Jennifer Crusie - Maybe This Time

“That was a joke,” Southie said, and then sipped his brandy again. “I think it was a joke.”

Andie leaned closer to Dennis. “So what is Kelly up to?”

“I don’t know.” Dennis sipped his brandy, made a face, and sipped again. “She was very interested in hauntings, but now…”

“I’m beginning to wonder, too,” Southie said. “She hasn’t been asking about the ghosts, she’s been asking about the kids.”

Andie drank her brandy, tasting an odd but not unpleasant woodsy undernote that the tea must have muted, and watched Kelly as she bent close to Bill, whispering to him between belts of her own brandy. Kelly was socking it right down, woodsy undernote be damned. “Well, her specialty has always been children.”

“Child ghosts?” Dennis said. “That’s a narrow specialty.”

“No, live children. In peril. And as it happens, I have two of those. I don’t trust her.” She glanced up at Southie. “And you brought her.”

“She brought Dennis,” Southie pointed out. “It’s a package deal. The kids-in-peril thing, though, that’s bad.”

“Well, the peril is…”-Dennis heh-hehed-“not true. There are no ghosts. Ghosts don’t exist. People are very good at faking them, but in the end, that’s all they are: fakes.”

Andie knocked back the rest of her drink and put her glass on the table beside Dennis’s. “If I take you upstairs, show you where I saw Alice’s rocker move, can you tell me how those things could be faked?”

“Of course.”

“Then come with me.” Andie stood up, and the brandy rushed to her head and made her blink.

“Now where are you going?” Kelly said gaily from across the room, and Andie said, “Away,” and waited until Dennis refilled his glass and then took him out through the Great Hall while Southie blocked Kelly from following by handing her another glass of brandy and asking her about the séance.

There is no séance, Andie thought, and took Dennis upstairs.

• • •

“It was here,” she told Dennis when they were standing in Alice’s room while Alice propped herself up by her elbows in bed. Dennis was sipping his drink and looking at the drawings she’d done on her walls with a mixture of academic interest and paternal disapproval. “The rocking chair, right there.”

Dennis stared skeptically at the chair at the foot of Alice’s bed. “That chair.”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s not surprising that it rocks. It’s a rocking chair.”

“I know.”

“Is she there now? Your, uh, ghost?”

“I can’t see her.” Andie looked at Alice. “Alice, is the woman in the old-fashioned dress there now? Or your aunt May?”

“What woman?” Alice said, pretending to yawn.

“The woman in the long dress with the tiers, the flounces, that we saw out by the pond. Is she the one who makes the rocker move?”

Alice slid down under the covers and ignored her.

“You said she was wearing a long dress with flounces,” Dennis said. “Was her hair in a bun?”

“Yes,” Andie said. “How did you know?”

Dennis pointed to the Jessica doll on Alice’s bedside table, her age-mottled dress in three tiers and her hair in a bun.

“Yeah,” Andie said. “I noticed that, too, but I can’t figure out what it means.”

Dennis nodded, and Andie wanted to kick him. Then he said, “Could I see you in the hall, Andie?”

Andie picked up the Jessica doll and put it beside Alice. Then she leaned over and kissed the little girl on the top of the head. “Good night, baby.”

“Good night, Andie,” Alice said, her voice muffled in the covers.

Andie followed Dennis into the hall and closed the door.

“I think Alice is a telepath,” Dennis said.

“What?”

“Oh, she doesn’t know it. She’s had a most unusual childhood and she’s highly emotional and those probably combined to awaken latent talent. She’s probably a natural. Add to that the fact that she’s been alone so much, and that she probably wants to see somebody sitting at the end of her bed taking care of her, and it’s not surprising that she imagines there’s somebody there. That’s very common, the imaginary friend.” He smiled at her reassuringly. “It’s not at all dangerous. She’ll be fine.”

“Imaginary friend?” Andie said. “But I saw the woman by the pond.”

“You saw the telepathic image that Alice projected, based on the doll.” His tone was kind, he wasn’t patronizing her at all, but he was very definitely in the there’s-no-ghost-here camp.

“Okay, Alice is telepathic,” Andie said. “But the chair rocked.”

“Telekinesis. Making a rocking chair rock would not be a problem for somebody with the psychic energy Alice has probably accumulated.”

Psychic energy. “There is no ghost.”

“I’d say almost certainly.”

