House of Strangers (Harlequin Super Romance) (2 page)

The railroad still ran along the far side of the open square that separated the town from the Wolf River bottoms on the north side, but the trains no longer even slowed to acknowledge the existence of the town.

Once there must have been a station. Probably it had stood where the small park with the shiny, ornate Victo
rian bandstand now perched across the parking lot from the café.

The café stood on one corner of what remained of the town square. About the time the Delaneys decided to build a fine house and move into town from their plantations, the area must have been a crush of mule-drawn wagons piled high with bales of cotton. Probably the café hadn’t existed then. He doubted the high-and-mighty Delaneys would have chosen to build their mansion next door to a café.

The pickup trucks and stock trailers parked haphazardly in the area now were not nearly as romantic.

Bank, mom-and-pop grocery, and dingy pool hall sat on the south side across the street from the café. Three handsomely restored row houses formed the west side. The lower floor of the first held his real-estate agent’s office and the second a florist shop. On the front porch of the third building, a twelve-foot black wooden grizzly bear advertised something, but Paul couldn’t begin to guess what.

Those few small stores constituted the entire business district of Rossiter. The nearest shopping mall was more than twenty miles away, on the road to Memphis.

Paul checked his watch and sauntered along the sidewalk toward his house.
His
house. He still couldn’t believe he’d done such an insane thing. He didn’t generally operate on impulse.

The sidewalk was dangerously buckled and broken by the roots of several giant oaks and magnolias in his front yard. Didn’t the city council, or whatever passed for government in this village, pay attention to things like dangerous walkways? Perhaps nobody in Rossiter actually walked.

When he reached the snaggle-toothed brick path that
led up to his front porch, he simply stood and gloated. His house was younger, smaller and less splendid than Tara, but it must have been imposing in its day.

Unfortunately, at the moment it looked like an aging whore trying to cadge money for her next drink.

“I own your house, Daddy, you bastard,” Paul said louder than he’d planned.

Behind him he heard tires squeal. A squad car with the Rossiter seal slid to a stop by the curb. A man climbed out of the driver’s seat.

Paul had met Buddy Jenkins only once before, just after his bid to buy the house had been accepted. At the meeting in his real-estate agent’s office, Buddy had worn jeans and a University of Tennessee sweatshirt. They’d spoken on the telephone a number of times while Paul was winding up his affairs in New Jersey and storing his few possessions, but Buddy had never mentioned he was the chief of police.

In a town like this, being chief of police probably wasn’t a demanding job. No wonder he’d started his renovation company.

At first Paul had been reluctant to give the restoration contract to a local construction firm. How could anybody working out of a town the size of Rossiter be any good?

But when he’d inquired about renovation and restoration experts in the Memphis and west-Tennessee area, Buddy Jenkins’s name had come up repeatedly at the top of the list. After Paul checked out the mansions, theaters, government state houses and private homes that Jenkins had restored, he’d decided to hire the man.

“Don’t know if you can get him,” Mrs. Hoddle, his real-estate agent, had said. “He’s usually booked up pretty far in advance. But because the house is in Rossiter, you may be able to convince him to do the job for you.”

Buddy’s preliminary estimates on doing the job had taken Paul’s breath away until he found out what his New York friends were paying to renovate their brownstones.

Paul wanted the job done right. Now that he had committed to this crazy charade, this crazy
crusade,
being able to resell the house for a profit would make his victory even sweeter.

“Hey, Mr. Bouvet,” Buddy Jenkins said as he came forward and stuck out his hand. In uniform the man looked even larger. His starched shirt was perfectly pressed and tailored to his barrel chest and broad shoulders. His boots were spit-shined. What little hair he had left was cut in a gray fringe that barely showed against his tanned skin.

Jenkins probably carried 250 pounds or more on his six-three frame. God help the drunk driver who gave this man any lip. At six feet even and 175 pounds, Paul felt almost small by comparison.

“Ready for the bad news?” Jenkins said happily.

“Not really, but there’s no sense in putting it off.”

“First the good news. In three months or so this old place can look better than it’s looked since the day the Delaneys first moved in.”

“Three months?”

“Maybe five.”

“And the bad news?”

“Come on, I’ll walk you through.” Buddy reached into his pocket and drew out a key.

“If you don’t mind, Buddy, I’d like to use my key.”

