“What, indeed?” The idea of that idiotic pretty boy courting Eve after he’d gone rankled more than Lucien was ready to admit. Even to himself.
“Miss Abernathy. Mr. Thorpe,” Garrick called too gaily. “If you don’t answer the door I must assume you are in dire straits and in need of my daring rescue. I’m coming in to play the hero. One, two…”
Lucien moved Eve aside and rushed to the front door, just as Garrick Hunt said, “Three.”
The idiot grinned as he looked up at Lucien. “Good afternoon,” he said pleasantly.
“What do you want?” Lucien asked, his own manner less pleasant.
“I’m to deliver a message to Eve from Daisy. Your small supper has turned into a dinner party. Fancy dress. Parlor games. We must all be on our best behavior.”
Behind him, Lucien heard Eve groan, low and distinct. Apparently Hunt heard as well. His grin widened. “You will deliver the message to Miss Abernathy for me, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
The annoying man did not move on. “I suppose she’s indisposed at the moment.”
Lucien didn’t bother to answer.
Hunt leaned in close, and when he did Lucien smelled the whiskey on his breath. “A word of advice. My mother always told me not to be too persistent, where women are concerned. If they think you are besotted, they’ll drag you around by your… well, whatever it is they can lay their hands on.”
“Really?” Lucien asked dryly.
“People in town are already talking about you two,” Hunt revealed in a whisper. “You’ve been spending entirely too much time in this house, and without a proper chaperone, at that. Another day or two and this talk might turn into a full-blown scandal.”
And Eve’s reputation would be ruined. At the moment, Lucien didn’t much care.
“Thank you for your concern,” Lucien said, slowly closing the door.
Hunt did not take the hint. “See you this evening, then,” he said with that damnable smile of his.
“I suppose,” Lucien said as the door continued to swing.
“I can hardly wait,” Hunt said, raising his voice slightly. “See you tonight, Miss Abernathy, wherever you are.”
Lucien grunted as the door slammed shut on Garrick Hunt.
“I believe he was drunk,” he said as he turned to face Eve, who stepped out of the parlor looking as disgusted as he felt.
“Quite possible. I have seen him drink more than he should, on occasion.” She pursed her lips. “A dinner party! Fancy dress! What was Daisy thinking?”
“Ghastly,” Lucien muttered.
“Torture.” Eve sighed.
They returned to the parlor, where Lucien placed a comforting arm around Evie. “Perhaps we should decline.”
“We can’t! Daisy is my best friend. I can’t possibly cancel at the last moment, not when she’s gone to so much trouble.”
Lucien placed his hands on her shoulders again and made her face him squarely. “There was a time when I thought I was your best friend.”
“I thought that, too,” she said softly.
He lowered his lips toward hers, craving another kiss so badly he could taste it. His mouth was almost on hers when movement at the window made them both snap their heads in that direction.
“It was a man,” Eve whispered.
“Stay here,” he ordered, running for the front door.
The man who had startled them was surely that damn Garrick Hunt, snooping and no doubt giggling like a little girl. Well, enough was enough.
From the front porch, Lucien saw nothing unusual. His horse snorted. A cold breeze kicked up. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Lucien saw movement to his right. He took off running. Damned Hunt! At the corner of the house he turned, but again he saw nothing. There weren’t many places for Hunt to hide… but where was the man’s horse? It had been directly out front, before. When he’d burst out of the house in search of the peeper, the horse had been gone.
Afraid the movement he’d seen had been a figment of his own imagination, or else one of the many squirrels who inhabited the area in abundance, Lucien turned the corner that took him to the back of Eve’s little cottage. Her gardens were here. One for flowers, another for vegetables. She’d been too late moving in to do much with the two small plots this year, but as she’d said, she had great plans for next year.
Had either of them ever been in one place long enough to even think of what next year would bring?
The door to her kitchen, which opened to the gardens on one side and a well to the other, was closer than the front door, and that was where he headed.
