“I think even the Queen would have been frightened by what happened to you.”
“I do hope you’re not talking about our queen! After all her relatives have put her through, do you think a little ghost would do her in? I think not!”
Jace laughed. “You aren’t hungry, are you?”
“Starved. I’ve had nothing but my own cooking since Tolben Hall. By the way, how is Mrs. Fenney?”
“Good. She said we were her favorite guests she’s ever had.”
Nigh laughed. “I’m sure she did. Maybe we were her most exciting.”
“So how about tea?”
“You mean with you?”
“Unless you’d rather…” He trailed off.
“Eat here alone? No, thanks. I’ll go to your house. Except that it’s raining.”
“Excuse me, I forgot. You’re English, so you don’t know how to deal with rain.”
“I thought maybe I should take some dry clothes with me, that’s all.”
“Oh,” Jace said. “Yes, by all means. Bring some. Maybe after tea you could show me those sheep or my property boundaries. It might be good to know what I own. I’d like to see it at under sixty miles an hour.”
“I think that’s a great idea. I’ll be there by four. See you soon.”
Jace put down the phone and the grin came back on his face. They’d not said so, but she was coming for a sleepover, he thought, thinking he sounded like a first-grader. He found Daisy in the big downstairs sitting room. He hadn’t been in the room since the first day he’d been there. “Please build a fire in here,” he told her, “then I want you to put fresh sheets in that bedroom…” He had to think. “Isn’t there a blue bedroom somewhere? One with a bathroom attached?”
“The lady’s bedroom,” she said, her face wearing a know-it-all smirk. “It’s across from the master bedroom.”
“Good,” he said. “And put clean sheets on the big bed in the master bedroom please.”
“But you sleep in the chintz room.”
He gave her a look that made her erase the smirk. “Master bedroom and the blue bedroom. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” she said and came close to bobbing a curtsey, then she hurried down the hallway and out of sight.
He went to the kitchen to give Mrs. Browne instructions for a weekend of wonderful meals to be prepared.
“Havin’ guests, are we?” she said, but he didn’t answer.
“And today at four I want a tea served that would make Edward VII proud. Got all that?” He started to leave, but turned back. “And Mrs. Browne, if you say one derogatory word to my guest, there will be consequences.”
Her eyes widened and she said nothing, but she nodded. It was the most he could hope for.
He went upstairs to change out of his running clothes, and when he saw Daisy and Erin changing the sheets in the room across from his, he told them to tell Mick that he wanted the rooms full of flowers from the garden.
“Yes, sir!” Daisy said, smiling.
“Maybe this old house will come back to life,” he heard Erin say as he went into the chintz room to shower and change. He looked around it and again thought that he’d made a mistake in trying to re-create what Ann had had. And he’d been mistaken to sleep in that room.
On his way downstairs, he stopped by Daisy and Erin and told them to move his things into the master bedroom.
This time, their laughter made him smile.
17
Lovely,” Nigh said, her feet propped on the big round ottoman before the fire. At tea she’d told him every word about seeing Danny Longstreet in her rearview mirror, the telling of which had taken all of about ten minutes. He’d told her all about what he’d done in Tolben Hall, which took another ten minutes. After that, they’d talked about—
She wasn’t sure what they’d talked about, but they’d never run out of things to say. After tea, they’d walked in the rain, both of them in tall rubber boots, and looked at the boundaries of his property.
At the southwest corner, he looked down at a small house. “That looks familiar.” It was Nigh’s house.
She shook her head. “Didn’t the estate agent show you what you were buying?”
“I’m sure he told me everything, it’s just that I don’t remember what he said.”
“Yet you bought the house anyway. Imagine that.”
“Mmmm,” he said. “Imagine that.” He changed the subject. “So I own your house. How often are you there?”
“Seldom. You rent it to me very cheaply, so I mostly use it for storage. I have a bedroom in an apartment in London with two roommates, but it doesn’t matter since I’m gone most of the time.”
“I saw.”
She looked at him in question.
“On the Internet. I looked you up.” When she said nothing, he said, “So what are you planning to do with your life?”
“I don’t know. Ask me a year from now.”
“Is that how long you plan to take off?”
“I haven’t had any time off since I started and it’s almost ten years now. I have to figure out what I want to do. What about you?”
“Same here. My degree is in history, but all I’ve done is buy and sell things for my family’s business. All done under my uncle’s supervision.”
“That sounds modest. You must have had some ideas of your own.”
“A few,” he said. “Now and then. But I’m like you and have no idea what I want to do.”
“You could live here,” she said, smiling.
“In Priory House?”
“Right. I forget that you bought a terrifically expensive house that you detest. And why did you do that?”
He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “On impulse.”
She knew she should just let it go, but she couldn’t. She wasn’t going to bring up Stacy; he had to do that, but she wanted to let him know that she would listen. “You bought a house that you don’t like on impulse. On a whim.”
“Yes,” he said, still not looking at her.
“You must have had a powerful reason for doing that.”
“Very powerful,” he said, then hesitated before he spoke again. “What if you had been falsely accused of something horrible? What would you do to clear your name?”
