Christmas Spirit

by Amy Garvey

  And Charlie didn’t look much better when she finally untangled herself from Lillian’s embrace. Her glasses were smudged with fingerprints and tears, and Lillian removed them gently before steering Charlie onto the sofa beside Sam’s chair.

  “Sit down for a minute and let me make some tea, sweetheart.” She turned around and saw the bags on the floor in the entry hall, and smiled. The pair of them were like a couple of bedraggled orphans coming in from the storm, and she was so pleased they had come to her, even though she lived right next door, she had to bite back a foolish grin.

  But on her way into the kitchen, she offered up a silent remark to the one person she hoped might care. I’m here for Charlie, Michael. And I’m so happy to be her friend.

  “Are you comfortable?”

  “Stop fussing, girl,” Sam growled, and pulled Charlie closer. Lillian’s guest room boasted a big old bed with a pitted brass frame and handstitched quilts, and comfortable wasn’t the word. Blissful was closer.

  Of course, he knew that wasn’t really what Charlie meant, but he was determined to distract her from his minor injury. As far as convincing her to leave the house went, his unexpected sprawl into the cabinets had certainly done the trick, although he would have preferred not to actually pass out. Jesus. He must have connected with a hell of a lot of force.

  His head still ached, a deep, vibrating throb that hadn’t really let up even with ice and ibuprofen. And the truth was that his point about the ghost hurting someone had certainly been proven. But he didn’t want Charlie terrified, which was the distinct impression he got when he opened his eyes to find a strange guy examining his head and Charlie crouched on the floor beside him, looking very serious.

  He wanted her to be. He needed her to take this thing seriously, especially when one of the goddamned spooks seemed determined to shove him around the house at every opportunity. But he didn’t want her so terrified she was frazzled, because if anything that would make her sloppy, too distracted to pay attention.

  And he wasn’t going to be around forever. That was just the plain truth.

  He tightened his arm around her as she snuggled closer, laying her head on his chest. She was warm and pliant beside him, all the lines of her body finally loose and relaxed as she let him stroke down her back and nuzzle into her hair.

  “You need to sleep,” she murmured, already sleepy, the words fanned warm against his chest as she breathed. “But you should wake me up if you wake up, and I’ll get you more ice and pills, okay?”

  “I’ll be fine, baby.” He kissed the top of her head, breathing in the sweet apple smell of her shampoo. “You need to sleep, too, and stop worrying.”

  She pressed lazy, soft kisses to his chest, her eyelashes fluttering against his skin like delicate wings. “It’s a little tough when something keeps knocking you out when you come over, you know?”

  “Hey!” He reached down to pinch her ass lightly. “I’ve only been knocked out once. Total lucky shot.”

  “Don’t joke about it, Sam,” she said, and got up on one elbow. In the silver moonlight, her eyes were huge and sad. “This is serious.”

  He didn’t answer, just tugged her toward him and lowered his mouth to hers. She opened for him willingly, letting him lick lazily into her mouth, curl his tongue around hers, ease her into submission against him. Draping a leg over both of his when he urged her up, she kissed him back, until there was nothing but their mouths, connected wet and hot and endless.

  But ... comfortable, too. Not urgent, he realized. This was comfort, this was reassurance, not the hungry need he’d felt every other time they’d kissed like this.

  And it made him wonder. What if that demanding, overwhelming need really was something the spirits had fed into them? What if the incredible sex had been nothing more than two ghosts acting out a long-ago passion and using their bodies?

  He let his mouth fall away from Charlie’s, and she subsided back onto his chest with a contented sigh. The sound was so intimate, so happy, he could feel it warm in his bones, his veins.

  And that was odd, too. Because if he didn’t need to have her right this minute, hot and hard and right now, what did it mean that this easy familiarity, this contentedness felt so right?

  He frowned as she snuggled deeper, getting comfortable, her breathing already slowing and deepening as she eased toward sleep.

