by Anne Stuart
This time, she’d be using it for more than getting the best possible terms on a contract. This time, she was bargaining for her father’s livelihood and her own life. If Ethan Winslowe held to his revenge, there’d be no way she could leave Chicago. She’d need to stand by her father in his disgrace.
No, it was her life she’d be fighting for, too. Setting the gun back down on the desk, she leaned back in her chair. It was going to be a hell of a weekend.
* * * * *
Endless hours later, she was beyond stress, beyond worry, beyond regret. The late flight out of Chicago had been full of turbulence and grumpy flight attendants. She had had to change planes twice, each one getting a little smaller and a little choppier. By the time she arrived at a small municipal airport outside of Bennington, Tennessee, she was feeling jarred, achy and angry. And depressed, knowing she had a five-hour drive ahead of her.
Oak Grove was a tiny, faceless town that nestled somewhere between Kentucky, Arkansas and Missouri. None of the states wanted to claim it, and it had the odd distinction of having belonged to all three in the last one hundred years. Currently, it belonged to Arkansas, but that probably wouldn’t last too long.
The only rental car was an aging Ford with no springs whatsoever. As Meg drove through the long, empty hours of early morning, she told herself things would look better when the sun rose. If it ever bothered to. There was a gloomy mist falling, and the late-spring weather seemed bleak, timeless. Somewhere beyond the side of the road, dogwoods must be blooming, azaleas and forsythia and tulips and daffodils. All she could see was gray.
The road narrowed as it climbed through twisty, dark hills. She was still more than fifty miles away when the road turned to gravel and the rain turned that gravel to mud. She was forced to slow down to something slightly faster than a crawl, and for a moment, she considered pulling off to the side of the road and trying to catch a little bit of sleep. She hadn’t seen another car in three hours—no one would be likely to be traveling this godforsaken road and find her sleeping.
But she couldn’t do it. She wanted to get to Oak Grove with a need that bordered on desperation. The sooner she faced Ethan Winslowe, whatever there was of him to face, the sooner she could get away, back to that horrible little airport with its horrible little plane. Her flight to Europe left New York in less than seventy-two hours—she was already cutting it close.
Besides, when it came right down to it, she was afraid. Afraid of facing Ethan Winslowe, afraid of what she’d find. Afraid that all her pleas, all her reasonable explanations were going to fall on deaf ears, either literally or figuratively. Afraid this midnight trip from hell was going to be a miserable, agonizing waste of time.
She almost missed the town of Oak Grove when she came to it. The gray mist had lessened somewhat, the sun was making a vain effort to poke through the thick clouds, and it was just past eleven in the morning. The gas gauge on the Ford was heading toward empty when she passed a cluster of buildings that suggested civilization was near at hand. She drove straight through, looking, but things rapidly became uninhabited again. There’d been a rusty gas pump near what seemed to be an abandoned store five miles back. She had no choice but to turn around.
This time, she saw the sign. Covered by weeds, rusted so that it was almost unreadable, the once-white sign said Oak Grove, Founded 1835. Underneath, someone had scratched something with a knife. Slowing the car, she peered at it. Lost, 1962, it said.
A tiny shiver of fear ran across her backbone as she pulled up next to the gas pump. She didn’t recognize the brand, and she could only hope there was even a trace of fuel in the old-fashioned pump. She sat there in her car, staring at the deserted street, and her hands came up to rub her chilled arms.
There was a church. Every speck of paint had peeled off, the front was a mass of weeds, but the windows were intact, and a sign listed services for almost every day of the week. Next to the church was a store with dingy, fly-specked windows full of old canned food and faded clothing. Oak Grove looked like a ghost town, she thought. The houses were dark and empty looking, the town deserted, eerie, a place no one in their right mind would want to live.
“Fill’er up?”
She screamed, thoroughly spooked. “Yes, please,” she said, pressing a hand to her racing heart. “I’m sorry, you startled me.”
“Yeah,” said the man. “I have a habit of doing that.”
A fitting resident of a ghost town, Meg thought. He was ageless, the man who’d materialized beside her window, moving with a slow gait that seemed more sullen than elderly. She glanced back at the town and for the first time realized that some of the blinds were being pulled back from the curtained windows. People were watching her.
