Maybe This Time

  “This is a long story,” Simon said, but North could tell from the sound of his voice that he was enjoying it.

  “Make it shorter,” North said.

  “The people you were asking about were a governess and a valet who died in 1847. The governess, Mary Jessel, gave birth to a stillborn baby and drowned two days later. Peter Quint the valet died from a fall after he’d been drinking and then headed home down an icy hill.”

  “Where are the bodies?” North asked.

  “Someone dug them up and burned them in 1898. The vicar was walking through the graveyard and found the graves opened, full of bone and ash. Scandal. They closed the graves and put the headstones back.”

  “Burned,” North said. “Anybody know why?”

  “There’s a legend that if you burn a corpse, the spirit will not walk.”

  “Had they been walking?”

  “Not that anybody remembers, although that was ninety-four years ago.”

  “Fine. This takes care of most of my problem anyway. Thank—”

  “Not so fast. Forty years later, 1938, the next vicar walks through the graveyard and sees the graves covered in salt. He told the current vicar it looked like a snowfall.”

  “Salt?”

  “There’s a legend that ghosts can’t cross salt.”

  “So the people in the town think the graveyard is haunted?”

  “No, that’s what’s odd. There’s no legend here of haunting, nothing about these graves except that they’ve been disturbed three times.”

  “Three?”

  “Two years ago. 1990. The current vicar caught two men digging up the graves and turned them over to the police. They’d been hired by an American named Theodore Archer.”

  “My second cousin,” North said, thinking, Two years ago? “What did they charge Theodore with?”

  “Nothing. He died before they could contact him. In fact, he died whilst the men were digging up the graves.”

  Coincidence, North thought, but he didn’t believe in coincidences. Somebody who was here two years ago is faking a haunting here now. And Theodore had investigated, and they’d killed him.

  No, that was insane. Theodore had been alone in the car when he’d had a heart attack. A heart attack at forty-eight was not out of the range of the ordinary. People had seen him in the car before it went off the road and he’d been alone. He’d just died, nobody killed him.

  “North?”

  “Sorry, trying to think this through. Thank you. I owe you.”

  “Nonsense,” Simon said. “You kept me out of an Ohio jail. My gratitude is limitless.”

  North hung up and looked at the situation from all sides.

  People had been trying to put those bodies to rest for decades. Possibly even before that. So faking the haunting wasn’t a new idea.

  Maybe back in the beginning, in England, the haunting had been useful to keep the house private. Smuggling maybe. And somebody had believed the fake enough to dig the bodies up and burn them.

  And then every ensuing generation that wanted privacy kept the tradition going, so the rumors followed the house to America. Given the kind of personality that would transport a haunted house stone by stone across an ocean, the original Archer had probably spread the legend just to make himself more interesting. “Brought myself a haunted house over from England, yes, I did.” And then somebody in America believed the rumors enough to hire somebody back in England to spread salt on the grave? That was less plausible.

  And then Cousin Theodore hired grave robbers and died the same night.

  The clock on the kitchen wall chimed and North realized it was almost four. The séance would be starting. He headed for the Great Hall to stop it and Southie met him by the servant stairs.

  “We need to stop the séance,” he told Southie.

  “No,” Southie said, handing him a set of keys. “We need to keep the séance going as long as possible so you and Gabe can get any videotape out of the satellite truck.”

  North looked at the keys. “These are the keys to the truck?”

  “I told Bill I’d dropped my wallet in there. He’s so mad at Kelly, he’d probably just have given them to me. Don’t hurt the equipment, just get the tapes. I’ll keep the séance going as long as possible.”

  Gabe came up behind them, and said, “I know what’s going on. Come with me to the pantry and I’ll show you.”

  “We have to rob a satellite truck first,” North said.

  “Okay,” Gabe said.

  Twelve

  When the cookies had come out of the oven, Andie had asked Lydia to sit with the kids in the library so Kelly couldn’t get to them, and Lydia said, “No problem,” with enough grimness in her voice that Andie didn’t worry about the kids again. Lydia would put a stake through Kelly’s heart before she’d let her near Carter and Alice.

