“Even my husband?” she teased, but Michael looked away and didn’t answer. And she didn’t ask, because heaven only knew what had happened to her in a time before modern medicine.
True or not, the stories he spun almost made her see herself in another time and place. She could see the candles, smell the perfume, hear the soft laughter of the other dancers. She could almost feel the corset cutting into her skin and making her waist tiny while the long skirt, heavy with thousands of tiny silver glass beads, twirled about her legs sensuously.
When the music stopped and Michael removed his hand from hers, the vision disappeared, and it was all she could do to keep from flinging herself back into his arms just to have it reappear.
It was Michael who said, “I think we should separate for tonight, Emily. Good night.” Then he’d turned away abruptly, leaving her alone under the glaring modern lightbulbs. No more candles, no more bare-shouldered gowns.
But it was when she was locked safely away alone in her bedroom that she gave herself a good talking to. She had to get control of herself. “Detachment,” she said aloud. Detachment and distance. And maybe tomorrow night a call to Donald, even though he didn’t like to be bothered during the week. Except for emergencies. And wasn’t this, she thought as she slipped between the sheets, an emergency?
So now—walking to work after having tiptoed out at 5 A.M. while Michael was still asleep—she told herself she was not a coward. She left early because she had a lot of work to do, no other reason. And leaving Michael a note in which she sternly told him he was not to leave the apartment all day, not to allow anyone to see him, was just a common-sense precaution. He knew he couldn’t be seen, but it was better to remind him, wasn’t it? And a letter showed more force than a conversation, didn’t it?
Again, she thought of waltzing with Michael. “Maybe I’ll call Donald at lunch,” she murmured, then increased her pace.
“And how’s your family, Mrs. Shirley?” Emily asked the heavily pregnant woman across the checkout desk of the library.
“They’re all well, except the youngest has a cold. And how’s Donald?”
“Excellent health. He’s—” She broke off as she looked up and saw Michael come walking into the library.
“Emily? Are you all right?” Mrs. Shirley asked “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“No, just an angel,” Michael said, leaning on the counter and looking at the swollen, pregnant and very tired Mrs. Shirley as though she were the sexiest person he’d ever seen.
“Oh my,” Mrs. Shirley said, fluttering her lashes. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Susan Shirley and you are—”
Michael lifted her extended hand to his lips and lingeringly kissed knuckles that were permanently reddened from ten years of caring for her growing brood of children. “I’m Michael….” Hesitating, he looked at Emily and she knew he’d forgotten his last name.
“Chamberlain,” she snapped, and gave him a look meant to let him know she was going to kill him for appearing in public.
But he ignored her and looked back at Mrs. Shirley. “Yes, of course—Chamberlain. I’m Emily’s cousin. On her mother’s side. And I’m staying with her.”
“Why, Emily, you should have told us,” Mrs. Shirley said, making no effort to remove her hand from Michael’s.
Emily was choking too hard to be able to speak. Cousin? Staying with her?!
“Emily, honey,” Michael said, “are you all right? Can I get you something to drink?”
As Mrs. Shirley looked from one to the other, she gave a little smile, and Emily knew that her life, as she knew it, was now over. Within three hours all of Greenbriar would know that her “cousin” was staying with her.
“Tell me, Mr. Chamberlain, are you married?”
“Yes!” Emily spat out, the word catching in her throat so hard she started coughing.
Michael reached across the desk and thumped her on the back, but after one thump his hand motion turned into a caress.
“Separated,” Michael said, smiling at Mrs. Shirley. “Alas, a divorce is underway.”
Emily, still coughing, jerked away from Michael’s hand on her back, but when he left his arm draped across the counter she gave it a good, hard stamp that said his due date was in two weeks.
Michael didn’t take his eyes off Mrs. Shirley but he withdrew his arm while Emily finally finished coughing.
“Well, Emily,” Mrs. Shirley said, “I better get back to the house before the kids destroy it. I must say that it’s been a surprise and a delight to meet you, Mr. Chamberlain.”
“Michael, please,” he said.
“You must come to dinner at my house so my husband and I can get to know you. Or no,” she said as though she’d just thought of it, “a divorce can be so lonely—maybe I should introduce you to a few of my women friends.”
“I would like that very much,” Michael fairly purred. “Oh, but you’d better make it soon because those babies are coming early.”
“Babies?” she said, puzzled. “Oh no, it’s just one. I’m just extraordinarily big and I have two whole months yet.”
To Emily’s pure disgust and Mrs. Shirley’s obvious delight, Michael put his hands on her enormous, hard belly. “Two babies, a boy and a girl, and you have only five weeks left.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Shirley said, smiling, for all the world looking as though she’d just been blessed by the pope, as she started toward the door. “I do think I’ll call my doctor and maybe I’ll insist he do another sonogram.”
“Yes,” Michael said sweetly. “And don’t forget your invitation.”
“Oh, never fear,” she said, backing out the door as though to turn her back on him would make her miss even a second of seeing him.
When she was gone, Michael turned back to Emily, still smiling.