“No credit cards,” the man said when he finished, appearing beside her just as abruptly. He watched with interest as she shuffled through her meager supply of cash. “You just passing through? We don’t get people in these parts very often.”
This sudden curiosity would have been disarming if Meg had been able to rid herself of the notion that he clearly wanted her gone. She handed him two twenty-dollar bills, waited while he laboriously counted the change, and then she flashed him her friendliest smile, the one guaranteed to melt Chicago bus drivers and postal workers everywhere. “As a matter of fact, I’m looking for someone.”
He remained unmoved. “That so?”
She didn’t let her smile falter. “A man by the name of Ethan Winslowe. He lives around here, doesn’t he?”
If the man had seemed distant and unfriendly before, he now seemed positively icy. “Winslowe don’t cotton much to visitors. You’d best keep on your way.”
“I’ve come to see him,” she said firmly. “I have an appointment.”
The old man narrowed his eyes. “He’s not going to want to see you. That man doesn’t see nobody, and nobody wants to see him. They say the last person that looked him in the eyes turned stone blind.”
Meg’s mouth dropped open. “I beg your pardon?”
“And then there’s old Mrs. MacInerny. She saw him one day when she was out walking and ain’t been right in the head since. He’s a son of the devil, he is, girly. No one’s rightly sure whether he’s real or not, whether he’s dead or alive. Some say he’s a phantom, haunting that crazy old place, but truth of the matter is no one wants to find out. You’d better get away from here before you run into anymore trouble.”
“I’m not going anywhere but to Winslowe’s house. I don’t believe in that kind of…” She was about to say shit but suddenly thought better, “…nonsense.”
“Your funeral,” the old man announced with an air of gloomy satisfaction. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“You warned me, all right. You still haven’t told me how I can find him.”
“First left. Just keep driving—you’ll come to the old Meredith place sooner than you’ll ever want to.”
It was lack of sleep, Meg decided there and then. It was sheer exhaustion, not to mention tension, that was making this odd old man sound so sinister. “Meredith place?”
“His granddaddy’s. No one in their right mind would ever want to come back there to live, but then, Winslowe ain’t in his right mind. Everyone around here knows it.” And then the man disappeared back into the deserted-looking building, slamming the door shut behind him.
Just as well, she thought, starting up her car again. She might have been crazy enough to ask him another question. Considering the strange answers he’d already given her, she’d be better off waiting to see what she found at the end of her journey.
It took her half an hour to drive what couldn’t have been more than five miles. The road turned into a rutted swamp, one the old Ford could barely negotiate. She was so busy dealing with the driving conditions that she didn’t have any time to look ahead. When the road finally ended, she pulled to a stop, sitting there staring up in mingled awe and horror.
Find Night of the Phantom on Amazon.
And don�
��t miss the rest of Anne Stuart’s Greatest Hits:
Cinderman
The Soldier, The Nun and The Baby
Blue Sage
Night of the Phantom
One More Valentine
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About Anne Stuart
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Anne Stuart is a grandmaster of the genre, winner of Romance Writers of America's prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, survivor of more than thirty-five years in the romance business, and still just keeps getting better.
Her first novel was Barrett's Hill, a gothic romance published by Ballantine in 1974 when Anne had just turned 25. Since then she's written more gothics, regencies, romantic suspense, romantic adventure, series romance, suspense, historical romance, paranormal and mainstream contemporary romance for publishers such as Doubleday, Harlequin, Silhouette, Avon, Zebra, St. Martins Press, Berkley, Dell, Pocket Books and Fawcett.
She’s won numerous awards, appeared on most bestseller lists, and speaks all over the country. Her general outrageousness has gotten her on Entertainment Tonight, as well as in Vogue, People, USA Today, Women’s Day and countless other national newspapers and magazines.
When she’s not traveling, she’s at home in Northern Vermont with her luscious husband of forty years, an empty nest, five sewing machines, and when she’s not working she’s watching movies, listening to rock and roll(preferably Japanese) and spending far too much time quilting and making doll clothes because she has no intention of ever growing up.
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