Maybe This Time

  He’s loaded, May said, not judgmentally.

  “Harold says their names are Peter and Miss J,” Isolde said. “But they’re not communicating much else.”

  “Tell me how to get rid of the other two,” Andie said to May. “Okay, you can stay”—The hell you can—“but you must know how to get rid of them.”

  I don’t know anything about them, May said. Keep the fires going and you’ll be fine.

  “I had a fire going in the nursery. Somebody turned it off.”

  May stopped dancing. I made Crumb do it. I just wanted to be with North Archer. He liked me when he came down that first time. He was so beautiful and expensive, and he liked me, he told me he really appreciated everything I was doing with the kids, like I was doing him a favor . . .

  That was North, Andie thought. All that cool charm, and there was nineteen-year-old May—

  . . . and I thought he’d come back and then he’d love me, and I waited but he never did.

  “May,” Andie said.

  So I wrote him and asked for things, but I always got his secretary, and that’s when I decided it was time to take the kids to live with him. We’d all live with him. She swished her skirt again. And once I was there, he’d love me. I’m lovable.

  “Yeah, you probably were,” Andie said.

  I’m lovable NOW, May said, her face contorting for a moment, and Andie saw the empty eyes she’d seen that first night, the skull beneath the phantom skin May clung to.

  “All right,” Andie said.

  And then that bitch KILLED ME.

  “Harold says things are not good,” Isolde said. “I’m ending this.”

  “She killed you,” Andie said, talking fast, “so let’s return the favor. Let’s get rid of her. How do we do it?”

  May hesitated.

  “She stole your life,” Andie said. “For no reason, she took your life. Let’s end hers. Tell me something that will get rid of them.”

  There might be one thing, May said.

  • • •

  “Somebody’s been doping people here with salvia,” Gabe told North when they’d locked the satellite truck and were in the pantry with the tapes.

  “Salvia.” North shook his head. “Red flowers?”

  “Wrong branch of the family. I called Chloe and had her look it all up to make sure, but I remember this stuff. We caught Riley growing it out behind the agency once a couple of years ago. You know teenagers.”

  “I will very shortly. Carter’s twelve. What’s salvia?”

  “Salvia divinorum. Very old natural high, not dangerous, produces visions.”

  “Hallucinations,” North said, everything dropping into place.

  “Yep. It’s not illegal, it’s not addictive, and it doesn’t hurt anybody. It’s not a crime to grow it. I still kicked Riley’s ass, though.”

  “So how—”

  Gabe pulled the jug of tea out of the lineup of decanters. “I tasted this. It’s not tea.” He jerked his thumb at what North had thought was a bundle of dried herbs. “Somebody’s drying Salvia divinorum, steeping the dried leaves and, I will bet you anything, spiking your booze with it.”

  “Andie told me she drinks tea with a shot of Amaretto at night to sleep,” North said.

  “Which somebody spiked.” Gabe leaned back against the counter. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I know why people see ghosts. They’ve been doped.”

  “You are a good man,” North said, more relieved than he thought possible. “Let’s go tell Andie.”

  But when they got to the doorway to the Great Hall and saw the séance in progress, Gabe stopped him.

  “It’d be smarter to watch this,” he told North in a low voice. “See who’s benefiting from people believing.”

  “It has to be Crumb,” North said. “She’s the one who’s been here with Andie and the kids the whole time.”

  “Yeah, but what if somebody is paying her to do it?”

  North looked at the people around the séance table, watching Andie talk to empty air. Southie wouldn’t drug Andie, but the rest . . .

  Isolde, whose reputation rested on ghosts being real.

  Dennis, who’d told him the night before that he could get a book sold if he ever really saw a ghost.

  And Kelly, who needed the fraud for her big comeback.

  “Okay,” he told Gabe. “Let’s watch.”

  There’s a piece of each of them someplace in the house, May said. I don’t know where, I’d tell you if I did, but there’s a piece from each of them. Find that and burn it. I think that’ll do it.

