A Haunted Romance (16 page)

“They got Melanie in
Driver Beware
the first time.”

Chelsea was flattered he’d remembered the scene from her book, but she shook her head. “Yeah, but brakes aren’t under any pressure when the car is still and her husband was doing the filing. The chandelier exerts downward force all the time, and yet the thing breaks the moment you’re on the scene? I don’t buy it.”

“Trust me, I didn’t stage this whole thing.”

“Oh, I believe you. That’s a nasty bump on your head, and if you missed by even a little, you would have killed yourself.”

“So someone was trying to kill you.” Trent glowered. If someone was trying to kill her, she was glad he wasn’t that someone.

She shook her head. “No. I wouldn’t be going directly under the chandelier, probably, because I’d either come in here to eat, after I put the table right under the chandelier, or I’d be going through it to the kitchen, which cuts a corner and doesn’t have me right under it. It was meant to scare, not kill, and only because you went straight for your sketchbook did it brain you.”

Chelsea looked around, trying to find something out of the ordinary—for a room with a broken chandelier all over it, anyway. “Did you feel like you tripped on anything?” She remembered the fishing wire séance trick.

“No, I’d remember that.” Trent frowned. “But I did something else, something anyone would do coming into a room like this, probably.”

“Hmm?”

“I turned on the light.”

She didn’t find any fishing wire on the switch or on the ground. She had just about given up when she found a little piece of charred insulation.

“I don’t know quite how they did it,” Chelsea said, “but when you turned on the light, something burned through the wire. That explains the dark mark I saw. Something got very hot, very fast, and caused the whole thing to fall.”

“And it took just long enough that I had time to be right under it.”

Chelsea nodded.

“Let’s look upstairs.”

“You’re in no shape for that,” Chelsea objected.

“Maybe,” he agreed. Chelsea didn’t think that was very encouraging, but he moved off from the wall with a grunt and went for the stairs. She stayed right behind him, but he didn’t look too very wobbly.

“I’ve had a concussion before,” Trent said. “I was on the football team. Helmet to helmet crash.”

“So you know what it feels like, and this isn’t it?”

“Nah. I definitely have a concussion. I know what it feels like, and I know what I’m still capable of.”

“Men.” Chelsea gave a sigh of disgust.

“As if a knock on the head would stop Cat Connors,” Trent retorted.

“What are we looking for?”

Trent chuckled and opened the door. “Well, I had a thought, and maybe it’s not a great thought. I don’t want to make an accusation against anyone unless I’m sure.”

Chelsea nodded. “That’s fair.” She kept her eye out for moving books and flying candlesticks, but everything in the room that shouldn’t be moving wasn’t.

Trent rapped on the wall. “Nice thing about plaster walls, they’re good and solid. You could go rapping on a modern gypsum board wall, and you’d think you’d found a secret door every foot. Not so with plaster.”

“You’re looking for a secret door?”

“No.”

Good, because it’s an exterior wall on the second floor, and if he’s looking for a secret door there, his head’s worse off than I thought.

Trent rapped once more, and Chelsea could hear it—a slight change in quality, a hollow echo.

It was right where Dalton had patched the wall. Trent knew it too. Chelsea hadn’t painted it over yet, so the patch was still very obvious.

“He does shoddy work?” Chelsea asked, with a sinking feeling.

“Very shoddy, since if it isn’t backed, plaster isn’t that tough.” Trent gave it a few hard elbows, and it started to crumble. “Sorry about your wall.”

“All in a good cause, I’m sure.”

Trent backed away. “You do the rest, please.”

He’d not really knocked much of a hole in it. Chelsea looked around for something she could use rather than her elbow and spotted the chairs. She moved the first one under Trent. “Sit,” she said.

He sat.

She picked up a sturdy-looking dining room chair and whacked the plaster with the leg of it until she’d cleared out the area.

A square piece of black plastic sat in the hole, and Chelsea lifted it out. It looked kind of like an MP3 player, but there were little speakers and some sort of other electronic device plugged into it.

“What’s this thing?” she asked Trent.

“No idea. I think maybe we should ask a ’lectrical engineer.”

“Know any?”

“Sure. Dalton Cornick.”

