The Husband Quest

by Lori Handeland

“And you?”

  “What about me?” Her voice was defensive, a bit shrill, she poked him and this time he felt it.

  “Hey!”

  “Sorry.”

  “You were telling me about your childhood. Why was yours so different from mine?”

  “Did you ever sleep on the streets? Eat out of a garbage can?”

  He turned his gaze on her. No wonder she was so desperate to sell the inn and acquire some cash. He wanted to question her further, but figured he should probably wait until she wasn’t sticking him with a needle.

  “Can’t say that I have,” Evan murmured. “The last person to sleep on the street in Gainsville was Freda Lallenheimer. Her husband, Fred, locked her out after she came home from the Daughters of the American Revolution meeting at 3:00 a.m. singing selected offerings from the soundtrack of Moulin Rouge.”

  Jilly smiled. “Go on.”

  “As I heard it, the daughters had broken out the peppermint schnapps in an attempt to cure the common cold.”

  Jilly’s gaze sharpened. “Does that work?”

  “No. But you no longer care that you have a cold.”

  “Darn. I could have used a cold cure.” She shrugged. “Oh, well. Then what happened?”

  “The chief of police found Freda stripped down to her slip in the town square, brushing her teeth in the water fountain. He took her home, where his own wife was already sleeping off the effects of the cold medicine.”

  “And did the chief let Freda live at his house?”

  “For about two weeks. Then he couldn’t stand one more rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and dropped Freda off at home. She and Fred pretended nothing had ever happened.”

  “I’ll bet no one goes hungry in that town, either.”

  “Of course not. That’s why there’s a ladies’ auxiliary. Word gets around that a family is having tough times, and food magically appears on their doorstep.”

  Jilly’s fingers hovered over his arm. “Magic?”

  “Well, Illinois farmers have their pride. They don’t take charity. But if the food just appears, they wouldn’t let it go to waste.”

  “That would be a sin.”

  “Now you’re catching on. So what happened after your mother got married?”

  “I was sent to school. Switzerland. Vienna. Paris.”

  “Really? Cool.”

  “Not.”

  “I’ve never been farther than here.”

  “Count yourself lucky.”

  “Why?”

  “I was an outsider. The poor stepdaughter.”

  “You sound like Cinderella.”

  She flicked a glance from his arm to his face and then back again. “How come a red-blooded American male knows so much about Disney movies for little girls?”

  “Zsa Zsa.”

  “Since when does Miss Gabor give a fig about Walt Disney?”

  He laughed. “Zsa Zsa’s my niece. Her real name is Glory. She has a thing for hats, purses, matching socks. She’s two.”

  “Precocious.”

  “And then some.” One of the few things he missed about Gainsville was Glory. “Seeing the world sounds like fun.”

  “It didn’t suck.” Jilly took a deep breath. “Actually, it did. I was eight when I was sent away. I wanted my mother, but she wasn’t there.”

  “Did you tell her how you felt?”

  “Of course.”

  “And?”

  “She didn’t care.”

  Evan couldn’t fathom a mother who didn’t care that her child was lonely and miserable. His mother, as un-cuddly as she was, would have moved heaven and earth to make any one of her children happy.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

  “I shouldn’t complain. I didn’t starve or freeze for long. And I’ll never do either one again.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JILLY WAS HIGH on life. Or maybe just high on herself.

  She’d stitched up Evan’s arm and managed to sew a straight line. The blood hadn’t bothered her a bit. The only thing that had was talking about her childhood.

  In the middle of straining pasta for the tuna salad she was making for dinner, Jilly paused. She wasn’t going to think about the past. She wasn’t going back to the way things had been, and there was no reason to fear that she was.

  Jilly took a swig of white wine from her cup. “Tastes the same whether it’s in plastic or crystal.”

  Her mother had always said everything tasted better when sipped from expensive glass. Mother was wrong.

  What else had she been wrong about?

  Zorro chittered and tugged on Jilly’s skirt. Absently she leaned down and gave him a quick hug. After the brief show of affection, he began to bat one of Henry’s cat toys around the kitchen. Zorro was happiest when playing with someone else’s things.

