The Ghost and Miss Demure (2 page)

A disconcerting clatter from the back of the car intruded abruptly on Karo’s brooding. Her left rear tire had flattened something large in the road. She checked her side-view mirror but the mud was too thick to be certain of what she was leaving behind. Whatever it was, it was long and tubular.

Damn!
She should stop and pick it up. This was littering, and spare parts were so expensive, even for cars as old as hers. On the other hand, the car was still running and it might not stay that way if she took her foot off the gas, especially with the battery being as old as it was. And, there was nowhere to turn around. And it couldn’t be anything important, like the transmission or engine, or the car wouldn’t still be working. She’d check the muffler later. Her father was always warning her about that.

Karo felt a different sting of guilt as she sped away. Dad loved this old Honda. He would die when he saw the way it had deteriorated. Maybe she could get it to a paint shop before he came to visit. It was only money, right? And how much could a coat of cheap paint be? But Dad would never be fooled by paint, no more than either of her parents were fooled by her carefully worded answering machine message. Mother had called back immediately, and her recorded sigh, captured by Karo’s machine, said all too clearly that
she did not believe her youngest daughter’s explanation about an exciting career opportunity. If Karo truly needed to dress up in costumes in order to enjoy her work, at least Williamstown had maintained a certain cache. If she wanted a change, why didn’t she just come home? They had jobs in California where she could wear a costume, like Sam’s Lobster House, where she had worked her last year of high school.

“Go home? When pigs ice skate,” Karo muttered, wiping at the window. Her defogger was on the fritz again. She’d promised to get it fixed last March but never got around to it.

Dad had called, too. As he did whenever he was concerned with one of his children, he gave detailed instructions on auto maintenance and road safety. He was discussing the muffler when time ran out, and now Karo felt doubly guilty for her car abuse and for worrying him enough to fill twenty minutes of recording time.

Well, why shouldn’t he worry?
Karo asked herself as she swerved around a chunk of road detritus and scraped some more paint from the bottom of her passenger door. She was a little worried, herself, but this job was one of those gift-horse things. A job in her field, more or less, that she was qualified for? That was a rare thing indeed. Who could refuse, even if the pay was minimal? At least she got room and board while mending her very sketchy resume. She might be a while, waiting for the Smithsonian to call with a real job offer now that she was notorious. Besides, Tristam English sounded like a very nice, very calm, very British, very honest employer. Everyone knew that the
English—in general, and hopefully in specific—were trustworthy, unemotional people. That was just what she needed.

After all, hadn’t she had enough of the romantic delusion that love in the form of a tall, handsome man with a reasonable degree of intelligence would come sweeping into her life and conquer all? Wasn’t her present predicament proof of the damage brought on by trusting someone because they had lovely eyes and were flirting with you and there was hope they might be able to fix your computer? Career and romance didn’t mix! That two-in-one economy pack was usually as bad as a sexually transmitted disease, and a hundred times more disastrous to the heart and wallet.

It didn’t matter that she had meant well by dating F. Christian, or that he’d spun her a sad tale about being so wrapped up in work that he had no time to meet interesting women. He never dated people in his office, he’d said; he was doing it just this once, because she was so smart and fascinating. She hadn’t suspected a thing when, after discussing the piece she was working on for an architectural magazine, F. Christian had volunteered to edit it. Add some impulsive screwups, and you had a slippery slope that never led to the kind of everlasting love her parents had found…or even to any kind of reasonable mental, financial or physical well-being. Why, the sound of his voice—the mere
memory
of the sound of his voice—made her want to do mean and mostly illegal things. She clearly had given F. Christian too much control over her emotions.

But that was all in the past. She’d had enough
of being low woman on the romantic and professional food chains. She was taking charge of her destiny. No man was ever going to screw with her life again.

Karo let up on the gas pedal as she went glissading around a blind curve in something approaching a true hydroplane, leaving a little more of her precious paint behind on the roadside bushes. She exhaled a shaky breath and wiped the film of sweat from her brow, knowing she had to get a grip. She couldn’t afford to go into a rage every time she thought about F.-fucking Christian. She had already broken her eyetooth bridge by grinding her jaw, and she couldn’t afford another nine hundred bucks for dental repairs. After all, her new employer hadn’t said anything about dental insurance. Did such a perk come with a guide/curator/secretarial-dogsbody job?

