Ready & Willing (7 page)

Nevertheless, she told him, “Well, the least you could do is say please.”

He looked confused for a moment, then backtracked to the place in their conversation where he’d uttered his command. Then he gritted his teeth at her. In spite of that, he said, “Please move this . . . this . . . this thing.”

“It’s a wardrobe,” she told him as she covered what little distance remained between them.

He looked at it with antipathy. “Craftsmanship has suffered greatly in the last century, I see.”

“You have no idea,” Audrey muttered as she pushed the wardrobe aside. She started to add that at least children weren’t forced to work in sweatshops in this country anymore, as they had been in Silas’s time, then she remembered that that was only because those sweatshop children’s jobs had been outsourced to children in sweatshops in other countries. Craftsmanship may have suffered, she thought morosely, but corporate greed had advanced with enormous strides. Yay, progress.

There was nothing behind the wardrobe, so she turned to look at Silas questioningly.

“There,” he told her.

She looked where he was pointing and saw an air vent cut into the hardwood floor, covered by a square, filigreed grate fashioned from black wrought-iron.

“Remove that,” he told her. Then, when she snapped her head back to look at him with, she hoped, venom, he hastily added, “
Please
remove that, Mrs. Magill.”

The grill was screwed onto the vent, so she went to a box upon which she’d scrawled the words MISCELLANEOUS KITCHEN and picked through it, until she located a set of screwdrivers she normally kept in a drawer for easy access, but which she hadn’t yet unpacked. She chose the one she knew would be the right size, then returned to the grate and effortlessly loosened each screw. She had to tug hard twice to free the thing, and after she did, a rather large spider came scurrying out to greet her. She immediately stepped on it, went back to the box to retrieve a roll of paper towels, then scooped up its squishy remains. When she turned to look at Silas again, to see why he’d wanted the grate removed from the air vent, he was eyeing her with something akin to admiration.

“What?” she asked.

“You dispatched that spider rather well,” he told her. “And without squealing or some other feminine rubbish.

You also used that tool with aplomb. As well as any man would.”

“So?”

“So, Mrs. Magill,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a woman who could do both so comfortably.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve come a long way, baby and all that.”

His expression turned puzzled again, but Audrey didn’t bother to explain. If this was a nervous breakdown, she wanted to get on with it and get it over with as quickly as possible. “What next?” she asked wearily.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to reach in there,” he said.

“What for?”

“Because there’s a pair of gold cuff links in there that Bellamy evidently stole from my room and stashed there, and you need to retrieve them for me.”

This time Audrey was the one to be puzzled. “Cuff links?”

“Yes.”

“You need cuff links in the afterlife?”

“No, Mrs. Magill. But they’re rather unusual cuff links, and I shall describe them for you before you locate them, and then, when you do locate them, you’ll have no choice but to accept the reality of my . . .”

“Haunting?” she said, even though she still wasn’t convinced of that.

“Visitation,” he corrected her.

“Why will that prove anything?” she asked.

He crossed his arms over his chest again. “Because right now, you can’t possibly know what these cuff links will look like,” he told her. “For that matter, you can’t even know for sure there are cuff links down there. Once you discover them and see that they are exactly as I described them, you’ll have to accept that the only way that could be is due to the fact that I, Captain Silas Leyton Summerfield, am standing here, speaking to you, and you are not enjoying a hallucination.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t exactly say I’m enjoying this,” she told him. Whatever
this
was. Still, what he said did make sense. In a weird, beyond-the-veil, maybe-it-wasn’t-the-Chunky-Monkey-after-all kind of way. “Okay, so what are they going to look like, these cuff links?”

“They are solid gold,” he told her, “each with a lapis lazuli inset fashioned to look like a paddlewheel from the side. What appears to be a coil of rope surrounds the design.”

Audrey nodded. “Okay. And how far down will I have to go to find these cuff links?”

“Just past the bend in the flue.”

