Charlaine Harris

by Night's Edge

  KILEY HAD SHOWERED, DRESSED in one of Jack’s clean T-shirts, and then crawled into his bed and slept like a log. She only woke when something touched her cheek, gentle as a breeze, making her eyes flutter open. Jack was crouching beside the bed, looking at her oddly.

  “Oh. Hi again,” she said.

  “I hated to wake you, but we have a date.”

  She blinked sleepily. “A date?”

  “Yeah. Here, I brought you some clothes.” He nodded toward the stack of neatly folded garments he’d placed on the nightstand.

  She sat up in the bed, raking her hair with one hand. “You went back to the house?”

  “Yep.”

  “Alone?”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Hell, no. Took Chris along.”

  She laughed, shaking her head.

  “What? That’s funny?”

  “Just that a guy built like you are would drag scrawny little Chris along for protection.”

  “I didn’t take him for protection—I took him as a witness, in case something too odd to believe happened to go down, and—” He stopped there. “A body like mine, huh?”

  She pursed her lips, threw back the covers and got out of the bed, though she had to slide by him to do it. He was still sitting on the edge. “So did anything happen?”

  “What? Uh, no. Nothing. Just grabbed you some clothes—although, I kind of wish I hadn’t.”

  Frowning, she swung her gaze his way. But his eyes weren’t on hers; they were sliding up and down her body instead.

  He said, “You look so damn good in my T-shirt it’s a shame you have to change.”

  “Oh, yeah. And what is it you’re hoping to accomplish with that line of bull?”

  He shook his head slowly. “It’s not a line, Kiley. I’d have said something sooner—I just…never thought of you that way. Till last night, at least.” He gave a little shrug, met her eyes with a teasing light appearing in his own. “Guess it took sleeping with you to open my eyes.”

  “Yeah, that’ll do it every time.” She held her clothes to her chest and headed into the bathroom, muttering, “Men.” Then she closed the door behind her. She tried to put his words out of her mind as she dressed. It was only his libido talking. He didn’t like her, much less give a damn about her. This was all based on the heat that had flared up between them last night, and that had been based on nothing more than pure idiocy, combined with bowstring-taut tension and bone-chilling fear. All that adrenaline pumping. All that unbelievable shit happening in her house. Sure, they’d reacted. Why the hell wouldn’t they?

  It was a mistake, and it meant nothing. And God, she wanted to do it again—and not be interrupted this time.

  The look in his eyes had been so intense just now. She’d felt an answering heat rise up under her skin everywhere his gaze lingered. His voice had gone all soft and throaty and it felt like a touch when he said her name.

  “Knock it off, Brigham.” She said it to her reflection, and she said it firmly.

  Her reflection looked back at her, wearing the tight, low-slung jeans he’d picked out, with a tiny T-shirt that hugged every curve. She wondered if he’d done it on purpose.

  “Did you say something?” he asked from beyond the door.

  “Uh—what’s this date you mentioned?” It was the only thing she could think of on short notice. Besides wondering how he would react when he saw her in these jeans, and then chiding herself for wondering. Still, her tummy tightened in anticipation.

  “I found the people who lived in the house before you. Turns out Chris knew who they were. Moved out to Saratoga Springs.”

  She went to the bathroom door, a hairbrush in her hand, and yanked the door open. “You called them?”

  He nodded.

  “And they agreed to meet us?”

  “For lunch today at—Holy shit. I take it back.”

  “You take what back?” But she already knew. She knew by the way his eyes were wandering down her body, even before he reached out to clasp her arm and draw her farther into the room, so he could walk around behind her.

  “I take back wishing I hadn’t brought you any clothes. How come I’ve never seen you in those jeans before?”

  She shrugged. “You wouldn’t have noticed if you had.”

  “A dead man would have noticed you in those, lady.”

  She sighed, turned to face him and looked him square in the eye. “Jack, what the hell are you doing?”

