by Lisa Cach
“But maybe you’re right,” she said as they moved to the car. “It could have been a heart attack. Do you want me to drive? Maybe we should get you checked out at an emergency room.”
He looked at her, then went around to the passenger side and opened the door.
She raised her brows, surprised he’d taken her up on the offer.
He stared at her, then gestured toward the door. “My lady?”
She tried to keep the satisfaction from showing on her face. No emergency room. “Thank you,” she said, and got into the passenger seat.
As they headed down the drive, her sense of satisfaction was drained away by the sight of a shadowy figure caught in the corner of her eye.
A shiver ran over her.
She hoped this was the last she would see of Case Lambert’s house. She couldn’t imagine him finding any way to persuade her to come back.
She glanced at him. His gaze was turned inward, his jaw set against the unmanly accusation of a panic attack. It was strangely appealing. A chink in the armor.
He needed help.
She clenched her jaw against the thought. No, I can’t give in! I’ve got to think of my own safety first.
She wasn’t going to go back to that house, no matter how badly Case needed her.
Four
Case drove and tried to digest the humiliating fact that he might have had a panic attack.
It was not the type of failing he wanted to admit to. He didn’t care what the rational, underlying cause of it was; it still made a man seem like an overreacting sissy.
His frowned deepened. There he’d been, passed out on his own foyer floor, while Megan had been on her own upstairs. And then to have her find him like that. How embarrassing!
He could feel the trail of testosterone he was leaving behind him, like oil dripping from a car.
Dinner didn’t seem like such a good idea now. He didn’t want to see Megan’s lovely face across the candlelight, gazing at him with concern, worried that he might start hyperventilating at any moment.
Crap.
But he’d said he’d buy her dinner, so he’d buy her dinner. Besides, he wanted to hear what she’d discovered, if anything, during her walk-through.
Five minutes later, he parked the car near a nice little restaurant he knew a dozen blocks from Antique Fancies. As they undid their seat belts, he turned to Megan.
“Not another word about panic attacks, okay?”
She gave him a look that said he was being a male of fragile ego.
“Just…don’t,” he said. “Please.”
She gave a little shrug and nodded.
“Have you been to Eva?” he asked as they crossed the street to the small restaurant.
“I’ve always meant to, but it seemed an extravagance.”
Her answer told him a lot about her financial status. Eva was not an expensive restaurant by his standards; it was a good restaurant, with a chef who experimented with seasonal local ingredients, but it wasn’t a “Put on the fur and diamonds, honey, we’re going to town,” type of place. It had more of a “Wear your cashmere sweater” ambience.
They were seated at a candlelit, linen-covered table by the window. It was six-thirty, and the long days of a northern May meant that the sky was showing only the first signs of fading light.
“Would you like something to drink before the wine?” he asked. “That lavender cosmopolitan you were talking about? Although I’m not sure they make one.”
“How about you order for me? Something that doesn’t taste too much of alcohol.”
Another clue to Megan. She’d never been a party girl. It didn’t surprise him, but he was beginning to wonder just how insular her life had been.
When the waitress returned, he ordered a Scotch for himself and a lemon drop for Megan.
He watched her as she perused the dinner menu, her face showing faint alarm, although whether that was for the prices, the esoteric choices, or the date-like atmosphere of the restaurant, he didn’t know.
“They usually have a prix-fixe special, if you don’t want to choose your courses,” he offered.
She glanced up in surprise. “What, and take the fun out of it? I’m just trying to figure out how much I can eat, and whether it would be a mistake to order all the appetizers and call it dinner.”
He laughed. “Be my guest, as long as you don’t mind sharing.”
When the waitress returned with their drinks, Megan surprised him again by asking a few knowledgeable questions about the dishes and pronouncing the occasional French word with a far better accent than he himself could manage. And she didn’t order all appetizers.
“Cheers,” he said, raising his Scotch glass.
She lifted her lemon drop, winked, and said, “Skoal!”
He shook his head, laughing silently, and took a much-welcome sip of his Scotch.
“For someone who doesn’t go to expensive restaurants, you seem to know food,” he said.
Megan tasted her lemon drop and licked a grain of sugar off her lip with a small dart of her tongue. “This is good. And not eating out a lot doesn’t mean you can’t cook well. My mom was a foodie, and she instilled the love in me. You should see the cookbook collection at the house. There’s even a framed, autographed photo of Julia Child.”
“You live in the house where you grew up?”
She nodded, taking another sip of her drink. “I really like this.”
Maybe a little too much. The martini glass was already half empty. “Just because you can’t taste the alcohol doesn’t mean it’s not there,” he warned.
“Oh.” She set her glass down. “I suppose we should talk about the house.”
“Business before pleasure.”
“Or at least before I drink myself under the table.” She giggled.
He looked at her in concern.
She straightened up in her seat. “Sorry. I’ve found silliness to be an aftereffect of being scared out of my panties.” She paused. “Not literally, of course.”
He suddenly pictured her panties coming off and cleared his throat. “So you did experience something upstairs?”
