Now she was seeing what she’d been told for what it was: revenge served cold. In the sixth grade, she’d seen Lewis taunting a first grader and Nigh had hit him in the nose so hard he had to be taken home. Like the bullies they were, neither of the boys ever again bothered Nigh or anyone else when she was around.
So they got her back at last. It had taken years, but they did it.
When she got to Lewis’s house, she slowed down, meaning to turn into his driveway, but she didn’t. To bawl him out would give him no end of pleasure.
Instead, she found herself on the road to Aylesbury. Every piece of clothing she owned was worn out and stained. And her shoes weren’t much better. And she needed a new tube of mascara, and maybe a lipstick or two. Maybe she’d take a little time off and do some shopping.
Nigh arrived at Priory House at ten minutes to seven. Jace hadn’t given her a time for dinner, but she knew that Americans ate early. She pulled into the courtyard and tried to still the butterflies in her stomach. This was, of course, preposterous. Twice in her life she’d been in places where bombs were going off, so why was something like having dinner with this American making her nervous?
She looked down at her dress. It was a deep blue silk, cut on the bias, and fit like a second skin. It was made by some designer Nigh had never heard of, but who the clerk assured her was “famous.” And her heels had to be at least four inches high. Her ankle twisted on the gravel as she headed toward the front door, but she quickly righted herself.
As Nigh walked under the archway, she hesitated. Which door should she use? She was an invited guest, so she should use the front door. On the other hand, she was a resident of the village and she’d been there as a child, which made the kitchen entrance more likely.
For a moment she gritted her teeth. Was she insane? She had twice eaten dinner at Buckingham Palace, yet here she was…okay, she thought, admit it, Nigh, you’re scared of Mrs. Browne.
“I’m not going to be,” she said aloud, then started for the front door. Before she reached it, Mrs. Browne appeared out of nowhere.
“Use the front door now, do we?” Mrs. Browne asked. “And all tarted up too, I see. The American strike your fancy? Going after him now, are you?”
“I have been invited to dinner,” Nigh said, her nails cutting into her palms. “Mr. Montgomery invited me and—”
“He didn’t tell me he was invitin’ anybody, but it’s not my place to ask. If he’d’ve told me he’d asked you, I’d’ve told him a thing or two. What a nasty bit you wrote about him in the paper. It’s a wonder he didn’t use an American gun on you. That’s what they do in America, you know. Shoot you. But it’s nothin’ to me what he does on his own time. Or who he does it with.”
“Where is he?” Nigh asked, her teeth clenched, torn between wanting to use her fists on the horrid little woman and running to hide in her mother’s skirts.
“Out in the stone round, he is. You do remember where that is, don’t you? You used to snoop around here well enough when you were a child, so you should remember. This place was a trainin’ school to you, weren’t it? I hear you snoop all over the world now.”
This is ridiculous! Nigh thought and took the slump out of her shoulders. “That I do. I snoop everywhere, so maybe I’ll just tell Mr. Montgomery what happened to the brandy that was supposed to come with this house. You and your old girlfriends still filling the empty bottles with cold tea?”
Mrs. Browne put her nose in the air and stalked away.
“Great, Nightingale,” Nigh muttered. “That’s two enemies you’ve made in one day. You should have stopped at Lewis’s house, bawled him out, and made it three.”
High heels were not made for walking across soft English lawns. After the third time she sunk down to her heels, she took the shoes off and carried them. The “stone round” that Mrs. Browne referred to was the local name for a beautiful eighteenth-century stone gazebo. It had a round floor, columns, and a beautiful domed top. At least it had once been beautiful. The last time she saw it, Hatch was using it to store plastic bags full of greensand.
As she walked through the trees, down the little-used path toward the gazebo, she had a lovely idea. What if Montgomery had set up dinner in the gazebo? Candlelight, a damask-covered table. Would he serve oysters? What delectable thing from Jamie Oliver had Mrs. Browne prepared for tonight? As hateful as the woman was, she was a renowned cook.
Smiling, Nigh contemplated the evening ahead. In spite of the bad that had gone on between her and Jace Montgomery, she’d felt the physical attraction. He was a very good-looking man and she was, well…she wasn’t bad to look at either. So maybe he had forgiven her about the newspaper, and maybe he was ready for something a little more personal to begin…
When Nigh stepped through the trees and saw the gazebo, it wasn’t what she’d hoped for. Jace Montgomery was there with what looked like a machete and he was clearing away years of vines and weeds. He was drenched in sweat and what skin was showing from under his dirty shirt was grimy.
When he saw Nigh, he looked startled, as though he’d forgotten their dinner date, but then a slow smile spread over his face. Forgotten or not, obviously, she had misinterpreted his invitation. He’d meant sandwiches and a bottle of beer, while she had taken him to mean a tuxedo in the moonlight. Nigh felt over-dressed, foolish, and extremely embarrassed. She wanted to say that she was going to a party afterward and that’s why she was dressed up, but she didn’t. She did hide her high heels behind her back.
“You brought the retraction,” Jace said. “You can put it over there. Sorry if I don’t stop, but…” He trailed off as he shrugged in the general direction of the mess surrounding the gazebo.