A package wrapped in brown paper was propped against that kitchen door.
Lucien grabbed the package as he opened the door. “Evie,” he called, alerting her to the fact that he was the one coming in through the back door. “I didn’t see anyone. Sorry. It was probably that damned Hunt.”
She met him in the dining room. “Probably.” She sighed. “So much for my reputation.”
“Hang your reputation,” Lucien said sourly.
“That’s fine for you to say. When you’re gone, I’m the one who has to live with it.” She took the package he offered. “Not that it matters,” she said, sounding dejected. “Sometimes I want, so much, to be proper and dignified and normal, but in truth I can’t see myself married to Garrick or anyone else, settled down only to have babies and join ladies’ clubs and throw boring parties.” She looked down at the package. “I’m twenty-seven years old, and I don’t know what I want. That’s… horrid.”
“Not so horrid. I’m thirty, and I don’t know what I want. Well,” he added in an attempt at total honesty, “I want you, but other than that…”
“Don’t tease me.”
“I never tease.” He motioned to the package in her hand, anxious to change the subject. “Were you expecting a delivery?”
She shook the soft, brown-paper-wrapped package. “No. It’s probably something Daisy sent over, or some samples from the dressmaker. I did a little shopping there this morning.” For some reason, she pursed her lips.
Eve grabbed a pair of scissors from the buffet, laid the package on the dining room table, and cut the string. Brown paper fell back and away to reveal a scrap of white paper and a fold of red silk. Eve stared at the contents for a moment, and then she blushed prettily.
“Just an unexpected delivery from my dressmaker,” she said, trying to fold the paper over the red silk.
Lucien reached past her and snapped up the note. The paper unfolded and he read, “Just a little something to get you started. This was finished, and just needed a tuck here and there. Consider it a gift from a new friend. Laverne.” He dropped the note. “Started on what?”
“Nothing really.” Her blush deepened. She peeled back a small piece of paper and lifted a corner of silk. “It’s not at all important. It’s… silly, actually. Very, very silly.”
“You’re never silly.”
She sighed. “Perhaps I need to be, now and then.”
“Aren’t you going to at least let me see?”
She lifted the package and clutched it to her chest. “I don’t think so.”
*
Eve followed a chattering pink-silk clad Daisy into the kitchen. “I asked Garrick to join us, because three for dinner seemed like an odd number. But then I started to worry that he’d think we were a couple, so I invited Buster, because he was standing right there in the general store, buying tobacco, and it seemed like a good solution. And then I turned around and there was Katherine Cassidy, and I knew she had overheard so I felt obligated to invite her, knowing she would decline. You can imagine my surprise when she accepted the invitation. Still, six is a nice number.”
“Daisy,” Eve said, “take a breath.”
Daisy did just that, as she turned to smile at Eve. “And look at you! I adore that dress.”
Eve glanced down at the simple silver-gray satin gown she wore. It was elegant, she supposed, and flattering to her f
igure. She had only worn it once before, on the day that should have been her wedding day. Tonight there was something new, though. A red silk petticoat, hidden under the silver-gray skirt.
“It’s not nearly as fancy as yours, of course,” Eve said. “Why, Buster and Garrick will be fawning over you all evening.”
Daisy waggled her eyebrows. “And what about your Mr. Thorpe? Won’t he be impressed?”
She was tired of pretending. Tired of playing foolish games. “Just keep your designs off my Mr. Thorpe,” Eve said gently. Even if she were worried about Lucien’s eye straying, she had to admit—she had never worried about him being unfaithful. He just wasn’t that kind of man. And as for Daisy, she’d had her pick of every man in the county since she’d been seventeen, and she’d turned them all down, for reasons Eve didn’t understand.
“Look at these,” Daisy said proudly, gesturing grandly toward the counter. “Pumpkin pies.”
“You made them yourself? How do they taste?”
“I don’t know yet. We’ll all be surprised when it’s time for dessert.” She pointed one finger up, and Eve glanced in that direction.