She dropped to her knees and stuck her hand down the vent, pushing her fingers through the dust and sediment until they bumped something that was small and blunt. Her heart hammered hard as she moved her hand further and encountered a second something that was small and blunt. Gingerly, she closed her fingers over what felt very much like two cuff links. When she withdrew her hand and opened it, she saw what also looked very much like two cuff links. Two dust-coated gold cuff links. She swiped her thumb over the flat part of one of them, and when she saw the asterisk-like design inset in blue stone and surrounded by a braid of rope, her mouth went dry.

It was only then that Audrey realized she had been convinced she was imagining the good captain. His appearance could have been triggered by her reaction to the break-in, or might have even been the result of some leftover grief for Sean at her sudden fear of being alone. She’d always felt safer when her husband was alive, had never worried about things like break-ins the way a single woman would. A threat to her safety now might understandably generate a desire to have Sean back, and with the recent addition of Silas Summerfield’s portrait to her house, her brain could have manufactured him instead of Sean as a suitable protector.

Up until the cuff links, everything Silas had said to her could have been something she could have conceivably invented in her own subconscious. Even the things he’d told her about his great-great-however-many-greats-grandson could have, as Nathaniel himself had pointed out, come from her unconscious absorption of some news story about the guy. But the cuff links . . .

There was no way she could have known they were there. And there was no way she could have known what they would look like. So her hallucination couldn’t have plucked that information from some dark recess in her mind. Having found them here, this way, after Silas had told her what to look for and where, could only mean one thing.

Her house was haunted. By the ghost of Captain Silas Leyton Summerfield. And, judging by the look of him, he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

 

NEVER IN HIS NINETY-THREE YEARS ON EARTH—NOR
his seventy-six years elsewhere—had Silas seen someone go white the way Mrs. Magill did just then.

“Mrs. Magill?” he said. “Are you all right?”

She uttered a strangled sound in response, something that reminded Silas of the creak and whine of the steam as it primed the engine of
Desdemona
, his paddle wheeler. The vessel had been as contrary as . . . as . . . Well, as Mrs. Magill. But he’d never lost his respect or admiration for the old girl.

“Mrs. Magill?” he said again. “Are you all right?”

This time she sputtered something that sounded vaguely like English, but Silas couldn’t be sure. The language had, after all, changed rather a lot since his day.

“Perhaps you should sit down,” he told her. Automatically, he started to reach out to her, then remembered he couldn’t touch anything, so would be of no help. His temper flared at feeling so impotent—a condition he had
never
suffered in life—and his next words came out a little harsher than he had intended them. “Oh, for God’s sake, woman. I’m just a ghost. I can do you less harm than the damned spider.”

She worked her mouth a few more times, expelled a few more incoherent sounds, then, finally, managed, “That spider is something I can explain through rational means. You, on the other hand . . .”

He grinned at that, relieved she was regaining some of her spirit. “Are you calling me irrational, Mrs. Magill?”

She shook her head. “No. I’m calling myself irrational. This can’t be happening. You can’t be a ghost haunting my house.”

“Why not? As you can see for yourself, I am here.” He nodded toward the cuff links that lay open in her grimy palm. “I just proved it.”

Instead of pursuing the topic of his existence or her own rationality, she asked, “How did you know they were there? I mean, if you knew they were there, why didn’t you get them yourself while you were still alive?”

“Because I didn’t know they were there when I was alive. I lost them not long after the set was given to me for my fiftieth birthday. I only found them myself this morning.”

She shook her head slowly, then chuckled.

“What do you find funny, Mrs. Magill?”

She looked at him and smiled, albeit a bit shakily. “I just realized there’s something that bothers me more than discovering I’m being haunted.”

“What is that?”

She pressed a palm to her forehead and gazed at the iron grate lying haphazardly beside the square hole in the floor. “That if these air ducts are original to the house, I need to get them replaced, and that’s going to set me back a lot more than I planned to spend just yet.”

