The Ghost Wore Gray (4 page)

Dad gestured toward the door with his head, and we followed him out of the kitchen.

Martha and Isabella were just finishing up in the dining room. “Lucky you,” said Isabella, when she saw the goodies Chris and I were carrying. “Dieter doesn't pass those out to just anyone.”

“Obviously,” said my father in a mournful voice. I laughed and handed him my pastry. He took a bite, then laid his hand over his heart. “Ruined!” he cried. “I'll never eat another sweet again without remembering this glorious moment.” He looked at it greedily. “Are you sure you want it back?”

“Positive,” I said, taking it out of his hand.

“I'll tell Dieter you liked it,” said Isabella. “He'll be pleased.”

Martha snorted, which seemed to be the extent of her vocabulary.

“Well,” said Chris, slipping a blue dress over her head, “I think we're in for an interesting three weeks.”

I nodded in agreement. I would have answered out loud, but I was holding my brush in my mouth while I tried to work an elastic band over my hair.

There was a knock at our door. “Ready?” called my father.

I spit the brush onto my bed. “Just a minute,” I yelled. I turned my back to Chris. “Button me,” I said.

Sixty seconds later we presented ourselves to my father, who looked us over approvingly. “Very nice,” he said. “It's not every man who gets to go to dinner with two such lovely ladies.”

We giggled and took his arms to walk down the hall. I braced myself as we passed the old photographs, but there was no repetition of the cold chill I had felt earlier that day.

Baltimore was waiting for us at the entrance to the dining room. “I decided to make dinner a bit of an occasion tonight,” he said. “We sometimes do this midweek, when there aren't too many guests.”

Looking past him, I saw that some of the tables had been pushed together to create a large table in the center of the room. I did a quick plate count. It was set for ten. Three of the chairs were already filled—two by a pleasant-looking older couple, the third by a very good-looking younger woman.

The pretty woman turned out to be an editor from New York City. Her name was Mona Curtis. She had dark hair, enormous brown eyes, and long fingers. She also had a thing for my father. He didn't notice it, of course. He's pretty dense about that kind of thing. But I spotted it the minute they were introduced. Maybe it's just something one woman can tell about another. It's not the first time it's happened. I mean, my father is not a bad-looking guy. The thing is, he doesn't know it. In fact, he generally doesn't notice when a woman is interested in him, unless she just about hits him over the head.

This is a problem, mostly because it makes him an easy target for the kind of woman who doesn't mind hitting a guy over the head. That made Mona's presence at dinner depressing; I get nervous when I see a woman about to sink her claws into my father.

The older man and woman were a retired couple visiting from Canada. “Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Coleman,” said Baltimore, making the formal introduction.

“Please, please,” said Mr. Coleman, pushing back his chair and standing up to greet us. “Call us Arnie and Meg. We'll be much more comfortable that way.”

Arnie was as tall as Baltimore was short—“six foot five,” he told me later when I got up the courage to ask him. He had a head of thick, white hair, and that kind of leathery look that usually means a person has spent most of his or her life outdoors. Meg was small and cuddly. She made me think of the women who serve the church dinners I go to with my grandmother.

“Well,” said Baltimore. “As soon as my wife and Mr. Markson arrive, we can begin.”

I counted the seats again. “Isn't there someone else coming?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I like to set an extra place, just in case. It's an innkeeper's duty. Ah, here's Mr. Markson!”

Baltimore hurried to the door of the dining room, where the newcomer had just appeared. Taking the man by the arm, he steered him to the table and again introduced everyone.

There was an awkward moment when Baltimore introduced my father.

“Ah,” said Mr. Markson, “the man who has my room.” His voice was quiet but slightly testy.

Baltimore blushed and explained that there had been a mix-up and he had put my dad in the room that was normally reserved for Mr. Markson, who was a longtime customer of the inn.

Dad offered to trade. Mr. Markson made a funny noise and told him not to worry about it, and the tension vanished.

