by Maddy Hunter
Tilly looked at Nana. Nana looked at Tilly, then at me. “It’s about the castle, dear. I don’t mean to alarm you, but…it’s haunted.”
My mouth fell open. “You know? Who told you? Bernice? How did she find out? Was she eavesdropping again? Oh, great. If Bernice knows, everyone will know, and they’ll all want to go home. I can’t go home. What am I supposed to do about Etienne? He took time off work to be with me. I think he might be planning to pop the question!”
Nana clapped her hands together. “How nice for you, dear. You want I should e-mail your mother so’s she can reserve the Knights a Columbus hall for the reception? You can never book too early these days.”
“No e-mails! Not yet. Now let’s back up. Who told you about the castle?”
“Tilly told me last night,” said Nana, “but she’s kept it to herself ’cause she didn’t wanna spook anyone. What with the maid dyin’ like that, though, we thought you oughta know what you might be dealin’ with.”
“How did you find out?” I asked Tilly.
“It’s a long story.” She staked out one of the room’s velvet boudoir chairs and sat down. With a waggle of her walking stick, she directed Nana and me to do the same.
“One of my pet courses during my years at Iowa State was a graduate seminar on Irish myth and legend, and one of the most poignant tales my students uncovered was that of a wealthy English lord who accepted an invitation from James I to settle on land the king was disbursing in Ireland. By James’s edict, Irish landowners were expelled from their farms, driven into bogs, and forced to act as slave labor to the new English landowners. This particular English lord had a daughter who some say was the most beautiful female ever to set foot on Irish soil. She was light-eyed, golden-haired, and fair-skinned, and when her father commissioned a castle to be built, the girl fell in love with a handsome Irish laborer who was as dark as the girl was fair. Naturally, their union was forbidden. They didn’t share the same social class or the same faith, but despite their differences, they ran off and were married in a secret ceremony by an Irish monk. No one knew what they had done until it became obvious that the girl was breeding. Her father forced a confession out of her, and they say he was so incensed, he locked her in the dungeon and forbid anyone in the family to speak to her. As far as he was concerned, his daughter was dead to him. When her lover discovered her punishment, he tried to scale the castle wall one night to save her, but his body was found floating in the moat the next morning. When the girl’s father told her of her lover’s fate, she went into premature labor and, after two days of agonizing pain, died in childbirth.
“Legend holds that from that time on, the two lovers have roamed the castle in search of each other, their wailing cries echoing through the halls. And when experts have chased down the cries, they’ve found a man’s wet footprints, as if he were dripping from the moat, and a woman’s bloody footprints, as if she were fresh from childbed. The name of the Irishman who dared marry an English lady has been lost to history, but the name of the castle is…Ballybantry.”
I stared at her, spellbound. “Has anyone ever seen the ghosts?”
“A handful of people swear they’ve seen the girl rattling doors in the hall in search of her lover. Others claim she moves chairs close to the window so she can sit and wait for him to appear. And she’s blamed with filching articles of a personal nature from guests’ rooms, items that might provide small comfort to her as she wanders through eternity.”
KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK!
“EHH!” I leaped out of my chair. I liked scary stories, but I wasn’t so keen about finding myself at ground zero. “Don’t anyone move,” I said bravely, ignoring the goose bumps that were tap-dancing up and down my spine. “I’ll get the door.” I was pretty sure a ghost wouldn’t bother to knock.
“That’s an awful good story,” said Nana. “Maybe they could use this place as the location for the next Survivor series. If you’re a contestant in a haunted castle, maybe they’d even let you order takeout ’stead a forcin’ you to eat rodents and bugs.”
I checked the peephole and opened the door. Etienne stood before a baggage trolley crammed with luggage. “If you see your suitcase, point it out. And by the way, I missed you today.” He cupped his hand around my neck and kissed my mouth. Unh.
“Why are you playing porter?” I asked dizzily. “You’re one of the paying guests. You get to have your luggage delivered to your door.”
“I haven’t mastered the art of how to stand around doing nothing. If there’s activity going on, I need to be in the middle of it. Besides, I assume the guests would like their bags tonight. I feared that being the bastion of inefficiency he is, Michael might not finish unloading the luggage bays until next week.”
Bless his little Swiss heart. “That’s so sweet,” I gushed. Was this guy proving to be a perfect ten or what? He probably even liked animals and small children. He was the catch of the century, and even though I was a little squeamish about this sudden possibility of another marriage, intuition told me that if I didn’t reel him in, some other woman would be only too happy to do the honors.
But what if I was jumping the gun? What if the question he wanted to ask me was more basic, like what side of the bed did I like to sleep on, or was I the type of woman who’d freak out if he left the toilet seat up? Hmm. Maybe I needed to see the whole picture before I got too far ahead of myself. “About the question you’ve been meaning to ask me,” I hedged. “Would now be a good time for you?”
“Now?” He looked around him. “I’d envisioned a slightly more intimate setting than a hotel corridor, darling. Say, something with candlelight, and champagne, and an obscene amount of bare flesh.” He trailed a slow knuckle down my cheek. “What if we synchronize our watches and meet in my room a little later? I’ve seen the room. I have a king-size bed.”
