Maybe This Time (32 page)

He sighed heavily and sat down beside Isolde. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything,” Isolde said, and Andie said, “Thank you,” and went to check on Alice and Carter in the library.

Where there was a fireplace.

 

On her way through the Great Hall, she ran into North and the detective he'd been friends with for years, resisting the urge to lean on North just because he was there. She really had to get over this
needy phase she was going through. Once she and the kids were out of the house, she'd be independent again.

“How are you?” North said to her. “You—”

“I'm fine,” she said hastily. “Good as new. Gabe, it's good to see you again. What are you doing here exactly?”

“Trying to find out who's faking your haunting,” Gabe said, and Andie looked at North, thinking,
It's not a fake, damn it,
but he was looking at her T-shirt.

“Nice shirt,” North said, and she looked down and saw the glowing, green “Bad Witch” stretched tight.

“Alice gave it to me,” she said. “And the haunting is not a fake.”

“You work on your theory, I'll work on mine,” he told her. “I want you and these kids out of here, one way or another.”

Andie nodded. “But there really are ghosts, so don't waste too much time.” She started to go on, but then she heard “No, no, no!” coming from the library and went to find out what latest injustice had struck Alice.

She spent the rest of the day feeding people, trying to get rid of Kelly and her cameraman—the storm hadn't let up and the satellite truck wasn't going anywhere—keeping Flo and Lydia from open warfare—their allegiance against Kelly could only do so much—and maintaining as much normality as she could for the kids, which involved telling Will to leave her alone several times while she worked with them in the library, and ducking North and Gabe while they searched every inch of the house looking for something that wasn't there.

Because the house was haunted.

The only guests not giving her fits were Dennis and Isolde, who hunkered down in the dining room, forming an uneasy truce that grew less uneasy as the day passed and the level of the brandy in the decanter in front of them sank lower. Andie made sandwiches for lunch and told people to stay out of the dining room because people were working in there.

“On
what
?” Kelly said, smiling automatically even though by now she must have gotten the message that everyone loathed her.

“None of your damn business,” Andie said, and went back to the library to eat with the kids.

At three, she checked in with Dennis and Isolde again, who were now sitting with their heads together over his notes.

“There's a remarkable consistency in the reports,” Dennis told her. “Somebody must have written the legends down and then made sure each generation told the same story. Usually there's more randomness, more inconsistencies.”

“It's the same ghosts,” Isolde said. “Of course the reports are the same.”

“There are no such things as ghosts,” Dennis said, and this time Isolde rolled her eyes, but they were clearly on speaking terms and getting somewhere, so Andie left them alone to set up the Great Hall.

“So I'm very excited about our next séance,” Kelly said, catching her as she came out of the dining room with a chair. “I'd like to interview you—”

“Go
away,
” Andie said. “Or I swear I will throw you out into the storm and you can sleep with your cameraman in the satellite truck.”

“It's three o'clock,” Alice said from behind her.

“What happens at
three o'clock?
” Kelly said, beaming down at her.

“We bake,” Alice said, and turned her back on Kelly and went to the kitchen.

“Is it all right if I watch?” Kelly said.

“No,” Andie said, “go away, forever,” and went to make cookies with Alice.

 

By late afternoon, North and Gabe were staring defeated at the outside of the house. The rain had stopped, but the sun had given up for the day, and the house rose up over them in the gloom, crumbling
and bleak. They'd left a box full of stuff they'd found in the pantry—pieces of odd-shaped metal; a length of goldish chain; a few battered, sepia-toned photographs; rusted screws and a bent screwdriver; a broken pocket watch; a woman's hair clip; and several keys that fit nothing in the house and wouldn't have helped if they had since nothing in the house was locked—but it was all junk, and North knew they were done. There wasn't anything in the house, not just nothing suspicious, but nothing. Mrs. Crumb evidently lived in the kitchen and her bedroom and ignored the rest of the house. The kids had all of their belongings in their bedrooms. Nobody had ever spread out in all of that space, nobody had lived in the house for years.

“This place has a very bad vibe,” Gabe said, surveying it.

“Yes, but it's not haunted,” North said, exasperated. “Somebody has Andie convinced that there are ghosts here, she's doing another séance at four. I don't know whether it's Mrs. Crumb or the kids or somebody from the outside, but there's fraud going on here.”

“Why?” Gabe said. “Who would want this place?”

“I don't know. I just know it's working.”

Gabe turned around to look at the grounds. “I thought somebody might be growing pot, but we've walked the whole property and there's nothing but weeds. There's no meth lab in the basement, the paintings aren't anything special, there's nothing in the walls.” He kicked a clump of purple asters and watched their petals scatter. “There's something wrong here, anybody could feel that. But I'll be damned if I can find it . . .”

His voice trailed off and he stared at the asters.

“What?” North said.

Gabe bent down and picked up a dried ugly weed someone had thrown down at the edge of the garden.

“What is that?” North said.

“I need to make a phone call,” Gabe said, and headed for the house with his plant.

 

“Here you are,” Lydia said when she found Andie and Alice in the kitchen. “I wanted to talk to you about coming to Columbus.”

Alice stiffened and Andie said, “Not until you say yes, Alice,” and dumped the chocolate chips into the dough, keeping an eye out for May. Damn kitchen had no fireplace.

“I was hoping for banana bread,” Lydia said, looking into the bowl. “I haven't had decent banana bread since you left. I put bananas on the kitchen counter at home so you could bake when we all got back.”

“They have to be brown to make banana bread,” Alice said severely. “The yellow ones will not do.”

“That's why I left them on the counter,” Lydia said. “So they'll be brown when we get there.”

They'll be rotted through by the time we get there,
Andie thought,
if we ever do,
and kept mixing and watching for May.

