It had only been five weeks, and already Carly could see her work coming to fruition. Talk about a great feeling. There hadn’t been any more calls from the school about Tiffany, which was a good thing. Neil had actually called his daughter three times. Life was good. Now if she could grow the business steadily, she would be a happy camper.
“Has Steve called?” Rhonda asked.
Carly’s good mood took a decided turn for the unsettled.
“Um, yeah. Last week. He asked me to dinner but we had that group in and I had to stay and supervise the evening.”
“You turned down a date with him to stay home and work?”
The tone of her mother’s voice implied she was not only stupid, but she might have lost the only opportunity she would ever have to date again.
“The B and B has to get all my attention right now.”
“You can take an evening off when a nice man asks you out to dinner. You’re never going to get married again if you don’t put yourself out there.”
Had Carly been drinking, she would have choked. “What? Married? Why would I want to do that?”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life alone?”
“Frankly, that doesn’t sound so bad. Mom, I was married for over sixteen years. I’m kind of enjoying being on my own.”
“What woman wants to be alone?”
“A lot of them.” Married. Yuck. “I’m still recovering from my time with Neil.”
“The best way to get over a bad fall is to get right back on the horse. I would have myself except no one could measure up to your father.”
“I’m through riding.” Although Maribel’s comment about sex popped into her head. It had been a really long time. She might not want to commit to any one man, but some time in bed had a certain appeal.
Of course having sex with a man meant getting naked. The last time she’d done that with someone new, she’d been twenty and pretty damned hot. While she wasn’t hideous now, she was a couple of days shy of forty and she’d had a child. No one would look at her body and use the word perky to describe anything. There were stretch marks and squishy bits and some odd bulges she couldn’t get rid of.
Obviously the solution was to find a way to have sex with her clothes on. Or in very, very subtle lighting. Or with someone so incredibly desperate that he would only feel amazing gratitude that she was willing to be with him at all.
Carly’s reluctance to date Steve came back to bite her in the butt less than five hours later. And it started so innocently, too.
“Jack asked me out,” Tiffany said that night over dinner.
The clear evening was blessedly silent, what with all the model plane folks busy eating their catered dinner in the main dining room.
“That’s nice,” Carly told her. “You know the rule.”
“But it’s not fair. I can’t help it if I’m not sixteen yet. If you’d had me earlier, I could be sixteen now and go out with him.”
“Yes. And although I did specifically plan my pregnancy so that fifteen years later I could ruin your life, the answer stays the same. No dating until you’re sixteen.”
“Just because you’re not interested in men, Carly, is no reason to infringe on your daughter’s happiness,” Rhonda said as she passed the salad.
“Yeah,” Tiffany said smugly.
Carly clutched her fork while the shower scene music from Psycho played in her head.
“Thanks for the thought, Mom,” Carly said, wishing there was wine with dinner. “But Tiffany is too young to be out alone with a guy.” She turned to her daughter. “You’re more than welcome to have Jack over here where you two can hang out in a very supervised way.”
“You mean so you can spy on us.”
“Pretty much,” Carly admitted cheerfully.
Tiffany rolled her eyes as she turned to her grandmother. “She thinks we’re going to have sex. We’re not. I know all about it and I’m not interested.”
Carly completely believed her. At that age, she’d been far more interested in romance than sex. Right until some slightly older guy had kissed her senseless and then touched her breasts in a way that had made her want to explore the possibilities.
“Tiffany seems very trustworthy,” Rhonda said.
“I agree. But my decision stays the same. No dating this year.”
“But I hate having Jack over,” Tiffany complained. “He’s so interested in the stupid house and the stupid ghost. He wants to check out all the rooms with some dumb equipment he bought so he can figure out where she is. I swear, he’s more interested in that ghost than in me.”
Which made Carly really like the boy.
“Plus, he wants you to be with him, so you can tell him where you’ve seen the ghost,” Tiffany added, sounding outraged.
“Your boyfriend isn’t interested in your mother,” Rhonda said, patting her granddaughter’s arm.
“I know. It’s just weird.”
Carly changed the subject by asking about Tiffany’s progress on the new letterhead. From there, they moved into a spirited discussion on the best kind of swimsuit for summer and if they should sell “beach packs” to guests wanting water—a towel and some suntan lotion. The meal ended without anymore mention of Jack, dating, or Carly’s inability to attract men.
When her mother and her daughter had disappeared—Rhonda to open the mail and Tiffany to check out the latest fashions on the Style network—Carly retreated to her office where she leaned back in her chair and breathed in the silence.
This was good, she thought, hoping her pleasure in the moment didn’t jinx it. She was working hard and it was paying off, big-time. Sure, she still had five billion things to do, but in the meantime, she was happy and making progress.
Then her mother walked into the office and put a letter on her desk.
“We’re going to have a new guest,” Rhonda said.
“Okay. And this is important, why?”
“Because he’s going to try and ruin us. This always happens. Why can’t they just leave us alone?”
Carly sat up in her chair and reached for the letter. It was addressed to her from an Adam Covell. He wanted a large room with a view for three weeks, during which time he would be conducting experiments on the house.
