Christmas Spirit

by Rebecca York

  Michael left with a bag of hard candies, wondering about his motives. Was he being objective or merely looking to bolster his case against Chelsea?

  As he stepped onto the street again, the back of his neck tingled. Apparently that was going to be a regular occurrence as long as he was in town. Casually, he stopped to look in the window of a real-estate company. Using the reflection of the glass, he tried to see if someone was following him. But the street was crowded, and he couldn’t pick out anyone in particular, even when he walked all the way down the block, pausing frequently to surreptitiously look behind him.

  After crossing the street, he wandered into the Chesapeake Gallery, where he stopped short when he saw a painting he recognized. He’d seen it on Chelsea’s Web site. It was a landscape scene that he assumed was near Jenkins Cove. He saw a marsh with cattails and a mist rising from the ground. In the background was a grand house with balconies and multiple chimneys.

  A small woman with dyed black hair noticed his interest. “That’s by Chelsea Caldwell, one of our local artists.”

  “It’s very evocative,” he allowed. “Is that a real house?”

  “The Drake mansion.”

  “Um.”

  The Drakes again. He’d heard about them last night from that guy in the Duck Blind—Phil Cardon. Maybe they were like the local nobility.

  He wondered if the house was really in back of a marsh, or if she’d moved elements around to create the effect she wanted.

  When the woman asked if he was interested in buying the painting, he disappointed her by saying that he wasn’t going to purchase anything until the end of his stay in town.

  He walked around the gallery and saw several more paintings by Chelsea. New works, he assumed, since they hadn’t been on the Web site. She was good. He could see why she’d done well in Baltimore. He hoped she sold as well in Jenkins Cove.

  That thought brought him up short. He kept letting his feelings interfere with business.

  It happened again when he returned to the B & B, hoping to see Chelsea. When she wasn’t anywhere around, he fought a stab of disappointment.

  He could have made himself comfortable in the living room. Instead he got in his car and drove to the approximate location of the murder. Pulling onto the shoulder, he climbed out and snapped some more pictures.

  Keeping busy, he returned to town and found the owner of a fishing boat who was willing to take him for a ride and point out local landmarks. Some creek, he thought. It was almost a hundred yards wide.

  He snapped pictures of the Drake estates, both of which were on the bay, separated by a spit of land. One of them was definitely the house he’d seen in the painting.

  From the fisherman, he found out that it was Brandon’s house in the painting. Did that mean Chelsea was friends with the local nobility?

  Chelsea. He kept coming back to her. Even when he wasn’t asking questions about the lady who’d seen the ghost.

  Thinking that he was acting like a teenager with a crush, he deliberately walked in the other direction. After picking up his jacket at the dry cleaner’s, he had an early dinner that kept him away from the B & B during the wine and cheese hour.

  It was dark by the time he came back, and nobody was on the first floor. He returned to his room, got out his laptop and uploaded the pictures he’d taken, then settled back to look at a slide show.

  The first two images seemed normal, but he got a jolt when he clicked on the third one, a view along Center Street. While the previous scenes had looked bright and sunny, in this one, mist seemed to hang over the area. Mist that he hadn’t seen when he’d been out for his walk.

  A chill skittered along his nerve endings. It was as if he’d captured something strange in the atmosphere of Jenkins Cove.

  He ran rapidly through the rest of the innocuous pictures he’d taken until he got to the one taken in the swampy area where Chelsea had seen the murder. There again he found the same kind of foggy patches that he’d encountered on the Center Street image.

  What was he seeing? Some trick of the light? An atmospheric disturbance that was only apparent on a digital image?

  Or was there something wrong with his phone after the dip in the creek? Would he get the same kinds of distortions with a camera that used film?

  He spent a long time studying the images, feeling stranger and stranger as he did so.

  Finally, he turned off the computer and spent another restless night. His dreams were filled with foggy images and Chelsea.

  Chapter Seven

  When Michael got up the next morning, he felt fairly certain that Chelsea was avoiding him. He had to change that. Because he wanted to get her to tell him ghost stories…or because he just wanted to see her?

  In the dining room Sophie greeted him warmly. “How are you enjoying your stay in Jenkins Cove?”

  “Fine.” He poured himself a cup of coffee from the sideboard, then brought it to the table that had been set for him with silver, china and a basket of freshly baked muffins.

  “Where’s Chelsea?” he asked as he unfolded his napkin.

  Aunt Sophie answered in a chipper voice. “She’s been anxious to get a painting finished. She’s up in her studio.”

  She bustled out of the room and returned with a slice of cheese frittata, bacon and cubes of cantaloupe.

  As soon as he’d finished eating, Sophie came back into the dining room, and he wondered if she had been waiting for him to leave so she could clean up.

  Instead she said, “I can take you up to see her studio, if you’d like.”

  He thought about that for a moment. Chelsea probably wouldn’t appreciate his barging in. If her aunt were with him, however, she couldn’t complain.

  “I’d like that,” he answered.

  Sophie led him to the third floor of the B & B where several closed doors lined the hallway.

