Shades of Midnight (12 page)

Still, he wondered if Eve knew about Miss Gertrude's past history with Alistair. If not, she would be livid that he'd been the one to discover the tidbit she'd missed.

He wanted to come up with a way to discretely ask more questions about Alistair Stamper, but they were interrupted by a blur of denim and blue cotton, by stampeding feet and a head of bouncing pale curls.

"Chester Taylor!" Miss Gertrude said sharply. "Where are your manners?"

The little boy, who appeared to be somewhere around ten years old, stopped by the sideboard and grabbed a biscuit. "Sorry, Aunt Gertrude. If I stop to have good manners, I'll be late for school." He split the biscuit expertly and reached past his aunt for the preserves.

"Mr. Thorpe, this is my nephew Chester. My great nephew, actually. He's my sister Agnes's second oldest daughter Ruth's third-born son."

The explanation gave Lucien a headache, but he got the general idea. "Nice to meet you, Chester," he said. "Don't eat all the preserves."

"Don't worry," the boy said as he cast Lucien a quick glance. "Aunt Gertrude always has more." He lowered his voice. "My mom makes terrible biscuits. If I don't stop by here on my way to school, I'm starving by lunchtime!" With that, he took his biscuit which oozed peach preserves, and ran, yelling, "Thanks for the breakfast!" as he reached the door.

Lucien's plate and his coffee cup were empty. Miss Gertrude offered more but he declined, anxious to be on his way. He wondered if Eve was up and about or if he'd surprise her still warm and snug in her bed.

As he stood, so did his landlady. "I'm sorry to have burdened you with such old gossip," she said, smiling halfheartedly. "I don't know why I said so much. You just have that kind of face, I suppose."

"What sort of face is that?"

"A kind face. The sort of face that's easy to talk to." Her smile faded. "I would appreciate it if you kept our breakfast conversation in this room. You keep my confidence, I keep yours."

"Of course, if that's what you wish," Lucien said. "But why? Surely anyone who was here in Plummerville when the Stampers died knows that you were once engaged to Alistair. It's not like the betrothal was a secret."

Miss Gertrude went pale and she turned her back on him, mumbling something about a pot on the stove as she hurried to the kitchen.

* * *

"First of all," Eve said, half asleep and annoyed that Lucien's knock had awakened her, "you do not have an easy face to talk to. Miss Gertrude simply doesn't know when to be quiet. She talks constantly, and to anyone who will listen."

"But..."

"And besides, if she and Alistair had really been engaged at one time, I would have heard it by now. Someone would have told me."

"Not if it was a secret," Lucien argued.

Eve threw up her hands. "A secret engagement no one else in town has ever heard of! Really, Lucien, you are so gullible."

"I am not!"

Eve shook her head. "You are. Miss Gertrude is a lonely old woman who loves to talk. You were there, you listened." She shrugged her shoulders. "She told you a fanciful story, nothing more."

"You didn't see the expression on her face."

Eve closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

"She said Viola was seeing more than one other man."

Eve's eyes flew open. "No! That's not possible."

"Why not?" Lucien asked sensibly.

"It's just... not." Eve felt herself blush. "Why can't you simply accept that things here happened exactly as they appeared to? Viola made a mistake. Alistair pretended to forgive her, but in fact he did
not.
He seduced her, and then he killed her." Her hands worked as she spoke. "Alistair could not forgive her one indiscretion, and yet Viola continues to love the man who murdered her! How could she?"

Lucien smiled. "Perhaps she is simply a woman who has more mercy than vitriol in her heart."

Eve's lips pinched together. Was he trying to say that
she
had no mercy? That she was filled with vitriol? Ha. She could be as merciful as any woman! "What are you grinning at?"

Lucien's smile didn't waver. "You look particularly lovely in the morning."

Eve had glanced at her reflection in the hallway mirror as she'd hurried to answer his knock, and knew better. "Sarcasm does not become you, Lucien."

"I'm perfectly serious. Your hair curls around your face going this way and that, your cheeks are a lovely pink, your eyes are dreamy and, if possible, more green than I remember." His smile faded. "And that particularly ugly and cumbersome wrapper cannot disguise the fact that you are not wearing a corset. You look so soft and..."

"Lucien!" she interrupted, grasping the lapels of her wrapper and pulling them together and up to her chin.

"It's the truth, Evie."

She didn't know whether to argue with him or run up the stairs. He didn't give her a chance to do either, but collected his specter-o-meter from the corner near the window and dropped to the floor to examine once again the damaged needle. She could swear that he cradled that device every bit as tenderly as he'd cradled her.

She moved to stand behind him, while he fiddled with his contraption. "Why are you so intent on proving that Alistair didn't kill Viola?"

"Perhaps the truth needs to come out before they can move on."

"The truth has been apparent for thirty years," she said sensibly.

"Then why are Alistair and Viola trapped here?"

"Because... because Alistair betrayed Viola and she cannot forgive him."

"You said she still loves him, even though she believes he killed her."

"She does, but... but..."

He lifted his head. "Can't we simply accept that there is the slight possibility that Alistair did not kill his wife and himself?"

Eve wrinkled her nose. "I suppose I could concede to a
slight
possibility."