“Experiments?”
“Keep reading.”
Carly scanned the rest of the letter. “He’s coming to debunk the myth? What? He’s a ghostbuster?”
“Apparently. They show up from time to time.”
This Carly didn’t need. “What are we going to do?” she asked, more to herself than her mother. “Are we expected to produce a ghost? I don’t have one right now.”
There hadn’t been any “shimmering essences” since she and Tiffany had returned. As much as Carly wanted to believe her childhood sightings, there wasn’t any proof.
“We haven’t had one ever,” Rhonda told her. “Sometimes I worry about you. You’ve been talking about the ghost like this for some time and I couldn’t figure out why. It’s not real. It never has been. This man is here to ruin us and I don’t think we can do anything to stop him.”
CHAPTER 8
Carly clutched the arms of her chair. “No one is going to ruin us. I won’t let him. Besides, there was something once. I remember seeing things, feeling a presence. Maribel felt it, too.”
Rhonda sat down and took her hands. “I know you think you did. When you were little we talked about Mary all the time and I think that made her real to you. But anything you saw was just our usual tricks.”
“What?” Carly pulled free and stood. “What tricks? I’ll admit believing in ghosts is a stretch of the imagination, but I saw her. Or something shimmery. I saw her walk through walls. I heard her voice.”
Rhonda sighed. “I’m so sorry. I never meant for this to hurt you. The stories about the house being haunted have existed for as long as the house has been here. I remember hearing them when I was growing up. People were always interested in the fact that the place
was haunted and the family has kept that interest going. It’s good for business.”
Carly felt odd defending the fact the house was haunted when she wasn’t a hundred percent convinced. But she wasn’t willing to reject the possibility. “But over the years, dozens of people have tried to prove there’s no ghost and they’ve all walked away believers.”
“I know. There are things that can be done to make people believe. Our family has been fooling the public forever. But it’s not real. It’s never been real. What you’re remembering is all the stories, Carly. What we talked about. Mary isn’t real and the house has never been haunted.”
She didn’t want to hear any of this, so she excused herself and walked out of the office. As she moved down the hallway, she studied moldings and doorways and antique pictures. What had, just a few minutes before, seemed charmingly eccentric, now just looked old and dusty. She felt the walls beginning to close in on her.
Carly walked to the edge of the property and stood staring out at the sun sinking over the ocean. The waves were orange and red and gold, the sky nearly white. It was breathtakingly beautiful, but all she could think was that she couldn’t take one more kick in the teeth.
She’d lived through an unhappy marriage, staying because she thought it was the right thing to do. She’d endured a divorce, the loss of most of her friends, selling her house and furniture, a move here, only to find out the B and B wasn’t going to be a haven after all. By God, she would not give up her ghost.
As soon as the thought formed, she felt her lips twitch. Then she started to laugh. Giving up the ghost. She’d never understood what the expression meant, and still didn’t, but it was appropriate. She wasn’t giving up on Mary.
Maybe it hadn’t been real to anyone else, but it had been real to her. She wouldn’t allow some would-be ghostbuster to take that away from her.
She returned to the house and found her mother in her room.
“What do you mean, you faked Mary,” Carly asked. “How come I remember stuff?”
Her mother shook her head. “Your father and I used to fight about your belief in the ghost. I wanted to tell you the truth, but he thought it was charming. And he did a lot of things to convince you she was real.”
Carly suddenly understood Tiffany’s emotional outbursts at the unfairness of her world when the grown-ups around her did their best to destroy her happiness.
“No,” she said, trying to stay calm, but feeling panic build. “Daddy would never have lied to me.”
“It wasn’t a lie, Carly. It was…something to make you feel special. Come with me.”
Her mother led her to the tower Carly had always escaped to when she’d been a kid. They climbed the stairs to the dusty room where Carly had curled up to read. But instead of going inside, her mother showed her a small secret compartment in a wall. After pressing a hidden latch, the door swung open, revealing a kind of slide projector. As Carly watched, her mother turned it on.
“Go back into the tower room,” Rhonda told her.
Carly hesitated, then did as she asked. Shock swept through her as she realized a shimmering presence stood gracefully in the corner of the room.
“Mary,” she breathed as sharp disappointment cut through her. It wasn’t real. None of it had been real.
“There are three or four slides,” her mother said. “Your father would use different ones at different times. He worried you were too solitary, and having Mary around gave you a friend.”
Carly couldn’t believe it. She returned to the hallway. “What else did he do?”
Rhonda turned off the projector. “There are dozens of tricks. We have specially prepared rooms for nonbelievers where we can change the temperature at will. We can mist their room so they feel a chilly presence. There are tables that tilt, walls that rotate. I’ll show you everything before this Adam Covell arrives. I’m sure we can convince him just like we’ve convinced the others.”
“Okay. Yeah. We should probably talk about it,” Carly said, still surprised by all the trickery. “Thanks for showing me this.”
“Are you all right?” her mother asked.