She wrinkled her nose at him and pressed the Play button. A very familiar moan came out of the speakers. She sighed.

“So how’d they do the bumping?” Chelsea asked. “If you, me, and Caroline are all in the clear, neither Dalton or Andrea could get their hands free. Were they bumping the bottom of the table with their knees?”

Trent grabbed her left wrist. She blinked, remembering when he’d taken both her wrists in his hand. She felt her pussy dampen just at the memory.

“Grab my wrist, Chelsea.” He ordered. His other arm was behind his back, so he meant the same one he’d grabbed her with.

She didn’t understand this new game, but she grabbed his wrist with her other hand.

“They didn’t bump the bottom of the table,” Trent said, “because I would have felt it lift. I had one hand resting on the table, the one holding Caroline’s wrist. But as you see, if you imagine that your right hand is Caroline’s and your left wrist is yours, it’s not too hard to grab one arm while having one wrist held and still have an arm free.” He banged the top of the table with his free hand.

“But we clasped our hands in the—oh! The sneeze.”

“The sneeze?”

Chelsea grinned. “Good to know you didn’t have everything figured out. We had all grabbed wrists in the candlelight and never let them go. But Andrea let go for just a moment, right after you blew the candle out. It seemed so natural—you blowing the candle toward her, her having to sneeze. But it allowed her to let go of my wrist with one hand and grab it again with the other.”

“Right. And the comment she made about romantic tension worked because we all knew it was true, but it was her excuse for us not to hold hands, so we’d think the odd wrist-holdin’ thing was natural. I think you have it figured.” Trent grinned. “Brainy women are so sexy.”

For a moment, she thought he was teasing her, but as he kept staring at her, she realized he meant it. She never really thought of herself as brainy—just as being good with words, maybe. But for the look in his eyes, she’d be anything he liked. “You keep staring at me like that, Trent Johnston, and pretty soon I’m going to have to insist that you make love to me.”

He raised one eyebrow. When had that gone from irritating to endearing? “Insisting, dear?” He took her other wrist in his hand and pulled her wrists together. She could have resisted, but she didn’t want to, not at all.

“Damn you’re lovely, but we shouldn’t let ourselves get distracted.” Trent let her wrists go with a sigh and looked around the room. “We don’t really know what Minerva did and what Dalton did, although we have some guesses. What we do know is that last night raised the stakes for Dalton. The séance didn’t go as well as he’d hoped, because of the interference from the real ghost, so he rigged up the chandelier. He’s desperate to scare you.”

“But why? I mean, I presume he’s trying to get me to sell, so that he can—it’s a lot of money. But why the urgency?”

“You didn’t read the letter very carefully, did you?”

Chelsea shook her head. She had noticed the dollar figure, sure, but since she hadn’t been seriously considering selling, she hadn’t gone beyond that.

“The offer expires November twentieth,” Trent told her. “Which is three days from now. If Dalton rigged the chandelier, there’s really no telling what else he’s fixed up. Until now, he wasn’t risking hurting you. Now he’s taking chances, although he’d like you to be conscious enough to sign. Which means we need to watch our step.”

It made sense to Chelsea. “So what do we look for?”

“No idea,” said Trent.

“I guess Dalton must have broken in here after we left, huh?”

“Probably. He could have even run back and gotten supplies. Do you remember locking the door? Because it sure wasn’t locked when I got here.”

Chelsea thought about it. “I don’t think I locked the door. I was pretty spooked, and I was thinking about getting away, not going back to secure the place. The ghost had it pretty well protected as far as I could tell. So let’s go looking for trouble and see what else he’s rigged up.”

Trent smiled weakly. “Brains, beauty, and guts too.” He sat down in a chair.

Chelsea looked at his eyes. With the light on in the office, his eyes were still dilated far more than they ought to be. His color wasn’t good, and the lump on the head looked even bigger than it had before. “I need to get you to a doctor, booby traps or not. Where’s your truck, anyway?”

“I parked it behind the house, out of sight, just in case Dalton came by. I’ll be fine. Just let me rest a bit.”

“Oh no, you don’t. You’re staying awake. I seem to remember that people with concussions shouldn’t nod off. We’re marching downstairs right now, and we’re taking my car.”

