Afterwards we lay back in the gathering twilight and listened to the soft crackle of bubbles in our champagne, and the sirens of Christmas echoing across Central Park.
    â€œAre you going to ask me to marry you?” said Jill. I nodded.
    â€œIt’s not against the law or anything, is it? For a widow to marry her late husband’s brother.”
    â€œOf course not. In Deuteronomy, widows are
ordered
to marry their late husband’s brothers.”
    â€œYou don’t think Robbie would have minded?”
    â€œNo,” I said, and turned over to pick up my glass, and there he was, still smiling at me.
Immortooty, Immortaty, ever, ever after
.
    Robbie, in Paradise, may have approved, but our families certainly didn’t. We were married in Providence, Rhode Island, on a sharp windy day the following March, with nobody in attendance but a justice of the peace and two witnesses whom we had rounded up from the local bookstore, and a gray-haired old lady who played the wedding march and
Scenes from Childhood
.
    Jill wore a cream tailored suit and a wide-brimmed hat with ribbons around it and looked stunning. The old lady played and smiled and the spring sunshine reflected from her spectacles like polished pennies on the eyes of an ivory-faced corpse.
    On our wedding night I woke up in the early hours of the morning and Jill was quietly crying. I didn’t let her know that I was awake. She was entitled to her grief; and I couldn’t be jealous of Robbie, now that he had been dead for over a year.
    But I lay and watched her; knowing that by marrying me she had at last acknowledged that Robbie was gone. She wept for almost twenty minutes, and then leaned across and kissed my shoulder, and fell asleep, with her hair tangled across my arm.
    Our marriage was cheerful and well-organized. Jill left her apartment on Central Park South and moved in tomy big airy loft on 17th Street. We had plenty of money: Jill worked as a creative director for Palmer Ziegler Palmer, the advertising agency, and in those days I was an accountant for Henry Sparrow the publishers. Every weekend we compared Filofaxes and fitted as much leisure time together as we could; even if it was only a lunchtime sandwich at Stars on Lexington Avenue, or a cup of coffee at Bloomingdale’s.
    Jill was pretty and smart and full of sparkle and I loved her more every day. I suppose you could have criticized us for being stereotypes of the Perrier-water generation, but most of the time we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. In July I traded in my old BMW for a Jaguar XJS convertible in British racing green, and we drove up to Connecticut almost every weekend, a hundred and ten miles an hour on the turnpike, with Beethoven on the stereo at top volume.
    Mega-pretentious,
n’est-ce pas
? but it was just about the best fun I ever had in my whole life.
    On the last day of July, as we were sitting on the old colonial verandah of the Allen’s Corners hotel where we used to stay