  She turned toward her pasta just in time to see Lightning’s lips reaching for a taste. “Out!” she shouted.

  He jerked his head up so fast he banged it on the window frame.

  “Shoo!”

  He gave her his usual puppy-dog look and backed away. She had to get Evan to put glass in that window before Lightning ate their dinner out from under them some night.

  “Yoo-hoo! Anyone home?”

  Naomi, followed by Ruth, ducked into the kitchen. They glanced around the room. Both frowned to see only Jilly and Zorro.

  “Evan’s resting. He had a little accident.”

  “We heard.”

  “From Addie?”

  “From Crawdad Gates, our neighbor. Addie told Jose Buntrock and he told Suz Orlon and—”

  “She told Crawdad.”

  “No. I think she told Mavis Melrose. But she told—”

  “Never mind,” Jilly interrupted. “I get the picture.”

  “Picture! That’s why we came. We wanted to show you one of Miss Dixie. We found it this morning.”

  Jilly finished tossing the ingredients for the salad into a big bowl, dried her hands and crossed to the kitchen table. Naomi opened a scrapbook and pointed to a photo. “Ain’t she pretty?”

  Why Jilly had been expecting a plain, older woman wearing a black dress and sensible shoes, she couldn’t say. Miss Dixie had operated a bordello. She’d been run out of town on a rail. She was progressive, a maverick, a madam.

  Nevertheless, the sight of the beautiful young woman in a minidress, with platform heels on her feet and a headband stretched around her forehead in Native American fashion, surprised Jilly.

  “She always wore Jandolet perfume. Mama said the company stopped making it long about 1972, but she always kept a tiny bit in a golden bottle….” Naomi breathed in deeply. “Cinnamon never smelled so good.”

  “C-c-cinna—” Jilly couldn’t get the rest of the word past the sudden blockage in her throat.

  “You chokin’?” Ruth whapped her on the back so hard Jilly stumbled into the table. Zorro growled and scooted out the door.

  “I—I’m fine.”

  So she’d smelled cinnamon in her bedroom. So what?

  “Do you know which room was Miss Dixie’s?” she asked.

  “The one you’re sleepin’ in.” Naomi tilted her head, narrowed her eyes. “You seen her?”

  “Of course not.”

  She’d only smelled her.

  But wait a minute, Jilly rationalized. If she was sleeping in Miss Dixie’s room, that could explain the phenomenon. The scent had permeated the walls, the floor, the ceiling, and was merely being released into the air at a certain temperature.

  That explanation made a lot more sense than a ghostly presence wearing perfume that hadn’t been manufactured for thirty years. Didn’t it?

  “So you’re sayin’ you ain’t seen no ghosts.”

  “None.”

  “Nothin’ strange goin’ on?”

  Jilly shrugged. “Strange is in the eye of the beholder.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Never mind. Who else is supposed to haunt this place?”


  Naomi stared at her for a long moment. Jilly stared right back. She wasn’t going to admit anything, because there wasn’t anything to admit. Eventually Naomi gave up and answered the question.

  “Well, there’s Matthew, of course, and a black man who was hung in yonder tree. One of Miss Dixie’s girls.” Naomi lowered her voice. “She died tryin’ to get rid of a baby. Terrible thing. Who else, Ruth?”

  Ruth snapped a salute.

  “Oh, him. That’s right.”

  “Who’s him?” Jilly asked.

  “The soldier. Died in the back bedroom at the base of the stairs.”

  She shivered as she remembered the door closing behind her, the chill, the breeze when there wasn’t any breeze at all.

  “Goose on your grave?” Naomi asked.

  “What?”

  “Yer cold all of a sudden. Goose on your grave. Ain’t you ever heard that?”

  Jilly shook her head. Graves. Ghosts. Geese. This was all too much for her.

  “What soldier?” she pressed.

  “From the war.”

  “World War Two?” Jilly guessed.

  The girls exchanged a glance. “She is a Yankee,” Naomi allowed.

