Ready & Willing (6 page)

She shook her head. “No. You’re not.”

“Then why are you speaking to me?”

She opened her mouth to reply, told herself that he was just trying to get a rise out of her, and closed it again. Just her luck that she’d have hallucinations that were sarcastic. Just how little sleep had she had last night?

When she said nothing, Captain Summerfield sighed with something akin to disappointment, and folded his ghostly arms over his ghostly torso.

Hallucinated
arms over his
hallucinated
torso, Audrey quickly corrected herself.

“I am not a figment of your imagination, Mrs. Magill,” he told her. “I am Silas Summerfield, and I am standing right before you. And yes, the sunlight does render me somewhat . . . thin,” he finally concluded.

Oh, she didn’t know about that. The guy seemed to be solid rock. Except, you know, for that translucent thing.

She said nothing in response, mostly because speaking to a man who wasn’t there would make it seem as if maybe he were there. And if Silas Summerfield was standing in her kitchen, then the door to the afterlife was way more than ajar at the moment. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, Sean Magill could walk through it, too. And Audrey simply could not allow herself to have that hope.

At her reticence, Silas expelled a soft sigh and said, very quietly, “Please say something, Mrs. Magill.”

But Audrey only shook her head in silence.

“What will it take to prove to you that I’m not a hallucination?” he asked. “That I am Silas Summerfield, former owner of this house, dead almost four score years and now returned because I must ensure that my descendant escapes a fate worse than death.”

A fate worse than death?
Audrey echoed to herself. Terrific. Her hallucination was sarcastic
and
melodramatic.

Silas nodded in response to her silence this time. “Actually, I had anticipated this reaction,” he told her. “I will prove to you that I am who and what I say I am. Come with me to Bellamy’s room.”

Audrey hesitated. And not just because she didn’t know which room was Bellamy’s room, either. Or who Bellamy was, for that matter. Was following a hallucination’s orders the same thing as talking back to one? Would she be more crazy or less if she did what he told her to do? Then again, by virtue of this hallucination going on as long as it had, the level of her craziness was probably moot at this point. She just hoped her health insurance covered at least
some
of the cost of therapy.

She hesitated a moment, then thought,
What the hell.
Speaking to a hallucination couldn’t be any crazier than having one in the first place. So she asked, “Who’s Bellamy?”

He gazed at her blankly for a moment, as if she should know the answer to that. Then his expression cleared, as if he remembered why she didn’t know the answer to that. “Bellamy is . . .
was,
” he quickly corrected himself, “my valet. He served me well for nearly forty years.” His expression darkened some. “Of course, I had no idea the man was stealing from me at the time.”

Audrey had no idea how to reply to that. So all she said was, “Gee, guess good help was hard to find in your day, too, huh?”

All Silas said in response to that was, “Come with me to his room.” He made a face, then corrected himself again, “To his
former
room. I believe you’re currently using it to store supplies.”

Oh,
that
room, Audrey thought. The one that was little more than closet-sized and claimed only one tiny window and was wedged into a corner of the second floor at the opposite end of the house from the bathroom. Audrey had thought it too small and bleak to even use it for her office. No wonder Bellamy had stolen from his employer.

Silas suddenly frowned, as if she’d spoken that last aloud. Then, as if to illustrate that very thing, he asked, “You think theft is an excusable offense, Mrs. Magill?”

Whoa. Now her hallucination could read her mind? Well, that was going to be inconvenient. Not to mention irritating. And embarrassing, too, on those occasions when she got Backstreet Boys songs stuck in her head.

She gave her forehead a good mental smack.
Well,
of course
her hallucination could read her mind
, she thought. That was, after all, where it had originated. Naturally it would have access to anything else that might be parading around in her head.

Not sure why she was continuing a dialogue with a figment of her imagination, she replied anyway, “No, I don’t think theft is excusable. Well, unless you and your family are starving to death like Jean Valjean or something. I just meant, you know, if you’d given the guy a better room, he might have shown you better service.”

