There's Always Plan B (10 page)

Carly
clutched the arms of her chair. “No one is going to ruin us. I won't let him. Besides, there was something once. I remember seeing things, feeling a presence. Maribel felt it, too.”

Rhonda sat down and took her hands. “I know you think you did. When you were little we talked about Mary all the time and I think that made her real to you. But anything you saw was just our usual tricks.”

“What?” Carly pulled free and stood. “What tricks? I'll admit believing in ghosts is a stretch of the imagination, but I saw her. Or something shimmery. I saw her walk through walls. I heard her voice.”

Rhonda sighed. “I'm so sorry. I never meant for this to hurt you. The stories about the house being haunted have existed for as long as the house has been here. I remember hearing them when I was growing up. People were always interested in the fact that the place was haunted and the family has kept that interest going. It's good for business.”

Carly felt odd defending the fact the house was haunted when she wasn't a hundred percent convinced. But she wasn't willing to reject the possibility. “But over the years, dozens of people have tried to prove there's no ghost and they've all walked away believers.”

“I know. There are things that can be done to make people believe. Our family has been fooling the public forever. But it's not real. It's never been real. What you're remembering is all the stories, Carly. What we talked about. Mary isn't real and the house has never been haunted.”

She didn't want to hear any of this, so she excused herself and walked out of the office. As she moved down the hallway, she studied moldings and doorways and antique pictures. What had, just a few minutes before, seemed charmingly eccentric, now just looked old and dusty. She felt the walls beginning to close in on her.

Carly walked to the edge of the property and stood staring out at the sun sinking over the ocean. The waves were orange and red and gold, the sky nearly white. It was breathtakingly beautiful, but all she could think was that she couldn't take one more kick in the teeth.

She'd lived through an unhappy marriage, staying because she thought it was the right thing to do. She'd endured a divorce, the loss of most of her friends, selling her house and furniture, a move here, only to find out the B and B wasn't going to be a haven after all. By God, she would
not
give up her ghost.

As soon as the thought formed, she felt her lips twitch. Then she started to laugh.
Giving up the ghost.
She'd never understood what the expression meant, and still didn't, but it was appropriate. She wasn't giving up on Mary.

Maybe it hadn't been real to anyone else, but it had been real to her. She wouldn't allow some would-be ghostbuster to take that away from her.

She returned to the house and found her mother in her room.

“What do you mean, you faked Mary,” Carly asked. “How come I remember stuff?”

Her mother shook her head. “Your father and I used to fight about your belief in the ghost. I wanted to tell you the truth, but he thought it was charming. And he did a lot of things to convince you she was real.”

Carly suddenly understood Tiffany's emotional outbursts at the unfairness of her world when the grown-ups around her did their best to destroy her happiness.

“No,” she said, trying to stay calm, but feeling panic build. “Daddy would never have lied to me.”

“It wasn't a lie, Carly. It was…something to make you feel special. Come with me.”

Her mother led her to the tower Carly had always escaped to when she'd been a kid. They climbed the stairs to the dusty room where Carly had curled up to read. But instead of going inside, her mother showed her a small secret compartment in a wall. After pressing a hidden latch, the door swung open, revealing a kind of slide projector. As Carly watched, her mother turned it on.

“Go back into the tower room,” Rhonda told her.

Carly hesitated, then did as she asked. Shock swept through her as she realized a shimmering presence stood gracefully in the corner of the room.

“Mary,” she breathed as sharp disappointment cut through her. It wasn't real. None of it had been real.

“There are three or four slides,” her mother said. “Your father would use different ones at different times. He worried you were too solitary, and having Mary around gave you a friend.”

Carly couldn't believe it. She returned to the hallway. “What else did he do?”

Rhonda turned off the projector. “There are dozens of tricks. We have specially prepared rooms for nonbelievers where we can change the temperature at will. We can mist their room so they feel a chilly presence. There are tables that tilt, walls that rotate. I'll show you everything before this Adam Covell arrives. I'm sure we can convince him just like we've convinced the others.”

“Okay. Yeah. We should probably talk about it,” Carly said, still surprised by all the trickery. “Thanks for showing me this.”

“Are you all right?” her mother asked.

“Fine.” Not really, but what was she going to say? “I'm going back to my office. See you in the morning.”

She left her mother in the tower and made her way downstairs.

Intellectually she understood the pain of learning that Mary wasn't real came from a whole lot more than just the loss of a memory. It was the final straw in what had been an emotionally difficult year.

But it didn't feel that way. Disappointment threatened to crush her.

She'd been walking around wondering when Mary was going to show up. She'd called out to her several times and had even started investigating ways to get a ghost to appear. All of which made her feel stupid. She'd been so sure. She'd depended on the reality of having a ghost. She'd—

Carly walked from her office to the side door, then made her way back to the cliffs. Once there, she turned back. The massive old house rose four stories into the evening sky. Huge and beautiful and very, very expensive to keep going.

Disappointment flared into anger. Without the ghost, she didn't have a viable business. She'd been selling Chatsworth-by-the-Sea as a haunted B and B. No one was all that interested in a slightly rundown, very old, former English manor. Without Mary, they were sunk.

Carly might have come here because she didn't have any other choice, but now she was committed. She liked the house and she liked the idea of returning to her roots. After nearly six weeks of hard work, she'd seen plenty of progress. No way was she going to uproot Tiffany and start over in some other place all because of a hotshot guy who thought he was Bill Murray in
Ghostbusters.