“Sure.” Buddy grinned. “First time you’ve used it?”

“Since I had the new locks installed.” The front door was original, complete with an etched-glass oval in the center. Although the original brass lock remained, the shiny new Yale lock was the one that worked. Paul
thought he’d feel a surge of triumph when he stepped into the house again. He felt nothing.

“Let’s start in the basement,” Buddy said. “We’ve got a temporary permit for the electricity, so we can see while we replace the wiring.”

“All of it?”

“Every whipstitch,” Buddy said. “Phone lines, too.” The old oak floors echoed their footsteps. “Watch your head.”

Over the next hour Paul listened to Buddy’s litany of disaster. Maybe the house hadn’t been such a bargain, after all.

“Need to jack up at least one corner of the house to replace sills,” Buddy said. “Termites.”

“The house has stood this long with termite damage. Why disturb it?”

“Because it may decide some night in a storm that it has stood plenty long enough and fall down around your ears. Besides, you won’t get any inspector to sign off on the renovations unless we do.”

Paul nodded.

“I’ll show you when we get to the attic. Needs a new roof and decking, of course.”

Another hour of crawling through attics, poking into bathrooms, peering up fireplaces, left Paul even more dispirited.

When at last they moved into the kitchen, Buddy said, “You need new appliances and stuff. I got a kitchen designer working on a plan for a whole new kitchen.” Buddy looked at him. “How you holding up?”

“I’ll survive. At least I think I will.”

“Now we get to the restoration part. Come with me.”

Buddy shoved the pocket doors aside and ushered Paul
into the back parlor. Buddy pointed at the Steinway grand piano in the bay window.

“It’s not quite a concert grand,” Buddy said, “although Miss Addy used to tell her students it was.”

“It’s a beauty.”

“It’s yours.”

“I know, but I don’t understand why it was built into the house that way.”

“The Delaney who built the house in 1890 thought any daughter of his ought to be able to play the piano. He bought this one and literally had the music room—that’s what this is officially—built around it.”

“But I was under the impression that the man who built this house had only one son.” Paul could have bitten off his tongue. At this stage, he wasn’t supposed to know anything about the Delaneys except their name.

“Had a daughter died of the yellow fever when she was no more than four or five, so I’ve heard.” Buddy looked at Paul curiously. “How come you know about the son?”

“I, uh…after I bought the house I did a bit of checking with the historical society about it. Just curiosity, you know.”

“Uh-huh.” The chief seemed satisfied, but Paul knew he’d have to be more careful in the future.

Buddy walked over to the piano and plinked middle C with his index finger. “Needs tuning. Ann thinks she can restore the strings and pads and the ivory on the keys.”

“Ann?”

“Ann’s the restoration part of Renovation and Restoration. She’s the one who’s going to strip all that paint off your fireplaces and re-create the old crown molding that’s missing. And a bunch of other stuff.”

“I see.”

“Mostly she redoes the cosmetic stuff. Like that mural in the dining room. It’s a fine Chinese rice paper old Mr. Delaney imported. You weren’t thinking of stripping it and throwing it away, were you?”

“Not if it can be restored.”

“If it’s possible, Ann’ll do it. It’s amazing what she can do. She worked as an art restorer in Washington and New York for a while.”

“Then Ann it is.” Paul turned to look out the dirty bay window. “What’s that old building down there behind the house?”

“Summer kitchen. It may be too far gone to save, but we might be able to salvage enough old wood to rebuild the gazebo so you could use it for a pool house, maybe, if you ever put one in.”

“No pool, thank you. Maybe eventually a fountain.”

“When you going back to New Jersey?”

“I’m not. I’ve sublet my apartment.”

“You’re not expecting to live in the house, are you?” Buddy looked horrified. “Not until it’s finished, I mean.”

“Actually, I am. I’m used to camping out. If the plumbing works, I can make do with a cot in the back bedroom.”

“Son, it still gets very cold at night. The old water heater may hold up until we replace it or it may not. Plus the dust and the noise. You sure you want to stay here?”

“I’ll give it a try. If I get uncomfortable, I can always spend a night in a motel.”

Buddy scratched his balding head. “Your choice, but I wouldn’t advise it. You surely don’t plan on cooking, do you?”

Paul laughed. “Not with the café next door.”