He smiled back at her, he hoped reassuringly. “Don’t be concerned,” he told her. “The house is quite sound.”

She expelled a long, weary-sounding breath. “Too bad I can’t say the same for myself.”

“Have no fear, madam,” he said. “You are one of the soundest people I have ever met.” He was about to say more, but her legs suddenly buckled beneath her, and she landed on her rump with a resounding thump.

Again, he instinctively reached for her, and this time didn’t check himself quickly enough before touching her. For the merest of moments, his fingertips grazed over her lower arm, and although he felt no physical sensation of touching her, something akin to an electrical shock leapt into his hand, sending a shudder of heat up his arm. Mrs. Magill must have felt something similar, because she jolted at the contact, scrambling away from him, pressing her own hand to her shoulder.

“What was that?” she asked breathlessly.

Silas, more than a little shaken by the sensation himself, replied, “I don’t know. I gather we just discovered what happens when your world meets mine.”

She looked as if she wanted to say—or perhaps ask—something else, then seemed to think better of it. She only nodded silently, pulled her dungaree-clad legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her knees. She still clutched the errant cuff links in one hand, and her bare arms were trembling.

“I truly won’t hurt you, you know,” he said softly.

“It’s not that,” she said quietly. “For some reason, I’m not afraid of you. It’s just . . .”

“What?” he asked when she didn’t finish the statement.

She blew out another breath, this one sounding a bit shaky. “If people who die are able to come back, then why . . .”

He understood then. She was a
Mrs
. Magill, after all. And there clearly was no
Mr
. Magill living with her. “Your husband,” he said simply.

She nodded.

“You want to know why I’m here and he isn’t.”

She nodded again, but dropped her gaze from his to study the floor instead. “It’s nothing personal,” she told him.

Silas took a few steps toward her. “I don’t know why I’m here and he isn’t,” he said honestly. “I only returned here myself a few days ago. And only because of the fix my great-great-et-cetera grandson has managed to get himself into. When I realized what was about to happen, I had to come. I can’t have him sullying the Summerfield name the way he is bound to sully it if he involves himself in a criminal enterprise. The only way to stop him was to come here. And the only way to come here was to join myself to something that belonged to me in life, something that represents the man I used to be.”

“Your portrait,” she said, sounding a little more steady.

“Yes, my portrait. When I saw you come into the shop, and when I heard you say you lived in my home, I knew it was fated that we meet. So I changed the price on my portrait to make it affordable to you. You are the perfect vessel to assist me,” he concluded.

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “we Summerfield men are notoriously susceptible to beautiful women. Particularly those who have jet hair and eyes the color of a springtime sky.”

Her mouth fell open at that. “You thought you could pimp me out to your great-great-whatever grandson?” she asked incredulously.

He looked at her blankly. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Magill, but once again, the language barrier impedes my understanding of the conversation.” Although he was reasonably certain he understood the implications of what she was saying, and it wasn’t a particularly flattering image. Nor was it, he was afraid, an altogether inaccurate one. So he hurried on before she could saying anything else, “If your husband has never returned to you, Mrs. Magill, it is doubtless because you have done nothing to sully his name or his memory.”

When she looked up at him then, he saw that her eyes were filled with tears, and he cursed himself, both for being the cause of them and for feeling so irritated at their appearance. “I am sorry, Mrs. Magill,” he said, doing his best to mask his annoyance. “But I’m still not certain how this works myself. There are some things I know with confidence—though I don’t know how I know them—and other things that are a complete mystery.”

She hesitated a moment, then asked, “What do you know with confidence?”

“I know that where my portrait goes, I go. I am bound to it.”

She seemed to brighten some at that. “Then I can give it to someone else, and you’ll haunt them?”

This time Silas was the one to hesitate, waiting to see if the answer would come to him. It did. “You cannot,” he told her. “At least not yet. You were sent into the shop for the express purpose of buying it.”