A Date With the Other Side (2 page)

“I can’t just order it to sit and lie down like a dog,” he said testily.

She eyeballed him, as if she didn’t quite believe him. Her eyes dropped down to the tented spread. “Were you having a good dream? Geez Louise.”

He supposed that was flattery. “You know, maybe if you weren’t staring at me, we could move things along.”

Reaching behind him, trying not to rock anything and cause further damage, he grabbed his pillow and flopped it down on his uncooperative appendage.

“Oh, sorry,” she said in a tone that clearly indicated she wasn’t. An unholy grin was creeping across her face.

The doorknob rattled again.

Shelby whirled. “Stop rattling that damn knob, Brady, or I’ll rip your tongue ring out.”

Boston heard a disgruntled voice from the other side of the door. “Shit, Shelby, I didn’t touch the doorknob.”

Shelby narrowed her eyes. “Maybe Nanny Baskins wants in.”

Christ, he needed a freaking interpreter between her country accent and her weird and vague announcements. He was starting to think he shouldn’t have rented this house, since the family lunatic seemed to have the run of it.

Shelby added, “Go on home, Brady! Tour’s canceled.”

Right. The tour. She had babbled something about a haunted house tour. “Can you explain this tour to me again? I can’t seem to figure it out.” Since she hadn’t bothered to explain it.

Shelby shrugged. “Cuttersville’s the most haunted town in Ohio. Ghosts all over the place. I run a tour of the most active sites. This house is on the tour.”

Maybe they could go back to when he hadn’t known anything and then his blood pressure wouldn’t be shooting through the haunted house roof. “That’s ridiculous. I rented this house and no one said a word to me about any tour. You’ll have to remove this stop on the tour.”

Her mouth dropped. “You rented the whole house?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Are you married or something?”

Boston wondered if he would ever be not confused again. “No. So? I wanted privacy.”

She snorted. “You won’t get any here. This place is crawling with spooks.” She glanced around nervously. “No offense meant, folks.”

Happily, the insanity of this conversation had caused total deflation. Boston reached under the pillow and worked the bedspread free. He let out a sigh of relief.

“Everything okay under there, Mr…”

He supposed she could know his name since she’d seen him naked. “Macnamara. Boston Macnamara.”

Now it was her turn to look confused. “Which one’s your first name and which one’s your last name?”

Boston flipped his hair out of his eyes. “My first name is Boston.”

“Oh.” Her lips pressed together, like she was holding back. Then she put her hands on her hips. “How’d you get saddled with a name like that?”

So much for her holding back.

He was offended. He happened to like his name. It was different and suited him. “Not that it’s any of your business, but my parents eloped in Boston.”

Understanding dawned. She nodded. “Oh, I get it. Your mom got pregnant there, didn’t she?”

Boston didn’t know that for a fact, since he had never once felt the urge to get confirmation from his mother about it, but he did know he was born nine months after their wedding. But the way Shelby said it made it seem… vulgar.

“I have no idea,” he said flatly, feeling that she had distinctly worn out her welcome in his bedroom.

“Because you know that’s how Chevy Danforth got his name and Harley Johnson got his.”

Now there was a visual he didn’t need.

“Oh, and Abigail Murphy.”

Boston pondered that one for a second, but couldn’t draw any conclusions from it. He shouldn’t ask. “How is that?”

“Because that was the name on the headstone of the grave she was conceived on.”

He’d had to ask.

Turning, pillow still protecting him, he dropped his feet to the floor. “Well, as charming as this conversation is, I’d appreciate some privacy now, Shelby.”

“Sure.” She nodded and backed up toward the door. “I’ll see you at eleven, then.”

He froze on the bed. “Why? What’s at eleven?” He had every intention of staying far away from Shelby Tucker, her perky breasts, and her slightly scary speech patterns.

“That’s when the first tour runs. Then at five, I have a seniors’ group from Warren coming.”

Boston was starting to get the feeling that maybe Shelby was being paid money to annoy him. She was just too good at it.

“I told you quite specifically that you’ll have to take this house off the tour. I rented it for three months and no one is setting foot in here but me.”

Shelby didn’t look impressed. “I’ll be here at eleven.”

“I’m going to call Mrs. Stritmeyer. This is ludicrous!”

