Someone to Love (12 page)

She put her arms in the damp shirt and hated the way she loved the feel of it, the smell of it. What was more enticing than a warm, sweaty male?

She grabbed a vine and pulled, and when it didn’t come away, she cut, then pulled harder.

“Hey!” Jace yelled. “Leave something for me to do. And where did all this energy come from? Was it something I said?”

Nigh had a vision of being followed around the village by people talking to her about their schemes to make money in a “Ghost Center.” “So what have you and Dead Ann been up to this afternoon?” she asked with as much sarcasm as she could put in her voice.

“Haven’t seen her,” he said as he pulled the last of the vines away from the column. “She’s angry at me. In fact, she nearly killed me. Took my breath away until I turned blue. Another few seconds and I would have been able to join her.”

Nigh quit cutting and pulling to look at him. “Killed you? Took your breath away? I thought maybe you saw her walk through a wall or something. Or heard her. You’re having…relations with her?”

“I guess you could call it that. Here, do that one next,” he said, pointing to a column that was so covered you could hardly see the white marble beneath.

Nigh cut for a few minutes, waiting for him to go on, but he said nothing. “Is that it? Are you going to tell me more or not?”

“Am I going to see it in the newspaper tomorrow? By the way, can you make a living from such a small newspaper?”

Nigh opened her mouth to tell him about her career, but she closed it again. He had secrets; she had secrets. Only hers were pretty public if he’d bother to ask anyone about her. “No, you won’t see it in the newspaper. If you did, what would you do to me?”

“I’d do something creative, something to fit the crime.”

She waited, but when he again said nothing, she leaned against the column and started cleaning her nails with the tip of the shears.

Jace laughed. “Okay, I saw her under some unusual circumstances and I wanted to see her again, so I decided to…well, to court her. Entice her, make her want to visit me again.”

Nigh started cutting vines. “Go on. Don’t make me beg. Talk!”

“When I saw her in her room, I—”

“Saw her? How did you see her? Is she transparent?”

“You want this story or that one?”

“Both of them. I want to hear every word of all of it. From the beginning.”

“That will take hours.”

“I have nothing else to do, do you?” she asked.

“Not a thing,” Jace said as he pulled on the vine Nigh had cut away. “You aren’t hungry, are you?”

“Starving. But then you did invite me to dinner.”

“Ohhhhh,” he said, and smiled as he looked her up and down. She knew that he saw what she’d been expecting and why she’d dressed up. “So I did. Sorry about that, but I forgot. Today I’ve had a few other things on my mind. But, anyway, Mrs. Browne has a kitchen filled with food. As soon as we get this done and the whole story told, we’ll eat.”

Nigh grabbed a handful of vine and pulled hard. “Get busy! Talk! Pull! Any hope of wine with that meal?”

“Whatever’s in the cellar.”

“If it’s not brandy, it’ll be great. So start telling me about the very first time you saw Ann.”

“Actually,” Jace began, “I was right about the history of the lady highwayman. By the way, I was meaning to ask you—”

She held her shears toward him in a threatening way. “Ask me later. Now, I want to hear everything you know, and everything you’ve done.”

She was watching him out of the corner of her eye and she could tell he was pleased by her words. Yet again she wondered why he’d bought a huge house in England. The Internet said he had a large family. Did he have a falling out with them? Had he done something awful that made them throw him out? Or had one of them done something that he couldn’t abide, so he’d left the country? If so, why hadn’t he bought a nice apartment in London? Or if he wanted the country, why not a nice little Queen Anne former rectory? Something manageable?

She thought for about ten minutes, then Jace’s story began to take over her thoughts. Three times he had to remind her to keep cutting because she was so engrossed in his words that she forgot the task at hand. Hiding in a wardrobe, listening to two women who had been dead for a century? Of course she didn’t believe a word he was saying, but he sure did tell a whopping good tale.

I
can’t see my hand in front of my face,” Jace said. “I think we’d better go in.”

“Sure,” Nigh said softly. Her mind was full of the story Jace had been telling her. “She talked to you? Actually
talked
to you?”

“Yes,” he said as he put the tools in the wheelbarrow. “You think we can find our way back in the dark?”

“I’ve been walking these paths in the dark since—”

“I know, since you were nine.”

“Right,” she said, smiling at him. “Here, you’ll need your shirt. It’s getting chilly.”

“Chilly? Is that what you call it? England has three climates: cold, colder, and coldest.”

She had lived in too many places to take offense at his words. “When it’s merely cold, we go to Scotland to cool off. Now
there’s
cold for you. Wool in August.”

Jace chuckled as he put his shirt back on. “Race you to the house.”

“You’re on,” she said, then smiled as he took off running.

Nigh took her time, fumbling around in the grass for her new shoes, then slowly following the dark path toward the house. She listened for a moment, but heard nothing. When she was a child she liked nothing more than sneaking around the grounds of Priory House. She’d always had an idea that Mr. Hatch knew she visited, but until tonight she’d had no idea that Mrs. Browne did also. But then Mrs. Browne made it her business to know everyone’s business.

