Emily sighed. “Get one of them that says ‘frozen yogurt,’ not the other kind.”
“Ah, I see. Emily, I’m beginning to think that this word ‘cream’ is a curse word to you. Now, where were we?”
“You were telling me that someone was trying to kill me to keep me from publishing the Duke’s love letters.”
Michael looked puzzled for a moment, then grinned. “You want a title in your next life? I could arrange it. Usually it’s not considered a reward. Lots of temptation and lots of responsibility. And not a whole lot of love.”
“No, I don’t want a title. I want—” She narrowed her eyes at him. “So why don’t you want to talk about this anymore?”
“I think we just have to find out who wants to blow you up and no amount of talking is going to figure it out. It does amaze me that you don’t know something like that.”
She put the filled basket on the counter while Michael looked at the candy bars and gum in front of the cash register. “Those are all good for you, so get as many as you like,” she said sweetly as she started to empty the basket. “Not all of us have the advantages that you have of being able to see what’s not there. We poor mortals live our boring little lives and don’t see evil spirits everywhere.”
The man behind the counter woke up and started to ring up the purchases as Michael put half a dozen candy bars on the counter. “What’s this ‘caramel’? If you’re referring to Mr. Moss, he wasn’t any more evil than…than this man,” Michael said, smiling at the man behind the counter, then he dropped another four candy bars onto the counter. “And, Emily, dear, you are the worst liar I have ever seen,” he said companionably, referring to her attempt to get him to not purchase the candy bars.
An hour later, they had pulled over at a rest stop and were eating their sandwiches—Michael was sampling the junk food he’d bought—when Emily turned to him and said, “If those men found you—or me—at that truck stop, then they must know who I am and where I live.”
“Yes,” he said gently, stretching out the coconut-covered pink icing of a cake he’d bought.
She sat down at the picnic table heavily. “They’re sure to be following us,” she said, knowing without a doubt that he had blocked her from seeing this very obvious fact.
“No, not anymore.”
“And you’re sure of that, are you?” she said, leaning across the table from him. “You act like you know what’s going on, but you didn’t know that my car was being fitted with a bomb.”
“True, I didn’t.” He looked at her, now having discarded the icing but enjoying the chocolate cake inside. “The truth is that I have no idea what I can and cannot do. I know my powers when I’m at home because I’ve had years of experience, but here I find I’m extremely limited. For one thing, I can’t see the future.” A frown creased his brow as he looked off at the view that the picnic table overlooked. “I was frightened this morning because I couldn’t see that everything was going to be all right about that bomb. I could feel that something was wrong with the car, but I didn’t know what it was. For all I knew it could have had a broken….” He made a back-and-forth motion with his hand.
“Windshield wiper.”
“Yes. But then I don’t think something so minor would have made the aura of the car turn dark like that. But what do I know? I’d never ridden in a car before I went with you.”
“But now you can sense that no one is following us, right?”
“Yes. They put the bomb on your car and they left. I could tell that much.” He smiled. “So far, my powers seem to be limited to being able to do things with you. I can make your car door open, but I tried to open other locked car doors and couldn’t. And only your hotel door opens to me. Isn’t that odd?”
“Being able to open any locked door is odd,” she said. “And being able to see auras is odd. Not to mention ghosts. And then there’s that little girl at the ice cream parlor. And the bullet in your head, plus the ones in your body. And there seem to be a million things about everyday life that you don’t know. And—”
“Be careful, Emily, or you’ll be telling me that you believe me.”
“I believe that you think you can see ghosts and you think you can—”
“So what would you do with me if I really were an angel?”
“Protect you,” she said without thinking. But when she said it she blushed and looked down at her half-finished candy bar, which she couldn’t believe she was eating in the first place. Angels were protectors, not the other way around.
“So what would make you believe? A miracle? A vision? What?”
“I don’t know,” she said as she stood and began putting food away and avoiding his eyes.
“What is it called when a person stands by the roadside and asks others for a ride?”
“Hitchhiking,” she said quickly, then gave him a stern look. “And don’t you think about doing it. It’s dangerous.”
“If you leave me somewhere I will hitchhike to your town and look for the evil that surrounds you on my own. No one will know you’ve ever met me.”
“And you’ll be reported to the police within ten minutes of stepping into town,” she said abruptly. She put the food into the trunk of the car, but Michael didn’t move. Instead, he sat at the table and looked at the view, sipping his awful, sugary fruit drink that she could tell he didn’t like but wasn’t going to admit it.
I should leave him, she thought. I should just drive off and leave him now. He is not my responsibility and I don’t need more complications in my absolutely perfect life. For that’s the way she saw her life—perfect. She had everything she wanted: a job she loved, a man she loved, friends—and she’d just been honored by the National Library Association. The only thing left that she wanted was to marry Donald and have a couple of children.
But she didn’t leave the man sitting at the table; instead, she went back and sat at the opposite end of the bench and stared at the view.