  He didn’t want this. He didn’t need this. He didn’t even believe in this. But he was pretty sure, lying in Lillian’s guest room with a woman he hardly knew, that he was falling in love.

  “Okay, here’s my itinerary,” he said softly. “You wanted to know it, right?”

  “Aren’t you romantic,” she whispered. “And the answer to your question is no, not now. Besides, you’re in no shape to travel.”

  “Granted.” He pulled her closer. “And I will wait until I can drag a comb through my hair without bleeding from the scalp.”

  She snorted into his chest. “I’m beginning to think you’re not as smart as I thought.”

  “I can live with that,” he replied. “Anyway, I have to go to Narragansett, there’s a weeping woman ghost there, then to Gloucester for an ectoplasmic manifestation that could be a man or a giant jellyfish, I can’t remember. Then back here.”

  “Can’t any of that wait?”

  “No. Kevin, my boss, has hinted that I will be fired if I don’t get these interviews and get this story. I swear he has a GPS chip planted in my cell to track me.”

  She patted his chest. “Let me talk to him.”

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” Sam said hastily.

  “Mind if I ask why?”

  “Because he’s a punk. And he has an assistant who is apparently named Angel Pants. You wouldn’t like them.”

  “You may be right,” she agreed with a soft sigh. “Well, do you still want me to come with you?”

  He dropped a kiss on her tousled hair. “I don’t want you to stay in your house until I get back. Think you can handle that?”

  She nodded, brushing his nipple absentmindedly with her lips.

  “I’ll travel faster if I’m alone,” he explained. “I’m used to working that way. Nothing personal.”

  “Of course not,” she murmured. She was just glad he really was all right. But she did intend to use her womanly arts to keep him on the island for another day. “Now don’t move. And no reciprocating.” Charlie slid down his body and began.

  After several minutes of what she was doing, Sam groaned in ecstasy. She slid back up and nestled contentedly under his arm, and they fell asleep together.

  By tomorrow evening, he looked pretty much as he had on the day she’d met him. Gorgeous. A little raffish. And good to go.

  “Bridget Hartigan is about eighty, from the sound of her,” he reassured Charlie.

  “Okay. It’s your job, you have to do it, I’m not going to whine.”

  “Thanks.” He planted a tender kiss on her lips.

  “But I want to whine,” she said when he’d stopped. “Just so you know. I will miss you. Hurry back.”

  “I will.” He patted the breast pocket of his parka. “Got the ferry schedule right here, you’re on speed dial, and Lillian is going to keep an eye on you.” He grinned before he shouted to her in the next room. “Right, Lillian?”

  “Right,” came the abstracted answer.

  “She’s going through the new releases catalog,” Charlie said. “Summer book orders are coming up already.”

  “Really?” Sam said. “And I haven’t done my Christmas shopping. What do you want?”

  So they were going to get that far, she thought suddenly. “Just you,” was all she said.

  “Okay,” he answered evenly. “I’m looking forward to it.”

  She glanced at the clock on the mantel. “You have about half an hour before you have to go.”

  “Got that ferry schedule memorized, I see.”

  Charlie laughed. “It’s not that complicated. On the hour this time
of year, going and coming.”

  He set down his laptop case and eased his parka off. “I’m going to lose ten pounds if I stand here sweating. So ask the big question, whatever it is.”

  Sam grinned at her but she didn’t grin back. “You’re just happy because you know there’s a time limit here.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. Sorry, it’s a guy thing. So what did you want to ask me that won’t keep for a day and a half?”

  Charlie patted his chest. His shirt was a bit damp and he hadn’t been kidding about the sweating. “Just about your family. You sort of said you weren’t going to see them at Christmas, but I was wondering if they were in Boston or around there. You did mention going up there once to investigate us Prescotts, and—”

  “I grew up outside the city. Upscale suburb. Big stone houses, perfect lawns. I used to call it Dead-wich, because it might as well be,” was his unemotional reply. “And I won’t be stopping in. My dad made it clear a while ago that I was a grave disappointment, blah blah blah, and my mom goes along with whatever he says. No brothers or sisters.”