"That's all I ask. We must approach this with open minds. Anything at all is possible. What do you have planned for today?"

He was looking at her that way again, as he had in the entryway a few minutes ago. He saw too much, he saw too
deep.
Time to run upstairs and get herself properly coiffed and armored for the day.

"I'd like to pay a call on the preacher."

Lucien's smug expression changed subtly. Preachers rarely understood or appreciated his talents. She had seen Lucien in church before, had seen him pray. But he always sat in the back pew and remained quiet, and he steered clear of personal contact with the preachers. She suspected that something had happened, before she met him. Something that made him leery of men of the cloth.

"You don't have to go with me," she said, trying to appear nonchalant. "It's not like there's anything you can do, and besides, it would be better if we weren't seen together in town."

"Why?"

"Lucien!"

He continued to stare at her. "It doesn't matter. I already told Miss Gertrude that we were going to get married."

"You did
what?"
She grabbed the closest thing to her and threw it at the man sitting on the floor. Luckily for Lucien, it was a soft afghan he caught and set aside. "Half the people in town have heard that rumor by now! Miss Gertrude is the biggest gossip in Plummerville!"

"When you insisted that I stay there rather than sleep on your couch," he said calmly, "you didn't share that bit of information."

"Oh!" She grabbed something else to throw, then glanced down at her mother's hand-painted vase and thought better of it. She placed the vase carefully on the end table by the sofa.

"If it makes you feel any better, I did tell her that you had not yet said yes." He returned his attention to the specter-o-meter. "My diligent pursuit will explain away my persistent presence and the fact that I might be seen following you doggedly around town."

His presence did have to be explained away somehow, and a persistent suitor was better than a ghost chaser, she supposed. But there was always Justina Markham.

Who had apparently told no one but Douglas Hunt that the spirits of Alistair and Viola lived on in this house. If the rumors of ghostly hauntings had begun, Lucien would have heard from his landlady. And Eve would have had people knocking on her door by sunset last night. Curious.

"If we're going to track down the reverend, perhaps you should get dressed," Lucien suggested absently.

Chapter 8

In the past Eve had always been so objective when it came to a haunting that Lucien could not believe her stubborn insistence that in this case he was
wrong.
She had either lost all sense of neutrality, since the haunted house in question was hers, or she had changed considerably in the past two years.

Then again, perhaps she simply enjoyed arguing with him. If he said the sky was blue, would she insist it was actually as green as the plain day dress she wore? If he informed her that the month was October, would she argue that it was really November?

They hadn't said much on their trek to Plummerville, taking a route he was getting disgustingly familiar with. It wasn't an unbearably long walk, but Eve did live at the edge of town. Thirty years ago, it had surely been even more secluded. And there Viola had been, perhaps lonely and too far from her friends for her liking. Did she feel isolated in that cottage her husband had built for her? Trapped? Was she so achingly lonely that she was easy prey for any man? He had a hard time seeing Viola as a hussy, as Miss Gertrude had so unkindly called her, but in truth they knew very little about her. And if she had been truly lonely, anything was possible.

Lucien knew what it was like to be lonely. As a child, even his own mother had shunned him. In fact, she had been afraid of him, and as a child he had not understood why. Not until much later, years after her death, and even then understanding had been difficult. The mind of a child could not grasp why a mother would look at her own son that way, why she would sometimes flinch when he came near.

And now... spirits often visited their loved ones, watched over them unseen, reached out a silent, invisible hand of comfort. Lucien saw these spirits. He felt their presence and the warm light of love. He never saw his own mother. Was she afraid of him still?

He had lived his life as an oddity, and at one point he had convinced himself he was insane. It was a logical explanation, and at the time—he'd been sixteen, orphaned and confused, and his stepfather of three years wanted nothing to do with him—he'd actually preferred the concept of insanity to admitting that the ghosts who presented themselves to him were real.

Hugh Felder had saved Lucien's life and his sanity, teaching him how to control his gift, convincing him that it
was
a gift. And still, Lucien was always searching for a way to scientifically explain away his abilities. He was convinced that somehow scientific proof would make things better. That if he could explain what he saw in a logical and methodical manner, he would no longer be considered an oddity.

He owed Hugh so much, more than he could ever repay. The man had quickly become the father Lucien had never known. Hugh Felder had saved Lucien's life and his sanity, taught him how to use what he'd been given, and introduced him to Eve.

The only time in his life that he had truly not been lonely had been his too-short time with Eve. She didn't see what he did—at least not usually—and still she understood. She was his in a way he had never expected a woman to be; she had the power to push away the loneliness forever... and he had ruined everything by letting a date slip by. So simple. So stupid.

"You don't have to go with me," Eve said as Plummerville's main street loomed before them. Was it his imagination, or was her voice softer than before? Kinder? "I know you don't care much for churches."

"I love churches," he argued. "The most magnificent architecture in the world can be seen in houses of worship. They're usually the grandest buildings in town." He gestured to the spiraling bell tower at the opposite end of Plummerville. "Is that it?"

"Yes," she said. "That's the Baptist church. The Methodist church is newer, and they haven't yet raised the money to build a bell tower."

"They will," he said, squinting at what he could see of the stately structure that was their destination.