Shelby turned the brass doorknob. “You can call Gran, but I happen to know for a fact that she writes it into every lease that you grant permission to allow this room to be viewed on the tour.”

Boston’s mouth fell clear down to his chest. “That’s impossible. I read the lease.”

Shelby gave him a grin and a wave. “There’s always the fine print, Mr. Boston. Bye, now.”

The second the door closed, Boston dove for his discarded clothes, afraid she’d come back and he’d have one foot in and one foot out, further humiliating himself. Underwear secure, he paced back and forth in front of the four-poster bed in his black boxers.

There were only two possible explanations for what had just happened.

He was either the victim of an elaborate reality show joke, or his life was about to take a serious downhill Shelby Tucker-filled slide.

“Gran, is there something you forgot to mention to me?” Shelby fixed her grandmother with a stern look after kissing her on the cheek.

Gran was having breakfast on her wide front porch, digging around her plate with a fork and an expression of disdain. “This fruit salad is old. That deli at the grocery is going to hear from me. That’s what happens when these big stores take over and you lose the personal touch.”

Shelby agreed, and normally didn’t mind her grandmother saying her piece. But today Shelby wanted to hear about Boston Macnamara in the blue bedroom.

“Forget the fruit salad, Gran, there was a naked man in the White House.” Shelby sat down in the wicker chair opposite Gran and kicked off her sandals.

Her grandmother owned half a dozen properties around Cuttersville, each at least fifty years old, all haunted, or so people said. Gran referred to each house by the color of their exterior paint. The one Boston Macnamara was staying in was a white Victorian with black shutters, and was known to everyone in town as Mrs. Stritmeyer’s White House.

Putting her fork down, Gran gave her an amused look. At seventy, Gran was slowing down a bit, but she still managed her properties herself and was sharp as a tack. She was wearing capri pants and a coral sleeveless top, which Shelby realized made her own grandmother actually appear more stylish than she did. She had a bad habit of just pulling on whatever was clean and sitting on the top in her drawer.

“Shelby, I thought you said you never see ghosts.”

“I don’t.” That was probably the only reason she could do the job she did every day, guiding tours through Cuttersville’s myriad haunted houses. In three years, she’d never once seen a single ghost, heard a single sound that wasn’t explainable, or felt a cold spell. Lights never flickered and vapor never flowed past her.

Shelby was solidly in the real world and couldn’t count the number of times others had claimed to be experiencing a supernatural phenomenon standing right next to her while she saw diddly-squat. Sometimes she thought it was all a lot of bunk, and other times she was damn jealous. What was the matter with her that no ghost wanted to show her a spectral face and plead for justice?

Except for an hour ago. She’d heard that doorknob jiggle. Of course, that had to have been Brady, acting like an ass, as he was known to do.

Gran speared a melon. “Then how did you see the Old Colonel if you don’t see ghosts?”

“I don’t know who the Old Colonel is, but the guy I saw was not old, most certainly not dead, and he was sleeping in the blue bedroom.”

Naked.

Gran looked surprised. “You mean I never told you about the Old Colonel? He sunbathes in the nude. You’ll have to add that to the tour, it’s so eccentric. And folks just love eccentric.”

Shelby didn’t give a rat’s hooey about the Old Colonel, though she hoped if a ghost did ever decide to show himself to her, it wouldn’t be to flash her.

“I’m talking about Boston Macnamara. You know, you might have told me you let the house before I walked in on the man stark naked.” Not that she regretted it, but Gran didn’t need to know that.

Gran crossed her little white sneakers at the ankle. “Lucky you.”

Shelby laughed. “Don’t let Mom hear you say stuff like that, she’ll flip out.”

Gran snorted. “Your mother’s had about twelve boyfriends since your father left. She has no business going prude on me. And I really do think you’re a lucky thing to have seen that man without any clothes on.”

“Gran!” Shelby laughed. “Behave.”

Gran just smiled, her hand coming up to pat her straw-colored hair, trimmed short and framing her face in a cute modern cut. Shelby thought about her own hair, all eight hundred pounds of it, parked on top of her head like a brown octopus. Maybe she ought to think about getting a trim, if her own gran looked better than she did.

“What? I saw the man, and he’s quite a hottie. I’m so old, I’ve earned the right to say whatever I’m thinking.” Then Gran turned sly. “What did you think of him, Shelby?”