Still, it was hard to keep her temper as she thought about what a fool she’d made of herself. Did her IQ simply drop twenty—fifty!—points every time she got involved with a man who claimed to like smart women? Did the occasional red rose left on her desk destroy her reason? Why had she been the only person in Williamstown unaware of F.-fucking Merriweather’s reputation, and that he had his job only because his father bought it for him with huge annual grants to the society?

She unconsciously pushed down on the accelerator and fled another memory of the day she committed professional suicide; the Kodak-moment flashbacks seemed never ending. F. Christian
deserved
his bruised butt and bump on the noggin! If only the entire board hadn’t been standing behind
the buffet when she’d upended the potato salad on his head, it would have been grand. She could have had her revenge and no one would have ever known, because F. Christian wouldn’t have brought it up.

“Well, hell!” Karo beat her hands on the steering wheel. She had to stop reliving that awful moment. It would be the rubber room for sure if she continued to dwell on the fact that she was this decade’s main entrant for the Williamstown Hall of Infamy. It didn’t help her mental state that she felt belated shame about what she had done. Violence was never the answer, not even to snakes like F. Christian. Public executions had been banned for a century, at least, and she shouldn’t have ruined that party. Especially not if she wanted to be assigned to the visitors’ project, which had been her plan before she’d lost her mind.

Things weren’t a complete loss, though, Karo reminded herself grimly; she understood now why the Williamstown Historical Society wanted its employees to change clothes before leaving work. Real clothes could save a person a wealth of embarrassment out in the real world. She’d remember the lesson for the rest of her life. No one took the shrieking chambermaid seriously as she’d stomped through the lobby, raving; they had laughed uneasily at the slapstick routine instead of calling the police. The visiting professors had been very polite, too. Karo had to give them credit. Standing calmly in the ruins of the buffet, they had managed to pretend that it was an accident Karo had thrown the potato salad at her boss. Of course, what else could they do—laugh
at the man whose father patronized the foundation they were hoping would provide some financial backing for their latest project?

“That’ll be the day.” Karo aimed for a puddle, pretending it was F. Christian himself. She still couldn’t believe the rat fink had actually tried convincing her that they could continue their relationship—if she was willing to finish editing his crummy paper for the
Quarterly Historical Re-view
, and if she kept her mouth shut about him stealing her work. After all, wasn’t he her official supervisor? Most of her thoughts had only come to fruition because of his expert guidance, he’d insisted. She should be grateful that he was providing her with this learning experience.

The pain she’d felt was not in her heart, but in her head. Years of blinding scales had been scraped from her eyes like barnacles off a hull. The painful therapy had worked, too. She finally saw the reason for the emotional pressure F. Christian had been applying for the last six weeks. Those long-stemmed roses and dinner invitations weren’t the result of a late-blooming, soul-searing passion for his scholarly assistant; no, his daddy, F.-fucking Christian Merriweather Senior, had again started leaning on his son and heir to publish something, to start making a name for himself that wasn’t purchased with family money. Junior soul sucker had chosen her to be his savior.

He’d been using her for her research. The thought was disheartening. Karo felt emasculated, or whatever it was they did to women to take away their femaleness. She was unsexed. Didn’t anyone want to use her for her body? Why was it always
for her brains? She supposed she should be down on her knees that very instant, thanking the Lord that she had noticed the hair plugs and hidden emotional insecurity and hadn’t completely succumbed to F. Christian’s fine wine and blandishments when the pressure got intense, but she was stuck in her worn seat for another ten miles and would have to content herself with simply reminding herself of the bright side of the situation until she reached some place suitable for kneeling.

There was little of anything bright in the torrent outside, she saw, cracking her window a bit more, hoping to clear the fog from her windows. This storm was very weird. If she didn’t know such a thing was impossible, she would swear that she was being deliberately herded toward the woods. But that was just silly. Yes, she’d had some bad luck lately, but that didn’t mean the forces of nature were arrayed against her. Okay, so she’d imagine something bright and shiny until something real came along.

Well…there always was the shining fact that even if she’d stayed in the apprentice program, she would never have been promoted out of it. After all, a move to get rid of an assistant who could actually write when he, himself, couldn’t string two coherent sentences together would hardly benefit F. Christian—and he was the only one who could recommend her promotion. But that wasn’t much of a silver lining. In fact, the thought made her angrier than anything else about the situation. Trifling with her affections was bad. Trifling with her job was…Words failed. Her
parents hadn’t taught her enough vile terminology to cover a situation like this.