This job was starting to cramp my style. I hesitated. “I have a teensy problem. Rule number eight of my Escort’s Manual. I have to be available in my own room in case any of my group needs me.”
He nodded supreme understanding. “Then shall I plan to come down here? Your Escort’s Manual doesn’t prohibit guests from visiting you in your own room, does it?”
I sighed. “As it happens, I have a teensy problem with that too.”
Nana poked her head out the door. “I thought I heard Inspector Miceli’s voice. That was real nice a you to help Mr. Malooley with the luggage. Poor man needs all the help he can get. Makes you wonder what line of work he was in before he took up bus drivin’.” She eyed the luggage trolley. “My grip’s right on top there if you wanna haul it down. The big red one.”
“What’s your room number, Mrs. Sippel? I’ll deliver it to your door.”
“You just did. Drag it down and I’ll wheel her in. Be careful though. My laptop’s in it. Tilly! You wanna step out here and find your grip?”
Etienne shot me a quizzical look. I lifted my eyebrows and shoulders in a tandem shrug. “That’s what I was trying to tell you. Nana and Tilly are spending the night with me until another room comes available.”
“It’s on account a the dead body,” said Nana.
Etienne hauled Nana’s suitcase down from the top of the heap and fired another quizzical look at me. “Dead body?”
Tilly trundled into the hall and, after a moment, stabbed the tip of her cane at a tattered pullman. “This one’s mine. Look at it, all frayed and patched. But I think of it as an old warrior who’s fought his way through a lifetime of campaigns.”
I imagined the exotic places Tilly and her pullman had visited over the years. Bora Bora. Kathmandu. The Casbah. As Etienne unloaded it off the trolley, I regarded its worn seams and scarred fabric with respectful awe. “Wow. They don’t make luggage like they used to. That suitcase has to be—what?—twenty, thirty years old?”
“It’s practically brand-new,” said Tilly. “But you have to understand, it’s been through O’Hare a couple of times.”
Nana wheeled her suitcase into the
room and extended her thanks, as did Tilly, who closed the door behind them. Etienne drilled me with one of his patented police-inspector looks. “Dead body?”
“A chambermaid named Rita. She died in Nana’s room sometime today. The desk clerk claims she had a bad heart. We didn’t see any signs of foul play, so he could be right. Nana figured she’d been dead between six and eight hours.”
“How would your grandmother know that?”
“Discovery Channel.”
Frustration pulled at the fine angles of his face. “Tell me again how long you have to share your room?”
“Just tonight,” to which I reluctantly added, “unless there’s a problem finding them another room. They’re short-staffed, so…” I let him fill in the blank.
“The ladies could relocate to my room. I could move in here.” He looked hopeful for a moment before reevaluating his solution. “I don’t suppose that will look too good for you should word leak out. It could rather tarnish your professional image.” He pinched the bridge of his nose as if trying to ward off a migraine.
“I’m sure there won’t be any problem finding them another room,” I consoled. “This is just a…an inconvenience.”
He let out an exasperated sigh and cast a curious glance toward the palpable quiet of the lobby. “Did someone call the authorities about your dead maid?”
“A long time ago.”
“Odd they haven’t arrived yet. Perhaps I should offer my assistance to the desk clerk. Which room did you say the body is in?”
Uh-oh. This wasn’t good. If he involved himself with the investigation of Rita’s death, I’d never see him. I grabbed his forearm with both hands. “Remember when Ashley said the castle is haunted? I think she may be telling the truth.”
He paused, looking me straight in the eye. “Why do you say that?”
“There’s this legend about two star-crossed lovers searching for each other throughout eternity. People have heard unearthly wails and seen bloody footprints, and even though Tilly thinks the maid might have died because she wasn’t on a Special K diet, I think she died of fright.”
He digested this with typical Swiss equanimity. “Are you implying that you think the maid saw a ghost?”
“Tilly used to teach a course, so she’s an expert on the subject. She says this place has been haunted since the time of James I, which was”—I searched my memory for the dates when James I ruled England—“a really long time ago.”
“Over three hundred and fifty years. Close to four.”
I paused to register that. These were some old ghosts. “The expression on the maid’s face is chilling, Etienne. She looks terrified. If you ask me, she saw something so frightening, it killed her.”
“You did say she had a bad heart. Wouldn’t it be more logical to assume she died from a preexisting condition than from an encounter with some otherworldly being?”
“That doesn’t explain the wailing cries or the bloody footprints. You don’t know Tilly. She wouldn’t tell a ghost story that wasn’t authentic.”
“Have you heard cries or seen footprints?”
“Not yet, but we’ve only just arrived. These ghosts have been around for almost four hundred years! They’re out there.”
He smiled crookedly and feathered his fingers along my jawline. “Emily, darling, do you remember when you thought a group of seniors on your tour last year was trying to kill you?”