“You are insane!” she hissed, keeping her voice low so the other people in the library couldn’t hear her. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
“I wanted to see your library in this dimension,” he said cheerfully.
She took a deep breath and started to count to ten, but she only got to three before he leaned across the desk so that she was almost nose-to-nose with him. “Mrs. Shirley will tell every woman in town about you and within twenty-four hours the FBI will be here!”
“Actually,” Michael said calmly, “I don’t think that’s true. I was talking to someone this morning and—”
“Dead or alive?” she snapped.
“Alive.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “With or without a body?”
Michael gave her a one-sided grin. “Without. She said there are twenty women to every man in this town and—”
“She? She who?”
“The spirit who told me this is a woman. Are you jealous?”
“Not in the least. I just want to know where you met this woman and if she is haunting my apartment.”
“No, she stays at The Duck’s…er, ah, Donald’s. She told me that there are so few men in this town that I’m safer here than anywhere else on the planet. Even the women who have men are without them most of the time. She said I’m certainly safe from anyone telling something that will get me thrown out of here.”
Emily wasn’t going to comment on this distorted view of her beloved town. And besides, a patron, Anne Helmer, noticed them and decided she just had to check out her books at that moment. Michael opened his mouth to speak to the woman but Emily gave him such a fierce look that he turned away and became intensely interested in a poster announcing Nancy Pickard’s latest mystery.
When Anne was gone, Emily turned back to Michael, her voice lowered. “What was a woman doing in Donald’s apartment?”
“I don’t know. It seemed rude to ask.”
“Great. Etiquette for ghosts,” she murmured, her lips tight.
“Emily, are you angry with me about something?”
She was not going to answer what she was sure he knew was a redundant question, nor was she going to all
ow him to sidetrack her. “What do you want here?”
“I thought I might look over the documents you have on the house we went to yesterday and since Lillian said this is the town’s center—”
“Who is Lillian?” she asked so loudly Hattie and Sarah Somerville looked up from the true-crime novels they were reading. Quieter, she said, “No, don’t tell me, she’s the bodiless spirit who lives in Donald’s apartment, right?” She gave Michael a false smile. “Since he’s not there all week maybe she should pay rent.”
“She has no pockets to hold cash, and it might cause problems if she tried to open a bank account. You know how you mortals are about spirits.”
“Stop laughing at me. And what do you mean she has no pockets?”
“I wouldn’t dare laugh at you and Lillian left this world when she was taking a bath so….” He shrugged, then his eyes lit up. “Maybe you’d like to give her a job here in the library. She could certainly make people bring their books back on time and she’d be company for those two men sitting over—”
“Stop it! I do not want to hear any more of your stories about…about naked ghosts. And I certainly don’t want to hear about any ghosts in my library.”
“Sure? They’re awfully nice men. Except that I think one of them may have murdered—”
“One more word and I’ll throw you out of here,” she hissed as she glanced sideways at the Misses Somerville. They were trying so hard to hear that their bodies were leaning at forty-five-degree angles toward Emily.
Michael was grinning. “So where do you keep this research?”
“Why don’t you go back to my apartment,” she said pointedly, “and I’ll bring all of it home with me?”
“Not a chance. I want to stay near you until I find out what evil surrounds you.”
“You mean, other than you and your bodiless spirits, that is?”
“Emily, Emily, I’d almost think you were angry with me. You better smile, because people are beginning to wonder what you and I are whispering about so intimately.”
She suddenly thought that it would be better for him to stay near her than to be out of her sight. At least this way she’d know where he was and what he was doing. Besides, she was making no progress in getting him out of here. “All right, go sit over there and I’ll bring out what I have so you can look through it.”
“Thanks, but I’ll take that corner table. The men want something to do and they can help me look.”
Emily glared at him. “All right, but if one of them starts moving pages or whatever and frightens my patrons I’ll….” What could she do to punish ghosts? She gave Michael a fake little smile. “I’ll tell Adrian on all of you.” She was quite pleased to see the color leave Michael’s face.
“You catch on too fast,” he said, but as he turned away, he winked at her. And, later, when she dumped a foot-high stack of papers on the table in front of her, he whispered, “They want to meet Lillian.” Then he wiggled his eyebrows in such a way that Emily had to turn away to keep from laughing. The thought of two dirty-old-men ghosts, bored from spending heaven only knows how long sitting around in a library, wanting to meet a naked-lady ghost, was almost too much for her. It took her a moment to recover enough to be able to say, “When you finish with that, I have more.” Unfortunately, her voice did not come out sounding as stern as she wanted it to.
Chapter 10
FRIDAY NIGHT, EMILY THOUGHT AS SHE LEANED BACK against the tub and closed her eyes. Of course, everything that she’d done this week had been wrong, but still, she had to admit that it had been the most interesting week of her life. Not as good as if she’d spent the time with Donald, she reminded herself, and yet it had been extraordinary.
When Michael appeared in the library on Tuesday, she’d been terrified that he’d be recognized. She imagined him lying in a pool of blood on the pavement, FBI and Mafia men standing over him with tommy guns. Or whatever kind of guns they had nowadays, she thought. But after a very nervous afternoon and no hit men appearing, she began to relax.