“No, sure,” she mumbled, wishing she could sink into the ground and disappear. She should, of course, leave, but she’d have to go past Mrs. Browne’s windows. To be seen that she, Nigh, had thought she’d been invited to a real, sit-down dinner but wasn’t would be too humiliating. To be fair to herself, usually, when men asked her out they made an effort.
She watched him slash at some vines and pull them off the stone work. “Ann’s grandfather built that.”
“Did he? Nice man?” he asked.
“No. None of Ann’s male ancestors were nice.” Jace was tugging on a vine, but she could see that it was caught on a pillar. She thought it was possible that the vines were stronger than the marble. Pull too hard and the whole thing could collapse—on them.
She dropped her shoes into the grass and removed a pair of garden shears from the nearby wheelbarrow. “Wait,” she said, then stepped onto the floor in her bare feet and began to cut the vines that clung to the column. Unfortunately, some of them were beginning to take root, so she had to use her nails to disengage them. So much for that afternoon’s manicure.
Jace held the vines and pulled as she loosened them. “So what was the grandfather like?”
Nigh thought for a moment. “I think his death tells everything. He drowned when he was just twenty-eight years old. He made a bet with another young man that he could swim across the lake underwater. They all waited for him to come up, but he didn’t. Seems he got his foot caught in a pile of old bricks that were buried at the bottom of the lake. His father had thrown the bricks in there so the lake would require less water to fill it. He left everything to his only child, Ann’s father, who was only four years old. Not a penny was left to his young wife, yet the will required her to live in Priory House. He didn’t want to leave a rich widow behind. Mother and child ended up living in just a few rooms and had only two people to help them take care of this whole place.”
“Ah, the English love of primogeniture,” Jace said, pulling on the vines as Nigh cut them away from the column.
“Don’t knock it. It’s kept the big estates intact. Ow!” She sucked at her finger where a vine had lashed back and cut it.
“You’re going to ruin your dress if you do that,” Jace said. “Why don’t you just leave what you wrote, I’ll read it lat
er, and call you.”
Nigh gave him a little smile. For one thing, she hadn’t written anything down. Trying on shoes and dresses, then having wet nail polish precluded writing something she didn’t want to write in the first place. Second, she’d rather die than go past Mrs. Browne’s kitchen windows and let her see that she had not been invited for dinner after all. “No, that’s okay,” she said. “It’s been a long day and I could use the exercise.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. A truly rotten day. You should have seen what I read about myself in the newspaper this morning.”
For a moment Nigh looked at him in astonishment, then she gave a tiny smile. She wasn’t about to laugh out loud. His tone was deadpan, so hers could be too. “Yeah, well, I imagine you can handle whatever is dished out to you.”
“You’re right. At first I was in such a rage that all I could think about was lawyers, but then I calmed down and decided there were other ways to handle the problem. I put up six notices in town that the writer of the article was taking applications and interviewing for the twenty-eight jobs that would be available at the new Priory House Ghost Center.”
“You didn’t,” Nigh whispered.
“’Fraid so.” He smiled at her.
“I think I may be sick,” she said.
Jace unbuttoned his sweaty shirt, removed it, and handed it to her. “In that case, you’d better cover up your new dress.”
Nigh just stood there looking at his bare upper torso, at what seemed to be acres of sun-bronzed muscles. What did he do all day? Wrestle bulls? That’s the only thing that would account for a body like that. He said nothing, but smiled at her in a knowing way. Nigh took his shirt and looked away. She was damned if she was going to let him see what she thought of his six-pack abs.
She put her arms in the damp shirt and hated the way she loved the feel of it, the smell of it. What was more enticing than a warm, sweaty male?
She grabbed a vine and pulled, and when it didn’t come away, she cut, then pulled harder.
“Hey!” Jace yelled. “Leave something for me to do. And where did all this energy come from? Was it something I said?”
Nigh had a vision of being followed around the village by people talking to her about their schemes to make money in a “Ghost Center.” “So what have you and Dead Ann been up to this afternoon?” she asked with as much sarcasm as she could put in her voice.
“Haven’t seen her,” he said as he pulled the last of the vines away from the column. “She’s angry at me. In fact, she nearly killed me. Took my breath away until I turned blue. Another few seconds and I would have been able to join her.”
Nigh quit cutting and pulling to look at him. “Killed you? Took your breath away? I thought maybe you saw her walk through a wall or something. Or heard her. You’re having…relations with her?”
“I guess you could call it that. Here, do that one next,” he said, pointing to a column that was so covered you could hardly see the white marble beneath.
Nigh cut for a few minutes, waiting for him to go on, but he said nothing. “Is that it? Are you going to tell me more or not?”
“Am I going to see it in the newspaper tomorrow? By the way, can you make a living from such a small newspaper?”
Nigh opened her mouth to tell him about her career, but she closed it again. He had secrets; she had secrets. Only hers were pretty public if he’d bother to ask anyone about her. “No, you won’t see it in the newspaper. If you did, what would you do to me?”
“I’d do something creative, something to fit the crime.”
She waited, but when he again said nothing, she leaned against the column and started cleaning her nails with the tip of the shears.