Just my luck. He liked animals, small children, and had a photographic memory. “I vaguely remember that.”
“Do you also recall that your fear was completely unfounded?”
Not too hard to guess where this was going. “I do not jump to conclusions. I am not an alarmist. If you recall, someone was trying to kill me, just not the person I suspected.” If our discussion grew any more heated, we’d have to jump from cybersex to makeup sex.
“I’m simply trying to caution you against getting carried away with all this talk of hauntings and ghosts. The mind can play tricks on you, darling. If you expect wailing cries, you’ll hear them. If you expect bloody footprints, you’ll see them.”
“In other words, you think I’m cuckoo.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you have no gift at all for paraphrasing? I love you, Emily. I’m asking you to be wary of anything you see or hear but not attribute it immediately to castle lore. The terror you saw on the maid’s face could simply have mirrored her realization that she was suffering a fatal heart attack. I’ve seen that look on more corpses than I’d like to admit. When the forensic examination is completed, we’ll know more about how she died, but until that time, please consider the story of Ballybantry’s haunted past as myth, not reality. Can you do that for me?”
I waited a beat. “You love me?” I stared up at him. His exact words played back in my head like an old phonograph record with a stuck needle. He’d panned my ability to paraphrase and then he’d said he loved me. I was pretty sure he’d said something after that, too, but my ears had stopped working after the “I love you” part.
“Of course I love you, darling. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love you.” The sound of male voices caused him to glance toward the lobby again. “Ah. The police. I should talk to them.” He frowned at the luggage trolley. “I’ll have to draft someone into delivering the rest of the luggage for me.”
I regarded Etienne. I regarded the luggage cart. Hoisting fifty-pound suitcases off a luggage trolley wasn’t my cup of tea, but I was in love. I was walking on air. I wanted to be helpful. “I think Ashley should do it. It’s probably in her job description anyway, and you know what a stickler she is for doing everything by the book.”
A devious glint lit his blue eyes. A smile touched his lips. “I’ll have the desk clerk ring her up.” He kissed the tip of my nose. “Fetch me in the morning before you board the bus. My room is the last one down the hall on the left.”
“You’re not going to eat breakfast?”
“A full Irish breakfast? Emily, darling, those things will kill you.”
I gazed after him as he pushed the trolley back toward the lobby, suddenly aware of a major oversight on my part. “Wait a minute! You have my suitcase.”
By the time I wheeled my pullman into the room, Nana and Tilly were in their nightgowns and ready for bed.
“If it’s okay with you, Emily, Tilly would like to sleep in the bed nearest the potty and I’ll sleep with you.”
I nodded distractedly, wondering how a man could tell a woman he loved her, then just walk away. Wasn’t that the kind of revelation that should be celebrated like the Fourth of July with sparklers, and wheels, and aerial spinners? Maybe Etienne knew something I didn’t know. Maybe fireworks were banned in Ireland.
My neck started to itch again as I hefted my suitcase onto a luggage rack and unlocked it. Nana stood in front of the dresser mirror attired in her favorite brown flannel nightgown, toilet-papering her head. “This brand is only one-ply,” she lamented. “Two-ply cushions my curls a lot better. Hope I don’t wake up with bedhead.” When she was done, she yelled, “Catch, Emily,” and tossed a travel-size aerosol container across the room at me.
“What’s this?” I asked, bobbling the catch.
“Weaponry. After what happened on the last trip, I wanted to be prepared, so I brought a whole arsenal with me.”
My heart thudded in my chest. “An arsenal? You mean, like Mace? Nana! This stuff is bad news! It can weaken your lungs. Damage your skin. Ruin your sinuses.”
“All’s your grampa used to claim was that it gave him a headache.”
“You used this stuff on Grampa?” I looked at Nana. I looked at the canister. I read the label. “Strawberry Shortcake Room Freshener.”
“I was gonna buy one called Florida Sunshower, but it smelled too much like mildew. There’s a canister for each of us. Remember what we learned in Switzerland. A burst of spray into the ole eyeballs will bring down a two-hundred-pound man real good, especially if he has allergies. I’m not sure if it’ll
work on a ghost, ’cause I don’t know if a ghost has eyeballs.”
Clutching my room freshener in my hand, I crossed the room and gave Nana a little hug. “This was very thoughtful of you.”
“Think nothin’ of it, dear. Us girls need to stick together so’s we can watch each other’s back.”
Maybe this was my wake-up call. Sure I was disappointed about not being able to spend the night with Etienne, but I realized that I had a pressing duty to perform that far outweighed my desire for romantic satisfaction. I needed to watch out for Nana and Tilly. I needed to protect them from whatever Etienne claimed wasn’t out there, because if any harm came to them, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. My mother wouldn’t be able to live with me either. If anything happened to Nana, she’d annihilate me.
After Nana climbed into bed, I located my bank-supplied medical bag that was full of every over-the-counter painkiller and ointment known to man, dug my nightgown and toiletries out of my suitcase, and turned down the lights. At the bathroom door I paused to consult my watch. Okay. Any time now.