“Good, ’cause that old stove might blow up the first time you try to light the pilot.”

Paul followed Buddy to the front door and opened it for him. He was, after all, the host. Odd feeling. He’d never owned a house or even a condo in his life.

“My crew will be here first thing tomorrow morning,” Buddy said. “I got to get back to police work.”

“Fine.” Paul closed and locked the front door of the house behind the man. He planned to absorb the atmosphere of the place. Maybe meet a ghost. Weren’t ghosts supposed to be troubled spirits doomed to walk the earth to pay for their crimes in life?

If that was true, then he knew of at least one ghost who ought to be walking the halls of the Delaney mansion in torment. His father.

P
AUL’S SHOULDER
ached. He drove back to his motel using only his left hand. His right arm would never be really strong again. Even with all the physical therapy and the operations he’d endured, he’d been warned the pain might never completely leave him.

The damp chill in the Delaney house wasn’t helping. He probably shouldn’t have explored the place again after Buddy left. He hadn’t uncovered anything worth noting, anyway. The dirt floor in the basement, which hadn’t been disturbed since the house was built, was as hard as concrete, and the attic seemed to hold no hidden spaces. He decided he’d explore further when he was rested.

Another night in a good bed was more necessity than indulgence.

Time enough to organize his camping equipment tomorrow. And if he hated staying at the house, he could always check back into the motel.

He shut the door of his room behind him, tossed the key on the dresser and collapsed onto the king-size bed. In his years of flying he’d spent too many nights in anonymous rooms like this. Sometimes when his wake-up call came, he’d have to check the notepad beside the telephone to remember where he was. He never thought he’d miss those days, but now if he had his right arm and shoulder back the way they’d been before the attack, he’d never complain about his crazy flight schedule again.

Not going to happen. But at least he’d managed to pass the physical for a Class III commercial pilot’s license. He could still fly his own small plane and would be flying a cropduster for the local fixed-base operation in a few weeks. So in some sense, he still had the sky. Doug Slatterly and Bill McClure would never be able to fly again. Doug still had memory lapses and tremors. Bill had lost the sight in his right eye and along with it, his depth perception.

And all because one of their colleagues had decided to crash the L-10 transport they were flying so that his family could collect double indemnity on his life insurance.

They’d all had military experience, but even so, the attack was so sudden, so unexpected, that they’d all been badly hurt before they’d fought back. It was a miracle Doug had stayed conscious, keeping the man at bay to give Paul a chance to turn the plane and keep it level.

In the end, they’d managed to disarm the man and land the plane safely with no loss of life on the ground, but at a horrific cost to their bodies. Paul smiled ruefully. The lunatic was the only one who got what he wanted. After he’d tried to escape from the plane, a police sniper had shot him, and the insurance company had been forced to pony up the double indemnity.

The three survivors—Bill, the navigator, Doug, the co-pilot, and Paul himself, pilot-in-charge—had been paid off handsomely. The company hadn’t wanted any lawsuits with the attendant publicity. They’d settled generously.

But he’d be willing to bet that both Doug and Bill would give back the six million bucks they’d each been awarded if they could still qualify for their old jobs. Paul certainly would.

The last he’d heard, Doug was planning to open a seafood restaurant in Coral Gables. He didn’t know what Bill
was doing. Both their marriages had survived, although Bill and Janey had separated for a while.

Maybe Bill and Janey wouldn’t have come through if they hadn’t actually been legally married with children. Certainly Paul and Tracy hadn’t. Tracy had stuck with him in the hospital and for the first month of physical therapy after he came home, but in the end she’d broken their engagement.

He didn’t blame her. Tracy had been a flight attendant long enough to have her pick of the prime runs. She’d expected to marry a transport pilot, not a bad-tempered man with a bum arm and no idea what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
She
wasn’t the one who changed. He had.

They’d taken no marriage vows, no “for better or worse.” The breakup had been nasty. They’d both said terrible things that could never be unsaid.

Tracy had mailed him an invitation to her wedding a month ago to a pilot for one of the big commercial airlines. He had sent her a very expensive silver tray and toasted her alone in his apartment with too much brandy.

He soaked for an hour in the bath, slept for another and then drove back to the house. He wanted to poke and pry further. Maybe he’d be able to thrash his way through the damp weeds and vines in the garden to the summer kitchen or the garden shack.