Trent didn’t look happy, but Chelsea wasn’t going to give him a choice.

This time she was careful to lock and bolt the door behind her.

Chapter Eight

They got back four hours later. Trent’s concussion had been pronounced mild, and there was no keeping him away from her side.

There was an envelope stuck in the door, wedged in between the door and frame just above the bolt. It was one of those small envelopes that greeting cards come in, but it wasn’t sealed. She opened the envelope, aware of Trent’s curious eyes on her.

She read it once, “Can’t stop thinking of you,” the gilded script in the front said. And in the inside, printed, was a personal note. “Chelsea, call me. There’s something I need to tell you. Dalton.”

She handed it to Trent without comment.

“What do you think he wants?”

Chelsea shrugged. “That card. It’s almost as if he’s trying to be romantic.”

Trent nodded. “I’ve heard from reliable sources that he’s not the best at expressing his feelings.”

“Nothing says love like rigging someone’s chandelier to fall on them. He’s had four more hours to rig things up inside while I took you to the doctor.”

Trent nodded. “I told you that was unnecessary.”

“I think the word the doctor used was ‘wise.’”

He took the keys dangling from her hands and tried the lock. The bolt was still thrown, and the lock was still locked. Trent unlocked both and reached in to flick the light switch. Nothing crashed. “I don’t think he got inside, Chelsea. I’m going in.”

She walked forward after him. “Minerva?” she called. “Minerva?”

There wasn’t any answering thump, just the sound of Trent’s footsteps as he came alongside her. She walked carefully, looking around her.

Together they explored the rooms upstairs but saw nothing amiss. Books were in place, chairs askew—but then, they had left them that way. Nothing seemed to have been moved.

“Shall we bring the table back downstairs?” asked Trent.

“I don’t know. Minerva? You there?” Chelsea was reluctant to use the table, although surely there were plenty of ways for Minerva to thump if she wanted to.

No answer.

“We’re going to move the table downstairs, Minerva,” Chelsea said, feeling more than a little bit foolish for talking to thin air.

They swept the remnants of the chandelier to the side of the room and moved the table and chairs back in place. Chelsea wanted to see Trent’s sketchbook, but without the light of the chandelier, the place was pretty dark during the day with the curtains drawn, and Chelsea felt safer with them closed. “I’ll turn on the kitchen light and see if that makes it a little brighter in here. I want to see your sketches.”

Trent chuckled. “My sketches might look better in dim light.”

“I doubt that very much. I’ll make us some food while I’m at it. I’m starving.”

“Okay.”

Chelsea flipped the light and paused, remembering the chandelier. But nothing happened. She opened the fridge and brought out some sliced ham and mayonnaise, setting them on the kitchen counter next to the laptop she had left there the night before.

“Watch out!” said Trent from the door, as she was opening the mayonnaise jar. For a moment she stood, frozen by some unhelpful instinct. A meat cleaver was falling from the ceiling, right in front of her, spinning in the air as it fell end over end.

Then, suddenly, it veered. Chelsea felt a rush of cool as if the wind was blowing it, and it clattered, loud but harmless, on the range.

Her hands had been right below it, when it fell.

“Holy shit” was all Chelsea could think of to say. She shivered, thankful for Trent’s arms when he wrapped them around her. But Trent hadn’t dropped the cleaver. “Minerva?”

The cleaver clattered once on the range. Trent let Chelsea go.

“Why?” Chelsea asked.

There was only silence, and Chelsea belatedly realized it wasn’t a yes or no question.

Trent was pointing up at the ceiling where the cleaver had fallen from. There was a patch of ceiling that didn’t quite match. “My guess is an electromagnet was holding it up. Maybe on some delay from the light switch, the magnet turned off, and the cleaver fell.” He stretched up and touched the ceiling there and then off to the side. “Not tacky enough to get any paint on me, but still just a little stickier than the old paint. Probably done last night.”

So Minerva hadn’t dropped the cleaver on her—but she
had
brushed it aside just in time. Chelsea’s heart was still pounding from the near miss. “Thank you, Minerva.”

The cleaver clattered once.

“Does that mean you don’t want me gone?”

The cleaver clattered again, but it was hard to tell whether it was once or twice. The blade hit, and then the handle.