Ready & Willing (11 page)

She was about to lift her hand to knock again when she heard shuffling on the other side, then the rasp of a deadbolt and the creak of a hinge. So she pasted on her best carefree smile—gee, she hoped she remembered how to do that—and, when Audrey appeared on the other side of the door, said brightly, “Hi.”

Judging by her neighbor’s appearance, it was obvious she’d been in the act of creation when Cecilia knocked. A stream of radiant ribbons in a dozen colors cascaded over one shoulder, and a handful of flamboyant feathers sprouted from the pocket of her white, man-style shirt. Straight pins were stuck haphazardly through the fabric of the shirt on its other side, and her blue jeans were littered with bits of thread and straw. Wisps of black hair had freed themselves from a not-especially-tidy braid that was slung over the unpinned shoulder, and her face was smudged here and there with bits of what looked like glitter.

Audrey pasted on a smile that looked almost as carefree as Cecilia hoped hers did, but it was clearly no more genuine than her own. “Hi,” she replied. “Cecilia, right?”

Cecilia nodded.

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember your last name.”

“Havens,” Cecilia told her. Not that that was the name she’d been born with any more than Cecilia was. She’d chosen both because of her love of sixties rock ’n’ roll, even though she hadn’t arrived in the world until more than a decade after Simon and Garfunkel and Richie Havens were first played on the radio.

“You work at the restaurant with Stephen and Finn, right?” Audrey asked. Then, before Cecilia had a chance to answer, she continued, with a smile that looked a little more genuine than the first, “The day they played Welcome Wagon, they brought me a basket full of food from the restaurant, including a caramel swirl cheesecake you made. It was incredible.” She patted her flat tummy. “Not that my waistline thanks you, but my taste buds sure do.”

“Cheesecakes are my specialty,” Cecilia said. “But my tortes are coming along nicely. And I actually don’t work
at
the restaurant with Stephen and Finn. Well, not anymore. I do prepare some desserts for them at their house for them to take to the restaurant, but I’m actually looking for another job.” Without hesitation—or waiting for Audrey to reply—she added pointedly, “Listen, can I come in?”

If the intrusion surprised or bothered Audrey, she didn’t show it. She just stepped aside and swept her hand toward the interior in invitation. “Sure. If you promise to forgive the mess.”

The mess turned out to be considerably tidier than Cecilia’s tidiest tidy. Certainly it was clear that the woman was still in the process of moving in, thanks to a couple of open boxes and a sparsity of furnishings. What furniture there was—a royal blue settee, two richly embroidered chairs to complement it, and an intricately carved secretary whose glass doors were thrown open to showcase a number of exuberant hats inside—was all as Victorian as the house and arranged with comfort in mind. Even the hats strewn seemingly carelessly about in display had the look of actually being carefully arranged. And the boxes were each labeled with its contents—HATS, they both read . . . gee, there was a shocker—in a neat and precise hand.
The boxes
clearly had been packed with great care.

When Cecilia had left San Francisco a year ago, she’d haphazardly dumped everything she owned into a couple of duffel bags and four nearly collapsed boxes she’d pulled from the Dumpster behind Vincent’s apartment building. She hadn’t cared at the time what went where or how much trouble they’d be to unpack later.

Of course, she’d had a very narrow window of time to escape from San Francisco and had wanted to be as far from Vincent’s penthouse as she could before he discovered she was gone. That had rather hindered any sort of plan-making, never mind organization. Not that that had helped her get away from Vincent’s penthouse before he discovered she was gone, anyway, since Dolan had caught her packing and locked her in the bedroom before calling Vincent and ratting her out. And then Vincent—

She shook the thought off almost literally before it could fully form. She’d done very well not thinking about Vincent Strayer for the past twelve months. So why was he suddenly crowding back into her brain today?

Oh, right. Great, looming, hulky shadows. The reason she’d come over to Audrey’s in the first place.

Before her neighbor had a chance to say anything, Cecilia got right to the point. “The reason I came over is because I was up in my apartment a few minutes ago, and I just happened to look out my bedroom window, which faces the third floor of your turret, and something caught my eye, and it looked like—”

She halted abruptly, not meaning to, but couldn’t quite get the words out. She wasn’t sure if it was because she feared Audrey would start to think she was nuts or because she feared
she
would start to think she was nuts. She tried again. “What I mean is, I was worried there might be someone in the house who shouldn’t be, and I wanted to check to be sure you’re okay. So . . . are you okay?”

