by Julie Kenner
“Were you?” Stark asked.
“Was I what?”
“Did you make a habit of picking up men in the library?”
“No,” she answered curtly, insulted that he would assume such a thing.
“No reason to glare at me, Ms. Garner.” The psychic had made himself comfortable in a chair by the window, leaning back with his long legs thrust out and his fingers steepled. “It’s part of my job to absorb as many details as you can possibly give me before I begin.”
Miranda sighed deeply, reaching for control. She’d had so little control, in the past year. “Tony and I dated for a few weeks, and then I told him I couldn’t see him anymore. He didn’t take it well.”
“I assumed as much,” Stark responded.
“After I ended the relationship, it seemed Tony was around more than ever. I’d be shelving books in the library, and I’d turn around and find him right there, just a few feet away. He called at all hours of the day and night, and—”
“Please tell me you called the police.”
“Of course! But Tony hadn’t actually done anything illegal. The cops talked to him a couple of times and told him to back off, but…”
“He didn’t,” Stark finished when she stumbled over her words.
Miranda shook off the past, as best she could. Those unnerving days had been just the beginning of her troubles.
“He came here one night. It was raining, and he kept banging on the door begging me to let him in.” Her breath came too hard. “I tried to call the police, but he’d cut the phone lines.”
“No cell phone?”
Miranda shook her head. “No signal out here. You have to get beyond the curve in the road before you can get a halfway decent reception.”
Stark snagged his cell phone from his belt and checked for a signal. He cursed mildly before turning it off. “You’re right.”
“Of course I’m right.”
He looked directly at her, those blue eyes doing their best to see right through her. “It was raining, you didn’t have a phone,” he prompted.
The doorbell rang, and Miranda almost jumped out of her skin. She rushed to the door to answer; the plumber had finally arrived. Stark had risen from his chair and followed her, and now stood propped casually in the parlor entrance, watching.
The plumber, the same overweight older man who’d come to her aid last year, looked pointedly at Stark, and at the books Tony had tossed about, and at the broken figurine. The disapproval in his eyes was easy to read. Miranda didn’t care to try to explain. She told him what her plumbing problems were and sent the repairman to the basement.
Hot water first, trickle upstairs later.
When she heard the cellar door off the kitchen close, she turned to John Stark. He smiled, for the first time since he’d come to her door. “He thinks you and I had a violent lovers’ spat.”
Miranda shuddered. “I don’t care what he thinks.” She tried for a prim voice, but there was a bit of a tremble in her statement. “Can you help me?”
“I don’t know. You haven’t finished telling me what happened.”
“I thought you were a psychic,” she snapped. “Don’t you know everything?”
“Hardly.”
She wasn’t sure why she’d even bothered to call John Stark’s office. There had been a small article on the Internet about him, at some off-the-wall Web site she’d found herself reading primarily by mistake. A typo in her web browser had taken her there, and she’d ended up intrigued by a byline. Psychic solves crimes and answers questions of the heart.
A year ago she hadn’t believed in psychics, and she still wasn’t sure that she did. But a year ago she hadn’t believed in ghosts, either, and look what Tony had done to her. Calling John Stark’s office was proof of just how desperate she had become.
“A year ago,” he prompted with a wave of his hand. “It was raining. Tony was here.”
“I heard him around back, rattling at the kitchen door, so I left by the front door.” Her heart began to beat too fast, just as it had that night. “I dropped the keys in the driveway as I was running for the car, and when I bent down to pick them up I was so afraid that he was going to get to me before I reached the car. I think he would have killed me.”
Stark nodded once, in agreement with her assessment of what might’ve happened that night.
“He didn’t, though. I made it to the car, started the engine, pulled out of the driveway. I had left the driveway and was on the road, when he jumped in front of my car. I would’ve stopped if I’d seen him in time,” she said quickly, as she had many times on that night and in the days to follow. “But I didn’t see him until it was too late.”
“How did he get ahead of you?” Stark asked, skeptical as all the others had been at first.
“As you can see the driveway is quite long, and the road twists and turns. Tony must’ve heard me leaving and run through the woods, taking a shortcut in order to reach that curve in the road before me. He did, just barely. And he’s been with me ever since.”
“Getting rid of a ghost is usually simple work,” Stark said unemotionally. “Tell them they’re dead and no longer belong on this earth, tell them to go away—”
“I have told Tony to go away a thousand times!” she interrupted hotly. “I don’t need a professional to tell me how to order a man to leave me the hell alone!”
He gave her a small, reluctant smile. “I’m not implying that you do, Ms. Garner.”
“I’m surprised he caused a ruckus while you were here,” she said, trying to calm her voice and force her facial expression to blandness. “He’s usually quiet when others are present.” It was for that reason that everyone dismissed her visions as posttraumatic stress, guilt or plain old hysteria.
“Your ghost revealed himself to me because he knows I’m not leaving until he’s gone,” Stark said in a matter-of-fact voice.
“How can you say that? We haven’t come to any sort of agreement.”