Aside from that instant of crankiness, Porter Markson struck me as being the most average man I'd ever seen—average height, average weight, average looks. His hair was kind of a medium brown, his clothes medium stylish. He seemed nice, but very forgettable.

Gloria Cleveland, on the other hand, was a complete surprise. She appeared at the doorway of the dining room about five minutes after Porter Markson, and it was as if someone had turned on a light. After all the screeching we had heard from her that afternoon, Chris and I had figured she would be some kind of hag.

Some hag! She was tall, blond, and gorgeous. Her dress looked like something from one of the nighttime soaps.

“No wonder he puts up with her,” Chris whispered.

And, indeed, Baltimore seemed to glow at the sight of his lovely wife. “Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “Our little party is finally complete.”

As it turned out, he was wrong about that. The last guest didn't show up until we were eating our dessert.

That was when the ghost sat down in the empty chair—directly across from me.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Look Into My Eyes

I was squishing peach melba between my teeth when the ghost showed up. I was so surprised I almost sprayed a mouthful of the stuff all over Mona Curtis. Fortunately, I kept it under control. Disgusted as I was at the way she was drooling over my father, I still knew that a shower of peach-raspberry goo wasn't the way to handle the situation.

I also know that dessert squishing is a disgusting habit. Fortunately, none of the grownups noticed it, mostly because they were so tied up in their own conversations. Besides, it wasn't just habit that night. I was doing it out of frustration. For the last hour and a half, I had been watching Mona circle my father like a vulture circles a wounded rabbit. And I still hadn't been able to figure out any way to warn him about her.

This is not to say that dinner was a total disaster. To begin with, the food was spectacular—even if it was mostly things I had never heard of before. The main dish was some kind of mystery meat, covered with mushrooms. But these weren't just ordinary mushrooms. According to Baltimore they were “domestic and imported, both wild and cultivated.” Or something like that. Anyway, I never saw so many different kinds of mushrooms on one plate.

Then there were the cucumbers. Now I've been eating cucumbers all my life. You peel them and slice them, right?

Not Dieter. After peeling them he had cut them in half the long way and scooped out all the seeds. Then he sliced them, which made all the pieces come out like little crescent moons. Then he
cooked
them. I mean, who ever heard of cooking cucumbers? Anyway, they were still firm, and kind of shimmery, and covered with this clear, shiny sauce.

But it was the peach melba that caused my mouth to send a message to my brain, asking if we had died and gone to heaven. That was the
other
reason I was squishing it; I wanted to make it last.

As good as the food was, when I think back on that meal I remember the sounds almost as well as the tastes. If I close my eyes I can still hear the bursts of laughter, the clink of glasses, the cries of delight as Martha and Isabella delivered each new course. The conversation seemed to whirl around the table, all very witty and grown-up sounding. The fact that people got friendly so quickly may have had something to do with the wine, which was flowing pretty freely. I think it also had something to do with ordinary-looking Porter Markson, who turned out to be a wonderful storyteller.

Porter was also a good source of information, since he had been coming to the Quackadoodle for nearly thirty years. In a way it seemed as if the place belonged to him more than it did to Baltimore and Gloria, who had only bought it two years earlier. Porter told funny stories about the guests who used to come there, and a romantic story about two people who met and fell in love there, and then a sad story about how beautiful the inn had been before the last owners had let it get so run-down that most of the old regulars stopped coming back.

“But here's to our new hosts, Baltimore and Gloria,” he concluded, raising his wineglass for a toast. “May they bring the Quackadoodle back to its former glory!”

We all raised our glasses and cheered. Baltimore was beaming. It was very nice, except that I thought Porter should have also mentioned my father, who was going to have a lot to do with bringing glory back to this place.

It was shortly after the toast that the ghost made his appearance. He drifted in through the dining room door. And I do mean
through
—Gloria had closed it behind her when she made her grand entrance. Taking his time, he crossed the room to where we were sitting and took his place at the table as if he had been invited.

