by Julie Kenner
“Never heard of it.”
“She also mentioned finding an article about you on the Internet, but she didn’t seem at all interested in romance. She’s apparently being stalked by a ghost.”
John offered his hand, and Claudia placed the small stack of papers on his palm. Touch almost always triggered some sort of response, though he never knew exactly what he would see. “I hope you told the man in Nashville and the woman in Charlotte to hire a conventional private investigator. I don’t take cases pertaining to personal relationships, ever. You know that.”
“Yeah, but face it, it’s what everyone wants. You could make a fortune just pairing people up. Steering them in the right direction. Telling them where to find Mr. or Mrs. Right.” She waggled her eyebrows. “John Stark, The Love Prophet.”
“Do you like your job?” he asked with a straight face.
Claudia leaned back in her chair. “Some days you are no fun at all.”
He leafed through the phone messages Claudia had taken in the past two days. Some days the phone rang off the hook, and he was bombarded with requests for help. Other days were blessedly slow.
The detective in Tampa didn’t need John’s help; he’d have the murderer in custody by the end of the day. The poor guy in Nashville was right; his wife was having an affair. Her third. The woman in Charlotte was right, too, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be the one to tell her. The soul mate in Cleveland was quickly approaching seventy, and John shared the honor of her obsession with Sean Connery, Johnny Depp and the Secretary of State. She wasn’t dangerous, and her obsessions changed with amazing regularity.
The entire “soul mate” thing really grated on John’s nerves. It was what everyone wanted. The perfect mate; a love connection on the grandest order; a destined romance that would never know pain or betrayal or heartbreak.
Hogwash.
When he touched the note with the name and address of the woman in Mississippi, it grew warm beneath his fingers. Ghosts weren’t dangerous. They rattled around, they occasionally moved objects, they made startling appearances that were frightening but not deadly. They certainly did not stalk the living. Sometimes simply telling them to move on was quite enough.
But something was very wrong here. Miranda Garner was in danger; her ghost wanted her dead.
“This one,” he said, tossing the discarded potential clients’ names and numbers onto Claudia’s desk and rubbing his fingers over the name and address his secretary had jotted down in her horrid excuse for handwriting.
“I’ll call Ms. Garner—”
“No,” John said sharply. “It’s best that she doesn’t know I’m coming.” He didn’t understand why, but he knew his arrival should not be announced.
Interested, Claudia leaned forward. “I’ll book your flight and reserve a car.”
John shook his head. While he gripped the paper, images he couldn’t decipher flitted through his mind, moving so quickly and sharply he didn’t have time to understand them. Most vivid was the image of a woman with long, dark hair that fell soft and intimate across his chest and his cheek, but there was also a throaty whisper; a glint of silver; the stench of cut flowers…. He lost the images quickly and completely. “No,” he said as he pushed away from the desk. “I’ll drive.” He could get from Atlanta to anywhere in Mississippi in less time than it would take to book a flight, deal with the airport hassle, get to his destination and rent a car. “Just get me a map.”
“When are you leaving?” Claudia asked.
John headed for his inner office, where he always kept a suitcase packed and ready to go. “Now.”
“I’M SO HAPPY to have you back.”
Miranda and her friend Elyse sat in the front parlor, drinking coffee and munching on the cookies Elyse had baked to celebrate Miranda’s return.
“Are you coming back to the library?”
“Not right away.” There had never been a financial need for Miranda to work. The Garner family had always had money…at least, in the past hundred years or so. Financially, the family had done well. Personally, their lives left something to be desired. In the ninety years this fine house had been standing, there had been one murder, two suicides and more divorces than Miranda cared to count. Her parents had broken the mold by daring to be happy, for a while, but their happiness hadn’t lasted. Miranda’s mother had died twenty-six years ago, leaving her two-year-old daughter and her beloved husband distraught and more than a little lost. Michael Garner had devoted himself to his financial concerns and his little girl, and there hadn’t been a second wife or any more children.
He’d died a little more than two years ago, in a one-car accident on the winding road that led from the Garner house to Cedar Springs.
Years ago, Miranda had taken a job as librarian at the Cedar Springs Public Library, where Elyse was in charge of the children’s section. She worked not because she needed the money but because she’d needed to be with people. And besides, she loved books with a passion she had never felt for anything or anyone else.
Miranda was glad to visit with her friend, but she was tired. She hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. “There’s so much to be done around here. While I was away something happened to the plumbing. I can barely get a trickle of water in the upstairs bathroom, and none of it is hot.”
“Did you call a plumber?”
Miranda nodded. “I called Ralph’s. A repairman is supposed to come by this afternoon to have a look at things.”
“That’s good.” Elyse smiled, but the smile was forced and it didn’t last. “Dammit, Miranda, you look terrible.”
“Gee, thanks.” She tried for a lighthearted tone of voice and a smile of her own.
“Seriously, you must’ve lost twenty pounds, and there are dark circles under your eyes.”
“I’ve lost seventeen pounds, and I only have circles under my eyes because I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Tony?” Elyse asked softly—gently, as if to say the name too loud might cause her friend to break in two.