“Almost.”

“There is no ghost.”

Andie tried to wrap her mind around it, wanting to feel relieved and yet… “What about May, the kids’ aunt? I thought I was dreaming but I don’t think so anymore, I think she was real. The room was really cold.”

“But you’d had a drink,” Dennis said, swirling what was left of his brandy in his glass.

“Tea with Amaretto,” Andie said. “One cup of spiked Earl Grey. I don’t think-”

“But it was at night, you were half asleep, and this house has a very definite mood to it.”

“Creepy.”

“Exactly. It wouldn’t be surprising if late at night, on the edge of sleep, you thought you saw something.”

“I didn’t just see her, I had conversations with her.”

Dennis shook his head. “Did she talk about something that had been bothering you?”

North. “Yes.”

“The subconscious finds ways to work out its problems. A dream state is as good a way as any.”

It was so plausible, it was demoralizing. “I feel like a fool,” Andie said. “I was really starting to think there were ghosts.”

“I’m worse,” Dennis said morosely over his glass. “I was hoping there were. Just once, I’d like to see one. It’s like studying the dodo. No matter how much you know, you can never get primary evidence.” He sighed. “If they were real, I could write a groundbreaking paper on them. It could revolutionize the field. I could be…” He met her eyes, his face flushed now. “Because, unlike Boston Ulrich, I am respected in my field.”

“Of course you are,” Andie said, startled. Then he took another sip of his drink and she realized the brandy was doing its good work. But even tipsy, Dennis made sense. There were no ghosts, of course there were no ghosts. “Listen, I am very grateful. And I will make you a huge breakfast in the morning before you go back as a thank-you. If you give me your sweater, I’ll even get the pizza sauce out for you.”

He smiled at her, his face relaxed now. “That’s very kind of you.” He handed her his glass, and then took off his ugly green sweater and handed it to her. Then he patted her arm as he took back his drink, his basset-hound eyes sympathetic. “You get some sleep now.”

“All right, thank you,” Andie said, and watched him toddle down the big stone staircase, weaving a little. The guy could not hold his after-dinner drinks. But still he’d been patient. And he knew about ghosts. Good guy, she thought, and took his sweater into the bathroom and washed the tomato sauce out of it and hung it to dry, patting it a little in sympathy with its owner who’d been kind without making her feel like she was crazy. All that angst over nothing.

I really did believe in ghosts there for a while, she thought and went back to Alice’s room to make sure she wasn’t upset about the whole ghost conversation, cracking the door just an inch to make sure she was asleep.

The woman in the tiered dress was standing at the end of Alice’s bed, pale and dreadful, watching Alice. Andie clutched the doorknob, and opened the door farther, and the chill in the room hit her as the woman looked up. Andie saw two black, blank eyes staring at her, empty and implacable, as the cold went into her bones.

Not a woman. Not telepathy. A ghost.

“Oh, my God,” Andie whispered, staring at the thing, and Alice sighed in her bed, fast asleep, unaware that the temperature in the room had dropped by thirty degrees.

Alice. I have to get Alice out of here.

She stepped into the room and the ghost wafted toward her, sepia toned and translucent, like old tea. “I have to take Alice,” she whispered to the thing, trying to keep from screaming. “It’s too cold in here for her. She’ll get sick.”

The thing grew darker, the form stronger, and then Andie heard a whisper from behind her.

I wouldn’t do that.

She turned around and saw Aunt May in the little hallway, swishing her long skirt that became translucent as it moved.

She’ll kill you as soon as look at you, May said. She killed me.

Andie could see the stone floor flickering through May’s skirt as she swished it, and the old vertigo came back with a new surge of terror that this was real, that she wasn’t hallucinating, that there were ghosts and one of them was talking to her right now and the other was at the foot of Alice’s bed, that Alice was there, she had to get Alice out of there-

If I were you, May said, I’d call North. He ought to be here. He ought to help.

“May,” Andie said, making one last grab for sanity. “You’re a dream.”

No, May said, flipping her skirt again, like a teenager trying to be cool. That was really me, talking to you. I wanted to see if you were a keeper.

“A keeper,” Andie said, her heart pounding as she looked back at the thing at the foot of the bed, terrible in its immobility, more terrible when it moved. Gotta get Alice out of here, gotta find out if I’m losing my mind, gotta talk to Dennis, gotta get Alice out of here-