  “It didn’t do it for you,” Andie said. “You were cremated.”

  Part of me is here, too, May said. You said I could stay. But not them. That bitch killed me and I want her gone.

  “Okay, a piece of each of them. Like what? What are we looking for?”

  But May had turned and was looking at the thing that Alice called Miss J. Get rid of her. Burn her out. I HATE HER.

  The thing moved toward her, its empty eyes trained on her, and May laughed and went for it, and Isolde stood up and said, “End it, Harold, get them out of here,” and then they were gone, and the Great Hall was empty, and Andie sat back and thought, Something in the house.

  “I have no idea what just happened here,” Southie said. “Was any of that tape usable, Kelly?”

  “Yes,” Kelly said, all the animation in her voice gone when she looked at Southie. “Good, give it to me,” Southie said. “So Isolde and Andie can see it.”

  “I’ll make a copy of it for you.” Kelly stood up.

  “No, I’ll take the tape now.”

  “No, it’s the property of the station.”

  “But you didn’t have permission to tape here.”

  “Of course I did,” Kelly said, outraged. “Isolde and Andie—”

  “Don’t own the house and aren’t the guardians of the children.” Southie held out his hand to Bill. “You don’t really want to go to court for taping this, do you?”

  “No,” Bill said and handed the tape over.

  “Bill!”

  “Three of us,” Bill said, disgusted, and Kelly grabbed him by the arm and dragged him over to the window and began spitting words at him, too low for the others to hear.

  “Well, this has been a nightmare,” Isolde said to Andie.

  “May says we need to find something in the house that belonged to them,” she told Isolde. “There’s something of theirs here.”

  “We need to get the hell out of here,” Isolde said. “Harold says he doesn’t like it. He’s thinking about going back to Florida. And he hated Florida.”

  “I couldn’t see anything,” Flo said, sounding disappointed.

  “I couldn’t, either,” Southie said, cheerful again now that he had the tape. “It’s like listening to somebody else have a phone conversation. So explain to me again how I slept with a ghost?”

  Dennis got up and left the table and went back into the dining room.

  “Was it something I said?” Southie said.

  “Of course, Harold hates Ohio, too,” Isolde said. “The big thing is, Harold’s getting cold feet.”

  “He’s a ghost,” Southie said. “He always has cold feet.”

  Isolde glared at him and he shut up. “It’s too dangerous, Andie,” she said, serious as death. “No more séances, I won’t do any more.”

  “I just have to find out what it is that’s holding them here,” Andie told her. “I just need to know that.”

  “No. More. Séances,” Isolde said.

  “Then I’ll find out without you,” Andie said, and went to check on the kids before she searched the house.

  North watched her go, and said, “So what did you learn from that?” and Gabe shook his head.

  “I got nothing,” he said. “They’re all crazy.”

  North saw him to the front door and then went to look for Andie, finding her in the library with the kids. “I need to talk to you,” he told her, and when s
he came out, he tried to take her into the sitting room, but Isolde was in there by the fire, looking exhausted, so he took her into the dining room, but Dennis was there, making notes—“The brandy’s gone,” he said—and North nodded and moved on to the kitchen.

  “It’s almost five,” Andie said. “Talk to me while I make dinner.”

  “Sit down,” North said, and Andie looked surprised, but she sat down. “You’ve been drugged.”

  Andie blinked at him.

  “Mrs. Crumb has been putting a hallucinogen called salvia in the liquor,” North said, “and in God knows what else. You’ve been systematically drugged since you got here.” And I let it happen.

  “No,” Andie said.

  “I should have been here,” North said, the guilt that had been pressing him down since he’d heard about the salvia finally breaking. “I sent you down here alone. I left you alone again.”

  “North—”

  “Salvia looks like a weed. Crumb grows it in Alice’s butterfly garden, then she makes it into tea and cuts the liquor with it. That’s why she decants it. Anybody who’s had a drink here has been doped.”