  He looked surprised, but not confused. He knew exactly what she meant, and he didn’t pretend otherwise. Sighing, he lowered his eyes. “Damned if I know.”

  “Well, do you think you could knock it off?”

  “You really want me to?”

  She licked her lips. “I don’t know. But I do know it keeps me so off balance I can’t think straight. It’s goddamn surreal to have my worst enemy flirting with me like this. Almost as fucked up as the ghost in my house.”

  “Yeah. Okay, I get that. Although I think we’re way past that “worst enemy” stage. It’s bull and we both know it.”

  She lowered her head. “Okay, it’s bull.”

  “I never hated you as much as I pretended to.”

  “Me, neither,” she admitted.

  “It feels odd to me, Kiley, to be so into you all of a sudden. But I am.”

  She looked at him, questioning him with her eyes.

  “I’m still not sure if you really want me to rein it in.”

  Kiley sighed, looking away. “Hell, Jack, neither am I.”

  He lifted his brows, tipped his head to one side. “Maybe if we just did it, got it out of our systems…”

  She looked at the clock on the nightstand. “That’s such a freakin’ brilliant idea, it’s a crying shame we don’t have time.”

  He eyed her. “You’re being sarcastic.”

  “No, I mean it. I’d bang you right here if it wasn’t already twenty to twelve. ’Cause God knows that would fix everything.”

  “I never said it would fix everything.”

  “Jerk.”

  “Bitch.”

  She held his gaze, then smiled slowly. “Now, that feels normal.” Then she preceded him out of the bedroom and down to the car.

  CHAPTER NINE

  JACK SAT ACROSS FROM the couple he couldn’t stop thinking of as Ken and Barbie, and watched their eyes as they spoke.

  “I really don’t know why we agreed to this. It’s kind of silly,” Cindy Stark said.

  “You agreed because I told you there was a perfectly nice, innocent woman living in that house now, and that she was going through hell,” Jack said. “You agreed because I laid a big guilt trip on you.”

  The woman pursed her lips and met her husband’s eyes. “Still, that’s got nothing to do with us.” She slanted her gaze toward Kiley. “Whatever you’re going through, it’s got nothing to do with us.”

  “I know that,” Kiley said. “But if you could just tell me what happened to drive you out of that house…?”

  “Nothing drove us out,” her husband, Brad, said with a nervous laugh. “We found a great place in the Springs.”

  “Oh, it’s gorgeous,” Cindy beamed. “Totally restored Victorian. We did it in shamrock, with three shades of maroon in the trim.”

  Jack nodded, translating their words. “You have a nice, clean, spook-free life now, and you don’t want to pollute it with thoughts about the trouble you left behind. It’s almost as if you might accidentally conjure the same trouble in the new place if you admit to what happened in the old.”

  Cindy widened her eyes. “How can you—how does he…?”

  “Don’t be silly, dear,” Brad said, silencing her by covering her hand with his own. “He’s taking shots in the dark.”

  “No,” she whispered. “He’s reading my mind.”

  Kiley shot Jack a look, surprise or something like it in her eyes. Then she drew her gaze back to Cindy’s. “He’s going to help me clear the house.”

  “It’s not going to work. We ha
d three different people come in and try to clear it, but nothing worked.”

  “Maybe not, but if anyone can clear this place, Jack can,” Kiley went on. “The thing is, our chances of success are much better if we can figure out what’s really going on, what’s causing this. To do that, I need to know what happened. What did you see, what did you hear, what did you feel in that house?”

  Brad looked at Cindy, willing her not to say a word.

  Jack said, “Knock it off, pal. If you don’t want to help us, that’s your choice. Don’t try to make her responsible for your bad karma.”

  Brad rolled his eyes and looked away. “I don’t believe in karma.”

  “I do,” Cindy said. “I believe in a lot of things I never did before.” She licked her lips. “There’s more than one ghost in that house, Ms. Brigham. There’s the woman in the tub, she’s the main one.”

  “You mean you saw her, too?” Kiley asked.