  “Oh. Well, we don’t have to talk about it. Sorry if I touched on a sore spot.”

  He reached out to her, taking her by the hand. “Not really. I deal with it in my own way, just keep moving on.”

  Did he mean that being a roving reporter suited him or that he literally just kept moving? It didn’t seem like the time to ask squirrelly female questions, so she dropped the subject, settling for non-verbal reassurances that he seemed a lot more comfortable with.

  Hugs. Kisses. And a look in his eyes that was simultaneously masculine and vulnerable. It melted her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  His departure meant she was alone most of the day, because Lillian was at the bookstore. Charlie could have gone in and helped but she didn’t want to. They were together from evening to morning coffee as it was, and she didn’t want to wear out her welcome.

  Butch the cat had made peace with Gloria the dachshund with astonishing speed, and they slept together in the overstuffed armchair.

  But her own house called to her. She looked at it every time she went by a window. It didn’t seem scary or forbidding, just oddly empty.

  As if it were waiting for everyone to return. She had to wonder if the ghosts were banging around inside it. She’d left lights on against her eventual return, and she was pretty sure they didn’t like lights.

  Charlie had scarcely wanted to think about Temperance Prescott or her lover, Daniel. Whoever he was.

  Lillian and Iris would undoubtedly ferret out more information but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know it.

  Just thinking about them evoked fragments of her red-velvet vision and the half-glimpsed bodies in it passionately intertwined. She had a feeling that writing about it would not enable her to let go of the memory. No, it would only encourage the spirits to return.

  They hungered for the life they’d had and the love they’d known. She had no doubt of that. There were tantalizing threads of recollection in what she’d seen that told her, when she thought about them without Sam there to get her all stirred up, that the crucial part of Temperance and Daniel’s story had happened around Christmas.

  She didn’t know how she knew it, just that she did.

  Charlie gave a start when she heard the phone ring inside the house, and ran to answer it.

  “Hello—I mean, Lillian Bing residence,” she said, quickly correcting herself.

  “Yikes,” Lillian said cheerily. “That sounds like a college dorm.”

  Charlie laughed. “Well, it sort of is at the moment. What’s up?”

  “Slow day at the store,” Lillian said. “I’m turning it over to Jamie and you’re coming with me to the historical society.”

  “I am?”

  “Excuse me a sec—may I help you? Oh, Jamie, could you take care of this customer? Thanks so much.”

  She heard Lillian talking and waited for her to get back to the phone.

  “Charlie? Sorry. Yes, we can go today.” Lillian said it as if it was something Charlie very much wanted to do, she noticed.

  “Iris gave me the key so we’ll have the place to ourselves, bless her heart. But we can only stay an hour. There’s a sales rep coming in to the store later and I want to see him.”

  Charlie took a deep breath. She wanted to say no, but if Iris Munson had gone to the trouble and Lillian was free, she didn’t really have a choice.

  “I’ll meet you there,” Lillian added, quickly giving Charlie the location and hanging up before she could wiggle out of it.

  Charlie sighed and hung up on her end. It would be interesting to find out more, much more, about her wayward ancestor, if they could. There was the diary that Temperance’s sister Constance had kept. That promised to be the most interesting of all.

  It was the chance of stirring up the ghosts again that bothered her. She didn’t want to be pursued by them down the quiet streets—especially since whoever saw her would not see them. It seemed that only she and Sam had perceived them so far, and Charlie wanted to keep it that way.

  Booted, mittened, protected by a pom-pomed knit hat that went down to her eyebrows, Charlie made her way down a side street of Edgartown to the saltbox house that housed the historical society. It was adorned with a ship’s wheel and a tastefully lettered sign. She knocked on the door, stamping her feet on the mat, and heard Lillian call out to her from inside.