“Anything that I could,” she said.
“Then you understand why I bought this house.”
“Actually, I don’t, but have you made any progress in clearing your name?”
He shook his head. “None whatever. All I’ve done is get entangled with a bunch of ghosts, a smart-aleck female, and a bunch of employees who think I’m a great source of entertainment.”
Nigh smiled at his joke. “I’m not going to push on this, but if you want help in clearing your name, I’m willing. You would, of course, have to tell me what happened to dirty it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, and thank you,” he said, smiling at her. “You ready to go back? Mrs. Browne is making roast lamb for us tonight. And we’re having it in the dining room.”
Now, hours later, they were both full of food and drink and warm from the fire.
Jace was sitting in the chair next to her. “I enjoy your company,” he said softly.
“And I yours,” she answered.
He was quiet for a while and Nigh did her best to not let him know that her heart was pounding hard. It seemed that each man had that moment, the moment when he seemed to make up his mind about a woman. Some men had shown the decision by inviting her to meet his parents, some with a ring. Nigh knew that all that was much too early for her and Jace Montgomery, but what she was hoping for was that he’d tell her what was ruling his life.
“I want to tell you something,” he said after a while. “No, I don’t want to tell you, but I need help. I find that I can’t do what I set out to by myself.”
She didn’t say anything, just sat there quietly, willing him to go on, to tell her all of it.
He did. He told her about Stacy, but she could see that it wasn’t easy
for him to speak of the woman he had loved, and when he told of her death, she felt his anguish. After an hour and a half, he wound down and turned to look at the fire.
He hadn’t added much to what Nigh had already read and figured out, but she didn’t tell him that. He mostly told her facts, not of his pain, but she saw it in his eyes.
“Do you have the photo with the note on it?” she asked.
“Upstairs in Ann’s room,” he said and she followed him up the stairs.
The room had become familiar to her over the years, since the entrance to the secret staircase was there, and the new decoration of it had become known to her in the last week. Had it only been a week since she’d met Jace?
She watched as he went to the Victorian wardrobe he’d bought in London, opened it, and took out a box from the bottom. She couldn’t resist saying, “Quit hiding the things under the floorboard in the closet, have you?”
She enjoyed the shocked expression on his face, then he smiled and his eyes twinkled. “You do listen, don’t you?”
“A must in my job.”
She sat down on the bed beside him and they went through what little evidence he had. She held the photo of Stacy and said how pretty she was, even though it made her feel jealous to say the words—which was stupid, but emotions rarely had logic.
“Ours again. Together forever. See you there on 11 May 2002,” she read aloud.
“She died the next day,” Jace said.
He stood up and went to the cold fireplace. “I need to know what happened,” he said. “Can you understand that? Until I know what happened, until I’ve cleared my name—if it can be cleared, that is—I can’t do anything else with my life.”
She looked at him with understanding. “You don’t want to talk to Ann because she’s a ghost but because she was here that night.”
“Yes,” Jace said. “You thought I wanted a séance, didn’t you?”
“It makes sense.”
He ran his hand over his face. “None of this makes sense. Why are Ann and Danny showing themselves to us? Danny to you, Ann to me. Or she did until I made her angry.” He looked at the ceiling. “I was just trying to do something nice,” he said. “I didn’t mean to offend you or make you feel worse than you already do. If there’s anything I can do to make you feel better, you know, like help you get to the white light, let me know.”
When he looked back at Nigh, her face was pale. “What?”
“I wouldn’t tempt fate, if I were you,” she said. “You take ghosts in stride, but I don’t. Haven’t you heard that they’re always looking for bodies to take over?”
“A month ago, I would have said that they could have my body.”
“You loved her so much that you can’t ever get over her?” she asked.
“Yes,” Jace said. “And no. I’ve grieved for Stacy until I can’t grieve anymore. But my grief has become selfish. I need to know about myself. Her mother and sister said I drove Stacy to suicide. They said that I was such a tyrant that I wouldn’t let her out of the wedding. But that makes no sense. If she felt free enough to tell me just days before our wedding that she didn’t want to have children, then she could have told me that she didn’t want to get married.”
“I can see you as a lot of things but not as a tyrant,” Nigh said. “I think there was a lot more going on and you knew, know, nothing about it.” She looked at the photo of Priory House again, read what was written on it. “Someone somewhere knows about this.”
“Mrs. Browne,” Jace said flatly.
“I’m sure of it, but she’s a mean-spirited old woman and she’d put splinters under her own fingernails before she told what she knows. If Stacy clandestinely met a man here, Mrs. Browne would think it was right and proper that she paid the ultimate penalty for doing so.”
Jace winced, then sat on the bed beside Nigh. “This afternoon I had an idea. Maybe Danny Longstreet has appeared to you because his descendant is involved in this.”
Nigh looked at him questioningly. “Jerry? You think maybe Stacy was meeting Jerry Longstreet here in Priory House?”
“I can tell that you don’t think so.”