Stark smiled at her, and she was immediately disarmed. He didn’t look at all weird, as she’d expected he might when she’d read that Internet article, but was a fairly normal above-average good-looking guy with a nice smile. He even drove a pickup truck, for goodness sake, and wore jeans and work boots. The only truly unusual feature was his eyes, and they were extraordinary. They seemed to look right through her, and were such a vibrant shade of blue she could hardly tear her gaze away.
“We will come to an agreement,” he said with confidence.
“How can you be so sure?”
He lifted his eyebrows slightly. “I said I don’t know everything, not that I don’t know anything.”
He’d said he wasn’t leaving until Tony was gone, which was a relief. “So, you can send him away today? Now?”
“Not likely,” he said absently. “It will take some time.”
Her heart hitched, a little. “You expect to…to stay here?”
He nodded. “It’s the only way to get the job done, Ms. Garner. I need to discover what’s holding your ghost here. When that’s done, perhaps he will move on, as he should’ve a year ago.”
She found herself wringing her hands, and she couldn’t stop. “He says he loves me,” she admitted in a lowered voice.
Stark’s jaw went hard. “I’m not a romantic, Ms. Garner, but I do know that love and terror do not go hand in hand. This ghost has terrorized you for a year. There is no love in that.”
IT WASN’T A GOOD HOUSE. John feathered his fingertips against the wallpaper in the upstairs hallway, as he carried his bag to the spare bedroom where Miranda Garner had grudgingly told him he could sleep.
People had a hard time coming to grips with the fact that things were good and bad, just like people. This house had absorbed a lot of bad energy over the years. John could hear the screams that had echoed in this house, he could feel the death. There had been some happiness to cut the chill of the horror, but the misery remained more steadfast than the joy.
&nbs
p; He stopped when he came to an antique side table and his fingers brushed against the polished wood. The dark-haired woman flashed into his mind again, only this time she wasn’t laughing. She screamed, she begged him to stop…and then blood bloomed on the front of her white nightgown, and the screaming abruptly stopped.
The table had been new then, and the woman’s prim nightdress and dated hairstyle told him that whatever had happened to her had happened long ago.
John yanked his hand away from the table. He wasn’t here to solve an old crime. He was here simply to send Miranda Garner’s ghost away so she could live in peace. Nothing more.
But he found he couldn’t make himself move away from the table. He laid a trembling hand there again, and this time the images that assaulted him were very different.
She was smiling this time, and her dark hair was unbound and hanging over her shoulders and down her back. A thick lock of dark hair fell across her face, almost hiding one brown eye.
She perched on the edge of this very table, her arms draped loosely around his neck, her narrow skirt pushed up so she could wrap her legs around his hips. He unbuttoned a few of the pearl buttons down the front of her silk blouse. The column of her throat was pale and tempting, her lips were parted as she moaned softly.
“YOU HAVE TO LEAVE HIM,” he said as he opened her blouse. Afternoon light shone into the hallway, from the small window that overlooked the back lawn and from the windows of the bedrooms that opened onto the hall, so he could see her well. The sheen of her perfect skin, the swell of her breasts, they mesmerized him, as usual.
“I will,” she said breathlessly as he lowered his head to lay his lips on her shoulder. “I can’t stay with him another minute. I love you. I love you with all my heart.”
He had waited so long to hear her say those words, and he wanted to believe her. But she had lied to him before.
“When are you going to tell him?”
“When he gets home,” she whispered. “I promise.”
She had promised before to leave her husband for him, he remembered that as he reached beneath her skirt to stroke the soft skin of her inner thigh, to slip his fingertips into the top of her stocking. She had broken that promise many times. He hated her for that, but he loved her, too. He had not known it was possible to love a woman and hate her at the same time, but this woman was maddening. He wanted her; he needed her. But at times like this he wished he didn’t love her quite so much.
She closed her eyes and smiled and reached out to stroke the erection that strained his trousers, and he forgot how infuriating this woman could be.
“YOUR ROOM’S ON THE LEFT,” Miranda Garner said.
John yanked his hand away from the table. His mouth was dry, and he could still feel the vision of the woman on this table. He didn’t normally feel anything. He saw, he listened, he even smelled…but he was always distant from whatever happened. No matter how disturbing the vision might be, he watched from a distance. He did not participate.
Ms. Garner’s footsteps on the stairs were loud enough; he should’ve heard her long before now.
John didn’t turn to face the woman who had hired him. It wouldn’t do for her to see the erection that now strained his jeans. He continued on down the hallway.
“Interesting house, Ms. Garner,” he said indifferently.
“You might as well call me Miranda,” she said reluctantly. “It seems we’re going to be living together for a short while.”
Her words did nothing to ease his discomfort.
CHAPTER THREE
MIRANDA WASN’T yet convinced that John Stark could help her. He’d spent most of the evening muttering to himself and handling all sorts of objects that caught his attention. Books, furniture, pictures that had hung on these walls for many years. His hands were never still…his fingers traced and touched and prodded almost everything. He had stayed downstairs for most of the evening. They’d shared a simple meal, sandwiches and soup in the kitchen, and since then he’d barely said two words to her. Unless some of that muttering was meant to be a communication of some kind.