  A sudden thought struck him, and he asked, “Is the psychomanteum up here?”

  “Why, yes. Would you like to see it?” She sounded delighted that he’d mentioned her pet project, and he was suddenly on the alert, wondering if she was going to try and sell him shares or something.

  “Okay,” he answered guardedly.

  She gave him an encouraging smile. “I won’t leave you in there.”

  “You think I’m afraid to stay by myself?” he snapped, then was sorry he’d let his tension get the better of him.

  “Some people are.”

  “Well, I’m not,” he said firmly, sounding to his own ears like a little kid proclaiming he wasn’t afraid to enter a haunted house.

  “Jenkins Cove is noted for psychic phenomena,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because we have such a long history. This was one of the first places settled in Maryland, due to our many rivers and creeks. In colonial times, water was the easiest way to get around.”

  “The town didn’t grow much,” he said.

  “That’s because we’re isolated from the mainland by the Chesapeake Bay. The water that was an advantage in the early days turned out to be just the opposite as people moved farther west.”

  Sophie opened a door and switched on a light, then stepped into a room that was bathed in black. It emitted an eerie feel. The ceiling was painted black, the walls were hung with black curtains and a dark carpet covered the floor. In the middle of the room sat a chair facing an enormous rectangular mirror framed in ornate gold. It leaned against one of the side walls. Various antique chests and small tables decorated the room, all of them decked out with pillar candles and slender tapers in elaborate candelabra.

  Aunt Sophie saw him eyeing them. “You have no idea how hard it is to get unscented candles,” she said. “I don’t want this place smelling like vanilla or cinnamon or something like that. So I started making them myself. Then I did get into the scented ones for downstairs.”

  “Right,” he murmured. His gaze flicked to the heavy mirror and the curtains. “Who set this up?”

  “I did. Well,
it’s all my idea, but I hired Phil Cardon to paint the ceiling, hang the curtain rods and carry the mirror up here. I sewed the curtains myself,” she added proudly.

  Suddenly, the fixture in the ceiling dimmed. With the black curtains and paint, the room became much darker—and spookier. He jerked around to see Sophie working a dimmer switch.

  “People who use the room adjust the light the way it’s most comfortable for them,” she said.

  “Uh-huh. Do people really communicate with ghosts in here?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do they know?”

  “The spirits speak to them.”

  “How do they know it’s not their imaginations working overtime?”

  “They have faith.” She dragged in a breath and let it out. “I’ve spoken to my sister in here. She died fifty years ago.”

  “How do you know it was her?”

  “She told me things that only the two of us would remember.”

  He could have argued that the conversation was coming from Sophie’s imagination, but he didn’t want to challenge her. If it made her happy to think she had spoken to her sister, that was okay by him. Just so she didn’t have a microphone in here where she pretended to be speaking for the dead. Yeah, he’d better check on that.

  “If you want to have a session, just let me know.”

  “I don’t know any of the ghosts around here.”

  “Well, the spirit world has no physical boundaries.”

  It would be a cold day in hell before he took her up on the offer to contact the dead.

  When they stepped back into the hall, he immediately felt some of the tightness go out of his throat. “Chelsea’s studio is down the hall,” she said.

  Instantly the tightness was back, but for a different reason. He was going to see Chelsea again for the first time since he’d stood in the kitchen in a borrowed bathrobe.

  Sophie led the way to the opposite end of the house where the hall turned a corner.

  As they stepped to their right, light flooded in through a huge window with a half transom addition above the rectangular section.

  It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the brightness. When they did, he could see Chelsea in a room right in front of them. She was standing at an easel, dabbing paint on a canvas. An artist’s pallet sat on a tall narrow table beside her.

  When she looked up and registered their presence, her eyes widened in shock. Was she thinking she could avoid him? Or was it unusual for her aunt to bring a guest into her private space?

  “What…what are you doing here?” she asked, her gaze accusing him of stepping over an invisible boundary.

  He kept his tone neutral. “Your aunt offered to show me your studio, and I took her up on it.”

  She regarded him for several heartbeats, then gave Sophie an annoyed look. “I’m supposed to be working. You know I like my private time.”

  “Of course. But Mr. Bryant seemed so interested,” Sophie said with enthusiasm.

  “Can I see what you’re painting?” he asked.

  Her mouth tightened.

  “I’d like to see it, too,” Sophie said.

  When Chelsea gave a little shrug and stepped back, Michael and Sophie took up positions in front of the painting.

  The canvas showed downtown Jenkins Cove on a winter evening, with all the shops decked out for the holidays. It was very much like the way the street had looked when he’d walked down to the Duck Blind, only in the painting, snow was lightly falling, dusting the road and shops.

  “It’s very good. Charming,” he said, meaning it. “I love the way you’ve done the lights. They seem to glow.”

  She looked at him as if to determine whether he was sincere.

  “Chelsea is donating it to a charity auction,” Sophie said. “That’s why she’s in a hurry—so it can dry in time for the big Christmas party.”

  “I’m about finished,” Chelsea said.