“No, I don’t. For one thing, look at her. She looks like one of those disgustingly healthy California girls that you Americans sing about. Jerry isn’t as tall as me and he’s always had a belly on him. He’s cute in an obscure way, but not to outsiders.”
“You like him,” Jace said.
“I grew up in Margate, went to school here. The pickings were slim. Now that I’ve been out in the world, Jerry Longstreet is a joke. I think your Stacy would think he was too. Besides, where would she have met him?”
Jace stood up again. “Now that is the question,” he said. “I’ve wracked my brain until it’s depleted. Stacy told me her life story. She went to England with her mother, and when she was in college, she took a couple trips to Europe, but she was always chaperoned. She complained that she never got to see anything or meet anyone.”
“I think you can fall in love with a person in a very short time,” Nigh said quietly, looking at Jace.
He didn’t turn away from her, but met her eyes. “So do I.” He held her eyes for a moment, then looked away. “But I can’t think about my future until I clear up my past.”
Nigh couldn’t help sighing as she looked back at Stacy’s photo, then put everything back in the box. “I think you should keep all of this hidden. I don’t think you should let anyone in this house see any of this.”
“You think she was murdered, don’t you?”
Nigh stood up and looked down at the box for a moment, then up at him. “I think that any woman who would leave you…” She didn’t finish the sentence. It was too maudlin, too sentimental—and it revealed too much about her.
“It’s late and I’m tired,” she said. “I brought my hiking boots, so why don’t we take a walk tomorrow, somewhere away from this house and Margate? Let’s go over what you know and see what we can figure out,” she said, then before he could respond, she said “good night” and left the room.
She hurried across the corridor to the blue bedroom, the “lady’s bedroom.” She smiled to see that it was full of fresh flowers and that her clothes had been unpacked and put away. The first time she’d visited Priory House with Jace, the maids and Mrs. Browne had been an insolent lot, but he seemed to have done something that was working.
She filled the bathtub and soaked for a while before putting on a flannel nightgown and going to bed. The sheets smelled of sunlight. She felt good because Jace had told her what was eating at him, told her his most private secret. Now all they had to do was solve the mystery.
She fell asleep smiling.
18
Let’s go,” she heard Jace say.
Sleepily, Nigh rolled over in the bed and looked toward the uncurtained windows. It was still dark. “Go away,” she said.
Jace sat down on the side of the bed. “I’ve been up for two hours and Mrs. Browne has already started frying things. Get up, get your boots on, and let’s go. There’s a trailhead twenty miles from here and we’re starting there.”
“Trailhead?” she muttered. “Is that an American word?”
“Up!” he said, then, when she didn’t move, he stretched out beside her, the thick coverlet separating their bodies. “You smell good,” he said, putting his face into her neck.
Nigh smiled and moved so her backside was closer to him. “I love morning sport.”
“Me too. And it looks like Ann and Danny do too.” He nuzzled her neck under her warm hair. “I guess that’s why they’re here.”
“What?” Nigh said, turning over to look at the room.
There was no one but them in the room. Jace got off the bed and smiled at her. “No ghosts, just us. Get up and get dressed. Let’s go! We’re burning daylight.”
“What a disgusting turn of phrase,” she muttered as she sat up. “I was thinking of a leisurely walk near here, not some mountain trek.”
“I need
the exercise,” Jace said. “I need a lot of exercise. In fact, I need to run up a mountain.”
She couldn’t help giving a giggle as his meaning was clear. “Where’s my early morning tea? Every good hotel serves early morning tea.”
“Sure,” he said. “Tea from Hotel Priory House coming up. In the dining room, that is. See you downstairs, and if you take more than fifteen minutes I’ll go without you.”
At that, Nigh flopped back on the bed. “A reprieve!”
With a serious look, Jace went to the bed, scooped her up, covers and all, and stood her up outside the bathroom. “Fifteen minutes,” he said, then left the room.
Yawning, but smiling, Nigh pulled on layers of clothes that she could peel off as the day got warmer. On the bottom was an old T-shirt that had been washed a hundred times and was so tight that it left little to the imagination. Over it went a long-sleeved cotton shirt, then a sweatshirt. She pulled on jeans, then put on her heavy socks and boots. She thought about makeup but she had an idea she’d be sweating it off, so she didn’t bother.
Ten minutes from the time Jace had left the bedroom, she was in the dining room and eating part of one of Mrs. Browne’s fry-ups.
“You’ll get there yet,” Jace said, meaning that she’d eventually be able to eat a whole one of the enormous breakfasts.
“I hope not,” Nigh muttered, but his good mood was infectious.
Thirty minutes later they were piling heavy backpacks into Jace’s Range Rover and heading north. It was a gorgeous, sunny Saturday and in spite of a lack of sleep she was looking forward to the day.
“Today we have a rule,” he said as he pulled onto the highway.
“And what is that?”
“Today we only talk about us, you and me. No one else.”
He didn’t have to say who they were not to talk about, but she knew. Thinking that, for the first time, there would be no ghosts—old or new—between them made her feel wonderful.
“I’ve been awake most of the night,” he said, “and I’ve been thinking about something.”
Someone to Love Page 20