It was long past dark, and she was tired. Heavens, she was so sick of being tired all the time! If John Stark could send Tony away, she’d be able to sleep again.
Since she’d agreed to pay this man for his time, she apparently wasn’t thinking well, either. Tomorrow morning she would pay him for the day and send him back to Atlanta. Damned if he wasn’t as disturbing as Tony, in his own way.
He had been standing behind the parlor sofa for a good fifteen minutes, eyes closed and mouth occasionally working gently as if he were talking to himself, when his eyes flew open and he looked at her.
“There was a woman who lived in this house back in the forties,” he said sharply. “She’s interfering, somehow. She’s blocking me from seeing what I need to see. She’s getting in the way.”
“Are you telling me I have another ghost?” Miranda asked, alarmed.
“No, she’s not a ghost,” he explained. “But I keep seeing her.” He didn’t seem at all pleased by that fact.
“If it’s the forties you’re seeing, then the woman is probably my great-aunt Vera.”
“Vera,” he repeated. “Yes, that’s it. She was an unusual woman.”
Miranda smiled gently. Unusual didn’t even begin to describe her great-aunt. “Vera Lavender. I believe I mentioned her earlier. She was an actress. She acted and danced in a number of moderately successful motion pictures. Her husband was her partner, at least for a while.”
“Fred and Ginger,” Stark said lowly.
“Not quite so well known, but that’s the general idea.”
Stark glanced around the room. “We’re a long way from Hollywood.”
Miranda’s smile faded. The success of that handful of musicals was the fun part of the tale. What came after was not so much fun.
“They were famous, for a while, but when their fame began to wane Vera and her husband moved here. This was her home, after all, and here in Cedar Springs she would always be a star, no matter what Hollywood thought of her.”
“She preferred to be a star in Mississippi rather than a has-been in Hollywood,” Stark muttered.
“Yes. I can’t say that I blame her.”
He looked at her, his blue eyes accusing. “You’re not telling me the most interesting details of this story.”
“Don’t you already know?” she snapped.
“I know some. Not all. I’d like to hear you tell it.”
“Vera and her husband, Phillip, moved here after her parents died. They passed within six months of one another, and her little brother—my grandfather—went to Virginia to live with relatives. The house was empty, and I suppose to Vera it was also home. Phillip didn’t like it here, by all accounts. He would’ve preferred to be a washed-out actor in Hollywood. As a matter of fact, he traveled there often.”
“Vera did not go with him.”
It was a statement, not a question, and still Miranda answered, “No, she didn’t.”
“She took a lover.”
Miranda felt her face turn warm, and likely red as well. In the beginning there had been those who’d believed BJ Oliver had broken in here that night, uninvited. But too many people had seen them together…too many people had known the truth. Her aunt had died long before her own birth, and still Miranda felt shame for the woman. They shared blood, after all. “She was lonely here, and yes…she took up with a local man. BJ Oliver was an artist. Not a successful one, I’m afraid. He painted pretty but unexciting pictures, and worked as a handyman on the side to make ends meet. He killed Vera in a jealous rage.”
John glanced away from her. “Are you sure it was Oliver who killed her? Why not the husband? If she was having an affair…”
“Vera’s husband was on his way home from Hollywood when she died. He didn’t get here until days later. Besides, after Oliver murdered Vera he took his own life. Their bodies were found in the upstairs hallway. She’d been stabbed in the
chest numerous times. He was lying on top of her with a bullet in his brain. The gun was still in his hand.”
“Someone might’ve reconstructed the crime scene to look like…”
Miranda clenched her fists. “This is a fascinating conversation, Mr. Stark, but it has nothing to do with getting rid of my ghost.”
“I’m afraid it does,” he answered halfheartedly. “Why are there no pictures of your aunt Vera? She was famous, you’d think there would be a number of photographs and memorabilia on display.”
“My father moved everything to a room upstairs,” Miranda explained. “He got tired of having this conversation every time someone stopped by and saw the photos.”
“May I see them?”
Miranda still didn’t see how this could have anything to do with Tony, but she led John up the stairs and down the hallway to a rarely used spare bedroom. “Everything’s in here.” She opened the door and John walked in slowly, almost as if he were afraid.
He walked to a collection of photos that was arranged on the dresser, and laid the tip of one finger on one of the most flattering photos of the decidedly beautiful woman.
Miranda stood in the doorway, watching.
As a child, she had been fascinated with Vera Lavender. Miranda Garner had been pale and plain and gawky, and the woman in the photographs was so beautiful and elegant. There had been more than one night when she’d sneaked into this room to delve into the trunk where some of Vera’s old clothes had been stored. She’d played dress-up, and pranced around the room pretending to be someone she was not…and never would be.
She felt Tony touch her throat, and the whisper in her ear was so close she caught her breath and held it.
“John Stark is not who he pretends to be,” Tony whispered. “He’s dangerous. He wants to hurt you. He killed you once, Miranda, and if you let him, he’ll kill you again. Be careful, love. Be careful.”
A frightened noise escaped from her throat, and Stark turned to look at her. “What’s wrong?” he asked, one small framed photo still caught in his hand.