by Gina Wilkins
Unwilling to intrude on her personal life, he kept silent. If she wanted to tell him about her problems, she would, in her own time.
Bailey changed the subject by bringing up the ghosts. “Aunt Mae told me all about them,” she said. “If I were you, I’d do some research and find out as much about the legend as possible. Your guests will probably want to know all the details.”
He sighed. “I keep telling everyone, I have no intention of capitalizing on old ghost stories. I’m running an inn, not a haunted lodge.”
“Dean, it was the age and the history of the inn that appealed to you in the first place. Don’t you want to know all the details, even the legends connected to it?”
He couldn’t argue with that, though he might have liked to try. “Well, when you put it that way...”
“I’m sure the local library or newspaper office would be able to help you print up a brief history of the inn. You really should consider it. Your guests would probably enjoy it.”
“I’ll consider it.”
“Great. I can’t wait to come and see the place again.” She had seen the inn only once, when Dean was considering whether or not to buy the place and had flown her down to ask her opinion. Like Dean, Bailey had fallen in love with it at first sight, and her encouragement had strongly influenced his decision.
“I hope you’ll be able to come soon,” he told her affectionately. “I miss you already.”
“Oh, by the way,” Bailey said just as he was about to hang up. “I ran into Gloria yesterday.”
He brought the receiver reluctantly back to his ear. “Did you?”
“Mmm. She was still trying to pump me for information about your emotional health. The conceited bi—Well, anyway, she’s absolutely convinced that you’re pining away for her and have suffered an emotional breakdown as a result.”
“She’s wrong.” Dean’s words were curt.
“I know that. She just can’t stand to think that you’re better off without her. Which you are. Much. As I said in so many words to her.”
Dean winced. “I’m sure you did.” Bailey shared their aunt’s sometimes ill-timed bluntness.
“She really hates me,” Bailey said cheerfully. “But I can live with it. Bye, Dean. Talk to you soon.”
Dean hung up the phone, then stood for a moment leaning against the reception desk, tugging absently at his lower lip. His thoughts were jumbled, ranging from concerns about his sister’s happiness to worrying about whether he really could have all the renovations finished in time to open the inn by July.
His eyes were focused blankly on one corner of the empty lobby, and he was dimly aware of the sound of hammering and pounding from somewhere on the second story above him, where the carpenters and electricians were working that afternoon. He’d have to go up soon and check on their progress. Later, he had an appointment with a decorator and a ...
He frowned, his planning coming to an abrupt halt. Something was odd about the corner he was staring at. The wall seemed to be shimmering, going hazy, as though a film had come over his eyes.
He blinked, closed his eyes and rubbed them, then opened them again. The haze was even thicker now. White. When he squinted, he could almost make out a pale face with pleading dark eyes ...
“Dean? Dean, look what I found! You’ll never believe it.”
At the sound of his aunt’s voice, Dean snapped his head around. “In here, Aunt Mae.”
When he looked back at the corner, the apparition—or whatever it had been—was gone.
The walls looked normal. Grimy, cracked, faded, but normal. No face. No pleading eyes.
“I am not having a breakdown,” Dean muttered with a ferocious glare, as though confronting his ex-wife.
“Goodness, what a frown,” Mae exclaimed, bustling through the doorway from the hall. “Stop glowering, Dean, and look at what I found in the attic.”
With one last scowl at the offending corner, Dean turned to his aunt, who looked even more disheveled than before.
“What is it?” he asked, noting that she held a length of half-rotted fabric in her left hand and what might have been a small wooden picture frame in her right. He wrinkled his nose when he caught a whiff of a musty, mildewy smell emanating from the fabric.
“I found a box of old fabrics and pieces of clothing,” she explained, waving the dark-colored scrap enthusiastically, making Dean sneeze when dust flew from it. “I thought we could use them for our decorating. Not these pieces, of course,” she added quickly when he would have spoken. “But maybe the colors and prints will give us ideas.”