Driving Route 5 through a bad storm was a semi-insane act, but escaping the city limits cheered Karo considerably. On some level, she was actually enjoying her rage. Her perkiness quotient was nowhere near her mother’s natural level, but she was feeling better with every mile she put behind her and those burned bridges. So what if the wind was screaming like damned souls denied the joys of paradise? It seemed reasonable to her that the storm would howl with sympathy.

Yes, she had made the right decision. There was no reason why working at this new job couldn’t be an exciting if somewhat lonely opportunity. And as for the lack of company on the job…well, if she got lonesome and felt her IQ begin to slip around her new boss, she would go out and buy a hamster or a dog. Animals were very loving, and they didn’t care if you had brains instead of big blonde hair and bigger boobs. And even with vet bills, they couldn’t possibly be as expensive as changing careers.

Also, maybe, if she could keep a job for six or eight months, she’d finally be able to trade up to a newer, single color car with all the extras—like a muffler and a working defogger.

“It is required of every man,” the ghost returned,
“that the spirit within him should walk abroad
among his fellow men, and travel far and wide;
and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is
condemned to do so after death.”

—Charles Dickens from
A Christmas Carol

Tristam English looked up from his desk and realized that the impossible East Coast weather had actually grown worse in the last hour.

“Bloody hell!” He hit the red power switch on his desk radio and listened to the update. The broadcaster’s message, though delivered with relish, was unnecessary; Tristam could hear more than enough proof that a strong storm was racing by at seventy miles per.

At first Hurricane Paula had been only a faint flicker to the west of the Chesapeake, and the rumble that followed was barely louder than the wind tossing the boughs of the tattered birches against the garret windows. But the autumn storm that should have passed to the south had unexpectedly changed its destination. Instead, she had defied all predictions of staying below the Carolinas and had veered north where she was rolling ruthlessly toward the Virginia interior.

Tristam first heard about Paula’s change of plans
on the noon news: a special edition lasting two hours, all of it talking about the murderous storm and the billions of dollars of damage she could do. The litany of disaster to the south had been impressive. The hurricane may have been officially downgraded to a mere tropical storm, but she didn’t seem to realize that she was supposed to be losing her fortitude as she headed in over land. Whatever the weather boffins chose to call this meteorological disruption, the lightning strikes that followed in Paula’s wake were managing to take Virginia’s wooden giants, the chestnuts and birches and oaks, and blast them out of existence in the blinking of an eye. As an added oddity, several cemeteries had also been hit, causing damage to large mausoleums and splitting headstones into rubble.

Unfortunately for Tristam, the James River and the Belle Ange plantation were currently in the way of Paula’s meteorological whimsy. He could only be grateful that the estate was located on inferior real estate that was far from the rising river’s angry water; the official opening date did not allow for repairing flood damage.

He put down the odd whip he’d been examining and walked over to the balcony. The suicide doors were opened to the rain and wind. Welcoming weather indoors was not a practice he often followed back home, but with temperatures on the third floor in the high eighties and the humidity near one hundred percent, the thought of closing off the only ventilation was unbearable. He didn’t know how his American cousins endured this bloody climate. England and Germany saw temperatures
in the eighties on rare occasion, but not when it was about to begin raining like a flood at the end of the world.

He glanced down at his watch and frowned. His new assistant hadn’t arrived yet, and he didn’t have a cell phone number for her. Normally he would not be concerned at the lack of punctuality. They hadn’t set an exact time—just “around noon”—and the drive from old Williamstown was a lovely one that encouraged dawdling and gawking at the splendid scarlet and gold colors of the area’s strangely premature fall. But the weather had worsened considerably since he had last spoken with the clear-voiced Karo Follett, and he couldn’t imagine that she was dallying for sightseeing purposes on such an unpleasant afternoon. The roads to Belle Ange were narrow and twisting, and the birch trees offered only intermittent protection from the buffeting winds. Nor did he care for the look of the advancing pyrotechnics that were lighting up the four o’clock sky and limning the trees with white fire. It was going to be quite a show, and he would feel better if his employee saw it from indoors.

No sooner was that thought conceived than Paula obliged by upending an ocean over the house. The rain went rapidly from autumnal shower to biblical deluge, the sort of downpour that must have stampeded Noah and his beasts into their ark. Visibility would be down to nothing on the roads, and there might even be flooding in the streams that crisscrossed it at intervals. He sincerely hoped that Karo Follett had the good sense to pull off on some high ground and wait
out the storm. It seemed wrong that he was resting on a velvet settee—albeit a somewhat moth-eaten one—when the young woman belonging to that soft, sexy voice was lost in the stormy confusion outside.

