I was creeped-out and scared silly half the time I was here, Kendall thought, but I stayed because I cared about Amelia. Where were these guys when she could have used some real family around her? How could they have been totally unaware of the existence of a member of their own family?
That was a question that would have to wait for another day. The most important thing right now was that she still had to get the hell out of here.
But how?
Walk out the front door and screw those assholes, she decided.
She tossed her hair back and walked down the stairs, setting her backpack down by the door so she could use both hands to undo the dead bolt. By the time she opened the door, they were on the porch.
“Hello,” she said, as if she had every right in the world to be there. Which she did, she reminded herself.
A tough-looking, raw-edged man with cobalt eyes and dark hair stared at her coldly. Luckily the other two brothers looked decidedly friendlier, and one even offered her a curious smile.
“I’m sorry. I’m Kendall Montgomery. I was staying out here with Amelia—your…aunt?—during her last days,” she explained. “I…left some things out here, so I came by to get them. I assume you’re the Flynn brothers?”
“We are,” the one who’d smiled said. “Oldest brother, Aidan, to my left, and Zach, the youngest, to my right. I’m Jeremy.”
“Well,” she said uncomfortably. “I’ll just—”
“I thought Amelia died three months ago,” Aidan said.
She looked at him. He was tall, all muscle and striking, and his features were clean-cut and rugged. But it wasn’t the warrior edge about his face that chilled her; it was the tone of his voice and something about the dark ice in his eyes when he looked at her.
“I work for a living. I put together her funeral, took care of her last bills and had everything set up for you three to come in,” she said, aware that her own voice had taken on a biting tension.
“Have you been living here since then?” he asked curtly.
“Aidan…” Zach murmured.
“I took care of Amelia. You didn’t even know she existed,” she said flatly.
“That’s right, we didn’t know she existed. We didn’t know anything about this place. We should have, I suppose, but…we just…didn’t,” Jeremy said quietly.
“Honestly,” Zachary added. “We always loved this area, but we had no idea we had family here. Clearly, you cared about Amelia, and now that we know, we’re grateful.”
“She was a very fine lady,” Kendall said, looking away for a moment. A knot had risen to her throat. “Very sweet.” She stared at the eldest brother. At five-ten, she wasn’t exactly short, but she had to look up to meet his eyes, and she resented it.
What the hell? None of it made any difference. If he was too much of a jerk to be grateful, what did it matter? Amelia was dead and gone, and she had her own life; she hadn’t given it all up to care for Amelia. She would just go back to it and let these idiots have the place to themselves.
No, that wasn’t fair.
They didn’t all seem to be idiots, just the one.
“Well, as I said, I do work for a living,” she said. “You’re here, and I need to get going, so…”
“Just what kind of work do you do?” Aidan asked.
She was furious with herself for hesitating, but she knew all too well that he would only make fun of her and would probably decide she was nothing more than a leech, preying on people’s weaknesses, if she admitted the complete truth.
“I own a café and gift shop,” she said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me…”
“Miss Montgomery,” Jeremy said, a wry smile curling his lips, “we don’t know a thing about this place. If you know anything and can spare a few minutes, we’d be eternally grateful if you’d show us around.”
“Please,” Zach added.
She let out a long breath. The eldest brother was still just staring at her. “…All right. Come on in. We’re, uh, in the foyer.” She stepped back, pointing in the appropriate directions as she spoke. “Grand staircase, ballroom to the left, parlor, dining room—you’ll find a wall of family paintings in there, if you’re interested—and kitchen to the right. The kitchen was added after the turn of the century and last updated in the fifties, I’m afraid. As bad as it looks, the place is structurally sound. There’s a huge basement beneath us, four bedrooms upstairs, and an attic with storage and a little garret room. It’s really a beautiful home. Some of the pillars need work in front. And there are over a dozen out-buildings, some in better shape than others. You’ve got the original kitchen, original stables, a smokehouse, and ten little buildings that were slave quarters. Actually—” She broke off. There was no need to share any more with them. She’d given them the basics, and now it was time for her to get out of here and leave the house to them.
They owned it, after all.
And they would almost certainly be looking to sell. With luck, one of the historical foundations would be able to buy it.
“Actually what?” Aidan asked sharply.
“Oh…nothing to do with the house,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
“Seriously, what were you about to say?” Zach asked. He had a killer smile, she noticed. He was extremely good-looking, but seemed confident without being conceited.
She shrugged. “Amelia was afraid. At the end. Terrible things happened here during the Civil War, and she…well, she heard things at night, and she was…afraid. That’s why I stayed with her.”
“She thought the place was haunted?” Aidan demanded. He didn’t snort out loud, but she felt that, inwardly, he was snorting with derision. Big, tough he-man. He wouldn’t understand fear.
“Every good plantation is haunted,” Jeremy said with a grin. “Right?”
The two younger brothers definitely seemed decent enough, she thought. She wasn’t surprised, though. Her employee and friend, Vinnie, had met them both, even asked them to sit in with his band, and he said they both had talent and were nice guys, besides.