“Fine.” Not really, but what was she going to say? “I’m going back to my office. See you in the morning.”
She left her mother in the tower and made her way downstairs.
Intellectually she understood the pain of learning that Mary wasn’t real came from a whole lot more than just the loss of a memory. It was the final straw in what had been an emotionally difficult year.
But it didn’t feel that way. Disappointment threatened to crush her.
She’d been walking around wondering when Mary was going to show up. She’d called out to her several times and had even started investigating ways to get a ghost to appear. All of which made her feel stupid. She’d been so sure. She’d depended on the reality of having a ghost. She’d—
Carly walked from her office to the side door, then made her way back to the cliffs. Once there, she turned back. The massive old house rose four stories into the evening sky. Huge and beautiful and very, very expensive to keep going.
Disappointment flared into anger. Without the ghost, she didn’t have a viable business. She’d been selling Chatsworth-by-the-Sea as a haunted B and B. No one was all that interested in a slightly rundown, very old, former English manor. Without Mary, they were sunk.
Carly might have come here because she didn’t have any other choice, but now she was committed. She liked the house and she liked the idea of returning to her roots. After nearly six weeks of hard work, she’d seen plenty of progress. No way was she going to uproot Tiffany and start over in some other place all because of a hotshot guy who thought he was Bill Murray in Ghostbusters.
“There is no way in hell you’re taking this away from me, Adam Covell.”
Carly found her mother in her private sitting room. Tiffany sat next to her on the small chintz-covered sofa. Her daughter’s forlorn expression told Carly that she’d been given the news.
“You said we’ve been fooling other ghostbusters for years,” Carly said.
“Oh, there are dozens of ways. There’s an old journal full of ideas. I can’t remember more than what I told you. Give me a second.”
She rose and walked into her bedroom. A few minutes later, she appeared with an old wooden box. “It’s all in here.”
Carly took the box. “I’m going to find out all I can about our guest and figure out what we can do to defeat him. The success of the B and B depends on us being haunted.”
Tiffany’s eyes widened. “You’re going to lie about Mary?”
“If I have to. It’s a matter of survival, and apparently there’s a long tradition of it in this family.” She clutched the box tightly to her chest. “Tomorrow, as soon as you get home from school, we’ll have a family meeting and figure out a plan. Between now and then, I’ll go over what’s in here and check out this Adam guy on the Internet. Fair enough?”
Tiffany and her grandmother nodded. “We’ll be there,” Rhonda said. “We’ll be ready to kick some ass.”
Jack joined their meeting the following afternoon. Carly wasn’t sure about discussing such a sensitive issue in front of him, but he insisted on being a part of things.
“I can help,” he told her. “I know technology. Maybe I can come up with some ideas or figure out ways to make them work. Please?”
He looked so serious and sincere, she thought wistfully. But what really sold her was Tiffany’s pleading expression. After all, fooling Adam would allow her to spend time with Jack, which wasn’t exactly as good as dating, but pretty close.
Carly set her papers down on the coffee table in front of the sofa in the rear parlor they’d temporarily taken over.
“Technical help would be nice,” she said. “As you all know, we get most of our business because we’re haunted. We’re featured on the national ghost registry as a haunting that has never been disproved. It’s like getting a five-star safety rating. But if one of the top ghos
tbusters disproves the haunting, we’re removed from the registry and marked as a hoax. Not good for our bottom line.”
“No kidding,” Jack said.
“What are we going to do?” Tiffany asked.
“Fight back. I spent a lot of time on the Internet, and Adam Covell is going to be difficult to defeat. Apparently he comes from a long line of people interested in debunking rumors about paranormal phenomenon. His grandfather made a living doing it and wrote a lot of books.” She held up the one she’d checked out of the library that morning.
“I couldn’t find out very much on Adam himself,” she continued. “He doesn’t do this with the same enthusiasm as his grandfather, but he’s just as deadly. He wrote papers on two supposedly haunted houses in Virginia. One was a restaurant and the other an inn. Both closed within a year of his report.”
Rhonda caught her breath. “A year? We can’t let that happen. Carly, did you go over those papers I gave you?”
“Every one of them.” She set the box on the table. “We’re going to assign Adam to the special bedroom. It’s been fitted with two secret entrances, a misting system and its own heating and cooling units.”
“Why?” Tiffany asked. “What will that do?”
“The heating and cooling will allow for fast temperature changes,” Jack said eagerly. “Misting him will give him a chill. And you can use the secret entrances to take stuff in and out of his room.” He looked at Carly. “Is that right?”
“Yes. It’s exactly right. We want to keep Mr. Covell on his toes.”
“Can we poison him?” Rhonda asked.
Carly stared at her mother. “What are you talking about? We want him impressed, not dead.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean kill him. But if he had an upset stomach the whole time he was here, he couldn’t do his best work.”
Fooling a man was one thing, but compromising his health was another. “No poison,” Carly said firmly. “Our goal is make sure our guest believes he’s been thoroughly haunted. Then he’ll go away and we can get on with our lives.”
There's Always Plan B Page 9