“Maybe you could find out something about the Madison House for me,” she said slowly. “You see, I’d rather like to write a book about what happened there. I’ve done a lot of research already, but something is missing.”
“So what’s the story?” Michael said as though he weren’t interested at all. “Mortal spirits always have a reason for not leaving this earth.”
“I’ve heard the story all my life. We children used to frighten each other with taunts that Old Man Madison was going to get us, but in the last years I’ve…well, I don’t know, I’ve become more compassionate.”
“You’ve always been willing to help people.”
She opened her mouth to tell him to stop pretending that he’d known her a long time, but why should she turn down a compliment? “It’s a simple story really and one I’m sure happened many times in the past. A beautiful young woman was in love with a handsome, but poor, young man and her father refused them permission to marry. Instead, the father forced the girl to marry a friend of his, a rich Mr. Madison—old enough to be her father. As far as I can tell, they lived together in polite misery for ten years, then the young man who loved the woman came back to town. No one knows what happened, whether she sneaked out to see him or what. But her husband killed the young man in a jealous rage.”
“Unfortunately, I’ve seen that too often,” Michael said seriously. “Jealousy is a major failing of you mortals.”
“Oh? I can’t wait to tell Mickey that,” she said, pointedly, reminding him of just one of the names he’d called Donald.
Michael grinned. “So now I guess your old Mr. Madison haunts the house.”
“Someone does. After the murder, there was a trial and a servant of the husband’s testified that he’d seen his master kill the young man. It was his testimony that convicted the man, because the body was never found. Anyway, Mr. Madison was hanged, the servant later jumped to his death from a window of the house, and the widow never left the house again and finally went mad.”
“So the spirit in the ho
use could be….” He trailed off, thinking.
“Could be the murdered young man, the old man who did the murdering, the unhappy servant who sent his master to his death, or the mad wife. Take your pick.”
“Emily, what do you think this has to do with evil surrounding you?”
“I, ah….” She looked down at her hands.
“Come on, out with it. What have you done?”
Her head came up and she glared at him defiantly. “I don’t know really. But I’ve done something.”
When Michael saw the fear in her eyes, he pushed his bottle of juice toward her. She took a sip, then grimaced at the too-sweet taste. “All right, I think you should spill your intestines,” he said.
“Guts. Spill my guts.”
“Whatever. Tell me what you’ve done that has been horrible enough to bring an angel to earth to solve the problem.”
She looked down at the bottle and absently started to peel the label. “Do you believe in evil spirits?” When he didn’t respond, she looked up at him and saw that he had one eyebrow raised in disbelief.
“Okay, so you do. But most people nowadays don’t.”
“Yes, I know. You mortals now believe in ‘science.’ Most of you think the person who does funny things on the stock exchange is an example of evil.” Michael’s voice was loaded with contempt. “Go on, tell me what you did.”
“I was going to talk to Donald about it this weekend,” she said. “That was part of the reason I was so angry when he didn’t show up. I felt I needed someone to talk to.”
“If you think he’d be a better person to discuss evil spirits with than me, please do so,” Michael said stiffly.
“How did you get to be an angel with your attitude?”
“I was made for my job. Are you going to get on with this or are you too afraid?”
She took a deep breath. “I went to the house. That’s all. I just went there to look at the place. I took a sketch pad so I could make a floor plan of the house, because I am trying to write about what happened. It was full daylight and even though the windows are dirty, I could see quite well.”
She took another sip of the awful drink.
When Emily didn’t say any more, Michael looked into the distance. “Let me guess. You opened something that was sealed.”
“Sort of,” she said.
“A box? No? You….” He looked at her very hard. “Emily! You tore down a wall?”
“Well, it was half falling down anyway and I could see something behind it. Whoever put that wall up was not a very good carpenter,” she said defensively.
“So what came out?”
“I don’t know,” she said with anger. “I can’t see ghosts. All I know is something whooshed past me and I nearly fainted from the nasty feel of it. It took me a while to recover myself, but when I could walk again I left the house.”
He gave her a one-sided smile. “Walked out quietly, did you?”
“Make fun of me all you want, but since that day, about two weeks ago, some very unpleasant things have happened in Greenbriar. A house burned down, a couple with four children are getting a divorce, there have been three car wrecks just outside town and—”
“Do you think you can attribute those things to an evil demon?”
“I don’t know,” she said, standing. “It’s just a feeling I have now that when I’m in the library alone at night, that I’m not alone. And I don’t like who or what is in there with me. Sometimes…sometimes, I think I hear him, or her, laughing. And…and it just seems that lately everyone in town gets into arguments easier than they used to.”
She fully expected this man to laugh at her. She knew Donald would. But that wasn’t a reflection on his character, because she’d tried to tell Irene the same thing and her friend had howled with laughter.
“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked, trying to sound angry, but not succeeding.
“I can’t see what this has to do with someone trying to blow up your car with you in it. But then demons can agitate others to do dreadful things. Their stock-in-trade is chaos and confusion so maybe….” He looked up at her. “Exactly what did you do to this fellow to make him follow you?”