  Then she and Flo went to join the others in the Great Hall, but Will stopped her, his overnight bag in his hand.

  “I’m leaving,” he said, his face sulky.

  “Good,” Flo said, and went into the Great Hall.

  Good, Andie thought at the same time. “Be careful getting out of the drive. It’s really dangerous.”

  He nodded. But first, “I have to tell you something.”

  Andie looked toward the arch to the Great Hall. “Can you make it fast?”

  “Sure,” he snapped. “I slept with Kelly last night.”

  Andie swung back to him. “Really? With Kelly?”

  “I was just so upset with you, with the way you handled—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Andie said, “it doesn’t matter, we’re done, you can sleep with anybody you want, but . . . Kelly?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Will said. “She came to my room. I tried to tell her no, but she said, ‘Andie’s in love with North, and I’m right here,’ and I thought, ‘She’s right—’ ”

  “Perfectly understandable,” Andie said, still confused. “Best of luck in the future—”

  “There’s not going to be any future,” Will said, sounding exasperated again. “She was weird.”

  “I really don’t want to know,” Andie began and then remembered Southie saying the same thing. “Weird how?”

  “Cold. Like she wasn’t really there. She wasn’t like you. It wasn’t like us. Andie, if you’d just be rational about this—”

  “No,” Andie said firmly, but she thought, Weird?

  “So you’re sure,” Will said, sounding annoyed again.

  “Absolutely. Be careful on the ride home,” Andie said, and when she’d closed the door behind him, she headed for the Great Hall. Isolde was there, and so were Flo, Dennis, and Kelly, with Bill on camera.

  “No camera,” Andie began, and Isolde said, “Let her do it. Sometimes things show up on film. It can’t hurt.”

  “It can if she shows the footage on TV,” Andie said.

  “It’s just for atmosphere,” Kelly said. “I wouldn’t do anything to make you look bad.”

  “I wouldn’t trust her an inch,” Dennis said, and Andie realized he was full of brandy. So was Isolde, but she evidently could hold her cognac. Dennis, not so much.

  Well, she’d dry him out later.

  Southie came in and took his place and smiled at Andie. “Sorry, didn’t mean to delay you. We’re not in any hurry, are we?”

  “Did Kelly sleep with you last night?”

  Southie looked at Kelly, who said, “I did not,” and then at Andie.

  “It’s important,” Andie said.

  “Yeah,” Southie said.

  “What?” Bill the cameraman said.

  “I didn’t,” Kelly said, and she sounded honestly outraged.

  “This is interesting,” Dennis said owlishly.

  “She slept with you, too?” Andie said to the cameraman.

  “You said you were done with him,” Bill said to Kelly. “I’ve had it with you.”

  “I didn’t sleep with either one of you,” Kelly said.

  “This
isn’t helping,” Isolde said to Andie. “Knock it off.”

  “No, it’s important, she slept with Will, too,” Andie said to her. “He just told me in the hall.”

  “I didn’t!” Kelly’s denial was clear now, outrage and anger but no guilt. “Those were dreams. They weren’t real.”

  “Yeah, they were,” Andie said, feeling almost sympathetic. “You were possessed. We have a nympho ghost here, and she hijacked your body and made the rounds.”

  Kelly stopped, her mouth open.

  “Oh, crap,” Isolde said.

  “I don’t remember anything like this in the literature,” Dennis said.

  “I slept with a ghost?” Southie said.

  “Twice,” Andie told him.

  “Wish I’d known,” Southie said. “I’d have paid more attention.”

  “That’s insane,” Kelly said. “They were dreams. This is crazy.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Andie said.

  “Can we get started?” Isolde said. “Harold’s really enjoying this, but he can turn on a dime.”

  “Sure.” Andie sat down and a visibly upset Kelly joined her.

  “I didn’t sleep with them,” she said to Andie, and she sounded more distressed than angry now.