  Andie started up from the table, and North said, “Gabe took samples of it and we dumped the rest down the sink. I’ve already talked to Mrs. Crumb and there’s a car coming from town to take her out of here. She’s packing now. She swears she didn’t do it—”

  “She didn’t,” Andie said. “Crumb’s not the type to garden. It was May. The butterfly garden was May’s.”

  “There is no May,” North said gently. “May died.”

  “May possessed Crumb to do it,” Andie said, sounding calm even though what she was saying was insane. “You don’t understand, the ghosts are real.”

  North nodded, trying to think of a way to reach her through the hallucinations. They had to have felt very real, especially since she was down here alone, nobody to talk to. “Have the ghosts ever told you anything you didn’t already know?”

  “Yes,” Andie said. “May told me about earrings her boyfriend gave her. She told me how she died. She—”

  “Those aren’t facts,” North said. “They’re things you could have made up in a hallucination.”

  “No,” Andie said.

  North shook his head. “Honey, you were drugged. I don’t know why Alice and Carter won’t leave, we’ll find that out now, but it’s not because of ghosts. There are no ghosts. Ghosts aren’t real.”

  He watched her face as she struggled with the idea, her brain so soaked in salvia by now that it probably couldn’t separate fantasy and reality.

  And he’d been in Columbus the whole time. Keeping in touch by phone. A real help.

  “God, I’m sorry, Andie,” he said. “I’ll never leave you again, I swear.”

  “They’re not real?” she said, looking distressed and confused. “They have to be real.”

  “Imagine if they’re not,” he said, trying to break through. “Imagine if this has all been hallucinations. Maybe the conversations you had with May were things you had to work out for yourself. Maybe it was like talking to yourself and she’d say the things you couldn’t say.”

  Something in that got to her.

  “What?” he said gently.

  “The first night we talked,” Andie said, looking almost sad, “she told me she was my younger self. She asked me who I loved and I said Will and then she said, no, who do you really love, and it was you.” She looked him in the eyes then. “We always talked about you. She had such a crush on you. She so wanted you to love her.”

  “She wasn’t real,” North said. “And I love you.”

  Andie took a deep breath. “I love you, too.”

  He closed his eyes for a moment just from sheer relief. “I’ll never let you down again. I will never let you down again.”

  “It was all a hallucination,” Andie said. “Which means I’ve been driving the kids crazy because I thought there were ghosts.” She stopped. “They’re so real, North.”

  “Hallucinations always seem real,” he told her. “And the kids are fine. We’ll talk everything out with them, and they’ll be fine, and we’ll take them back to Columbus and start a new life.”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “Whatever you want,” he told her. “We’ll do whatever you want. Just accept that the place isn’t haunted. We’ll work the rest out from there.” She hesitated and he said, “Andie, this is reality. There are no ghosts in reality. You’re a levelheaded woman, use your common sense. You know there aren’t ghosts here. You were drugged. None of it was real.”

  She bit her lip and nodded, and he got up and went around the table to her, and she rose up out of her chair to meet him.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he told her, and she put her arms around him, and he thought, Because this time I am not going to fuck this up.

  Then Alice came through the kitchen door and said, “I’m hungry now, I’m starving, what are you doing?” and Andie let go of him to make dinner.

  “Were you hugging Andie?” Alice demanded.

  “Yes,” North said. “I’m going to be doing it a lot, so get used to it.”

  “We’ll see,” Alice said darkly, and he left her to help Andie with dinner—“No broccoli!”—so he could sort out the rest of the wingnuts in the house.

  Andie walked her way through cooking and serving dinner like an automaton, trying to find her way through the I-was-drugged and There-are-ghosts paradox. She believed North, North would never lie to her, but she believed May, too.