Mrs. Hoddle had told him that nothing remained in the house from the Delaney years. The heir had commissioned an estate agent to sell everything he and his wife didn’t want. A junk dealer had carted off what remained.

Paul parked in the broken concrete area at the back of the house. No garage, of course. That would have to be built from scratch. He climbed out and stepped into the tall grass that had once been the back lawn. He was sur
prised to find a herringbone pattern of bricks just visible under the weeds. Must’ve been some sort of patio. He forced his way through tangled vegetation until he found himself snared by overgrown rosebushes.

Years without pruning should have killed them, but despite the long bracts that snagged his clothing, he could see the beginning of a few green shoots. Maybe they could still be saved.

The door to the summer kitchen had a heavy, rusted padlock on it. Looking around, Paul decided he wouldn’t be able to get to the fence at the back of the property without a machete, so he gave up and went back to the house.

Imposing from the front, the house looked much more informal from the rear. He could barely make out the outline of the piano through the filthy bay windows. On his left beyond the music room, the window wall of the conservatory stretched down the entire side of the house. Judging from the layers of grime and the festoons of spiderwebs, no one had washed the outside of those windows in twenty years.

He walked up the two steps to the back door and fitted his new key into its new lock. The door silently opened on oiled hinges. Buddy’s doing, no doubt. The broad center hall ran straight through the house. Paul could see shadows of the trees in the front yard through the glass of the front door.

He turned into the kitchen.

An old butcher-block table marred by the nicks of countless knives stood in the center of the room.

He heard the slightly off-key tinkle of the piano.

The hair on his arms stood up. His first ghost?

After a moment he got himself under control and lis
tened. Debussy, maybe, or Ravel. Familiar, although he couldn’t identify it. Something soft and sad and French.

When he’d looked through the bay window earlier, he’d seen no silhouette at the piano. There had been no other cars parked either in the driveway or out front on the street, and he’d heard none drive in.

Buddy had the only other key, but Buddy hardly seemed the type to favor Debussy or Ravel.

Paul started to call out, then stopped. He definitely did not believe in ghosts, so there must be ten human fingers on those keys. If the pianist thought he, too, was alone in the house, then hearing Paul’s voice might give him or her a heart attack. The sudden sound had definitely accelerated
Paul’s
pulse.

The music stopped suddenly.

Paul waited a moment, then crossed the central hall. The music room was partially open. Paul peered in.

No one was at the piano. The room was empty. So was the front parlor, which he could see through the open doors between the two rooms.

He stepped into the music room. Absolutely empty. Had he been hearing things? The piano was open. He remembered Buddy’s closing it after showing him how discolored the old ivory keys were.

He touched the bench. Still warm. To the best of his knowledge, ghosts did not have warm bottoms.

Someone was in the house. Heart attack or not, it was time to call out.

He started to open his mouth when a huge black object hurtled through the hall door and hit him full in the chest.

Paul’s feet slid out from under him, and he landed flat on his back, barely managing to keep his head from cracking against the bare floor.

He managed a couple of gasps before the black object
reached out a long, maroon tongue and licked him straight across the face.

“Get off me!” Paul didn’t think attack dogs were trained to lick their quarry, so he felt relatively safe shoving this one off his chest.

“Dante!”

Footsteps pelted down the back stairs. A moment later he saw a figure silhouetted in the shadowy doorway. “What are you doing here?”

“I might ask you the same thing,” he said. “Call off your moose.”

“Dante, get off him. Down.”

Dante gave Paul one last quick swipe with his tongue, then sank to the floor beside him and stared with beseeching eyes.

“What kind of dog is this, anyway? I’ve never seen one like it.”

“He’s a Neopolitan mastiff.”

Paul rolled to a sitting position and found himself nose to nose with the mastiff. “He makes bloodhounds look cheerful.”

“He’s really a happy dog. It’s just his woebegone expression and all those wrinkles that make him look miserable. Listen, I’m awfully sorry. He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“Just my dignity, Miss…uh?”

“Ann Corrigan.” She offered a hand, and when he took it with his left, she helped him back to his feet.

“Ah—you’re the Ann Buddy was talking about.”

“You have to be Mr. Bouvet. Do you need to sit down or anything?”

“Not quite that decrepit, thank you.”