“Oh, yeah. Something I’d rather not experience again.” She took another sip of her lemon drop.
“Tell me what happened.”
Her description of the dark figure in the corner of the hall sent a chill down the back of his neck.
“I’ve never actually seen anything in the house—I mean, not an actual figure or ghost or whatever you want to call it. But I’ve seen things move. And heard them.”
“Things like what?”
He barked a laugh. “Unfortunately, it’s usually been the type of thing you talk yourself out of. Doors opening and closing when no one is there. Could just be drafts, right? A badly balanced door. A faulty latch. Some of my tools have disappeared, only to appear again somewhere I could not reasonably have left them. But still, maybe I did it. Or maybe a neighborhood prankster comes in and moves things. Periodically, the lights flicker and then go out, although the power usually stays on. Bad wiring? No electrician can find the problem. But even so, put almost everything down to the natural creakings of an old wooden house or to mischief on the part of an intruder. Almost everything.”
“Almost.”
“Yeah. There was a final straw that made me search out someone like Ramsey.”
She waited, not saying anything.
He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. He didn’t want to talk about this any more than he’d wanted to talk about the supposed panic attack. “Something seemed to get into bed with me.”
Megan’s eyes widened.
“Something cold and…curious.”
“Wh-what did it do?”
“It didn’t have a chance to do much. I felt hands on me, cold as stone. I shot out of bed faster than I knew I could move. I tried to light a candle but couldn’t find the matches in the dark. When I finally found them and lit one, I saw nothing but my own rumpled sheets. Then, in the si
lence, I heard someone slide across the bed and a pair of bare feet softly hit the floor. I couldn’t see anything: no movement to the sheets, no indentation on the mattress. But I was sure there was someone in the room with me.
“Then the bare footsteps started coming toward me where I stood by the door. And I’m afraid that my courage failed me. And the match, too—it singed my fingers and went out.”
He smiled sheepishly and took another sip of Scotch. “I ran. Didn’t even remember I was buck naked until I got outside. It was about the hardest thing I ever did, making myself go back in there to grab some clothes and my car keys. I spent the rest of the night in the backseat of the car.”
Megan shook her head. “And yet you’re still living in that place. Why? I don’t get it. I mean, sure, it’s a great location, and the house has the potential to be beautiful, but at this point, I’d think you’d raze it and start fresh or sell it. Why put yourself through this? There are other houses.”
He shook his head. “I’ve asked myself the same question more than once. I suppose the primary reason is that I’m a stubborn son of a bitch.”
“So I’ve noticed. So, what is it? You don’t want the ghosts to win?”
“Or whatever it is that’s going on. I’m not going to let it beat me.”
She tilted her head. “You’re putting yourself through a lot of misery for the sake of pride. I’d think a businessman would cut his losses.”
“This isn’t about business for me.” He didn’t want to say exactly how personal an issue the house had become.
When he’d first laid eyes on it, it wasn’t just a shattered beauty that he saw; it was his future. He had known in that instant, without understanding why, that if he was going to settle down and start a family, this was where it had to be. This was where he wanted to bring his bride; it was where he wanted to raise his children; it was where he wanted his grandchildren to come visit and be excited that they got to come to Grandpa and Grandma’s crazy, enormous house on the hill.
He wanted summers with kids playing badminton on a crooked net in the yard; Easter egg hunts enjoyed by all the neighbor kids; Christmas lights hanging from each and every angle of the roofline.
He’d seen the house on its private block and known it was the type of place a man could stay forever. Giving up on the house would mean giving up on his dream.
“Tell me what else you picked up about the house,” he said.
She explained the rest of her experiences as they made their way through appetizers and soup. Scotch and lemon drop gave way to a Spanish rioja. Their entrées had appeared by the time she finished.
He shook his head. “I don’t know what to make of it all.”
“If you’re willing to believe in ghosts for a moment, the simplest story would be that the thing that got into bed with you and that I saw in the hall—and that touched your face downstairs—was a widow who spent most of her life sleeping alone in that big bed. It would explain the loneliness I felt and why she seems interested in you.”
“What about the feeling you had at the gate, of being trapped?”
“Maybe she was an invalid. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t leave and couldn’t find someone else to marry. Her moving your tools around and opening and closing doors could be seen as a simple plea for attention,” Megan said. “If you believed in ghosts.”
“I might almost be tempted to. I’d rather have a lonely old lady ghost than think I’ve gone nuts.”
Megan speared a sweet potato gnocchi with her fork and chased it through its sauce, grumbling beneath her breath.
“What?”
“Maybe your being nuts would make more sense.” She set down her fork. “I’m not sure, but I got a vague sense that the shadowy figure I saw might be male.”
“Oh.”
“Which still might fit my story. I mean, if he was a gay Victorian, it’s easy to imagine that he spent a lot of lonely time. And it would explain him climbing into your bed.”
“Don’t tell me I have a gay ghost coming on to me.”
“Why are men always so upset by the thought of a gay guy finding them attractive? I never get that. You’d think it would be a compliment.”