When Nigh got halfway up the path, only yards from the house, she crouched down and went through a thicket of azalea bushes, then she turned a sharp left beside an ancient yew hedge. After another few yards of hurrying across open ground in her bare feet, she came to the old well house. Mr. Hatch stored garden tools in it now, so she hoped she could still find the little door. It wasn’t easy in the dark and the latch had rusted. She used to borrow oil from her father’s garage to keep the latch and hinges oiled so they wouldn’t squeak.

It took her longer than it did when she was a child because there was now a mound of dirt in front of the little door, but she managed to pull it open enough to squeeze through. She had to fight thick cobwebs that grabbed her face as she put on her shoes then stood up in the old tunnel. As a child she’d never worried about the safety of the old timbers holding the earth above her head, but she did now. She fumbled to her right and found the tin box of candles and the matches she’d put there many years before. Would they still light? After all, England had quite a moist climate. Montgomery would probably say it was damp, damper, and dampest, she thought, frowning. “If our climate is so bad, let’s compare our gardens with your American ‘backyards,’” she mumbled as she lit the candle. “Not too damp, I see.”

Cautiously, she made her way down the tunnel toward the house, looking suspiciously at the timbers over her head. What an idiot I am to take this route, she thought. And she’d done it just because some man had challenged her to a race. He’d get to the house quicker than she would, but she planned to surprise him when she walked down the main staircase. “Where have you been?” she’d say, as though she’d been waiting for him. But was such a childish game worth her life?

She stepped on three creepy crawly things, and the beams over her head seemed to creak ominously. As a child she’d loved every sound of the tunnel and never once had she been afraid of it. But back then she had been oblivious to the possible catastrophes. If a child of hers ever went through a tunnel like this, she’d…

She broke off when she heard a sound she’d never heard before. She stopped and listened, but she heard nothing unusual. She turned toward the house again. Just a few more feet. What if the old door into the house that was concealed in the paneling now had a heavy piece of furniture in front of it? That had happened once and she’d had to wait until those owners moved out before she could go snooping again. Not that she ever went into the house when people were in residence, but…Well, maybe she had once, but that was when she was thirteen and the seventeen-year-old boy who lived there was gorgeous. He—

Nigh almost cried out in relief when she reached the end of the tunnel, then cautiously pushed on the door. Please let it open, she prayed. Please, please. The door swung open with a loud creak, but she wasn’t worried because she knew that it opened onto a narrow stone spiral staircase, a leftover from when the house was a monastery. No one inside the house would hear the rusty hinges. The stairs led straight up to the top tower, to a door cleverly hidden in the wooden floor.

When she at last stood on the stone steps, she let out a sigh of relief. She wouldn’t do that again. Those timbers were too old to risk it again. The stone steps up to the tower were dirty and cold and Nigh wished she hadn’t come through the tunnel. She was suddenly aware that she was very cold, very hungry, and very dirty. She longed for a tub full of hot water and lavender-scented soap.

She started up the stairs, planning to leave the tower at the door that led into the chintz bedroom, when she heard a noise behind her in the tunnel. Did she leave the door open? Had some animal followed her into the tunnel? A dog? A wolf?

“Damn!” she heard and her mouth dropped open. It couldn’t be!

Bending, she pulled open the four-foot-tall door she’d entered the staircase by and held her candle inside as far as she could. In the dark she saw movement, then Jace Montgomery came into the light.

“Damned dangerous,” he said, scowling. “I think half those timbers are rotten. They’re staying up by memory. That was really stupid of you to go through there. And to think that you did that when you were a kid! Your father should have taken a belt to you.”

Nigh was too astonished at his presence to say a word. Heedless of what was left of her new dress, she sat down on the stone step and looked up at him while he brushed cobwebs off his body.

“How…?” she began.

“How did I follow you? Pioneer ancestors. But then you made as much noise as a herd of water buffalo. I had an idea that if I challenged you, you’d want to show off and enter the house in your secret way. You seem to want to beat everybody at every game. Damnation, but that was a scary thing. I’m going to have engineers shore that thing up with some good ol’ American steel. Forget those old beams.” He glared at her. “You should have better sense than to go through something like that. So how do we get out of here? I don’t know about you, but I’m freezing and I’m hungry.”

“Up one flight,” she managed to say, still in shock from her fear of the tunnel and his following her.

He stepped over her, swinging one long leg over her head to reach the step above her. “Well, come on. Don’t just sit there. You have the candle. Speaking of which, I think I’ll put electric lights in that tunnel.”

“Sure, why not?” she said, recovering herself. “How about a bar too? Ice maker, some cut-glass liquor dispensers. What about a barbecue?”

“Not a bad idea, although we have England’s weather, so what do we need with an ice maker? Okay, so where’s the door?”

“I found it when I was nine, so why can’t you find it at your age?”

“Guess I’m not as clever as you are,” he said.

Smiling, she reached down about knee level and pressed a little piece of iron that couldn’t be seen from above. She’d been able to see it more clearly when she was younger because she’d been shorter.