Alice reached up and turned on the radio. “We dance while we bake,” she informed Lydia.

“How nice for you,” Lydia said, and watched Alice pick up the beat at the end of “I'm Too Sexy” and bop around the kitchen. “Perhaps you could find a classical station?” she said to Andie.

“It's this or nothing,” Andie said. “The reception here is not good. We make do.”
Where the hell is May?

“Hello,”
Flo said, coming through the kitchen door as the music changed, beaming at them all. “Where is everybody?”

“Here!” Alice called to her. “We're dancing. Come on!”

“Dancing!” Flo said, and joined Alice to bebop around the kitchen to “Achy Breaky Heart.”

They looked like a demented conga line. In Texas.

“The sooner we get these children out of here, the better,” Lydia said to Andie.

The sooner we get me out of here, the better, too,
Andie thought, and mixed faster.

 

Crumb caught North in the servants' hall as he and Gabe came in.

“There's a woman on the phone for you,” she said, her voice full of scorn. “Says it's important.”

North went to the entrance hall and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“It's me,” Kristin said. “Simon called from England. He said to call him as soon as you could.”

“Did he find the graves?”

“He didn't say, but he found something.”

“I'll call right now.”

“And I found out about May Younger.”

“She's buried around here?”

“She's not buried at all. She was cremated and her ashes scattered at a dance club in Grandville called . . . here it is, it's called ‘The Grandville Grill.' Her friends hijacked the ashes when nobody picked them up and scattered them on the dance floor in her memory.”

“Touching,” North said, thinking,
At least I won't have to talk Andie out of burning her corpse.

“Evidently she spent a lot of time there. I got the impression she had a drinking problem. The night she died, her friends had to drive her home because she was too drunk to drive. The last they saw of her, she was on the tower, waving at them.”

“Good work,” North said. “Thank you.”

“When will you be back?” Kristin sounded a little frazzled. “People are becoming . . . demanding.”

“I'm hoping by Monday. If I'm not there Monday morning, Southie will be.”

“Whatever you say,” Kristin said, with a lot of
this is not a good idea
in her voice. “Don't forget to call Simon.”

North hung up, thinking,
May Younger got drunk and fell off the tower.
Tragic, but not supernatural. So far, so good.

He dialed England, and Simon answered on the first ring.

“It's North Archer,” he said. “Did you find the graves?”

“This is a long story,” Simon said, but North could tell from the sound of his voice that he was enjoying it.

“Make it shorter,” North said.

“The people you were asking about were a governess and a valet who died in 1847. The governess, Mary Jessel, gave birth to a stillborn baby and drowned two days later. Peter Quint the valet died from a fall after he'd been drinking and then headed home down an icy hill.”

“Where are the bodies?” North asked.

“Someone dug them up and burned them in 1898. The vicar was walking through the graveyard and found the graves opened, full of bone and ash. Scandal. They closed the graves and put the headstones back.”

“Burned,” North said. “Anybody know why?”

“There's a legend that if you burn a corpse, the spirit will not walk.”

“Had they been walking?”

“Not that anybody remembers, although that was ninety-four years ago.”

“Fine. This takes care of most of my problem anyway. Thank—”

“Not so fast. Forty years later, 1938, the next vicar walks through the graveyard and sees the graves covered in salt. He told the current vicar it looked like a snowfall.”

“Salt?”

“There's a legend that ghosts can't cross salt.”

“So the people in the town think the graveyard is haunted?”

“No, that's what's odd. There's no legend here of haunting, nothing about these graves except that they've been disturbed three times.”

“Three?”

“Two years ago. 1990. The current vicar caught two men digging up the graves and turned them over to the police. They'd been hired by an American named Theodore Archer.”

“My second cousin,” North said, thinking,
Two years ago?
“What did they charge Theodore with?”

“Nothing. He died before they could contact him. In fact, he died whilst the men were digging up the graves.”

Coincidence,
North thought, but he didn't believe in coincidences.
Somebody who was here two years ago is faking a haunting here now.
And Theodore had investigated, and they'd killed him.

No, that was insane. Theodore had been alone in the car when he'd had a heart attack. A heart attack at forty-eight was not out of the range of the ordinary. People had seen him in the car before it went off the road and he'd been alone. He'd just died, nobody killed him.

“North?”

“Sorry, trying to think this through. Thank you. I owe you.”

“Nonsense,” Simon said. “You kept me out of an Ohio jail. My gratitude is limitless.”

North hung up and looked at the situation from all sides.

People had been trying to put those bodies to rest for decades. Possibly even before that. So faking the haunting wasn't a new idea.

Maybe back in the beginning, in England, the haunting had been useful to keep the house private. Smuggling maybe. And somebody had believed the fake enough to dig the bodies up and burn them.

And then every ensuing generation that wanted privacy kept the tradition going, so the rumors followed the house to America. Given the kind of personality that would transport a haunted house stone by stone across an ocean, the original Archer had probably spread the legend just to make himself more interesting. “Brought myself a
haunted house over from England, yes, I did.” And then somebody in America believed the rumors enough to hire somebody back in England to spread salt on the grave? That was less plausible.

And then Cousin Theodore hired grave robbers and died the same night.

The clock on the kitchen wall chimed and North realized it was almost four. The séance would be starting. He headed for the Great Hall to stop it and Southie met him by the servant stairs.

“We need to stop the séance,” he told Southie.

“No,” Southie said, handing him a set of keys. “We need to keep the séance going as long as possible so you and Gabe can get any videotape out of the satellite truck.”

North looked at the keys. “These are the keys to the truck?”

“I told Bill I'd dropped my wallet in there. He's so mad at Kelly, he'd probably just have given them to me. Don't hurt the equipment, just get the tapes. I'll keep the séance going as long as possible.”