Emily's Ghost

A showdown between a U.S. Senator who
believes in ghosts and a reporter who doesn't.  What could
possibly go wrong?

Emily Bowditch, investigative journalist, is
a typical New Englander:  proud, stubborn, tightfisted and
skeptical.  So she's determined to expose aristocratic Senator
Lee Alden's fascination with psychic phenomena and his willingness
to waste good taxpayer dollars to fund research in it.

Her plan is first to gain his confidence by
convincing him that she has psychic powers.  That plan
flops.  The tables are turned and somehow Emily finds herself
at a seance as guest of the sexy, recently widowed young
senator.

As seances go, not much happens, despite the
disturbing, electrifying tension in the room.  It's not until
Emily is back in her tiny Boston condo that she realizes ... she
hasn't come home alone.  Fergus O'Malley, a handsome 19th
century scoundrel hanged for a murder he swears he didn't commit,
needs someone to clear him of the crime.  Emily, apparently,
is it.

And so begins a hair-raising odyssey full of
twists and turns and danger on both sides of the veil as Emily
tries to navigate between senator and ghost and her growing
feelings for both.

"Emily's Ghost is great fun.  A witty,
entertaining romantic read that has everything -- a lively ghost,
an old murder mystery and a charming romance. A fresh, engaging
voice in romantic fiction, Antoinette Stockenberg is sure to find a
wide audience."

 --Jayne Ann Krentz (Jayne Castle)

"Readers looking for highly original and emotionally rich reading
will find this outstanding contemporary novel a veritable feast for
the senses ... Ms. Stockenberg avoids even the slightest cliche as
her spirited heroine sorts through her confused feelings while she
pieces together the puzzle of a century-old murder.  The
result is pure and unadulterated reading pleasure."
--
Romantic Times Magazine, 4 1/2 stars
"EMILY'S GHOST is great fun.  A witty, entertaining
romantic read that has everything -- a lively ghost, an old murder
mystery and a charming romance.  A fresh, engaging voice in
romantic fiction."
--Jayne Ann Krentz (Jayne Castle)
"I loved EMILY'S GHOST.  It's an exciting story with a
surprise plot twist."
--Jude Deveraux
"An engaging heroine, a sexy senator, and a rapscallion ghost make
EMILY'S GHOST an irresistible read."
--Susan Elizabeth Phillips
"It's one of the best books I've read in a long time."
--Denise Little, B. Dalton
"Booksellers' recommended read."
--
Publishers Weekly

Jane Drew loved her spinster great-aunt and was always more
amused than convinced by her alleged psychic powers.  But the
ramshackle cottage on Nantucket Island that Jane inherited after
her great-aunt's passing seems to be filled with pretty convincing
psychic phenomena of its own.  Is the cottage haunted? 
After a series of eerie and compelling events, Jane is sure that it
is.  Some determined sleuthing even turns up a likely
candidate:  the spirit of a beautiful Quaker who died a
century earlier seems to be roaming the place.  If Jane is
ever to live there in peace, she is going to have to help the
spirit on her way.  It won't be with a simple smile and a wave
goodbye, Jane knows that.  She's going to have to think like
an islander.  But she's a Boston graphic designer with no
experience of the island or its people and could use a little more
local knowledge in her quest.
There is no one more local than the aloof, wary, and impossibly
seductive Mac McKenzie.  Descended from generations of
hard-working islanders, Mac has very clear opinions of
off-islanders, and he's not afraid to express them.  He has
little patience for New Age types, moneyed types, and those for
whom "antiquing" is a verb.  He regards spaghetti as noodles,
not pasta, and he drinks water from a tap, not a bottle.  He's
suspicious of people who design graphics, whatever those are. 
And he doesn't believe in ghosts.  Period.  When he finds
himself up against the insistent, persistent, infinitely irritating
Jane Drew with her knack for complicating his life, he does what
any self-respecting islander would and shrugs her off -- for a
while, anyway.

"BELOVED has charm, romance, and a delicious
hint of the supernatural.  If you loved the film 'Somewhere in
Time,' don't miss this book."
--LaVyrle Spencer
"BELOVED is a lively, engaging, thoroughly enchanting tale ... I
savored every morsel ... BELOVED is great."
--Jayne Ann Krentz (Jayne Castle)
Visit
http://www.antoinettestockenberg.com
to read sample chapters of other novels coming soon
in e-book format.
Post a comment on Antoinette's FACEBOOK
page.

Copyright

This is a work of
fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents are either
the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously,
and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
Emily's
Ghost
Copyright
©
1992 by Antoinette Stockenberg
Smashwords
Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal
enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to
other people. If you would like to share this book with another
person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If
you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not
purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com
and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work
of this author.

For Mom,

in Memory

Emily Bowditch threw down
her notes in disgust.

"Can you believe this? The
United States is gazillions of dollars in debt, and Senator Arthur
Lee Alden III wants funding for intergalactic communication. Can
you
believe
this?"

No one in the newsroom
paid any attention to her; everyone was on deadline. Emily turned
her monitor on and began setting up a new file.