“He might also have done that had he not been a damnable cur.”

Yeah, okay. There was that. Point to the hallucination.

The hallucination in question smiled suddenly, doubtless because he had read her mind again, and something about the smile made her toes curl. It was amazing how much he looked like his great-great-however-many-greats grandson when he did that.

Not that
that
was what made Audrey’s toes curl, no way. Heat in the pit of her stomach notwithstanding, Nathaniel Summerfield was the most odious man she’d ever met. He was everything she disliked in the opposite sex, epitomized all those things that gave the male gender a bad name. Overbearing, arrogant, short-tempered, self-important, more than a little sexist . . . The list could go on forever. The moment she’d stepped into his office and seen that it had been decorated by the design firm of Testosterone and Cash, Unlimited, she’d been reminded of all the reasons she’d left the corporate workforce behind. It was more than clear that what mattered most to Nathaniel Summerfield was money. And that power was a close second. For all she knew, those were the only things that mattered to him.

But he had smiled at her, she couldn’t quite help recalling. Once. When she’d first come into the room, as he’d told her hello. And when she’d seen that smile . . .

Well. Suffice it to say something inside her had stirred to life that hadn’t inhaled a single breath since Sean’s death.

She shook the memory off almost literally, reminding herself she had a hallucination to dispel and some sanity to check. Captain Summerfield still stood before her, watching her with a curious expression.

“You found him handsome, my grandson?” he asked.

Audrey’s mouth dropped open at that. “Of course not,” she hotly denied. Okay, so there was more than Backstreet Boys songs that could embarrass her. Except that she
hadn’t
been attracted to his grandson, she reminded herself. Which just went to prove that hallucinations didn’t know everything. So there.

“If you must know, I found him loathsome, your grandson,” Audrey added. “And I don’t think you need to be worried about him losing his soul.”

“Why not?”

“Because he lost that sucker a
looooong
time ago.”

“Sucker?” Silas repeated, his expression turning puzzled. “What does candy have to do with anything?”

Audrey opened her mouth to explain, then decided not to bother. Her sarcastic, melodramatic hallucination was also, evidently, way uncool.

“Never mind,” she said. Then she remembered he’d offered to prove his existence. Hah. So she repeated, “The storage room? You were going to show me something there?”

Silas nodded. “Meet me at the top of the stairs.” And then he was gone, as if he’d never been there.

Well, that was one way to get rid of a pesky mental disorder
, Audrey thought. Just agree to meet it somewhere else, and then don’t bother to show up. No way was she going to go upstairs to meet someone who wasn’t there.

“Mrs. Magill!” a deep voice boomed from overhead, so loudly, she could feel it reverberating inside her brain. “I’m waiting!”

She sighed. Fine. She recalled the old rhyme her mother used to say when Audrey was a little girl to make her laugh, the one about meeting a man on the stairs who wasn’t there. Paraphrasing, she thought,
Today, I will go up the stairs and meet a man who isn’t there. He won’t be there again tomorrow, because . . .

Because tomorrow, Audrey was going to get a complete medical workup. Starting with her head.

As she rounded the first-floor landing, she saw him standing at the top of the stairs, just as he’d promised, looking more opaque now, thanks to the lack of sunshine. But that lack of light made him appear darker in other ways, too, ways that reminded Audrey of Nathaniel Summerfield again, and, just like before, something hot and needy erupted in the pit of her belly. She closed her eyes and forced the sensation out, then opened them again and studied Silas, who still glowered down at her. For a hallucination, he certainly was stubborn.

“This way,” he said. And, without awaiting a response at all this time, he moved to the left and down the hall.

With a soft sigh of exasperation, Audrey followed, trying not to think about being “visited” by a man who’d been dead for seventy-some years, even if he had once called the house home. Maybe she did believe in ghosts. Maybe, on some level, she didn’t think she was talking to a hallucination. Maybe, on some level, she really did believe a spirit had manifested in her house as more than a smudge on film. Maybe that was why she was going along with this as easily as she seemed to be. But if ghosts were real, she thought further, then why hadn’t Sean ever tried to cross the veil and come back to her? The way Silas had, manifested in all his glory, able to communicate as if he were flesh and blood?