Audrey’s eyes went wider the longer Cecilia spoke, and two bright spots of color that appeared on her cheeks grew redder. It was only then that Cecilia realized that what she’d worried might be someone in Audrey’s house was, in fact, someone in Audrey’s house. Like a man, maybe. Only he wasn’t there to do her harm. He was there at her invitation. That possibility had never occurred to Cecilia, since she’d forgotten what it was like to actually
want
a man around.

“Oh, jeez, I am so sorry,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t realize you were involved with someone. I mean, I
should
have realized you were involved with someone. I was just afraid that maybe that really was a break-in the other day after all, and maybe someone had broken in again, and I just wanted to be sure you were okay, and . . . and . . . and . . .”

By now, she was beginning to babble, and Audrey’s expression was changing from vaguely alarmed to fairly perturbed. Not that Cecilia blamed her. At the moment, she felt like the very definition of nosy neighbor.

“I’m really sorry,” she said again.

“You think I’m hiding a man upstairs?” Audrey asked in a tone of voice that indicated she found the idea insulting.

“Well, no,” Cecilia said. “I mean, I wouldn’t say he was actually hiding. He just wasn’t wholly visible, that was all.”

“I do
not
have a man in my house,” Audrey hotly denied. “I have a ghost.” Her irritation immediately became embarrassment, and she muttered, “I can’t believe I just said that out loud.”

Cecilia hesitated, then asked, “Why not?”

Audrey eyed her with wariness. “Because it makes me sound like a lunatic.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Now Audrey eyed her with something akin to relief. “It doesn’t?”

Cecilia shook her head. “Old Louisville is one of the most haunted neighborhoods in America. Didn’t you know that?”

Audrey shook her head.

“There are whole books about it. Your house is only one of dozens around here that have ghosts.”

Audrey’s relief now turned into suspicion. Though it might have been amusement. Cecilia had trouble telling those two things apart. Which was what had landed her with a jerk like Vincent to begin with, and why she had stayed with him as long as she had.

“It’s true.”

“You believe in ghosts?” Audrey asked.

Cecilia didn’t even have to think about that. “Sure. I used to live in a haunted house myself.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. After my grandmother died when I was a kid, my parents moved the three of us into her house. She stayed around for a long time after her death. Around dinnertime every Sunday, we’d smell fried chicken cooking. My grandmother always made fried chicken for Sunday dinner, but my parents never did. And sometimes, I’d wake up in the morning because I could hear her calling out—” She stopped abruptly, before saying the name with which she’d been born—Georgia—and which she could still hear her grandmother calling. “I could hear her calling out my name to wake me up,” she concluded. “There were other things, too,” she added. “But yeah. I believe in ghosts.”

“But you’ve never seen one?” Audrey asked.

“Not really,” Cecilia confessed. “I mean, there were times, especially when I was a teenager, when I caught a glimpse of something from the corner of my eye that I knew was Grandma Dorothy, but . . . No. I’ve never seen a ghost full-on.”

“And you’ve never spoken to one?”

“Oh, sure I’ve spoken to one,” Cecilia said. “I talked to Grandma Dorothy all the time. I still do.”

Audrey brightened at that. “What kind of things does she say to you?”

Now it was Cecilia’s turn to eye her neighbor with suspicion. “Well, she’s never actually answered back.”

Audrey deflated again. “Oh.”

“Well, not in so many words,” Cecilia amended. “But every now and then, I wake up to the smell of homemade doughnuts, which was what she used to make me for breakfast whenever I spent the night with her as a kid. Whenever I wake up smelling homemade doughnuts, I know it’s Grandma Dorothy telling me everything’s going to be okay.”

What Cecilia didn’t tell Audrey was that, the last time she woke up to the aroma of doughnuts was the morning after she moved into the apartment above Finn and Stephen. That was how she knew she was finally safe, that Vincent wouldn’t bother her anymore. She’d spent six months on the lam by then, zigzagging across the country in an effort to elude him, because she’d feared he would try to find her and bring her back.