Karo searched the gloomy woods and was finally rewarded with the sight of a carriage drive. Even in the downpour, it would have been hard to miss the twin Gothic pillars topped with squatting gargoyles; they flanked the wrought-iron gate someone had thoughtfully left open for her now very late arrival.

As the intensity of the rain diminished, Karo was able to make out her surroundings in the pervasive gray light of the stormy afternoon. Things were definitely looking up. She had lost some more of her paint and a bumper about forty minutes and ten miles back when a newborn stream had sluiced past directly in front of the Honda and nearly taken her on an unscheduled cruise down the James. The trip had been stopped only by an old oak tree, which had also relieved her of her fender and her side-view mirror. But now she was in the home stretch and she was surprised—and thrilled, frankly—by the sight of the two stone urns lying in the deep, shadowed niches carved in the ancient gateposts.

She was prepared to swear that the pyxis were originals and not cement copies. And that they were Italian, not Greek, though they looked to be decorated with blind muses of Greek mythology who wept eternally for the death of art and beauty and for whoever was inside the urn. They were
ridiculously out of place on the abandoned, overgrown road…but what a welcome portent! If Belle Ange could afford to put real antiques at the carriage gate, there was no telling what treasures might be waiting inside the house. The urge to burn rubber all the way to the mansion and seek shelter in a sturdy, rain-proof house was tempting. But, those pyxis! Could they be real, or were they just more of fate’s recent cruel tricks?

Come out, come out, wherever you are
, a little voice whispered in her head. It was scary because the voice sounded masculine. Was her inner voice a male?

Too intrigued by the funeral urns to simply drive past, Karo obeyed her sudden mad compulsion to stop and leave the car. Forgetting about the crotchety battery, she stopped the Honda and climbed out into the drizzle. Just one little peek, she promised herself as she unfolded her cell phone and prepared to take a picture, and then she’d head for the house. She was already very late for her meeting with her new boss; another minute wouldn’t matter. And she really wanted to know if the urns were a cheat or a promise of great things to come.

Closer, closer, you’re almost there
.

Her footsteps were loud in the cracked shells that paved the drive around the ornate fortifications as she carelessly crunched across the sea’s old bones in her delicate loafers. The smell of electricity was strong in the air. It made her skin prickle and stirred the fine hairs on her nape. The damp heat was straight from the tropics, but she would only be in the wet for a moment. Just
long enough to see if the pyxis were really Italian, and then the barely functioning air conditioner could have its way with her clothes and hair.

She was within an arm’s length of the elaborate wrought-iron fence when the storm let go with a final barrage. The light and sound of the strike were simultaneous, and Karo’s short scream was drowned out by the thunderclap that tore the atmosphere in twain. She was hurled to the ground by a giant white hand, too stunned to move though her face was in a puddle of water. She had taken a picture, but whether it was of the urn or of trees rushing by, she did not know.

Through the blackness in her eyes, she sensed movement in the harsh vibration of the road under her as the lethal shockwave passed beneath her prone body, and something large fell to the ground with a resounding thump. Her eyes were open, she was sure, but she was unable to see or hear anything. The lightning strike had left her blind, deaf and numbed, a helpless target for the renewed rain falling around her in a thousand stinging drops. All she could do was cover her face and cower under the onslaught until the world stopped spinning. Her phone was clutched tight in her hand.

Eventually the world stilled, more of her senses returned and she was able to roll over and stagger to her feet. She put her phone in her pants pocket. The nerve endings in her fingertips tingled violently as she clasped them to her still sightless eyes. Her cheeks were caked with grit and her eyelids burned with sudden, scalding tears as they tried to dislodge the dust paste in and around them.

“Oh, God! Am I dead?”

She clutched blindly at her chest. Her heart was still beating, wasn’t it? Yes, there it was, pumping like an insufflator on an old engine. But her eyes! Why couldn’t she see? Hadn’t she read somewhere that a lightning strike was five times hotter than the surface of the sun?