“Daisy, do you have pumpkin on your ceiling?”
“I do. I really have no idea how it got there. Or in my hair, or all over my clothes. Cooking properly is messy business, Eve.”
“So I hear.”
“It took me all afternoon just to get clean!”
They returned to the party guests, who had gathered in Daisy’s parlor. Buster Towry worked a small farm just outside Plummerville. Twenty-five years old and relatively handsome—if one overlooked the slight cant to his nose and the fact that he could gain twenty-five pounds and still be thin—he was forever talking about finding himself a wife. He never did anything about it, though. He had a tendency to blush terribly when in the company of a single woman. He was beet red tonight.
Katherine Cassidy was dressed in black as always. Her dark hair was gathered into a severe bun, her face was too pale. She stood in one corner and watched the proceedings with a strange glint of amusement in her dark eyes. The widow was usually a sour, antisocial woman who kept to herself. Like Daisy, Eve was surprised that she had accepted the invitation.
Garrick was drinking again. He held a small glass of whiskey, half empty, in one hand. He, too, looked amused. Eve waited for him to say something embarrassing about his visit that afternoon. He said nothing, simply lifted his glass in a silent salute to her and then finished it off in one gulp.
Perhaps her reputation wasn’t ruined after all. Yet.
Daisy ushered them all into the dining room, where the table had been decorated with a large arrangement of golden fall flowers she’d grown in her own garden.
Dinner was a large roast with potatoes and carrots, side dishes of green beans and corn, and biscuits with sweet butter. The party was silent as they passed around the platters and bowls. The men piled their plates high. The women took small portions. Damned corset, Eve thought as she passed the corn after taking a tiny spoonful.
There were awkward mutterings of compliments, and in fact everything was quite good, even if the biscuits were a bit hard. Daisy had outdone herself.
It was Katherine Cassidy who broke the awkward silence, setting her fork aside and looking at Lucien. “The talk about town is that you’re a medium, or something like that. Is it true?”
Lucien almost groaned as he set his own fork aside. “While I don’t care for that particular term, I suppose the answer is yes.”
“You can communicate with the dead,” she said, as if to clarify.
“Yes.”
Buster went ashen, Garrick grinned, and Katherine nodded her head in satisfaction.
“Good,” the widow continued. “I’d like to hire you.”
“Well, I’m not sure…”
“It’s my husband. I know he comes back. Not every day, mind you, but some nights I just know he’s there. I can feel him.” She paled a little, and since she was already very fair the change was startling. Her face was almost white. “There’s a gust of wind through the house or a board creaks, and deep in my heart I know it’s him.”
Eve felt some sympathy for the woman, who still mourned so for a husband gone more than three years. Apparently so did Lucien.
“Do you want to know if he has a message for you? Is there something you want me to tell him?”
“Yes,” Katherine said sharply. “I want you to tell him to get the hell out of my house and stay out. Son of a bitch,” she muttered. “I should have known he’d give me grief, even from the grave.”
So much for sympathy.
Her response took Lucien off guard. “Ummmm, when I have a moment I’ll see what I can do.”
“So,” Garrick said, “I heard you were a fortuneteller or some such nonsense, but I had no idea you actually roused dead people to hold conversations with them.”
“I do not rouse dead people,” Lucien said tightly. “I… I…”
“He sends them home,” Eve said, jumping in to defend him. “Lucien finds lost souls who haunt this earth and he ends their suffering by helping them find their way to their proper place.”
“Haints,” a still-pale Buster said lowly. “You’re talking about haints.” A little color came back to his cheeks, and a shy smile drifted in. “Why, y’all are jest pulling my leg. T’aint no such thing.”
Lucien opened his mouth to respond, but Eve beat him to it.
“Ghosts are very real.” No more pretending, no more hiding the truth from people she considered her friends. “I’ve seen them. I’ve touched them. They remain here on earth because they died suddenly and don’t realize they’re dead, or because they carry some burden they can’t let go of.”