She’d become friends with Stephen years ago, when he’d been an instructor at the culinary school she attended in San Francisco after graduating with a business degree from Berkeley. When she heard from mutual friends that he had a restaurant in Louisville, she’d looked him up on the Internet and invited herself to visit. She’d only intended to stay for a little while, make the stop here only one of dozens to add to her convoluted trail. But when she’d awoken that first morning to the aroma of Grandma Dorothy’s doughnuts, she’d known this was the place where she should stay. When Stephen and Finn offered her a job at their newly opened restaurant that very afternoon, she’d been convinced that fate—or maybe even Grandma Dorothy—had orchestrated the whole thing.

Of course, she’d had to give up the job within days of taking it since the kitchen staff was overwhelmingly male, but that was beside the point. The day after she’d told Finn and Stephen the facts about her flight from San Francisco and why she couldn’t continue working for them, she’d awoken to the smell of Grandma Dorothy’s doughnuts again. So she knew Louisville was where she should stay. She just wished she could find a way to stay here. Finn and Stephen had been great about her inability to pay rent some months, but Cecilia wasn’t the type to take advantage of her friends. One way or another, she was going to have to find a job here she could keep.

So, yes, she believed in ghosts. In fact, before she could stop herself, she told Audrey, “Besides, I’d be way more worried if you had a man in the house than I would be if you had a ghost.”

Now Audrey’s expression turned puzzled. “Why is that?”

Oh, damn
, Cecilia thought. No way was she going to open the door to a discussion on her feelings about the opposite sex. So she fumbled, “Just . . . um . . . ghosts don’t eat as much.” And then, to be sure they stayed off the subject of men, she added, “So do you know who it is haunting your house?”

“Oh, yeah,” Audrey said. “It’s a former owner and occupant. A Captain Silas Leyton Summerfield.”

“How did he die?”

Audrey looked thoughtful for a moment. “Old age, I imagine. I think he was in his nineties when he finally went.”

“So I guess he’s the one who made the mess the other day, huh?”

Audrey nodded. “He was mad because the house was so different from when he lived here.”

Cealia nodded sympathetically. “One of those petulant ghosts, huh?”

“
Petulant?
” a loud masculine voice boomed out of nowhere. “How dare you call me petulant, young woman? Have you no respect for your elders?”

At which point Cecilia was too busy jumping out of her skin to even know how to react. Other than to, you know, jump out of her skin. She wasn’t just scared because the voice was disembodied, but also because it was extremely close. Even scarier, it was male. She spun around quickly, but saw no one. Even so, she knew what she’d heard. A man’s voice. Which meant there must be a man around. Which meant it was way past time for her to be leaving.

She was about to announce that very thing—over her shoulder, as she sped toward the front door—when she heard Audrey say, “Damn. I keep forgetting he can be around even when you can’t see him.”

“Who?” Cecilia asked. Even though it was past time for her to be fleeing. Leaving. Whatever.

Audrey inhaled a deep breath and released it as a sigh that was clearly fatigued. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “That was my ghost,” she said softly. “Captain Summerfield.”

Cecilia’s mouth dropped open at that. Wow. Grandma Dorothy never sounded that good.

She didn’t realize she’d spoken her thoughts aloud until Audrey replied, “I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘good.’ He can get pretty irascible.”

“
Irascible?
” Silas boomed this time. “I’ll have you know, Mrs. Magill, that I was considered to be a very gregarious and genial man in my time.”

Audrey dropped her hand, met Cecilia’s gaze levelly, and then looked at something over Cecilia’s left shoulder. “Silas,” she said, “this is my neighbor, Cecilia Havens. Cecilia, Silas. You two should have a lot to talk about. Because, Cecilia, you’re looking at me as if I’m crazy, and, Silas, you’re about to drive me around the bend.”

 

SILAS GAZED AT THE NEWCOMER IN SILENCE FOR A
moment, not certain what to make of her. When she’d first approached the front door, he had thought she was much younger. He had also thought she was a man. Her hair was cropped shorter than most men of his generation—or any other generation, for that matter—and her attire . . . Well. Her attire was anything but feminine. For that matter, so was the rest of her. With her hair so choppily shorn the way it was, she looked like an inmate, though whether one confined to a prison or an asylum, he honestly couldn’t have said. There was an air of both mischief and madness about her, and not a little desperation. And although, upon closer inspection, he could see that she was considerably older than he initially thought, she was still a good score years younger than he.