  The way she said it annoyed Jilly. How would they like it if she called them losers? She eyed the size of Ruth and decided she wasn’t going to try it.

  “Whenever we say war in these parts we’re talkin’ about the War of Northern Aggression. The Civil War,” Naomi clarified for any idiots who didn’t know the common Rebel term for it.

  “What side was he on?” she asked.

  “What other side is there?” Naomi drawled.

  “Uh, Confederate?”

  Naomi didn’t bother to answer such a stupid question.

  “What’s his story?”

  “If I recollect rightly, he’d come home for a visit.”

  “He lived here?”

  “No. Much farther south. This was a stage stop back then.”

  “Evan mentioned that. But he said it was high-class.”

  “No lie.”

  “What would a soldier be doing in a high-class stage stop?”

  “He was with Quantrill.”

  Jilly searched her mind for the name. “Border Wars. Guerillas.”

  Not regular army, but renegades who’d followed their own rules, and in the chaos, got away with it.

  “He was on the run,” Naomi continued. “Hiding from the Jayhawkers.”

  “I thought those skirmishes were in Missouri and Kansas.”

  “Not always.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Arkansas was right on the border between the North and the South. Missoura folks declared for the North, ye know, but then sent just as many troops fer the South. We don’t hold with that kind of behavior in Arkansas.”

  “Wishy-washy,” Jilly commented.

  “Exactly. But the problem with bein’ in the middle is that ye get overrun by both armies. Captain Bontemps had the misfortune to come through town when the Yankees were about. He hid at the inn.”

  “And?”

  “They shot him.”

  “Just like that?”

  “In his bed. It was a damn disgrace,” Naomi declared.

  When her sister gasped and put her finger to her lips, she rolled her eyes. “I can say damn if I want to, Ruth Wilder. Especially if I’m talkin’ about murderin’ Yankee scum.”

  “You do know that the war’s over?” Jilly asked.

  “Tell it to Captain Bontemps.”

  Jilly hoped she wouldn’t have the opportunity. She straightened at the thought and gave a self-derisive laugh. She didn’t believe in ghosts. She was tired, nervous, out of sorts. Which was the only reason she was experiencing things that couldn’t actually be true.

  “So…uh…” Naomi craned her neck trying to see into the next room. “Where are the Seitz brothers?”

  “Gone home at a run the instant Barry sliced Evan’s arm. I don’t think they like blood too much. Neither did Evan.”

  “My ma always says if men had to birth babies the world would have been over long ago.”

  Jilly laughed and the two women joined in. Laughing felt good after the tension of the day. She’d managed to sew up Evan’s arm, but she hadn’t been whistling Dixie while she did it.

  “Did you want to talk to the Seitzes about something? I can give them a message tomorrow if you like.”

  “Uh, no.” Naomi gave an uneasy shrug. “We were just wonderin’ where they’d got to.”

  Jilly glanced at Ruth and was surprised at the blush staining the woman’s cheeks.

  Hmm. She’d thought Ruth was after Evan, but maybe she’d been wrong. Was Ruth interested in one of the brothers, despite each of them being born long before her, or even her mother?

  Then again, Jilly wasn’t one to throw stones anywhere near that glass house.

  After the sisters left, silence settled over the inn once more. Until Lightning expressed his annoyance at missing out on the tuna salad, snorting through loose lips just outside the kitchen window.

  “Be quiet out there!” she shouted.

  He neighed and kicked the side of the house.

  Mario’s cage rattled. By the time Jilly reached the living room, Zorro had the thing open, and the dog raced after the raccoon, barking as if he were being attacked by evil forces.

  Peter, who’d been sitting in the open dining-room window, dived for the safety of the yard and didn’t come back.

  Mario and Zorro raced upstairs and—

  They woke Henry. The pitter-patter of twelve little paws thundered above her head. Jilly discovered herself smiling. Why, she had no idea.

  She was in the middle of a Beverly Hillbillies nightmare, but she’d never been happier in her life.