  “You did, you just didn’t know,” Andie said. “And then when you woke up, you were freezing, and then you threw up.”

  Kelly’s face was pale.

  “There really are ghosts, May really did possess you, and it really would be better if you left before she comes back for more tonight. I’m sorry, I really am. The best thing is for you to go before she tries again.”

  Don’t run her off, May said. We need her.

  Andie jerked her head up and saw May, twirling in the open space beyond the table, blue and lovely and treacherous, and beyond her two shadowy forms, Miss J and the man in the old-fashioned coat.

  Dennis squinted in their direction.

  “Hello, May,” Andie said, tamping down her anger. “We need to talk.”

  “What are we looking for exactly?” Gabe said when they were in the truck.

  “Videotape of the kids, the house, anything.” North looked at the racks of equipment. “You start at that end, I’ll start down here.”

  Ten minutes later, they’d found tapes marked with dates, not names.

  “This one’s yesterday.” Gabe slid it into a VCR slot and pushed play.

  The tape flickered and then the camera focused on Carter, sitting in the window seat, reading.

  “So you live here at Archer House!” Kelly’s voice came from off camera.

  Carter ignored her.

  “What’s it like living in a haunted house!”

  Carter ignored her.

  “All alone with just a nanny.”

  Carter ignored her.

  “I like this kid,” Gabe said.

  “I do, too,” North said.

  Kelly evidently didn’t because after three more questions, she quit. There was snow on the tape and a shot of Alice, sitting on a chair in the dining room, looking fairly depraved, her hair sliding down one side of her head, pizza stains on her shirt.

  “So you live here at Archer House!”

  “Yes,” Alice said. “You have a lot of teeth. Andie says you have to brush your teeth every night or they’ll rot out of your head.”

  “What’s it like living in a haunted house!”

  “I don’t like nuts,” Alice said. “But I eat them in the chocolate chip cookies and banana bread because Andie says, if you don’t like nuts, don’t eat the cookies.”

  “Andie is your nanny, right?”

  “No. Andie is my Andie. She says you’re a hag from hell.” Alice smiled serenely as if she were just a cute kid, repeating what some adult had said, but North could see the glint in her eye.

  “We’ll edit that out,” Kelly said to somebody, and then asked Alice, “Aren’t you scared to live in this haunted house?”

  “Guess what?” Alice said. “Andie says bananas have to be brown before you can bake with them.”

  “Alice,” Kelly said, her voice stern. “Tell me about the ghosts.”

  Alice rolled her eyes. “There aren’t any such things as ghosts. I can tell you about butterflies. I have a butterfly garden. Andie says I can have a hummingbird garden, too.”

  “Alice, people say this house is haunted!”

  Alice grew still, and the look in her eyes wasn’t pretty. “Kelly,” she said, and the pitch of her voice was so much like Andie’s that North started to laugh, “people will say anything.”

  “Forget it,” Kelly said to somebody off camera, and the tape ended.

  “You might as well leave that one,” Gabe said. “The kids defeated her.”

  “No.” North held out his hand and Gabe ejected the tape and gave it to him. “She’d find a way to cut it or overdub it. I want anything she filmed here.”

  “Fine,” Gabe said and picked up the next tape.

  “And we should hurry,” North said, “because I don’t know how long Southie can stall a séance.”

  “This time I want you to tell me everything that’s happening,” Southie said. “Like where is May standing?”

  “Right there,” Andie said, pointing behind him. “May, what the hell were you doing last night?”

  “Can she really see them?” Flo said to Dennis, but he was frowning, squinting in May’s direction.

  I was taking my second chance, May said, floating closer. It wasn’t fair that I died at nineteen, I wasn’t even—

  “It’s not fair to steal bodies, either,” Andie said. “You don’t get to take our bodies because you got a bad deal. That’s rape, May.”

  “Steal bodies?” Southie said. “Could you explain that?”

  “Yes, that would be good,” Kelly said. “Explain that fully. I mean, rape. Wow.”