Buster was suitably pale again.
“Before I came to Plummerville, I wrote several articles about authenticated hauntings.”
“And a damn fine book,” Lucien added.
“I thought you only wrote about gardening,” Daisy said.
“That’s actually a rather new subject for me.” She waited for the other people at the table to laugh, or become scared and throw her and Lucien out. It didn’t matter, not really. She wanted to be as honest as Lucien was… at least part of the time.
“Well, well,” Garrick said. Of course, he would be the first to condemn them. He was like his father, she supposed, narrow-minded and quick to judge. “A book! Eve, I’m impressed.”
“You are?”
“Writing a letter gives me a headache.” Garrick winked at her, and no one thought anything of it. When he’d been drinking, he was an outrageous flirt. He drank too much, too often.
“Me, too,” Buster said. “So, you really and truly seen these ghosts with your own eyes?”
“Yes, I have.”
All eyes turned to Lucien. It was Daisy who asked, “And you can actually speak to them?”
“Yes,” Lucien admitted.
“Do they talk back?” Buster whispered.
“On occasion.”
“It really is fascinating,” Katherine Cassidy said.
“It is?” Lucien was obviously surprised by the reactions of those at the table.
The widow turned to the man seated next to her. “Mr. Hunt, why don’t you fetch that bottle you brought with you and pass it around.”
“You want me to share my best whiskey?”
“Yes,” she said, flicking her fingers at him. “Shoo.”
He did as she commanded.
“I have pie,” Daisy said. “Pumpkin.”
“Pumpkin pie and whiskey,” Buster said, his easy grin returning. “Now, this is a party.”
Lucien was taken aback. He had probably expected, like Eve, that they’d be laughed out of the house or run out. But the questions that were tossed his way over whiskey and pie were intelligent. The people at the table were interested but not afraid or disbelieving. Eventually, after a glass of whiskey or two, one by one they admitted that they had always believed in ghosts.
A
wall of propriety came tumbling down. Soon it wasn’t Miss Abernathy and Mrs. Cassidy, but Eve and Katherine. No one called Garrick Mr. Hunt, which he teasingly said suited him just fine, since he kept looking over his shoulder for his father. A rousing conversation and a little whiskey, and they were all on a first-name basis.
It was amazing to be surrounded by such warm camaraderie. She had missed her occasional evenings and conversations with Hugh and Lionel and O’Hara. And Lucien.
“I have my own…” she began, the effects of a half glass of whiskey making her head swim.
Lucien interrupted her. “It’s wonderful to find you all so inquisitive. There was a particularly interesting haunted house in Baltimore…”
“Lucien,” Eve whispered, “I was going to tell them about…”
“Evie missed that one,” he continued. He turned to look down at her, and there was a clear warning in his eyes. “She was angry with me at the time, and no one could blame her.”
She got the message loud and clear. He didn’t want anyone, not even the people at this table, to know about Alistair and Viola. Not yet.
“Evie was angry with you?” Garrick said with a grin. “That sounds like a much more interesting story than any haunted house.”
“It is,” Lucien said, his voice low.
“I for one would prefer to hear more about the ghosts, at the moment,” Daisy said brightly. “I think they’re fascinating.” A half glass of whiskey had affected her as much as it had Eve. “Absolutely fascinating. Oh, I have a marvelous idea!” she said, clapping her hands together. “The six of us at this table, we can form our own secret society. The Plummerville Ghost Society.”
“What would we do?” Katherine asked sourly.
“Tell ghost stories,” Buster suggested.
“Hold meetings over pie and whiskey,” Garrick said.
“No,” Daisy said with a wave of her hand. “We can help Lucien!”
“Help?” Lucien repeated uncertainly.
“You know, we can go to haunted houses with you. We can help you investigate and… and… well, you’d have to tell us what to do, but surely we could do something productive.”
“I’m a fair shot with a rifle,” Buster said proudly.
Shades of Midnight Page 15