In the beginning, Miranda had told Elyse about the haunting. In those early days Tony’s presence had been subtle. She’d catch a quick glimpse of him in the mirror or hear a familiar voice whisper from an empty room. Over the weeks and months since then his presence had grown stronger. Bolder. And one night, she’d felt his fingers on her throat….
Tony never showed himself or made so much as a sound while anyone else was around. Friends had dismissed her early visions of the ghost to the high emotion of the situation.
No one would believe her now if she told them that Tony was still with her, especially not down-to-earth Elyse, so she answered, “Of course not.”
Elyse moved to the sofa to sit beside her friend, and she wrapped a comforting arm across Miranda’s trembling shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I know that.” She’d been driving along the narrow road just beyond the house when Tony had appeared before her, trying to stop her from escaping by throwing his body in front of her car. She hadn’t seen him in time. She’d hit the brakes, and then she’d hit Tony. He’d died moments later, but not before clutching her blouse with a bloody hand and whispering his last words.
Per sempre miniera.
Several days had passed before she’d been able to decipher what those words meant. She’d looked through foreign language dictionaries, and had finally gone to the Internet and tried different spellings at a translation site before she’d stumbled across the answer.
Forever mine. She hadn’t even known that Tony spoke Italian, but it was the only thing she could find that made any sense at all.
“Get a nap,” Elyse said, then she gave Miranda a quick kiss on the cheek and shot to her feet. “I have to get home and start dinner. I promised Gordon fried chicken for supper.”
“Lucky Gordon,” Miranda said as she rose to escort her friend to the door.
“Come join us!” Elyse offered sincerely. “Gordon is anxious to see you again.”
“Maybe next week. I’m still very tired from the trip.” It was more than the drive from Dallas that had exhausted her, but she didn’t dare share everything. Not even with Elyse.
Elyse rubbed Miranda’s arm in a gesture of friendship and comfort. “You can stay with us if you’d like, for as long as you’d like. I spruced up the guest room while you were gone. You’d love it, it’s very bright and cheery. And I have plenty of hot water, I promise. This is an awfully big house for one person to be knocking around in all alone.”
“Thanks, but this is home.” And she wasn’t exactly alone.
Since Tony didn’t show himself when others were around, she had tried to keep him away by having roommates, by surrounding herself with people for as many hours of the day as possible. When that happened, he came to her dreams each and every night, and she quickly reached the point where she could not function.
If she acknowledged him during her waking hours, he sometimes allowed her to sleep.
After Elyse left, Miranda unpacked a box of books and put them on the shelf in the parlor. She dusted the desk and the collection of figurines in the entryway. A cleaning service had come once a month while she’d been gone, but once a month wasn’t enough to keep this big house clean and besides…no one loved the place like she did. No one would care for it as she did.
She’d almost given up on the plumber when the doorbell rang. Duster in hand, she opened the door after peeking through the peephole and seeing a strange man standing there. He looked more bored than dangerous, and she had to admit—he was awfully good-looking for a plumber. The last repairman Ralph had sent out, before Miranda had made the mistake of trying to run from Tony, had been fiftyish and overweight, and wore the prerequisite baggy pants that came complete with almost two inches of exposed butt crack.
She threw the door open. “I thought you would never get here.”
The man on her doorstep lifted finely arched eyebrows. Man, those eyes were blue, the bluest she had ever seen. “You’re blond,” he responded oddly, sounding surprised.
He was dressed suitably enough, she supposed, in well-worn blue jeans and a dark gray T-shirt and work boots. His hair was short and dark. Not a warm brown dark, but black as night. His looks were very much Black Irish, and the coloring suited his features. She didn’t care what he looked like, as long as he got her hot water working. The cold shower she’d taken this morning had shocked her into awareness, but the misery had been more intense than she’d imagined it could be.
She stepped back so he could enter the house, and he did. He’d parked his black pickup truck in the driveway, behind her sedan, but had come to her door empty-handed. “Where are your tools?”
He cocked his head and tapped one finger to his temple.
“Great,” Miranda muttered. “A comedian.” She turned to look at him as she backed toward the stairway.
“The problem is upstairs,” she said, pointing with the feather duster. “The bathroom is the third door to the right, and the hot water heater is in the basement. I don’t know where you want to start, but…”
He just stared at her, his gaze locked on her face in a way that was absolutely mesmerizing. An odd shiver worked up her spine. She felt almost as if she knew him, but of course she didn’t. He did not have a forgettable face. If any man had ever looked at her with eyes like that before, she would’ve remembered.
Her stomach sank. “You’re not the plumber, are you?”
As soon as she said the words, books she’d just placed on the bookcase in the parlor flew off the shelves and into the entryway, where they banged into the wall. The walls of the old house rumbled and the ceiling shook, and a figurine she had just dusted spun off its table and then slammed to the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces. An unearthly wail filled the house and her head. A cold wind whipped through the entryway, ruffling her hair and the duster and chilling her to the bone—very much like the cold shower had done.
The man who was most definitely not a plumber leaned in so she could hear him above the noise. He gripped her wrist and shouted, “I don’t think your ghost likes me.”