She shrugged, feeling uneasy. “This house has a lot of history. Your family was almost wiped out during the Civil War.”
She paused for a moment, thoughtful. “And it wasn’t just the war. There were other events, too. Other deaths. In the 1890s, the owner had an affair with one of his housekeepers. She was stunningly beautiful, they say, with eyes as green as emeralds and skin the color of chocolate.”
She saw a slight smile on Aidan’s lips as he said, “So the wife killed the gorgeous housekeeper—or the housekeeper killed the wife—and now she’s haunting the place, right? Better yet—they killed each other and now they’re both haunting the place.”
Kendall looked at him and finished the story. “The wife demanded that the housekeeper be hanged. The Klan had a lot of influence in the area then, so they took care of it. Her head…she was decapitated when she was hanged. They say she haunts the property, looking for it. Oh, and she cursed the wife as she was being dragged over to that oak—” she pointed to a huge tree on the left side of the house “—to meet her death. The curse apparently worked. The wife died, falling down the grand stairway, one year to the day after the maid was executed.”
“Great story,” Jeremy said, smiling. “Is it for real?”
“I’m not sure. You’d have to check with the historical society. To be honest, several of the plantations claim that or a similar legend. I grew up here and heard all the stories about the local plantations. I can’t guarantee the truth of any of the tales about this place—except the one about the cousins and the Civil War. That story’s in the history books.”
Aidan turned his hawklike stare from her face and directed it at the house, shaking his head. “I’m back to thinking we should sell it and get the hell out,” he said to his brothers.
“Just look at it,” Jeremy said, opening his arms to the house, as if in greeting. “It’s beautiful. It’s our heritage. Hey, we’re related to those ghosts.?
??
“Maybe not,” Aidan said.
“Maybe not?” Jeremy echoed questioningly.
He shrugged. “Who knows if one of the mistresses of the house was fooling around on the side?” Was that a sense of humor he was demonstrating? Kendall wondered. “The men were known to fool around with the servants, so maybe their wives were fooling around with the grooms. Who knows what could have happened?”
Jeremy laughed. “My brother is a cynic, in case you hadn’t noticed,” he said.
“So it seems,” she agreed pleasantly.
“He’s different on the inside,” Jeremy assured her.
“Really? I was actually thinking that he’s just plain old nasty on the inside.”
She couldn’t believe that the words she had been thinking escaped her lips. Not that she expected to see any of these men again, but still, she was usually civil.
Her words had clearly startled Aidan. His eyebrow hiked up, and she would have sworn that he almost smiled.
“That’s calling a spade a spade,” he said. “I’m sorry, Miss Montgomery, that I seem to have made such a poor impression on you. Anyway, thank you for the tour, and now we’ll let you go.”
“Thanks.”
“Wait. Did you ever see anything happen here?” Aidan asked, his eyes hard again and his voice flat and emotionless, as if he were grilling her in an interrogation room.
She stared back at him. “No,” she said.
She was lying. And judging from the way he was assessing her, she had a feeling that he knew it.
She had seen something. She just didn’t know what. She wasn’t even sure that Amelia’s words and fears hadn’t crept into her mind, and made her think that there were…
That there were strange lights in the darkness, and that the noises that had awakened her in the middle of the night had no earthly cause. As if something—or someone—was being dragged across the lawn below her window. That there were whispers of sound in the middle of the night, eerie and unfathomable, as if some mad scientist were at work on the property.
“No, of course not,” she said with more certainty, tossing her hair back with feigned impatience.
Because all those things were imaginary, she insisted to herself.
She knew the explanation. Hadn’t she managed to graduate with a three-point-nine average, and degrees in both psychology and drama? She understood the depths of the human mind. She had simply been sharing Amelia’s nightmares, which were themselves a very understandable manifestation of her fear of death.
Kendall couldn’t allow herself to believe—ever—that any of it had been true.
Because Kendall was a fraud. She was an excellent performer, and she was a total fraud.
Although there had been a few times when…
The psychologist in her kicked in and insisted that there had been nothing inexplicable about those few times, either. She had been trained as an actress, pure and simple, and now she made both psychology and theater pay by playing psychic for a living. And “playing” was the operative word, she reminded herself. She wasn’t a real psychic, if such a thing even existed. Everything she had experienced could be explained. The mind was an amazing combination of logic and imagination, and it was the logical part’s job to kick in when the imagination became too fanciful.
“Guess what we want to do with the place?” Jeremy asked her.
“It’s not what we want to do,” Aidan corrected before she could answer him.
“I have no idea,” she said to Jeremy, ignoring Aidan.
“Restore the house and find a way to use it to benefit the community,” Zachary answered for Jeremy.
“Oh?” she said politely. Looking at the two younger Flynns, she could believe they were sincere, but she suspected things would go quite differently if Aidan had anything to say about it.
“I thought,” Jeremy explained, “that we’d give ourselves the goal of getting it up and running by Halloween, then open it to the public and use the profits to benefit Children’s House.”
“You mean open it as a haunted house?” she asked.
Aidan gave a disgusted snort.