“Cute,” Jace said as the door swung open and they were in the chintz room. Ann’s room. He half expected to see her there, but it was empty except for the furnishings he and Gladys and Mick had put in there. Closing his eyes for a moment, he inhaled. He could smell her.

“I’ve always loved the smell of this room,” Nigh said.

Jace looked at her sharply, but he didn’t tell her that the lovely fragrance came from Ann Stuart.

“I don’t know about you, but I want a shower before I eat.” He looked her up and down pointedly.

Nigh looked down at herself. Her dress was ruined. There were three torn places along the hem and there was too much dirt to ever fully come clean.

“You want the master bedroom bath?” he asked, then laughed at her expression. “You can have it all to yourself. I’ll use this one.”

She looked at him a moment. “Ann’s bath.”

“Didn’t I tell you that she gets in the shower with me?”

He laughed when Nigh frowned. “Go on. Look in the drawers in the bedroom and get some clean clothes. I have some sweats in there that you can tie on. I’ll meet you downstairs as fast as possible.” With that he half pushed her out of the room and shut the door behind her.

Standing in the hallway, Nigh hesitated. It was really, really stupid of her, but she almost felt jealous of a ghost.

She shook her head to clear it, then headed for the master bathroom. If she remembered correctly, there was a huge bathtub in there. She hoped there was enough hot water to fill it.

“You took long enough,” Jace said when she entered the kitchen. “The English love of bathtubs.”

“The English love of warmth in any form,” she said as she looked at the food spread on the big oak kitchen table. “I see you didn’t wait for me.” She picked up a black olive and ate it, which only served to reminded her how hungry she truly was. In the next minute she was at the table stuffing herself, and the more she ate, the more Jace piled on her plate.

“Have you tried this?” he asked repeatedly as he ladled something else onto her plate. “What about this?”

“Are you trying to get me fat?”

“You’re skin and bones. Do you eat anything besides cucumber sandwiches?”

She started to tell him that she was too often in Jeeps racing across a desert while helping the cameraman haul hundreds of pounds of equipment to be able to eat three squares a day. But she didn’t tell him. “Better than fried chicken.”

“Touché,” he said, smiling and dishing out more buttered parsnips.

“So what do you think Ann wants?” Jace asked as he refilled Nigh’s wineglass for the third time.

From the emphasis on “you,” she could tell that he had his own ideas of what Ann’s restless spirit wanted. “To at last be buried in the sanctified grounds of the churchyard?” she asked. “Isn’t that what spirits falsely accused of suicide usually want?”

“So how do we do that?”

Nigh looked down to cover her smile. She liked that he said “we.” “If any of what you’ve said is true, then the important thing is to find proof that she didn’t kill herself. If she wasn’t a suicide, then she could be buried in consecrated ground. What about you? What do you think she wants?”

“The burying thing was my first idea too, but I don’t know…sometimes I think it’s something else. In the vision I had, when I saw her with her cousin, I got the idea that she was pretty spunky.”

“Spunky?”

“Sassy. Cheeky, I guess you Brits would call it. She really seemed to know herself well. She knew what her life was going to be like if she didn’t marry, and she was a realist about her future with the philandering Danny Longstreet. I wonder what he was like?”

“Probably like his descendant.”

Jace paused with his hand reaching for a piece of bread—homemade whole wheat rolls with honey in them. “You mean there are Longstreets still in the village?”

“Only one. Most of them have moved away.”

“So what’s this one like?”

“We’re the same age and we went to school together. Very handsome,” Nigh said, watching Jace intently. “He looks like a short Superman, with glossy black hair, dark blue eyes, and a body that’s all muscle. He runs a repair garage. It’s down a side street so you’ve probably not seen it, but it’s called ‘Longstreet’s.’”

“Handsome, self-supporting, but I feel a ‘but’ coming on.”

“Right. He’s a rogue. Girls love him. Don’t look at me like that. I like men who can put sentences together. Girls who like, say, only the physical side of love, go for Gerald in a big way. The real problem with him is that he wants all the women all the time, or at least three at a time.”

“Not exactly the faithful type, then?” Jace said.

“Not at all. What about you?”

“Me what?” Jace asked.

“Are you the faithful type?”

“Oh yeah. An absolute bulldog. One woman and that’s it.”

“I see. And who is the woman?’

“Right now, it’s Ann Stuart. How are you related to her?”

“I don’t think I am, really. My mother said we were, but I don’t see how. I think she was so horrified at marrying a man named Smith that she gave me the most outrageous name she could come up with, so I got stuck with Nightingale. She probably read it in a book about Priory House.”

“The name suits you since you run around in the dark like a night bird.”

“Mmmm. You said I made more noise than…what was it? ‘A herd of water buffalo.’”

Jace smiled and refilled her wineglass. “Maybe not quite that much noise. You can sure slip through some small places! I thought I was going to get stuck in that little door in that little brick building. You think ol’ Hatch knows about that place?”

“I think Mr. Hatch knows every inch of this property. He must have seen the ground where the door scraped it when I was a kid.”

“I hope he checked those timbers for dry rot.”