CHAPTER TWO
JOHN WAS LESS CONFUSED by the ghost’s antics than he was by the fact that Miranda Garner’s hair was blond and short. She had one of those trendy hairstyles, where the pale strands looked mussed all the time. It was unexpectedly sexy, but his newest client should have long dark brown hair, silky and slightly wavy.
He was more disturbed by the fact that he’d been wrong than he was intrigued by a passably pretty woman who looked as if she hadn’t slept in a week. When he’d touched the paper with her name and phone number written on it, he’d been so certain she was the dark-haired woman.
Her soft hair had fallen across him, and she’d laughed….
A thick book hurtled through the air, tumbling end over end, headed directly for the blonde’s head. John already had a good grip on her wrist, so he yanked her out of the way. Startled by the sudden motion, she squealed and dropped to her knees. She wrenched her wrist from his grasp as she fell, and the duster she’d been holding went skittering across the hardwood floor.
As suddenly as the disturbance had begun, it ended. The house went quiet. The cold wind died as the ghost retreated.
John offered his hand to assist Miranda Garner to her feet. “I believe he’s done, for a while.”
She looked up at him, her green eyes accusing, her cheeks flushed pink. She did not take his hand, but struggled to her feet without assistance. “Who the hell are you?”
“John Stark,” he said, retrieving his offered hand. “Sorry if I startled you, but you were the one who called me.”
Her eyes widened, and she brushed back a wisp of fair hair that had fallen across her cheek. “I thought maybe you’d call or send a letter, not…stop by.”
“Slow day,” he explained.
Miranda Garner looked at him the way women often did, as if he were an oddity, a freak and a danger. She wondered if he would see into her soul when he touched her, if he would uncover all her secrets or whisper some dreadful prophesy into her pretty ear.
“Let’s get a few things straight,” he said, his voice and his demeanor completely businesslike. “I don’t do séances, Ouija boards or tarot cards. I don’t talk to dead people or read auras. I can’t guarantee you that I can help with your problem, or that I will see whatever it is you need me to see. I don’t control my gift, it controls me.”
“I have a ghost,” she said softly.
“Yes, I already know that,” he said too gruffly.
“Can you send him away?”
Miranda Garner sounded so desperate and looked so fragile, she touched something deep inside him, and that was a very bad sign. He never, ever allowed himself to become emotionally involved with a client.
He had known from the moment he’d touched that piece of paper with her name, phone number and address scribbled on it that she would be trouble. If she thought he was going to come in here and be her knight in shining armor, she had some seriously mistaken ideas.
“Can you?” she asked again, before he had a chance to contemplate an answer.
“I don’t know.” How was he supposed to concentrate on the spirit who was haunting her when he could not get past the fact that he’d been wrong about something so simple as her hair color? “Did you recently dye your hair?” he asked. “And perhaps cut it?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with—”
“I’m curious. Humor me.”
She cocked her head and looked at him, hard. Yep, she thought he was looney. “This is my natural hair color, and I’ve worn it short for years.”
“Oh.” He dismissed the vision of her as a brunette, with long hair that swept across his body. Everyone was allowed a malfunction, now and then. Even him. “Tell me about your ghost.”
THE MAN UNNERVED HER. When she’d called John Stark’s office, she certainly hadn’t expected that he’d jump in his truck and drive from Georgia to
Mississippi. If she had, and if she’d known how intensely he would look at her, she never would’ve made that call.
But if he could get rid of Tony…
What choice did she have but to trust John Stark, this odd man who called himself a psychic? Since she didn’t know him and would never see him again once this job was over, she had nothing to lose if he thought she’d lost her mind. “A year and a half ago, Tony Cochran walked into the Cedar Springs Public Library looking for books on the history of the area. That’s my specialty, area history.”
“You’re a librarian?”
“Yes.” What kind of a psychic was he that he didn’t already know that? “Anyway, I escorted Tony to the local history section, we talked for a while, and then he invited me out for coffee. Tony was cute and smart, and he…he had a really nice smile.” Her heart hitched. That smile had fooled her. “We talked about history and local architecture and the Civil War, and of course we talked about Vera Lavender.”
“Who?” he asked.
She should not be annoyed. Very few people who weren’t from the area remembered the once well-known actress who had been born in Cedar Springs and had died here. And yet she was annoyed. “Are you sure you’re psychic?”
A muscle in his jaw twitched. His lips hardened slightly. “Positive.”
Miranda sighed and waved off Stark’s lack of knowledge. “Tony and I had a lot in common, I’ll put it that way. A couple of days after we had coffee we went out to dinner. The next week we went to a movie.” It had all progressed so normally, for a while. “Before much time had passed, we were seeing one another regularly.”
The change in the relationship had been gradual, but looking back she could see the problems had been there from the start. “After a few weeks of friendly dinners and lunches and movies, Tony turned possessive. He started showing up here in the middle of the night, checking to make sure I was where I should be and that I was alone. One day at work he publicly accused me of having an affair with some poor guy who was simply asking about the library’s true crime section.”