  Cindy nodded. “Once in the upstairs bath, once in the downstairs one. But there are others. So many others. And some of them are angry. Some of them—lash out.”

  “Where have you seen these others?”

  “We never saw them.” Brad was speaking now. “But there were—incidents. Mostly in the cellar, but once in a while they’d come into the main parts of the house. Threaten us. Shit like that.”

  “Not us,” Cindy said. “Just you, Brad. They never tried to harm or frighten me the way they did you.”

  “What did they do to you?” Jack asked the other man.

  Brad pursed his lips, lowered his head, shook it.

  “There was the time he was going down the cellar stairs to check a circuit breaker, and the light bulb exploded. He was in total darkness, and when he turned to come back up for a flashlight, there was a wound-up piece of wire on the stairs.”

  “I’d have sworn it wasn’t there when I went down,” he said.

  “You fell?” Kiley asked.

  He nodded. “Broke a leg and two ribs.”

  “And there was the incident with the water heater. The way the pilot kept going out, the matches kept blowing out, the gas was running into the cellar. And when Brad tried to come up the stairs, the door was jammed. Wouldn’t open.”

  “My God, how did you get out?” Kiley asked.

  “I don’t know. Eventually they just…let me.”

  “They didn’t want you dead,” Jack said. “They just wanted you to pay attention. What do you do for a living?”

  The man looked up slowly. “I’m a cop.”

  KILEY SPENT THE AFTERNOON at her office, trying to at least look as if she were working on a story. But the pages she keyed into her computer were not work. Not the kind she was paid to do, at least. Instead, she filled screen after screen with a detailed account of everything that had been happening in her house, everything she had learned and everything she feared.

  It accomplished little, she decided later on. In fact, it accomplished nothing, except to keep her mind focused on her fear. She supposed that was better than leaving it focused on the change in her relationship with Jack McCain, which was something that scared her more than any ghost ever could. What the hell was up with that, anyway?

  Sighing, she glanced at the clock, realized the day was spent and thought it was time to go home. Then she shivered. Damn, but she didn’t want to go back there. And yet, her spine straightened and she got to her feet. She was not going to let anything scare her out of her home. She was not going to become so needy that she couldn’t go into her own house without a chaperone. No way in hell.

  She shut down her computer, shouldered her purse and picked up her keys. Fifteen minutes later, she was standing beside her car, staring at the house. The lights were still on. She’d never turned them off. She was glad of that now, even though it wasn’t completely dark yet. Taking a breath, she marched up to the door, punched in her access code and went inside. And then she stood there, with the door wide open and the entire house spread out before her. Empty, she told herself. But it didn’t feel empty. It felt as if there were eyes on her, watching her, waiting.

  Kiley looked around the empty house. “Listen up, okay?” She said the words loudly, and felt like an idiot for standing in her open doorway talking to herself. “I don’t even know if you can hear me, but if you can I have something to say, so pay attention.”

  She felt something. Or maybe it was her imagination. Whatever, her courage rose a notch, and she found herself stepping farther inside. “I know you’re here. I know there’s something wrong, something you want me to understand. I know that now. And I’m going to find out what it is. I’m going to do everything I can to figure it out and make it right. I’m going to dig until I uncover the truth, and—”

  She stopped there, because a vase tipped right off a stand and shattered on the floor.

  Kiley jerked backward, almost turned and fled right back through the door, but then she stopped herself. “What?” she asked. “Something I said?”

  Nothing. No sound.

  “Okay, then. Okay. I just…wanted to let you know I’m on your side, here. All right?”

  She listened, half expecting the ghost or whatever the hell it was to reply. But it didn’t.

  “Of course, if you hurt me, or scare me out of the house, the deal’s off. So how about you give it a rest for a while, give me a few days to get to the bottom of this?”

  Again, there was no reply. Then again, she hadn’t really expected one. She sighed and moved through to the living room, sinking into a chair and sighing again. “I’ll be fine here by myself,” she muttered. “Until I have to use the bathroom. What the hell am I going to do then?”