That he was a prime hunk of man and that she’d wished she’d been wrapped around him instead of that bedspread. Shelby crossed her legs. Lord, celibacy was catching up with her. “I didn’t think anything except that he was naked and in your house.”

“He’s single, you know.” Gran dipped her fork back into the inadequate fruit salad and stabbed a grape. “Works for Samson, of course. Probably rich too. Drives a fancy car and didn’t blink when I told him rent was fifteen hundred dollars a month.”

Shelby stopped inspecting the dry scaly patch on her left knee and looked at her grandmother in amazement. “You charged him fifteen hundred dollars? That’s almost double what he should be paying. You normally only charge two hundred per bedroom.”

“And there’s five bedrooms,” Gran said like that explained everything.

“So that’s only a thousand. Where does the other five hundred come in?”

“He’s paying extra for privacy. He’s got the whole house to himself.” Gran waved her hand in the air and didn’t look the least bit ashamed of fleecing a city boy. “He gave me three months’ rent up front.”

Shelby tried to imagine possessing forty-five hundred dollars all at one time and gave it up. “Dang. So what does he do at Samson? Is he here for good?”

Samson Plastics had been in Cuttersville for nearly ten years, and had saved the town from extinction. About half of Cuttersville’s fifteen hundred adults worked in the plant, which manufactured two-liter bottles and other plastic items. While it had brought employment, it had also brought outsiders, who didn’t always respect that Cuttersville had its own way of doing things.

Boston Macnamara was an outsider if ever she saw one. You only had to listen to him talk for five seconds to figure that out.

Gran shrugged. “I don’t know what he does, I just know he must be important. His cell phone was ringing left and right and the whole town’s buzzing with his arrival. Seems like nobody knew he was coming, now here he is, and nobody knows how long he’s staying. Folks are afraid he’s here to inspect the plant, maybe shut it down.”

“He can’t do that!” Whatever Shelby felt about the changes Samson Plastics had wrought on Cuttersville, she knew it would be a disaster if the plant closed. Half the town would starve.

Sweating in the June sun, even with the porch roof blocking the direct rays, Shelby picked at her tank top and inspected Gran’s petunias. White and purple, just like she had every year. There were classic and feminine, like Gran, and suited this tiny Victorian house with excessive gingerbread detailing. Gran had moved into the house in ‘fifty-six after her husband, Shelby’s grandfather, had gotten too friendly with a bottle of gin one night and his pickup truck had kissed a fence post.

“…about these folks staring at you. They just don’t like you because you’re corporate.”

Though Madge probably meant to make him feel better, it only restored his earlier surliness. He didn’t want to be in Cuttersville. He was forced there on a hazy, indefinite assignment that felt suspiciously like a demotion.

He was probably allergic to hay, he wasn’t overly fond of grease, and his idea of a good time did not involve haunted houses or cow tipping. Yet here he was, trying to make the best of it, and
they
weren’t going to like
him
!

He’d see about that.

With a charming smile over his coffee cup, Boston told Madge, “I’m hurt to hear that, Madge. I’m not a corporate shark, I’m just a poor workingman like anybody else, working too many hours and paying too much in taxes.”

Madge chuckled. “That’s another reason they ain’t going to like you. The girls in this town will be buzzing around you like mosquitoes, with that smile and those city clothes. You look like you stepped right off the TV.”

The only local girl he’d met so far had been Shelby Tucker, and she hadn’t seemed all that impressed. Amused maybe, but not impressed. But then who wouldn’t be amused when confronted with the sight of a man trapped inside a doily bedspread hole?

“Madge, you jawing that young man to death?”

His landlady scooted around Madge and took the seat opposite him. “Get him one of those Specials and leave us to talk.”

Boston narrowed his eyes and decided to forgo pleasantries.

“Should we talk about your granddaughter waltzing into my bedroom at the crack of dawn this morning?”

The smile Jessie Stritmeyer gave him was smug. “Well, since you brought it up. What did you think of Shelby? Sweet girl, isn’t she?”

He was thinking more along the lines of insane, but maybe that’s what
sweet
meant in the country. “She seems to think she can bring a tour through the house anytime she feels like it. That wasn’t in the lease, Mrs. Stritmeyer.”