"Not to worry, E.T.," she
muttered to no one in particular. "If the senator gets his funding,
pretty soon you
will
be able to phone home."

The minutes ticked by. Her
hands flew over the keyboard; her muttering became more indignant.
"Of all the hopeless wastes of taxpayers' money ... of all the
liberal spendthrifts ... of all the misdirected ... serendipitous
... irrational ... downright
weird
...."

Stan Cooper looked up
annoyed from his computer screen. "What’re you going on about?" He
swiveled his chair to face Emily and reached for his coffee mug.
"Tell me now and get it over with, for God's sake, so I can get
back to work."

The irritation in his
voice didn't bother Emily at all. She assumed that all forty-eight
year old bachelor newsmen came that way. "It's Senator
Alden."

Stan's eyelids flickered.
"Yeah? What about him?"

"I've just got hold of a
letter he wrote urging the National Science Foundation to fund a
heck of a lot more psychic research than they've been doing. I
didn't know they were doing
any
," she said through gritted
teeth. "And now, apparently, they're going to do more."

"How much more?" Stan
asked. His voice was low and still, the way it got whenever he
talked about Senator Alden.

Emily shook her head. "It
doesn't say." She fished her copy of the letter from a school of
papers on her desk and read from it aloud. "'We urge you' -- blah,
blah, here it is -- 'to allocate substantially greater sums for
psychic research which, among other benefits, can have far-reaching
ramifications for both our domestic and foreign
intelligence'."

Stan's laugh was short and
derisive. "FBI. CIA. Yeah. Rumors have been going around for years
that they've been fooling around with psi." Stan drained the dregs
of his coffee and made a wry face. "So how you gonna handle the
story?"

Emily sighed. "I'm sure
the Chief'll want me to play it straight; he respects the senator
too much to feel any moral outrage here."

"No problem," Stan said
with a deadly smile. "Between you and me we have more than
enough."

"Well, it
is
outrageous!"

"I agree."

"I mean it, Stan. Our
government is out of control, absolutely out of control. Our
bridges are falling down, our sewers are disintegrating, our
schools need overhauling and this guy calls for -- psychic
research! Who needs psychic research? We need concrete; pipes;
schoolrooms."

Stan swiveled slowly
around to face his computer, effectively ending the coffee break.
"What an innocent you are," he said in a tired voice. "I suppose it
comes from living and working in New Hampshire."

Emily flushed. She'd met
Stanley Cooper when he was on assignment in Manchester seven years
earlier. She was a junior reporter then, really just a Gofer, and
she'd been thoroughly awed by the hard-boiled political reporter
from the
Boston Journal
. He liked what little she'd written, though, and when she
took a job in New Bedford covering municipal affairs for the local
paper, his name was on her list of references.

Then, six months ago, she
sent her resume to the
Journal
. Stanley Cooper interviewed
her in depth, recommended her, and put her through her paces after
she was hired. Later she learned the exact wording of his
recommendation: "She'll be a royal pain in the butt. We need
her."

At twenty-eight Emily
Bowditch was as much in awe of Stan Cooper as ever. She didn't
think much of him as a man -- he drank, smoked, gambled, detested
kids and didn't keep house -- but as a political writer he was
without parallel. She'd do just about anything to impress him.
Whenever he cut her down to size (which was often) she took it
hard.

She studied him in profile
as he hunched over his keyboard, pecking fitfully. His clothes were
shabby. His face was lined, unshaven, unhappy. He was thin, almost
bony: he was suspicious of everything, probably including food. But
he was brilliant, and Emily wanted desperately to make her mark
with him.

"Stan?" she ventured,
risking his wrath. "I've been mulling over an idea for a story. I
think it could be pretty good."

"Hmmmn."

"Maybe even
sensational."

"Hmmmn."

"Do you want to hear about
it?"

"No. Just do
it."

That was it, the
permission she wanted--more or less. She grabbed her tweed jacket
and said, "I'll be at the library for the next couple of hours."
But as she sprinted down the steps of the bland brick building that
housed the
Boston
Journal
, the thought occurred to her that
her idea was cockamamie at best, and a pretty good reason for
getting fired, at worst.

She spent the rest of the
afternoon in the Boston Public Library, plowing through old copies
of
Etheric
, a
magazine devoted exclusively to psychic phenomena; a magazine that
until that morning she had never known existed. She was working
strictly on a hunch, and she wasn't sure what she'd
find.

When she'd called Senator
Alden's office earlier in the day to confirm the existence of his
letter to the National Science Foundation, she was put through to
his aide, Jim Whitewood. In the process some signals had obviously
been crossed. Mr. Whitewood had come on the line and, before she
could say boo, said in a sharp voice, "How did you get hold of the
letter? Are you from
Etheric
?"

"What's
Etheric
?" Emily had
asked, a little stupidly.

"Who is this?" Mr.
Whitewood had demanded.

That's when she made the
first of a series of snap judgments that later would come back to
haunt her. She had said in response, "Hello? Hello? Oh darn,
something's wrong with this phone," and hung up. She needed time,
time to track down
Etheric
and see what or who had made Mr. Whitewood so
press-shy.