  Except that everything that May had said about wanting North, that was her, too. She’d been isolated and sexually frustrated and she had wanted North, she was pretty sure she’d taken the job so she could stay in touch with him, and that was May all over. That girl with the curly hair like hers had been in love with North the way she’d been in love ten years before. May danced all the time the way she had danced ten years ago, the way she’d started dancing with Alice in the kitchen again. Maybe the hallucinations were just her way of getting back to the reality that she loved North. Maybe seeing May was seeing herself, the way she was supposed to be, carefree and dancing and unashamedly in love with North Archer.

  If that was true, everything was good. May hadn’t possessed her, she’d just been so drugged on brandy that her subconscious had tried to drag her into that bedroom while her conscious mind fought it because it was such a bad idea, like a nightmare while she was awake.

  Maybe Kelly hadn’t been possessed, maybe she’d just made the rounds to solidify her career and then lied about it.

  Maybe everything was all right. Maybe all she had to do was get her grip on reality again. Common sense told her there were no ghosts. The salvia had convinced her otherwise, but that was over. There were no ghosts.

  “Are you okay?” Flo said to her anxiously in the sitting room when dinner was over. “You haven’t said a word.”

  “Yeah,” Andie said, trying a smile. “I think everything’s okay.”

  “Well, I could use a drink,” Kelly said. “Where’s the brandy?”

  “Gone,” Southie said. “But there’s a case of beer in the car. Every bottle sealed with its own little cap.”

  “Aren’t they always that way?” Kelly said, confused, and Andie left them all and went into the kitchen to think.

  She turned on the radio, pulled out her baking stuff, and began on the six bananas she had that were sufficiently brown to make bread.

  North had to be right. It had all been a hallucination. Because, rationally, ghosts did not exist.

  She let out her breath. It was okay. Everything was okay. Reality was back.

  Once she accepted it, the relief was overwhelming. So was the anger—if North hadn’t turfed Crumb, she’d have strangled her with her apron—but there weren’t ghosts, she’d just been drugged, everything was fine . . .

  The radio blared, “And now here’s Kathy Troccoli, going out to Steve from Jen . . . ‘Everything Changes’!”

 
“Yes,” Andie said to herself, and picked up her bowl full of bananas and bopped around the kitchen, mashing as she went.

  May had been right. No, she had been right. Dancing made you know you were alive. Life was good. Life was normal. If she hadn’t lost her grip on reality, if she hadn’t lost her common sense, she wouldn’t have been so crazy the past month. And now she wasn’t crazy anymore. Thanks to North, she wasn’t crazy at all.

  “I’ll never be the same,” she sang, as she dumped in egg and vanilla and butter and then mixed them as she danced. Fifteen minutes and four song dedications later, two loaves of banana bread were in the oven, and when the DJ said, “And here’s an oldie, going out from Joe to Brenda . . .” Andie belted out “Hurt So Good” using her pepper mill as a microphone as she danced around the kitchen because that’s what normal people did when they sang to the radio.

  Then she looked up and saw North, leaning in the doorway, holding a longneck beer bottle and grinning at her, and she thought, That’s normal, too, and kept dancing and singing, happier than she’d been in years.

  Ten years.

  The music stopped, and North said, “Southie sent me in here. He didn’t tell me it was a concert,” but he was smiling at her in that old way that said, I don’t care what you do, I just want to be next to you when you do it.

  “I’m happy,” Andie said, smiling back as she put down the pepper mill. “I’ve decided you’re right, it was all just a hallucination because I was here all alone, and from now on I’m not going to be crazy, I’m not going to lose my grip on reality, I am going to be smart and sensible.”

  “Okay,” North said, looking not sure about it. “You got all of that from finding out there aren’t ghosts?”

  “I really believed there were. I talked to the kids as if there really were ghosts. They must have thought I was nuts. And then you saved me.” She beamed at him. “Plus, you saved Alice and Carter from Crazy Andie, which means extra points for you.”

  “What do I get for extra points?” North said, his eyes steady on her, and she felt her blood heat from relief and happiness, but mostly from looking at him, strong and tall and beautiful in the doorway, feeling the way she’d used to before everything had gone wrong.