  May drew back, scowling. It is not rape. I can’t make you do anything you wouldn’t do anyway. Look at you, you wouldn’t go to North no matter how hard I tried.

  “Kelly didn’t—”

  “What did she say?” Southie said.

  “She’s talking about me?” Kelly said. “The ghost is talking about me?

  Kelly was going to sleep with them all anyway. She’s been doing the guy with the camera to get him to bring the satellite truck down here. She’s doing Southie to get her story. She went along with Will because he’s famous or something and to find out about you. I was trying to seduce him and she kept asking him questions about you. She was there, Andie. She might be telling herself it’s a dream, but she was there. You were there, remember?

  “Does this rape have anything to do with North Archer?” Kelly said.

  “It’s not rape,” Andie snapped. “Because May says you would have slept with all of them anyway. And since you were already doing two of them, I think she’s right.” She looked into the camera. “That’s right, Columbus, your reporter here nailed three guys in one night, sixty percent of the adult male population of this house. Let’s give the little lady a hand.”

  “That’s not fair,” Kelly said, pulling back.

  “Neither is what you’re doing to North.” Andie turned back to May. “So she’d have done it anyway. Let’s talk about me.”

  “Or we could talk about Kelly some more,” Southie said, checking his watch. “What do you want to know?”

  “Sullivan!” Kelly said.

  “You shouldn’t have gone after my brother,” Southie said, before turning to the camera. “She fakes her orgasms, and she’s not very good at it.”

  “If you were any good at it, I wouldn’t have to,” Kelly snapped.

  “She fakes ’em?” Bill said from behind the camera.

  “Nobody makes sounds like that naturally,” Southie told him.

  “Do you mind?” Andie said. “I’m trying to have a serious conversation here?”

  “There’s way too much emotion in this room,” Isolde said quietly. “Dial it down, Andie.”

  Andie nodded an
d turned back to May. “You were out of line,” she said calmly, and thought, You body-snatching bitch.

  That was a mistake and I’m sorry. May smiled at her. I thought you’d want to go to him. I mean, North Archer. Who wouldn’t?

  “You can’t ever do that again.”

  I don’t want to, May said. It was interesting for a night, but you’re mad at me, and that Kelly was awful. At least in you I was warm. She’s just cold clear through. I’m not sure there’s a soul there.

  “There is, and you can’t have it.”

  “Can’t have what?” Southie said.

  “Southie, be quiet,” Andie said.

  Okay, okay. May swished again. What’s he looking at?

  “Who?” Andie followed May’s eyes and saw Dennis, frowning in May’s direction. “Dennis?”

  “Is there something moving over there?” Dennis said. “Or am I tipsy?”

  “Yes,” Isolde said. “There’s something moving and you’re drunk.” She turned back to the table. “Harold, find out what the hell is going on.”

  Oh, hell, not Harold, May said. He keeps hitting on me. I don’t know what the hell he thinks we can do. We’re both fucking dead.

  He thinks you can do dead fucking, Andie thought. “You have to go.”

  Where? I’m tied to this place, I can’t leave. You think I’d stay here if I could haunt someplace else? My best friend scattered my ashes at the Grandville Grill, but do I get to haunt there? No. I’m stuck here with Crumb.

  “Ashes,” Andie said with a sinking heart. If May had been cremated . . .

  “Harold says she says she was cremated,” Isolde told Andie. “What about the others, Harold?”

  I don’t know about the others, May said. Harold, get the fuck off my leg, I am not interested in you. Jesus, men. They don’t listen.

  “I know,” Andie said. “May, you have to move on. To the other side.”

  May stopped dancing. You mean, DIE?

  “You’re dead,” Andie said. “It’s over. Move on.”

  It’s not over, May snapped. I’m here. I’m staying.

  “Harold says you’re making her mad,” Isolde said to Andie.

  “Yeah, well, she pissed me off first,” Andie said.

  “I can see two people,” Dennis said, a little pompously. “Early nineteenth-century dress. I don’t think they belong here.”