“First your talk of panic attacks, now this. I’m going to have to go beat someone up to feel better.”
She laughed, then suddenly stopped. “You are kidding, right?”
“Of course. And I don’t mind if someone’s gay, by the way. Just so you know.”
“Just as long as I don’t mistake you for being gay, huh?”
“What heterosexual man wants a beautiful woman to think he swings the other way?”
She returned her attention to her gnocchi, her cheeks pinkening in the candlelight. The daylight had finally turned to dusk, and now a gentle darkness was falling, making it seem that they existed only in the small world of light thrown off by the candle.
“We’ve gotten off topic,” Megan said. “There’s another explanation besides that you’re nuts or have a gay ghost haunting your house.”
“Yeah?”
“You may have two ghosts.”
“Your ideas keep getting better and better, don’t they?”
“You haven’t told me the story behind the house. What do you know about it and the people who built it and lived in it? Why has it been sitting empty for so long?”
“It was empty because the trust it belonged to required it to remain empty.”
“Why on earth?”
“I don’t know. Neither did the law firm that sold the house. The house was owned by sisters: Isabella and Penelope Smithson. They lived there until 1970, and both died there at the ages of eighty-eight and ninety.”
“Good Lord. Great genes must have run in their family. They died the same year?”
“According to the records the law firm had. No one at the firm had been there when the Smithsons were alive and drew up the trust documents. I asked around the neighborhood, though, and found one old lady who remembered the sisters. Said they were the oddest pair of old birds, never out of each other’s company. Bickering constantly but apparently devoted to each other. You never saw one without the other.
“This neighbor, Mrs. Gainsborough, said that it was a true tragedy when they died. The younger one, Penelope, had apparently fallen seriously ill, and instead of calling for an ambulance, Isabella—suffering from dementia, no doubt—tried to carry her sister out to the street for help. Put her on a blanket and pulled her halfway down the drive.
“Of course, a ninety-year-old woman doesn’t have that kind of strength, and the effort killed her. They were found by each other’s side, lying in the driveway.”
“And the reason the house was to remain empty?”
“Like I said, no one knows. The Smithsons were well-off, never had to work. The trust declared that their investments were to be used solely for lawyer fees and to pay the taxes on the property and for a caretaker to make yearly checks that the house was sound. No provision was made for selling it or donating to charity. Conceivably, the house could have stood empty until it crumbled to the ground. If their investments had been better, it might have.
“As it was, though, bad investments coupled with rising property taxes and lawyer fees finally drained the trust. The law firm put the house up for sale, recouped probably more than its fair share of past fees, and the rest of the money went to the state.”
“No heirs?”
“Neither sister was known to have married. Although who knows; if they had married, it could have been at the turn of the last century. There’s a lot of time for love and loss between then and 1970, and lots of time for anyone else to forget it ever happened.”
“Probably never long enough for the woman to forget.”
He grimaced. “You think it’s one of the sisters crawling into my bed?”
“Could be. Why not? But what about their parents? Were they the ones who built the house?”
“Their father, Jacob R. Smithson, had his fingers in both
the lumber and coal industries and made a mint off them. That house must have been his statement to Seattle that he was now a member of the elite. It was built in 1880, when the Queen Anne style was cutting-edge. Isabella must have just been born, and Penelope was no more than a twinkle in her parents’ eyes. I know nothing about their mother. The sisters obviously lived down the hall.”
“I meant to ask you about that. Why didn’t you clear out that room with the awful gold carpeting?”
He smiled crookedly. “Same reason you ran downstairs. That hallway gave me the creeps. I kept telling myself it didn’t matter if I got to those rooms just yet.”
“But you cleared out the master bedroom?”
“No, that had been stripped long ago. The other rooms, yes, I got rid of the rotted curtains and Oriental carpets. Sent a few carpets out to be cleaned, the ones that looked salvageable. I’d like to keep as much of the original character of the place as I can.”
“Just not the otherworldly character.”
He raised his wine glass in salute. “So, Madame Medium, what is your diagnosis of my house?”
She sighed and sat back. “I’ve never—ever—been anywhere that felt as if it had such a…miasma of activity. The place is seething with it, and that’s not normal.” She shook her head, a crease between her brows. “Not normal at all. It’s as if something is seriously wrong there. I mean, neither battlefields nor hospitals have that degree of paranormal gunk floating around, and look at how many people died difficult, emotional deaths in those places.”
“I thought you said that the manner of death didn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t. I’m making a point. Places like your house just don’t exist. We experienced as much in an hour as some famously haunted places have had happen in a decade. It’s not natural, not even for the supernatural.”
“Lucky me. You know, I’ve wondered if Isabella and Penelope knew that something was wrong with their house,” Case said.
“You mean, that’s why they set up the trust that way?”
“Yes. You didn’t get a chance to go through the books in the house’s library.”
“No. Why?” she replied.
“The library’s filled with books on the occult. I’m not talking dozens of books. I’m talking hundreds.”