  “Coming!”

  She flung open the door and Charlie stepped inside on a gust of cold air that reminded her for just a second of the manifestations in the spare room. She shook the thought away as she divested herself of her coat and the rest of it. That had happened inside and wasn’t normal. A butt-freezing blast off the Atlantic, even on a side street, was to be expected.

  “The curator left the archive boxes that Iris and I were going through on a table for us,” Lillian was saying.

  “Okay. That was nice of him. Or her.”

  “Him. Mr. Bridge is awfully nice.”

  Charlie followed her to the table that held five lidded boxes made of beige cardboard with metal trim, lined up in a neat row. It was by a sunny window that was nonetheless drafty.

  “Too cold?” Lillian asked, seeing Charlie shiver as they reached the table. “We could move, but the light is so good here and some of the documents are almost indecipherable. Mr. Bridge was wondering if the ink in the diary was homemade. It’s faded badly.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t read it in the sunlight.”

  An out? Not a chance that Lillian would let her take it, Charlie thought.

  “The overheads are rather dim once you move back into the room,” Lillian said worriedly. “I think it will be all right and it’s just for this once. Do you know, this will be only the second time that diary’s been opened.”

  “Really?”

  Lillian nodded. “Iris undid the ribbon and it was easy to see from the bright color inside the knotted part that no one ever had. Mr. Bridge was of the opinion that the diary hadn’t been opened in over a hundred years. It was dated when it was donated.”

  “And when was that?”

  “Oh, fifty years after Constance’s death. I’d have to look at the cataloging document in it to give you the exact year.”

  “So anyone mentioned in it would have been long dead by then, too,” Charlie pointed out.

  “Yes, most likely. And it may have been simply swept up with a lot of other papers and stored in an attic somewhere, then surfaced in the town archives.”

  Charlie still felt a little uneasy. It had occurred to her that something about her had triggered the appearance of the ghosts in the first place. And if she were to handle something that at least one of them might have touched in their lives, the action could bring them here, out of the Prescott house.

  The serene setting of the society’s archive room didn’t seem like the place for passionate spirits. If Temperance and Daniel showed up, they might be better behaved. Or not.

&nb
sp; She hoped the strong sunlight would keep the shadows at bay. “Did you—feel anything when you opened it?” she asked Lillian.

  “No,” the older woman said, “but then I’m not a Prescott.” She smiled as she pulled a chair out for Charlie and then one for herself.

  Charlie sat and let Lillian take the lid off a box, glancing at the yellowing, deckle-edged papers that the older woman took out with both hands, carefully setting them aside and covering them with the lid of the box to protect them from the sun. “Those are birth and death records,” she said. “Marriages, property transfers, things like that, too. They were prosperous, generally speaking. Pillars of the community.”

  “I thought only the Prescotts owned the house I inherited.”

  “Yes, that’s true. Iris checked on that.”

  Nice old ladies made the best snoops, Charlie thought with an inward smile. She’d bet good money that Iris and Lillian were experts at it.

  “The Prescotts owned land that other people farmed outside of Edgartown and they held the title to other small houses in town.”

  “So the diary didn’t necessarily come from my house,” Charlie said thoughtfully. “I’m assuming they let their grown children live in one of the others.”

  “That’s probably true,” Lillian said. “I can’t confirm it, though, without reading each and every one of these documents.”

  “Don’t bother if we only have an hour.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” Lillian replied. “I just wanted to get to the bottom. I’m looking for tintypes if there were any. Wouldn’t it be fun if we could see what Temperance looked like?”

  Charlie surveyed the five boxes. Plain as they were on the outside, they held a wealth of secrets.

  “I think so.”

  Lillian shot her an appraising look. “Do you think you would recognize her from what you saw or sensed?”

  “I really don’t know,” Charlie answered truthfully. The thought was a little alarming. She was becoming more and more convinced that the past ought to stay where it was—in the past.