The Lady Has a Past (Burning Cove #5) - Amanda Quick Page 0,87

her time to gather her thoughts and tell her story. It wasn’t easy, because her emotions and her nerves were in chaos. She could not even identify exactly what she was feeling. There was overwhelming relief at having been set free, but there was also the knowledge that she had failed to protect Luther and the others from the long tentacles of her past.

Now she had to deal with the fact that if it hadn’t been for the three of them she would be dead. Luther had explained that others had also played a part in rescuing her—Irene and Oliver Ward; Ward’s secretary, Elena Torres; and a brave and very angry woman in Pasadena whom she had never met. Luther had explained that without the information from Angela Merryweather they might not have discovered the prison house in time.

A small community of people had worked to save her. Ever since Bar Harbor she had thought of herself as a loner, afraid to let anyone get close. Terrified to reveal her secrets. In Burning Cove she believed she had finally found a haven. She had just begun to dream of a different future when she had received the phone call from the Ghost Lady.

“In another life I had a different name,” she said, feeling her way slowly into the past. “I lost my parents when I was eighteen. After their deaths I discovered my father had died bankrupt. I was alone in the world. A year later a man named Malcolm Whitlock appeared. I thought he was perfect—charming, caring, handsome, and wealthy. Attentive. He was descended from a distinguished Boston family. His relatives made it clear from the outset that they did not approve of me or the marriage. They did not encourage us to live in Boston. We moved into what Malcolm called the summer cottage in Bar Harbor. There was a trust fund for Malcolm, so he did not have to work. We spent a lot of time on the water. He taught me how to sail because he enjoyed giving me orders and hurting me when I didn’t do things right.”

“Bastard,” Lyra muttered.

“It didn’t take me long to find out why the Whitlocks did not want us around in Boston, why they pretended that we did not exist,” Raina said. “While they did not approve of me, they were absolutely terrified of their son.”

“He was violent?” Simon asked.

“Yes, but his moods were unpredictable. It was as if he had two personalities. He could appear perfectly normal for weeks on end and then, in a heartbeat, he would turn into a monster. I never knew which man I was going to get when I woke up in the morning. He must have realized I was working up the nerve to leave him, because he began to lock me up at night. During the days he controlled my every move. I could not even shop on my own. I had no friends.”

“You escaped,” Lyra said. “We found the newspaper clippings in that shoebox. You faked your own death on that sailboat.”

“Yes. But I knew he would never stop searching for me and if he ever found me he would murder me. I had to invent a new identity. I managed to get to New York. I stayed in a charity house and found a job as a waitress. There were other women in the house who’d had experiences similar to mine. We heard rumors, little more than whispers, really, of a wealthy woman who had the money and connections to help women like me disappear entirely and reinvent themselves under new names and new identities. They called her the Ghost Lady.”

Lyra’s eyes widened with excitement. “You found her?”

“Yes. It wasn’t easy. I never actually met her. She takes precautions, of course. She moves in society. She can’t risk having her work with desperate women exposed. At the very least it would destroy her ability to protect her clients, as she calls them. She herself would be in danger from some obsessive man who wanted revenge. She must stay in the shadows.”

Luther was about to take another sip of his martini. He paused. “What did this Ghost Lady do for you?”

“She gave me a new identity as Raina Kirk and she paid my tuition at an elite secretarial academy. When I graduated I had a career and a future. I started out working as a private secretary. I was good. I got excellent recommendations from my employers. Eventually I ended up