  “Mmm-hum.” What was it about these women that reduced him to such replies? Casting around for something else to say, he asked, “Where do you get your ideas for paintings?”

  She gave him a strange look. “People ask me that all the time. But I wouldn’t expect the question from you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re a writer. Where do you get your ideas?”

  He flushed. “Right. But ideas for books are different.”

  “Why?”

  He fumbled for an answer. “You’re working in a visual medium. I’m not. Each painting you do is like a snapshot. You don’t get to show any progression.”

  “Sometimes I do, like when I paint the same scene at different times of the day or different seasons.”

  “True.”

  Sophie leaped into the conversation. “I showed Mr. Bryant the psychomanteum.”

  Chelsea’s head snapped toward her aunt. “And he thought it was a waste of time,” she guessed.

  “I think he sees it as artificial,” the aunt answered before Michael could give his own opinion. Changing the subject completely, she said, “I think you should take advantage of the nice weather. Take him to the old warehouse down by Smugglers Bend where he can experience something authentic.”

  Chelsea blinked. “Why?”

  “Because it’s supposed to be haunted. It’s something real, not a room that an old lady set up. He can see if he picks up any vibrations.”

  “Is that a challenge?” Michael asked.

  “Yes,” Sophie answered.

  “Why don’t you take him?” Chelsea suggested.

  “I have some baking to do. And, of course, I’m not as spry as I used to be. It’s a trip best undertaken by young people.”

  “I can go on my own,” Michael said, glancing at Chelsea and then away.

  “You’ll never find it,” she was quick to answer, and then her face contorted as she probably realized that she’d basically offered to take him.

  “Let’s go,” Michael said, before she figured out an excuse to change her mind.

  She looked as though she wanted to protest, but apparently she wasn’t going to be rude to a guest in front of her aunt. With a little sigh, she took off the smock she was wearing over her shirt and jeans, then went to the sink in the corner and washed her hands.

  As they all started downstairs, she asked, “You really want to go to the warehouse?”

  “Aunt Sophie thinks it will be good for me.”

  “You catch on real quick, young man,” the woman in question answered.

  When they descended to the first floor, Michael went to get his jacket. Chelsea was waiting for him when he came back to the front hall.

  She eyed the jacket, which looked a lot better than it had after his dunk in the creek. “You stopped at the dry cleaner’s?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh. The coat’s as good as new.”

  She gave him a long look, the first halfway friendly gesture of the morning. “And you’re okay?” she asked softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  They climbed into her small car. “I never did actually thank you for saving my life.”

  “No problem.”

  “Maybe not for you. But it made a great deal of difference to me.”

  He saw that she couldn’t quite suppress a grin.

  ***

  AS THE WATCHER SAW THE PAIR exit the House of the Seven Gables, he pressed back into the shadows of the storage shed.

  Michael Bryant and Chelsea Caldwell together.

  Very interesting.

  What were they up to now?

  He’d thought he could simplify his job by running down Bryant on his way back from the Duck Blind the other night. But Chelsea had saved him.

  Since Bryant had come to town, the guy had been asking a lot of questions. Mainly about ghosts. But that might not be his primary interest.

  Was he really an investigative reporter…or was he an undercover cop or a private eye?

  The sooner Bryant left Jenkins Cove, the better
—under his own power, or on a stretcher headed for the medical examiner. Either way was absolutely fine.

  But right now the two of them were up to something.

  When Chelsea pulled out of her parking spot, the watcher walked back to his own vehicle, which was over at the other side of the town parking lot. He didn’t need to keep them in sight. He’d already put a transponder on Chelsea’s car. And on Bryant’s, too.

  So, all he had to do was turn on his GPS, and he could follow at a discreet distance.

  ***

  MICHAEL MIGHT have gotten Chelsea to grin, but now that they were in her car, he could have cut the silence with a knife. As they turned onto Main Street, he heard himself say, “You’ve been avoiding me.”

  “Don’t you think that’s the best policy?” she snapped.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t usually end up in clinches with men I barely know,” she said.

  Keeping his voice light, he answered, “I thought that getting me to move out of the path of a speeding car showed you cared.”

  “That was just common courtesy.”

  “Okay.” After another few minutes of silence he said, “I’m only going to be here for a few more days.”

  “Are you suggesting that we have a fling while you’re in town?” she asked, her voice tight.

  “Come on. That’s not what I said at all. I just think we should try to get along with each other.”

  She nodded.

  “So, have you lived in Jenkins Cove all your life?” he asked.

  She glanced at him, then turned back to the road. “I grew up in Baltimore.”

  “How did you start painting?”

  “I always liked to do it. My parents left me some money—enough to live on for a few years while I established my career.”

  “Your parents are dead? I’m sorry.”

  “Losing them was hard. But it made me self-sufficient.”

  “Yeah. My dad died when I was little. My mom wasn’t so great at coping.”

  “I’m sorry.” She paused, then commented, “So I take it you didn’t have a happy childhood.”

  “No. We didn’t have a lot of money. And my mom didn’t spend it wisely.” He heard the tightness in his voice. “What about your childhood?”