“There is no way in hell you're taking this away from me, Adam Covell.”

 

Carly found her mother in her private sitting room. Tiffany sat next to her on the small chintz-covered sofa. Her daughter's forlorn expression told Carly that she'd been given the news.

“You said we've been fooling other ghostbusters for years,” Carly said.

“Oh, there are dozens of ways. There's an old journal full of ideas. I can't remember more than what I told you. Give me a second.”

She rose and walked into her bedroom. A few minutes later, she appeared with an old wooden box. “It's all in here.”

Carly took the box. “I'm going to find out all I can about our guest and figure out what we can do to defeat him. The success of the B and B depends on us being haunted.”

Tiffany's eyes widened. “You're going to lie about Mary?”

“If I have to. It's a matter of survival, and apparently there's a long tradition of it in this family.” She clutched the box tightly to her chest. “Tomorrow, as soon as you get home from school, we'll have a family meeting and figure out a plan. Between now and then, I'll go over what's in here and check out this Adam guy on the Internet. Fair enough?”

Tiffany and her grandmother nodded. “We'll be there,” Rhonda said. “We'll be ready to kick some ass.”

 

Jack joined their meeting the following afternoon. Carly wasn't sure about discussing such a sensitive issue in front of him, but he insisted on being a part of things.

“I can help,” he told her. “I know technology. Maybe I can come up with some ideas or figure out ways to make them work. Please?”

He looked so serious and sincere, she thought wistfully. But what really sold her was Tiffany's pleading expression. After all, fooling Adam would allow her to spend time with Jack, which wasn't exactly as good as dating, but pretty close.

Carly set her papers down on the coffee table in front of the sofa in the rear parlor they'd temporarily taken over.

“Technical help would be nice,” she said. “As you all know, we get most of our business because we're haunted. We're featured on the national ghost registry as a haunting that has never been disproved. It's like getting a five-star safety rating. But if one of the top ghostbusters disproves the haunting, we're removed from the registry and marked as a hoax. Not good for our bottom line.”

“No kidding,” Jack said.

“What are we going to do?” Tiffany asked.

“Fight back. I spent a lot of time on the Internet, and Adam Covell is going to be difficult to defeat. Apparently he comes from a long line of people interested in debunking rumors about paranormal phenomenon. His grandfather made a living doing it and wrote a lot of books.” She held up the one she'd checked out of the library that morning.

“I couldn't find out very much on Adam himself,” she continued. “He doesn't do this with the same enthusiasm as his grandfather, but he's just as deadly. He wrote papers on two supposedly haunted houses in Virginia. One was a restaurant and the other an inn. Both closed within a year of his report.”

Rhonda caught her breath. “A year? We can't let that happen. Carly, did you go over those papers I gave you?”

“Every one of them.” She set the box on the table. “We're going to assign Adam to the special bedroom. It's been fitted with two secret entrances, a misting system and its own heating and cooling units.”

“Why?” Tiffany asked. “What will that do?”

“The heating and cooling will allow for fast temperature changes,” Jack said eagerly. “Misting him will give him a chill. And you can use the secret entrances to take stuff in and out of his room.” He looked at Carly. “Is that right?”

“Yes. It's exactly right. We want to keep Mr. Covell on his toes.”

“Can we poison him?” Rhonda asked.

Carly stared at her mother. “What are you talking about? We want him impressed, not dead.”

“Oh, I didn't mean kill him. But if he had an upset stomach the whole time he was here, he couldn't do his best work.”

Fooling a man was one thing, but compromising his health was another. “No poison,” Carly said firmly. “Our goal is make sure our guest believes he's been thoroughly haunted. Then he'll go away and we can get on with our lives.”

They talked for another half hour. Carly passed out assignments, including several for herself. She wanted to make sure the special equipment was in working order.

When she was alone in the parlor, she drew in a deep breath. As much as she knew she had to convince Adam there was a ghost, a part of her simply wanted to give up and cry. How could she have lost such an important part of her past so easily?

She supposed that in the scheme of things, believing in a ghost in the first place was a little stupid. No one else did. But Mary had been a part of her memories for a long time. She'd accepted her because, to Carly, she'd existed.

And now she'd not only lost someone she'd thought of as a friend, but she might be losing the B and B.

“Not gonna happen,” she told herself. They had a plan. More important, they had desperation on their side. She was reminded of the old story about a rabbit being chased by a hound. When the rabbit got away, the hound was teased for being too slow. He'd pointed out that while he'd been running for his supper, the rabbit had been running for its life. She and her family were the rabbit and there was no way in hell that hound was going to catch them.

 

“Do you like it?” Tiffany asked anxiously.

Carly picked through the cheerful basket of office supplies her daughter had bought for her. “I love everything,” she said with a laugh. “You know I can't resist things like folders and paper clips.”

They sat at a table, outside, facing the ocean. The afternoon was warm, the sky a blue only found on the California coast. After a late lunch of all of Carly's favorites, they'd moved on to celebrating her fortieth birthday with presents and a large cake.

Carly fingered the gold bracelet her mother had bought her. The delicate links made her feel feminine—a nice change from her constant attempts to be businesslike and in charge. She'd been concerned that finding herself almost divorced, alone and forty would be too depressing for words, but so far she was doing fine.