Jace laughed. “Okay, I saw her under some unusual circumstances and I wanted to see her again, so I decided to…well, to court her. Entice her, make her want to visit me again.”
Nigh started cutting vines. “Go on. Don’t make me beg. Talk!”
“When I saw her in her room, I—”
“Saw her? How did you see her? Is she transparent?”
“You want this story or that one?”
“Both of them. I want to hear every word of all of it. From the beginning.”
“That will take hours.”
“I have nothing else to do, do you?” she asked.
“Not a thing,” Jace said as he pulled on the vine Nigh had cut away. “You aren’t hungry, are you?”
“Starving. But then you did invite me to dinner.”
“Ohhhhh,” he said, and smiled as he looked her up and down. She knew that he saw what she’d been expecting and why she’d dressed up. “So I did. Sorry about that, but I forgot. Today I’ve had a few other things on my mind. But, anyway, Mrs. Browne has a kitchen filled with food. As soon as we get this done and the whole story told, we’ll eat.”
Nigh grabbed a handful of vine and pulled hard. “Get busy! Talk! Pull! Any hope of wine with that meal?”
“Whatever’s in the cellar.”
“If it’s not brandy, it’ll be great. So start telling me about the very first time you saw Ann.”
“Actually,” Jace began, “I was right about the history of the lady highwayman. By the way, I was meaning to ask you—”
She held her shears toward him in a threatening way. “Ask me later. Now, I want to hear everything you know, and everything you’ve done.”
She was watching him out of the corner of her eye and she could tell he was pleased by her words. Yet again she wondered why he’d bought a huge house in England. The Internet said he had a large family. Did he have a falling out with them? Had he done something awful that made them throw him out? Or had one of them done something that he couldn’t abide, so he’d left the country? If so, why hadn’t he bought a nice apartment in London? Or if he wanted the country, why not a nice little Queen Anne former rectory? Something manageable?
She thought for about ten minutes, then Jace’s story began to take over her thoughts. Three times he had to remind her to keep cutting because she was so engrossed in his words that she forgot the task at hand. Hiding in a wardrobe, listening to two women who had been dead for a century? Of course she didn’t believe a word he was saying, but he sure did tell a whopping good tale.
9
I can’t see my hand in front of my face,” Jace said. “I think we’d better go in.”
“Sure,” Nigh said softly. Her mind was full of the story Jace had been telling her. “She talked to you? Actually talked to you?”
“Yes,” he said as he put the tools in the wheelbarrow. “You think we can find our way back in the dark?”
“I’ve been walking these paths in the dark since—”
“I know, since you were nine.”
“Right,” she said, smiling at him. “Here, you’ll need your shirt. It’s getting chilly.”
“Chilly? Is that what you call it? England has three climates: cold, colder, and coldest.”
She had lived in too many places to take offense at his words. “When it’s merely cold, we go to Scotland to cool off. Now there’s cold for you. Wool in August.”
Jace chuckled as he put his shirt back on. “Race you to the house.”
“You’re on,” she said, then smiled as he took off running.
Nigh took her time, fumbling around in the grass for her new shoes, then slowly following the dark path toward the house. She listened for a moment, but heard nothing. When she was a child she liked nothing more than sneaking around the grounds of Priory House. She’d always had an idea that Mr. Hatch knew she visited, but until tonight she’d had no idea that Mrs. Browne did also. But then Mrs. Browne made it her business to know everyone’s business.
When Nigh got halfway up the path, only yards from the house, she crouched down and went through a thicket of azalea bushes, then she turned a sharp left beside an ancient yew hedge. After another few yards of hurrying across open ground in her bare feet, she came to the old well house. Mr. Hatch stored garden tools in it n
ow, so she hoped she could still find the little door. It wasn’t easy in the dark and the latch had rusted. She used to borrow oil from her father’s garage to keep the latch and hinges oiled so they wouldn’t squeak.
It took her longer than it did when she was a child because there was now a mound of dirt in front of the little door, but she managed to pull it open enough to squeeze through. She had to fight thick cobwebs that grabbed her face as she put on her shoes then stood up in the old tunnel. As a child she’d never worried about the safety of the old timbers holding the earth above her head, but she did now. She fumbled to her right and found the tin box of candles and the matches she’d put there many years before. Would they still light? After all, England had quite a moist climate. Montgomery would probably say it was damp, damper, and dampest, she thought, frowning. “If our climate is so bad, let’s compare our gardens with your American ‘backyards,’” she mumbled as she lit the candle. “Not too damp, I see.”
Cautiously, she made her way down the tunnel toward the house, looking suspiciously at the timbers over her head. What an idiot I am to take this route, she thought. And she’d done it just because some man had challenged her to a race. He’d get to the house quicker than she would, but she planned to surprise him when she walked down the main staircase. “Where have you been?” she’d say, as though she’d been waiting for him. But was such a childish game worth her life?
She stepped on three creepy crawly things, and the beams over her head seemed to creak ominously. As a child she’d loved every sound of the tunnel and never once had she been afraid of it. But back then she had been oblivious to the possible catastrophes. If a child of hers ever went through a tunnel like this, she’d…