He looked doubtful. Judging from the scrap in her hand, he wasn’t sure he could even tell what color it had once been, much less make out the pattern.
“But this is what I really wanted to show you,” Mae said, holding out the frame and looking expectant. “Who do you suppose this is?”
Dean took the frame without much enthusiasm, still partially preoccupied with his former concerns—and trying not to dwell on that odd sensation he’d just experienced. He glanced down at the black-and-white photograph, and noted that it was old, and faded, and that the two subjects, a man and a woman, had been posed in front of the inn.
Guessing that the photo had been taken sometime around 1920, he ignored the people and studied the inn with a proprietary eye, examining the changes and additions that had been made since that time. He wondered if there were any other such photographs of the place that he could use for reference in his renovations.
And then something made him look more closely at the couple in the picture. His knees gave way, and he sagged against the counter, his gaze riveted on the face of the woman.
It was her. The woman he’d seen in the attic, and on the garden path. And again in his own bedroom.
There was no way he could be mistaken about that face.
She was, quite simply, gorgeous. Her glossy, dark hair was shaped into a soft upsweep that framed her delicate, fair-skinned face. Dark, expressive eyes. Perfectly formed nose. A chin that hinted of willfulness. Her mouth was a perfect bow, lips slightly parted.
Even in the faded, monochromatic photograph, he could sense her sparkle, her vitality. Her eyes gleamed with a real, lifelike twinkle.
Just the way they’d looked when he’d seen her three times before.
“Dean?” Mae asked, moving quickly toward him.
Though he heard her, he couldn’t seem to respond to his aunt. All his concentration was still centered on the photograph.
Reluctantly, he dragged his gaze from the woman in the picture and looked at her brother.
Brother? He frowned, wondering where that thought had come from. For all he knew, they could have been husband and wife. But, no. They looked too much alike. Eerily alike. Brother and sister, he would bet on it.
Twins, most likely.
Dean studied the young man’s somber, rather piercing dark eyes, straight nose, lean cheeks and firm, strong chin. There was a hint of a temper in the rather arrogant set of his head.
A few generations earlier, he might have been an Old West outlaw, or a cool, daring lawman. In modern times, he could be a valued member of an organized-crime family—or a maverick cop. He had that dangerous look that indicated either a complete disregard for the law or a grim determination to make sure others adhered to it.
Bootlegger. Murderer. Thinking of the tale Sharyn had told, Dean wondered now if it had all been true.
“Dean?” Mae repeated, placing a hand on his arm. “Are you all right? You’ve gone pale.”
“I—er—sorry, I got distracted,” he managed to say, still looking at the photograph.
“It’s them, isn’t it? I’ve found the only photo of the twins,” Mae said. “I thought it was, but I wanted to see if you agreed.”
“It certainly could be the Cameron twins,” Dean admitted. How could he have seen her? Had the woman he’d seen been an uncannily similar-looking descendant of Mary Anna Cameron? Or—
He swallowed.
/> “Dean, are you sure you’re feeling well? You really don’t look so good,” Mae fretted.
For just a moment, he considered telling her. About the first sighting in the attic. The cold feeling on the pathway, followed by his second encounter with the figure, and his conclusion that he’d been the victim of a joke. The woman’s whispered plea in the middle of the night in his bedroom.
He rejected the impulse almost immediately. This wasn’t something he could talk about. Not yet, anyway. “I’m fine, Aunt Mae. I’d better get upstairs and check on the carpenters.”
He handed the photograph back to her with a reluctance he didn’t quite understand. He was aware that his aunt was watching him with a mixture of bewilderment and concern as he abruptly left the room.
DEAN HARDLY TOUCHED his dinner that evening. Too restless to read or watch television, and knowing he would never get to sleep if he tried turning in early, he made his excuses to his aunt and went into the garden, where he paced, muttered and tried to figure out what the hell had been happening to him.