  EVAN AWOKE TO THE SOUND of scurrying feet, yipping doodle and squalling cat.

  Sometimes he felt as if he’d stepped into an alternate universe. One where he was the only sane human in an insane menagerie. But Jilly seemed to enjoy the animals, and they were drawn to her. Several times he’d gotten up before dawn and caught her sleeping with a cat, a dog, an opossum and a raccoon curled around her legs.

  A movement in the doorway now made him tense. He’d seen a lot of shadows at the inn, but whenever he gazed directly at them, nothing was there. This time when he looked at the shadow, he saw Jilly hovering in the hall.

  “They woke you,” she murmured. “Sorry.”

  He sat up. When her eyes widened and stuck to his chest he remembered he wore nothing but his boxers. Evan reached for his shirt.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “If I sleep now I’ll never sleep later.”

  The sun had faded. Night hovered at the edge of the horizon. Evan could barely see Jilly’s face, but he found himself studying everything else about her. She’d changed in the few weeks she’d been here.

  He’d thought her beautiful that first day—cool, sexy, sophisticated, completely different from any woman he’d ever known. He’d wanted her. What else was new?

  But in sharing a house with her, as well as a common goal, he’d come to know her so much better than any other female he’d ever met—save those with the name of Luchetti.

  She wasn’t just pretty, she was smart, compassionate and strong. What other woman would spend every day with Addie dosing pigs and chickens, lancing Lord knows what on the asses of strangers, and rocking children until their sore tummies went away?

  Seeing her now—barefoot, hair loose, no makeup, the clothes Naomi and Ruth had given her more a part of her than the frothy green suit Lightning had wrecked could ever be—she seemed happy. Evan wondered, not for the first time, if she could be happy with him.

  Except she didn’t believe in ghosts, love, magic or any of the things that made the world special and interesting.

  “I suppose your injured arm will slow down the work around here.”

  “Nah. The brothers are coming along pretty well. At first I figured they’d be more trouble than they wer
e worth, but they’ve stopped breaking things. They even fixed the porch this morning, and they didn’t make it worse before they made it better.”

  “High praise,” she said, and he heard the smile in her voice. “So we’re on schedule?”

  “Ahead. Another month and we’ll be ready to paint the walls and lay the floors.”

  “Then?”

  “Unless you plan to furnish the place, too, the painting and the carpeting are the end.”

  “I doubt I can afford furniture. Besides, I like to decorate my own space. Who knows what the new owners will want to do with this one? Antiques, I’d think. Or maybe they’ll go modern. Though I wouldn’t.”

  Her voice had turned sad. She leaned against the doorjamb staring past him out the window.

  Evan wanted to lighten her mood. The story of his life. Wherever there was a sad woman, or one in need, there was Evan Luchetti with the tools to fix her right up. Just call him the love carpenter. He snorted.

  “Something funny?”

  “Uh, no. Nothing.”

  “Dinner’s ready. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  She turned and walked into her room across the hall. Evan stood and reached for his jeans.

  Before he could put them on Jilly came back through the door, and they smashed into each other. His pants fell to the floor as he caught her by her shoulders. Her arms went around his waist, beneath his unbuttoned shirt, and her palms slid against his skin. His breath caught as his body tightened.

  “Down boy,” he muttered. Now was not the time.

  Jilly was trembling, her breath catching as if she’d just run miles instead of yards. With every hitch of her breath, her breasts rubbed against his ribs, his belly, and he was having a difficult time taming the beast in his boxers.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She lifted her head, and the light green of her eyes was nearly obliterated by her dilated pupils. The contrast was stark in her overly pale face.

  “Remember when I said I didn’t believe in ghosts, or magic, or—”

  “I remember,” he interrupted, not wanting to hear again that his dreams of everlasting love, his hopes of a bright and shiny family future, were foolish. “What happened?”

  “I saw…” She glanced over her shoulder and mumbled, “I’m not sure.”

  “A ghost?”

  “Maybe.” Her fingers tightened on his arms as she faced him again. “Maybe everything I never believed in is true.”