“I didn’t mean…I guess you heard the piano. Buddy swore you wouldn’t be back this afternoon, so I borrowed
his key to start taking pictures of the inside of the house. When I saw the piano, I couldn’t resist.”

“You play well.”

“No, I don’t.” Ann laughed. “I play one tempo—slow. And one style—easy with lots of mistakes—although I spent every Tuesday afternoon for years on that piano bench. I took lessons from Miss Addy.”

“The lady who owned the house.”

“Only for the last few years. It belonged to the Delaneys. When Mrs. Delaney died, she left it to her sister for her lifetime. Miss Addy must have taught most of the kids in the county to play the piano.”

“You sounded good.”

“I was not one of her star pupils. When I wasn’t in school I was either out with the hunt or pitching for the softball team. I hated to practice. Scales, yuck. Now I wish I’d worked harder.”

“I attempted to play the tuba in my high-school band. It was a grave error. I lasted less than six weeks. Football was easier, except that I wasn’t big enough for a college scholarship.”

Dante had not moved from his position but followed the conversation like a tennis spectator, turning his head from one to the other.

Ann lifted her hand, palm up, and Dante hauled himself to his feet and went to stand beside her. He had no tail, so his entire rear end wagged.

“Look, we don’t have to stand here in the middle of an empty room,” Ann said. “Let’s sit on the window seat in the conservatory—if you don’t mind getting dirty.”

Paul followed her through the archway at the left and into the conservatory. She perched on one of the cushions. “It’s pretty dusty.”

“I’m already dirty.” He sat far enough along the curve
of the windows so that he had a good view of her. “Does Dante always greet people so enthusiastically?” he asked.

“I’m sorry about that. I spend a lot of time in empty, isolated old buildings by myself. When I’m really doing good work, I sometimes keep going all night. There are never any curtains at the windows, so it’s like I’m standing on stage under a spotlight while the rest of the world outside is in darkness. I’d feel like a sitting duck without Dante as my early-warning system and my guardian.”

On hearing his name, the dog laid his head on Ann’s lap. She scratched his small, pointed ears.

“Not much of a guardian, although he looks scary enough,” Paul said.

“He’d never bite a living soul, but just having all 180 pounds of him land on you and lick your face would scare most bad guys into cardiac arrest.”

“Almost worked with me.”

“He doesn’t usually go looking for trouble. I guess he decided that since this was an empty house, I must be working. Sometimes he’s a bear of very little brain.”

“Has he ever had to launch into action before?”

“A couple of times in D.C. he barked and may have scared off the bad guys, but not since I’ve moved back down here. I didn’t even hear you from upstairs. He decided to investigate on his own.”

“Buddy says you know this house well.”

“I ought to. Miss Addy was not only my piano teacher, she was my great-aunt.”

Paul froze. Ann Corrigan was a Delaney? “I thought her sister owned the house and that the other lady only had life tenancy.”

“Her older sister, Aunt Maribelle, was the one who married into the Delaneys and inherited the house when
her husband died. But Aunt Addy lived with her forever, and Aunt Maribelle didn’t want her to have to move.”

“So Mrs. Maribelle Delaney was also your great-aunt?”

Ann nodded. “My grandmother was the youngest of the three girls.”

“Is she still—”

“Alive?” Ann grinned. “Is she ever.”

“So your father…”

“Gram is my mother’s mother.”

“So you really are a Delaney?”

“More of a kissing cousin by marriage. Practically everybody in this area is kin to everybody else.”

Paul looked at her closely for the first time, trying to discern something in her face that might show her relationship to the Delaneys.

A moment later he decided she was worth exploring for herself. She was of average height, average weight and average coloring. Her medium-brown hair was fairly long and tied back tightly by a red scarf. She had a nicely rounded body with long legs and a generous bosom.

She looked as though she laughed a lot—the sort of girl an earlier generation would have called “a good egg.”

Her face was too strong-boned for classic beauty and her mouth a bit too wide. Might be interesting to taste it.

Her eyes were her best feature. They were large, slightly tilted at the corners and the sort of gray-blue that changes color with mood or the color of the background. Although she’d long since chewed off her lipstick—if indeed she wore any—her lips were still the color of a not-quite-ripe pomegranate. Paul could see no resemblance to the Delaney in the only photo he possessed.