He still hadn’t completely abandoned the possibility that he’d been the victim of a joke. Even if the photograph really was of the Cameron twins—and he had every reason to assume that it was—that didn’t mean the long-dead Mary Anna Cameron had been popping out of her spectral plane, or whatever, to visit him. He lived in an age of computer-generated magic, a decade when movie actors could play scenes with dead historical figures, when special effects had to be pretty damned amazing to be truly special.
But would anyone in tiny Destiny, Arkansas, be skilled enough to bring to life a seventy-five-year-old photograph? And if so, why pull such a complicated hoax on Dean without at least taking credit for the stunt?
He turned to pace in the other direction, away from the inn this time. It was a cold night, and he burrowed into his leather jacket, his hands deep in the pockets. His cheeks were chilled, his nose a bit numb and his breath hung in ghostly little clouds ahead of him, eerily illuminated by the three-quarter moon overhead. He ignored the minor discomforts, still too restless to go back inside. Unwilling to face his aunt’s worriedly questioning eyes.
He wanted to be alone.
But, suddenly, he wasn’t.
“Hell,” he muttered when the woman stood in front of him on the path, primly smoothing her long white skirts.
She cocked an eyebrow. “A gentleman doesn’t curse in front of a lady,” she commented, and though her voice sounded a bit muffled, as though coming from farther away than she appeared, he could hear her quite clearly this time.
“Oh, this is great,” he grumbled. “Now I’m getting chewed out by my hallucinations.”
She laughed, the sound distant, musical. Like wind chimes heard from a neighbor’s lawn. She looked up and to her right, as though talking to someone standing beside her. “He still thinks he’s hallucinating,” she said. “But at least he hears me this time. I told you I could do it if I tried hard enough!”
Dean frowned gloomily. Terrific. Even his hallucination was hallucinating. As far as he could see, she was talking to a scraggly cedar tree.
The woman suddenly looked startled. “What?” she asked the tree. “But—why?”
Dean waited politely for the tree to reply. He wouldn’t have been entirely surprised had it done so, the way things were going tonight. But apparently the woman heard something he didn’t.
She turned to face him again, her dark eyes wide with curiosity. “You do see me, don’t you?” she demanded.
Dean shrugged. “Oh, what the hell. Sure, I see you. Want to tell me how you’re doing this?”
She ignored his question and motioned to the empty space beside her. “And Ian? Do you see him, as well?”
“Ian, is it?” Dean shook his head. Whoever was behind this was a stickler for details. “Is he, by chance, a pooka?”
She looked puzzled. “A what?”
“A pooka. Like Harvey, Jimmy Stewart’s bunny friend.”
She placed her hands on her hips, studying him in frank bewilderment. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Fictional characters,” he explained. “Imaginary creatures. Like invisible rabbits. Leprechauns. Santa Claus. Ghosts,” he added grimly.
She dismissed the pooka question with an impatient wave of one slender hand. “I wish you’d answer me. Do you see Ian or not?”
“Not,” he answered, his tone flat. “I see only you. Now, I’m giving you three seconds to tell me what’s going on here or to get the hell off my property before I call the police.”
“How very interesting,” she murmured, seeming unintimidated by his threat. “I wonder why you see only one of us?”
Forcing himself to study her objectively, Dean noticed that she appeared more solid this time than she had before. Though she still looked somewhat ethereal, he couldn’t see through her. As far as he could tell, she was no projection, but a real woman. An incredibly beautiful woman.
A woman who could have stepped directly out of that old photograph his aunt had found in the attic.
He moved a step closer. “Who are you?”
“My name is Mary Anna Cameron,” she said, holding her ground.
“Bull.”
Her delicate eyebrows drew downward. “You reallyshouldn’ t talk that way,” she scolded. “It isn’t proper.”