“Me? Why would he follow me? As far as I can tell, he’s after the whole town. And why would an evil spirit want to follow me? I’m practical, sensible and altogether quite ordinary. That is, when I’m not being good,” she said in disgust.
“From what I’ve seen of your life the last few days, you lead anything but an ordinary life. In fact, your life is so extraordinary that you’ve had an angel sent down to save you—and just in time, if I do say so myself. Why, Emily, if you were less good and sensible, you’d be shot for a spy.”
What he was saying was so ridiculous that she laughed and felt much better. “Are you ready to go?” she asked.
“With you? I thought you were throwing me out. I thought you were going to make me hike all the way back. I thought—”
“Liar!” she said, smiling. “You know, I think I’m going to talk to God about His angels. I think you guys need some rethinking.”
“Oh?” Michael asked. “I guess we should be like those angels you put on TV where we do nothing but mouth platitudes and talk in parables.”
“I could use some parables,” she said, opening the car door. “I could certainly use some angelic wisdom. Listen, why don’t you tell me who some of your other clients are, or have been?” she said, then when he smiled, she narrowed her eyes. “Make it up, like you do all the rest of what you tell me.”
Michael seemed unperturbed by her accusations as he got into the seat beside her. “Let’s see. I think you mortals like kings and queens, that sort of thing, right?”
“Stop trying to provoke me and tell me a story or two,” she said as she started the car.
“Marie Antoinette. She was mine. Poor dear. She lives on a farm now and has half a dozen kids and she’s much, much happier. She was dreadful as a queen.”
“So tell me everything,” Emily said as she pulled onto the highway.
Chapter 8
GREENBRIAR WAS NESTLED INTO AN ODD LITTLE LAND formation—a tea cup someone had called it long ago, and the name had stuck. Unfortunately, most people now referred to it as in, “I can’t wait to get out of the bottom of this tea cup.” Whereas Emily thought of the place as peaceful, most everyone else thought of it as boring. The most boring town in America was what some called it. They made jokes that Sheriff Thompson’s gun had rusted to his holster from lack of use.
The way into the town was down a steep slope and the way out was up a hill that only the hardiest of bicyclists could love. The other two sides were steep mountains that could only be scaled with heavy ropes and steel rigging.
At the bottom of this formation was Greenbriar, where two-hundred sixteen and two-thirds people lived (Mrs. Shirley was pregnant again), and everyone said that what made people stay there was inertia: They were just too lazy to move elsewhere. Except for the people who worked in the few shops in town, everyone else worked in the city. Often, they were like Donald and stayed away all week but came back to Greenbriar on weekends.
One of the few things in the town that drew outsiders was the library. In the last century, Andrew Carnegie had happened to visit the tiny town of Greenbriar, thought it beautiful and designated one of his beautiful libraries to be built there. And it was this lovely old building that Emily called hers, the place where she did what she could to harass state and federal governments to give her money to buy books for her little library. She wrote authors and begged; she constantly plagued publishers. She went to the American Booksellers Convention each year and lugged home masses of free books so she could share them with her patrons.
As a result of Emily’s nonstop efforts, the Greenbriar Library was the best small library in the state. People drove many miles to hear storytellers, to listen to authors read from their books, to see displays of book art, and anything else that Emily could think of to attract p
eople to her library.
Maybe to the other residents Greenbriar was a place they wanted to leave, but not to Emily. She loved the town and the people in it as though they were her family—which they were. With both her parents dead, no siblings, and no other relatives, all she had was Donald and this town.
But now she seemed to have the man sitting beside her, she thought as she glanced at him. He was engrossed in the music on the radio and kept changing stations and asking Emily questions about everything he heard. She told herself that of course he was just pretending that he’d lived his whole life and never heard country-and-western, or opera, or even rock and roll.
As she drove into Greenbriar, it was late and she was glad it was dark, as she didn’t want anyone to see her with this stranger in her car. It would be better all around if no one saw him—even if he weren’t recognized—because, well, Donald might not exactly understand.
Her apartment was at the near end of Greenbriar and she was glad of that. It was in a large building, at least large for Greenbriar. The ground-floor contained a grocery store, a post office and a hardware store. The upstairs had been divided into two apartments; one was hers and the other Donald’s.
Soon after they met, Donald had decided he wanted a place to get away from the city on weekends. He also knew it would look better on his political resume if he came from a small town—and you couldn’t get much smaller than Greenbriar. So, he’d rented the apartment over the hardware store.
After he began coming to the small town on weekends, the two of them had been inseparable. Well, at least inseparable in Greenbriar. Only once had Emily been into the city with him to see where he worked, to see his city apartment with its walls of mirrors and to meet the people with whom he worked. That once had been enough. She had felt out of place and useless, what with all those tall, thin women wearing black suits with wide-shouldered jackets and tiny skirts. Emily in her brown-and-white dress had felt out of place, a bit like a milk maid who had wandered into a palace.