She pushed that thought away, too, as she topped the last stair and followed in Silas’s footsteps. But when she arrived in the storage-slash-Bellamy’s-old-room, he wasn’t there. So she ventured warily, “Silas? Where are you?”

“Behind you,” came his voice from that direction.

She spun around, and there he was, standing in a spot she’d just passed herself, where he hadn’t been before. She started to reach out a hand to see if she could touch him, then stopped herself. She still didn’t know what was going on—whether she really was being haunted, or really was losing her mind—and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what would happen if she tried to push her hand through him. She remembered reading something somewhere about how there were supposed to be “cold spots” around ghosts. But even though Silas stood barely a foot away from her, the temperature in the room was in no way chilly. Was that more proof that this wasn’t a haunting? Or did it just mean ghost-hunters were full of hooey?

The room in which the two of them stood was the one where Audrey had dumped everything she wasn’t sure yet what to do with or hadn’t had a chance to unpack. Boxes were stacked upon boxes, and a few odd pieces of furniture—chairs and tables mostly—were pushed against the walls. There was a plastic wardrobe full of her old suits shoved into one corner, and it was beside that that the good captain currently stood.

“Move this,” he said of the rolling wardrobe.

Immediately, Audrey’s back went up. It was the same sort of command, spoken in the same sort of voice, that had been commonplace at her former company, an old-boy accounting firm that had only changed its hiring practices at some point after World War II because the federal government had required them by law to do so. Their attitudes, however, had remained unchanged. Women, her old boss had firmly believed, should only work in offices to type, file, and make coffee. And to pick up dry cleaning and order lunch and make travel arrangements. And be leered at whenever the urge struck.

“Move it yourself,” Audrey retorted, dropping her fists to her hips in much the way he had earlier.

His dark brows shot up at that. “I beg your pardon?”

She jutted up her chin at the wardrobe. “You want it moved, move it yourself,” she repeated. “I don’t follow orders.”

He gazed at her distastefully. “Obviously not.”

Point to the woman with the mental impairment.

Now Silas dispelled a sound of exasperation. “I can’t move it,” he told her. Then, to illustrate why, he placed his hand beside it and gave it a push, only to have his arm disappear into the wardrobe, up to his elbow. “I’m not corporeal,” he said unnecessarily.

“Then how did you move the painting and toss my hats around?” she asked in a voice she hoped told him how much that had pissed her off. “That was three thousand dollars’ worth of work you almost destroyed.”

His mouth dropped open at that. “Three thousand dollars? For a bunch of hats?” he asked, aghast. “Madam, I paid less than that for my house.”

“Yeah, inflation sucks,” Audrey said blandly. Then, before he could ask for clarification, she told him. “Inflation is bad. So how come you were able to move the painting and hats? And open the newspaper on my kitchen table?”

He hesitated for a moment, as if he didn’t know, actually. Then he said, “I don’t know, actually. I wanted them moved, and they were moved. But afterward, I was exhausted to the point where I was unable to do anything for some time. I’m not certain of the mechanics involved. Only that I wanted something done, and it was done. But at great expense to my . . . presence.” He made a pushing motion with his hand again, and, again, it went straight through the wardrobe. “I’m not certain how long it will be before I can do something like that again.”

“But why did you want those particular things done in the first place?” Audrey asked.

He inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly. “Because . . . because I returned to my home and realized it was no longer my home. In a moment of terrible frustration, I tried to put things back the way they were when I was alive. Then I realized things could never go back to being that way.” He made a face. “It was a childish thing to do. I apologize. I should have returned everything to its proper place.”

Audrey could tell by the way he’d apologized that it was something he wasn’t used to doing. So the fact that he had done it went a long way toward making her more amenable to him. And his edicts.