“Neither is pretending to be a ghost,” he retorted, wondering how quickly she’d duck away if he reached for her. Very slowly, he began to ease his hands out of his pockets. “Did you think it would be funny to see me scream and run? If so, I’m sorry you were disappointed.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t expect you to scream. Ian expected you to, but I told him, from what I’ve seen of you, I didn’t believe you’d be such a coward.”
“And have you seen much of me?” he asked mockingly.
He would have sworn her cheeks darkened in the pale moonlight. Even further proof, of course, that she wasn’t who she claimed to be. He doubted that ghosts, if they existed, would blush.
“Ian has been trying to keep me out of your private rooms, but I wanted to talk to you,” she explained, sounding apologetic. “It was only by accident that I saw you unclothed earlier this evening. I turned away, and I really didn’t see anything more than that cute little heart-shaped birthmark on your—er—”
She winced as she turned toward the cedar tree. “But he asked,” she said. “I was just trying to explain... You don’t think he meant ... ? Oh.”
She looked contritely back at Dean. “Ian has always said I talk too much when I’m nervous.”
How the hell had she known about that embarrassing birthmark? He’d spent most of his life trying to hide the thing from all but a very select few.
He’d had all he could take. His temper was slow to ignite, but when it did, it flamed. He reached out and took hold of her bare arm, just beneath the fluttery little sleeve of her floaty white dress.
And then he froze.
The woman who called herself Mary Anna Cameron might have looked real enough, but Dean knew from the moment he touched her that his entire world, every belief he’d ever held, had just been irrevocably changed.
4
True Love is Like Ghosts,
Which everybody talks about
and few have seen.
—François, Duc de la Rochefoucauld
IT WAS LIKE holding a woman made of marble. Her skin was unnaturally cool and smooth. There was no friction when he moved his fingers, no warmth, no ...life.
She had gone very still, watching him with wide, wary eyes. Because he couldn’t resist, Dean lifted his free hand to touch her face.
She didn’t flinch when he stroked her cheek—her icecold cheek—or when he slid his fingers down to the hollow in her throat, where her pulse should have throbbed.
He felt nothing.
Their gazes locked. Dean couldn’t have spoken, even if he’d known what to say.
It was almost a shock to
hear her voice again. She wasn’t speaking to Dean. “No, Ian, it’s all right,” she said, her tone soothing. “Just give us a minute.”
Somehow, Dean managed to speak. “What are you?” he asked hoarsely.
“I told you,” she said in that same, soothing voice. “I’m Mary Anna Cameron.”
“Mary Anna Cameron died seventy-five years ago.”
Her expressive dark eyes turned sad. “Yes.”
“Then you’re...”
She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “I suppose one could call me a ghost.”
“I don’t ...” His words trailed away.
“...believe in ghosts,” she finished for him. “I know. You’ve said so often enough. But as you see—and feel—I’m here. It’s very odd. No one’s been able to touch me before, though a very few have seen us.”
Us. He looked cautiously around, but still saw nothing more than that scraggly cedar tree. “Your brother is here?”
“Yes.” She nodded toward an apparently empty space beside her. “Right there.”
“Why can’t I see him?”
“We don’t know.” She looked genuinely perplexed. “It doesn’t make sense to us, either.”
“This is crazy,” Dean muttered, shaking his head.
She brushed that useless observation aside. “Dean, we think you can help us. Or at least, I think so. Ian isn’t so sure.”
“Help you? What do you mean?”
“We—I think we’re here because of those wicked lies that were told about us. None of the things that woman said about us is true. Ian wasn’t a bootlegger and he is certainly no murderer. We didn’t die in a shoot-out with Stanley Tagert. Tagert lied.”
“Even if what you say is true, what do you want me to do about it?”
She continued to hold his gaze with her own. “Prove it.”
He snorted. “Yeah. Right.”
“I’m serious. You must do this for us. You’re the only one who can. The only one we—I can talk to. The only one to hear our side of the story. You have to help us prove our innocence.”