I heard Chris drop her spoon. I felt her grab my elbow at about the time I managed to swallow the peach melba. “Do you see it?” she hissed.

I nodded, my eyes wide.

We recognized him at once: he was the same man we had seen in the photo upstairs. He was wearing his uniform, and if it wasn't for the fact that he was dead, I would say he looked even better in real life than he did in the picture.

The adults babbled on, totally unaware of the ghost's presence. Chris and I tried to stay calm, but I could feel my hands begin to tremble. I suppose if we hadn't already had one experience with a ghost we probably would have screamed and jumped out of our seats. As it was, we managed to keep ourselves under control.

As we watched, it became clear that the ghost was slowly and carefully studying the people at the table. He started with Porter Markson, who was sitting to his right, then moved on to Arnie, then Meg, and finally to Baltimore, who was sitting right next to me.

I braced myself, knowing I would be next. When he turned his eyes on me, I looked straight back at him.

I don't know if you've ever looked a ghost in the eye before. We are talking major weird experience here. It wasn't so much what I could see—my memory tells me I was staring into two empty, black holes. It was more like something I
felt
: as if I were falling out of time and into somewhere else altogether. The sensation only lasted for an instant, mostly because several things happened all at once.

One, I was swept by this terrible wave of sorrow.

Two, the ghost broke the eye lock.

And three, he disappeared—just blinked out of sight.

“What did you do to him?” whispered Chris. I think she was angry because he hadn't gotten around to staring at her, too.

“I didn't do anything except look at him,” I hissed back. “I think he was surprised that I could see him.”

About that time my father shot us his save-the-whispering-for-later look. We shut up and tried to pay attention to the conversation. But both of us were dying for dinner to be over so we could talk about what had happened.

It didn't take that much longer. When Martha and Isabella brought around refills for the coffee, Dad leaned over and asked if we wanted to be excused. Normally we would have hung around for a while, to see if we might hear a couple of juicy jokes. But that night we didn't think anything that might come up at the table would be half as interesting as what we had already seen. So we complimented Baltimore and Gloria on the meal and then took off.

The dining room had doors that opened onto the broad porch which wrapped around the inn. We went out there and settled into a couple of wooden chairs. It was a warm, clear night. The nearly full moon made everything look as if it had been brushed with silver, and the sound of the stream gurgling to itself as it rolled along the far edge of the lawn was soothing. I could smell the water, and just a hint of the fresh paint from the chairs Peter Gorham had covered that afternoon.

We propped our feet up on the porch rail and sat in silence for a moment.

“Well, what do you think?” I asked after a while.

“I think you have all the luck,” said Chris.

“Next time I'll pretend I don't see him, so you can have a chance,” I snapped. I really didn't want to have a fight with my best friend over a ghost.

Chris smiled. “I'm sorry. Just jealous, I guess.”

I smiled back. “I guess I can't blame you. He's gorgeous! But honestly, all I did was look at him.”

“Why do you think that surprised him so much?” asked Chris.

“Well, obviously he wasn't expecting anyone to see him.”

“OK, so why did we see him?”

“Now that,” I said, “is a question worth asking. Unfortunately, I don't have an answer.”

“Well then, let me ask you this one,” said Chris. “Are we dealing with a good ghost, or a bad ghost?”

I thought back to our experience with the Woman in White. From the beginning, both of us had sensed that there was nothing to fear from that ghost.

It wasn't so simple this time around.

“I don't know,” I whispered. It wasn't cold, but I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself. “I really don't know.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

Piano in the Parlor

We had been sitting on the porch for about half an hour, looking at the stars and talking about ghosts when Chris suddenly grabbed my arm. “Listen,” she hissed. “Do you hear music?”

I cocked my head and listened. The sound was so low it was hard to hear above the splashing of the stream. But it was there all right, the soft, sweet tinkle of a piano drifting out from somewhere in the inn.