Zachary said, “Well, we’ll have a party, anyway, though a haunted house would be great. We’ll have to give that some thought.”
“I’m sure it would be great,” she said, but a chill seemed to sweep through her.
She wanted to tell him not to do it, and she didn’t know why. All she knew was that the idea of creating a haunted house here was a bad one. A very bad one.
Why? she mocked herself. Did she really think they could wake the dead?
“It could really benefit the kids,” Jeremy told her. “I can take this to a whole new level. And I can use the radio spots I’ve already taped to promote it.”
“It—it sounds good,” she had to admit.
“The party would just be a grand opening,” Zachary said. “I’d like to see this place brought back to its original grandeur, and then we can use it for all kinds of functions to benefit the community.”
Could they really do it? she wondered. She felt the sun on her face at that moment, shining through the odd storm clouds that had gathered earlier, and the breeze suddenly gentled. A good omen? She did love this old house, and it would be nice to see it restored and being used for something important.
She knew this place backwards and forwards. She’d been young when Amelia had entered her life, young enough to fall under the spell of the plantation’s legends and ready to have fun with its spooky history.
“Let’s not get so far ahead of ourselves,” Aidan said firmly, looking at his brothers.
Not just an idiot, a killjoy, too, she decided.
Then he turned to look at her, and for a moment there was a genuine smile on his face.
It changed him. It made him look approachable, human. Sexy. Now where the hell had that thought come from?
“I’m sorry if I was rude earlier, Miss Montgomery. Could you possibly give us the grand tour?” he asked her, and added politely, “If you have the time.”
“I…”
“Please,” he said.
One word didn’t change the fact that he was an idiot, she told herself, even if he was still smiling. Suckering her in. Well, too bad for him, because she was no fool.
On the other hand, she had just been thinking about how well she knew and loved the house—their house now—so what would it hurt to go through it one last time, only with them?
“Sure. Come on.”
She walked past him. Her backpack with her belongings—and the diary—was resting against the entry wall. For a moment she felt a twinge of guilt about the diary, but she told herself to quit worrying about it and kept going. She could hear them following behind her. “As you can see, this is the shotgun hall. It got the name because—”
“A shot fired from the front door would just go straight through and out the back,” Jeremy said. “And will you look at that stairway?”
“Don’t forget to look at the wood rot,” Aidan said.
“Easily fixed,” Zachary assured him. “Honestly, Aidan. I bought a studio that had wood rot. All it took was a decent carpenter to get it fixed.”
The house really was beautiful, Kendall thought as she always did whenever she was there. Its grandeur was decaying, sure, but the elegance was still there behind the peeling paint and the rotting wood. There were floor to ceiling windows in the ballroom. The parlor was still furnished with a Duncan Phyfe love seat and nineteenth-century needlepoint chairs. There was even a grand piano—badly in need of tuning, Kendall warned them—along with elegant occasional tables, a secretary and more. They paused to study the wall of family portraits, some beautifully painted works of art, others less accurate and attractive records of the past.
“Amelia?” Aidan asked, looking at the photo on the far right.
Amelia hadn’t been painted as a young and beautiful girl. She’d had the painting done only a few years ago, and it showed her as Kendall knew her, w
ith a cap of snow-white hair, fine features worn with time, bright eyes and the kindly smile she had always offered.
“She looks like a nice woman,” Zachary said.
“She was,” Kendall assured them.
Upstairs, Aidan tested walls and stomped on the floors. He gave a cursory glance up the stairs into the attic, which was filled with trunks.
“Family history,” Zach assured him.
But even that drew nothing more than a noncommittal “hmm” from Aidan as they headed back downstairs.
Despite its age, Kendall had always found the kitchen quite charming, with its Leave It to Beaver wholesomeness.
All three brothers looked at it skeptically, clearly not sharing her enthusiasm.
“It’s wonderful. See, there’s a dumbwaiter,” she said, and showed them the small pulley-drawn elevator that had once brought hot food upstairs and returned dirty plates, laundry—and probably a small child or two, upon occasion.
At last they went outside. She showed them the original kitchen, now a caretaker’s cottage, should there ever again be a caretaker, and the smokehouse, which still smelled of smoke. Even the stables, which were in the best condition of any place on the property, still smelled of hay and horses, though Amelia hadn’t had a horse in over twenty years. They walked on to the neat row of old slave quarters, all of them two-roomed, most of them in serious need of repair. As they walked toward the last in line, Aidan said, “Someone has been living out here.”
“Really?” she said, surprised. He looked at her, and she realized he had been studying her reaction. She could tell that he believed her, but she resented the fact that he had doubted her at all.
“How do you know?” Zach asked, frowning.
Aidan kicked at a pile of broken two-by-fours. “The soup cans,” he said dryly.
“Great. And we’re detectives,” Jeremy muttered ruefully. “We would have seen them—eventually,” he added.
“Soup cans and beer bottles.” Aidan looked at Kendall. “You really didn’t know.”
It was a statement, not a question.
She shook her head. “But…Amelia said she saw lights. Maybe she wasn’t imagining things.”