  “Kiley?”

  She lifted her head, startled by the voice calling her name, but only for a brief instant. It was only Jack. He stood in the doorway, a large pizza box balanced on one hand, a brown paper bag in the other.

  Hell, she thought. She shouldn’t be so damned glad to see him. And yet she had to fight to keep herself from smiling ear to ear and running to him.

  “I stopped by the office, but you’d already left.”

  “Figured I had to face it sooner or later. You didn’t have to come, Jack.”

  “I couldn’t have slept a wink with you out here alone. Besides, I’ve been doing some research, and I think I’ve come up with an idea.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded, striding through the formal dining room and into the cozier kitchen. She followed him.

  “Sit,” he said. “I brought dinner.” He put the pizza box on the table, set down the bag, and then went to the cupboards for plates and tall glasses.

  “Health food, I see.”

  “Hell, yeah.”

  She peeked inside the bag, found a six-pack of cola and a large bag of potato chips, and smiled. “What, no tofu? No herbal tea?”

  He put the plates on the table, went to the fridge and filled both glasses with ice. He glanced her way, seemed a little nervous.

  “What is it, Jack? What’s wrong?”

  He sighed. “I…don’t really eat tofu and bean sprouts or drink herbal tea. You were right about that stuff. And I’m telling you this now, because it’s suddenly very important to me that you not think of me as some garden variety con man. So I figure honesty is the best policy.”

  She tipped her head to one side. “So…the flaky fake diet is just to go with the image?”

  “Exactly.”

  She sighed, flipped open the pizza box, pulled out a gooey slice and put it onto her plate.

  “You’re…disappointed,” he said.

  “No. Actually, I’m relieved. Just…worried.”

  “Relieved?”

  She almost told him she couldn’t imagine herself being with a man who subsisted on nuts and twigs, but she bit her tongue in time. “Never mind why I’m relieved. It’s why I’m worried that’s important here.”

  “Okay, then why are you worried?”

  She looked across the table at him. “I’m worried ab
out whether the rest of your claims are just as false. Tell me the truth, Jack. Can you help me, or are you just playing along to keep me from finally getting the goods on you?”

  He licked his lips, lowered his head. “If I can’t help you, Kiley, then I don’t know who can.” Then he met her eyes again. “To be honest, I’ve never dealt with anything like what’s going on here in this house before. I really don’t know if I can do it. After tonight, though, maybe you and I will both know.”

  She sighed, nodding. “What happens tonight, Jack?”

  He studied her, looking a little relieved. “You aren’t throwing me out?”

  She smiled a little, shook her head. “I appreciate you being straight with me. Now, will you tell me what you have planned for tonight?”

  He seemed to relax, took a bite of his slice of pizza, then chewed while pouring cola into both their glasses. He said, “Tonight, Ms. Brigham, we are going to hold a séance.”

  Kiley blinked and held his gaze. “A séance,” she repeated. “Like, where you conjure up spirits from the other side?”

  “Exactly.”

  She blinked twice. “Jack, we already have spirits from the other side. What we need to do is boot them out, not call them in.”

  He nodded, smiling a little, an act that made his lips far more attractive than they should have been. “When we figure out what the ghosts are trying to tell us, we’ll know how to get rid of them, right?”

  “I…guess.”

  “So, we hold the séance, give them the perfect way to try to tell us.”

  “And we’re going to do this ourselves? Just the two of us?”

  He averted his eyes. “Well, I tried to get some of the local mediums to help us out, but seeing as how they’ve all been the subjects of your columns at one point or another, they all said thanks, but no thanks.”

  She thinned her lips, lowered her head. “They didn’t put it quite that nicely, did they?”

  “No. I think one of the more memorable phrases was, I hope the ghost eats her skinny white ass.”

  She pursed her lips. “Well, I can’t blame them, I suppose. But then again, why would I want any of them? I caught each and every one of them faking, otherwise they wouldn’t have made my column in the first place.”