Before she could begin to truly panic, her baby blues had worked up a good cry, and they began to wash the dirt and calcium away. Karo hung her dizzy head and let her tear ducts have their way, and her vision slowly cleared enough to see that her shoes had more chalk on them than Minnesota Fats’s favorite pool cue. One of them even had a hole punched through the toe like a summer sandal! Another pair of Italy’s second finest had bitten the dust, literally. She looked like she’d been wading in wet cement.

She cried harder. So much for that old chestnut about the benefits of dressing for success! What was the point in investing in expensive footwear if Mother Nature was going to spit on it? Wasn’t she in enough trouble already? Now she had to face her boss looking like a dirty snowman.

A good cry for her loafers’ destruction drove back her panic to bearable levels and she began to feel more competent. Karo wiped her face on a clean bit of sleeve and began to consider other important things.

“Well, hell,” she muttered, looking beyond the end of her white feet.

It soon became evident what had happened. Lighting had struck at the old dogwood that leaned on the gatepost and snapped it like kindling. The
charred remains lay shattered and smoking only a few feet away. The tree trunk was toast. The road around her looked like the aftermath of an explosion from a howitzer round. Seashells were blown yards clear from the fresh red scar plowed in the topsoil.

Karo stood utterly still, her damaged shoes forgotten. She was numbly grateful that the lightning hadn’t actually struck her, as she had assumed in those first blinding moments, but holy moley and all the apostles! It had been close. Of course, getting crispy-crittered would only have been what she deserved for being such a moron as to be caught standing by an iron gate in a lightning storm.

She took a shaky breath. When she felt a little better, she would kick herself for being volatile and frivolous—and treasure hungry—during a hurricane. At the moment she was too cold and tired to punish herself further.

Taking a minute to inventory her tender body, she was relieved to see only minor scrapes and bruises. She hadn’t even torn her clothes, although they were now very wet and dirty. No osteoporosis for her jeans, she thought wryly; they’d just absorbed enough calcium to stave off brittle bones forever.

Except for the ringing in her ears and the odd painful tingling in her hands and feet, she was back on her feet and ready to roll—this time at a reasonable speed. If she could get past the poor blasted tree that was blocking the drive.

Karo stared at the burned offering with growing consternation. It was still smoking, and it
looked awfully big and flammable to try moving on her own. She could try nudging it with the car, but what if it wedged under the engine and the fuel lines caught fire? She didn’t need her dad to tell her that she might not survive a second explosion.

She wiped her hands carefully on the sides of her pants, frowned at the new white smears on the palms and tried to decide what to do. Fact number one: The road was completely blocked by the smoldering remains, and she couldn’t move them without some extra muscles and asbestos gloves. Fact number two: She was shaking like the proverbial leaf, and cognizant enough to realize that she was shivering because she was suffering from shock and cold. Which was an important fact. What had they said in her CPR class about treating shock? Get the victim warm and elevate the feet. That was it. The day’s temperatures were in the high eighties, but she needed to get warmer. It seemed scarcely feasible, but she had to try.

Karo walked slowly back to the Honda and climbed in through the open door. The seat was wet on the left side and the old sheepskin smelled like a barnyard. Had she left the door unlatched and maybe the wind had blown it open? Surely she hadn’t been so careless as to walk off into the rain and leave it standing wide…

What was she doing? Oh, yeah. Getting warm.

She started the engine without any trouble and turned the heater up to high and only then remembered to close the door. Soon the interior was warmer than the outside, and Karo began to dry out. As the cold receded from her quivering limbs,
she was able to let go her grip on the steering wheel and to think more clearly about what should be done.

The only option that she could see was to walk up the carriage drive. Belle Ange couldn’t be that far away now, and even it was, there was certainly nothing on the road behind her for at least eight miles. She should also be safe from lightning once she was away from the gate. How could the storm find one lone Yankee down among all these trees? There were plenty of other things to draw Paula’s fire if she was still hanging around looking for a target. The thing to do was to get away from her car and the gates. All that metal was just asking for trouble.

Despite her pep talk, Karo sat unmoving for several more minutes, staring at the path beyond the smoking dogwood, feeling oddly reluctant to travel any farther up the gloomy tunnel of foliage. She hadn’t noticed before, because of her excitement with the urns, but it was dark down there, with a premature twilight that belonged in a monster movie, and badly overgrown with clawing bushes that probably hosted spines and spiders. It was, in a word, spooky. Which was to be expected, she supposed, at this time year. Though Virginia had a kinder and slower onrush of winter than the north, Fall was still the season of dying and haunted things.