Well, sort of relax. The truth was, she hadn’t had so much as two minutes’ peace since Susan Shirley had left the library and started spreading the word that an eligible almost-bachelor was sitting in the library.
Greenbriar was a commuter town and all week there were few men around. Most of them were like Donald and had apartments in the city where they stayed during the week, coming home on Friday nights with briefcases loaded with work.
“It’s a war town, is what it is,” Irene had said. “The men go off to war every Monday morning and they come back on the weekend shell-shocked.”
Emily didn’t think Greenbriar was that bad, but sometimes there did seem to be an air of man-hunger on the wind.
So as soon as the word passed that an adult, heterosexual male was in town he became the attraction of the year.
And oh did Michael love it, Emily thought with some disgust as she ran a sponge over her left leg. He loved every minute of the attention, whether it was from lonely women or children who rarely saw their fathers.
By the end of that first day, Michael quit trying to read the mass of research that Emily had given him—which she suspected was no sacrifice—and had given his attention to the people of Greenbriar. By lunch-time he’d left the pile of papers and moved to the pretty corner of the library where Emily had set up the children’s section. There were chairs and big floor cushions and a thick carpet that she had spent three months pleading a nearby dealer to donate.
As Emily stamped book after book after book—since all of Greenbriar wanted a reason to be there—Michael set up what seemed to be a repair shop in her library. It had started innocently enough when the head fell off the doll belonging to a child who was standing beside her mother, who was welcoming Michael to town. The mother, divorced and raising her daughter alone, didn’t notice the child’s big, tear-filled eyes as she looked down at her headless doll. But Michael noticed. Kneeling, he took the two pieces of the doll and put them back together.
The mother was nervously talking, saying nothing, but trying to make a good impression, while Michael had eyes only for the child.
“Do you know any stories?” the little girl whispered, looking into Michael’s big dark eyes.
“I know lots of stories about angels,” he said softly, “and more than anything, I’d like to tell you a few of them.”
The child nodded and held up her hand for Michael to take, then followed him into the children’s corner. The child’s mother blinked a few times, then she turned to Emily and asked if it would be all right if she left her daughter there while she ran a few errands.
“I…,” Emily began. It wasn’t her policy for the library to be used as a daycare center, but then she glanced at Michael and the child; they were both sitting on the floor engrossed in some story he was telling. Emily said that of course the child could stay.
After that, there was no holding back. Children from all over town appeared with broken toys and ears eager to hear whatever Michael would tell them.
At three o’clock Emily called her part-time assistant and asked if she could come in to work, as she was desperately needed. Gidrah was so shocked by this request that she said not a word and was there so quickly that Emily was afraid to ask how fast she’d driven.
“Lord a’mercy,” Gidrah said, her big brown eyes wide as she took in the busy library in a glance. “Who is he?”
Gidrah was a foot taller than Emily and outweighed her by a hundred pounds, and she was the most generous person Emily had ever met. Gidrah lived on the edge of town with a husband who showed up only now and then, and with two teenage sons who did little but eat and watch TV all day. She told Emily that coming to work was her greatest joy in life.
“My cousin,” Emily said over the heads of three women who were lined up at the counter waiting for her to stamp their books. “Could you man the desk while I find books for people?”
“Sure thing,” Gidrah said, her eyes still wide and s
till staring at the top of Michael’s head where it could just be seen over the children’s. “He the Pied Piper?”
“An angel,” Emily said without thinking, then gave Gidrah a look and shrugged before she disappeared into the stacks. And once she was no longer chained to the checkout desk, she was like all the other women who packed the library: She was dying to hear what stories Michael was telling.
With her arms full of books, Emily halted on the outskirts of the group and listened. She didn’t know what she’d expected of Michael’s stories. Probably religious overtones, or at the very least, Bible stories, she thought. But he was telling them about American history. Except that he was telling them about the American Revolutionary War from the standpoint of someone who had been there.
And he could answer all the questions the children asked. “What did they eat?” “How did they go to the bathroom?” “Did their daddies work in the city?” “Did they like video games?”
Nothing stumped Michael, and without thinking Emily found herself creeping forward because she had a question or two that she’d like to ask. But when Michael looked up at her and winked, she remembered her job and took the books to the waiting patrons.
Gidrah was stamping books as fast as she could get them open. “I think you better close the window because those papers of yours are blowing all over the table,” she said, nodding toward the far corner where Emily’s research on the Madison tragedy was stacked.
To Emily’s absolute horror, she saw that her pages were being turned over one by one, just as though a couple of invisible people were reading them. As she watched, a thick file folder was moved from the stack and put on the table, then the cover lifted.
Trying not to run and draw attention to herself, she nevertheless tripped over two chairs as she made her way to the back. “Stop it!” she hissed to the table. “You’re going to scare my patrons.” Immediately the papers stopped moving.
She should have felt good about stopping them, she told herself. But, instead, she felt like she had just denied two patrons the right to use the library. Just because these two patrons had no bodies, she had no right to halt them, did she?