Jennifer Crusie - Maybe This Time

His voice trailed off and he stared at the asters.

“What?” North said.

Gabe bent down and picked up a dried ugly weed someone had thrown down at the edge of the garden.

“What is that?” North said.

“I need to make a phone call,” Gabe said, and headed for the house with his plant.

“Here you are,” Lydia said when she found Andie and Alice in the kitchen. “I wanted to talk to you about coming to Columbus.”

Alice stiffened and Andie said, “Not until you say yes, Alice,” and dumped the chocolate chips into the dough, keeping an eye out for May. Damn kitchen had no fireplace.

“I was hoping for banana bread,” Lydia said, looking into the bowl. “I haven’t had decent banana bread since you left. I put bananas on the kitchen counter at home so you could bake when we all got back.”

“They have to be brown to make banana bread,” Alice said severely. “The yellow ones will not do.”

“That’s why I left them on the counter,” Lydia said. “So they’ll be brown when we get there.”

They’ll be rotted through by the time we get there, Andie thought, if we ever do, and kept mixing and watching for May.

Alice reached up and turned on the radio. “We dance while we bake,” she informed Lydia.

“How nice for you,” Lydia said, and watched Alice pick up the beat at the end of “I’m Too Sexy” and bop around the kitchen. “Perhaps you could find a classical station?” she said to Andie.

“It’s this or nothing,” Andie said. “The reception here is not good. We make do.” Where the hell is May?

“Hello,” Flo said, coming through the kitchen door as the music changed, beaming at them all. “Where is everybody?”

“Here!” Alice called to her. “We’re dancing. Come on!”

“Dancing!” Flo said, and joined Alice to bebop around the kitchen to “Achy Breaky Heart.”

They looked like a demented conga line. In Texas.

“The sooner we get these children out of here, the better,” Lydia said to Andie.

The sooner we get me out of here, the better, too, Andie thought, and mixed faster.

Crumb caught North in the servants’ hall as he and Gabe came in.

“There’s a woman on the phone for you,” she said, her voice full of scorn. “Says it’s important.”

North went to the entrance hall and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“It’s me,” Kristin said. “Simon called from England. He said to call him as soon as you could.”

“Did he find the graves?”

“He didn’t say, but he found something.”

“I’ll call right now.”

“And I found out about May Younger.”

“She’s buried around here?”

“She’s not buried at all. She was cremated and her ashes scattered at a dance club in Grandville called… here it is, it’s called ‘The Grandville Grill.’ Her friends hijacked the ashes when nobody picked them up and scattered them on the dance floor in her memory.”

“Touching,” North said, thinking, At least I won’t have to talk Andie out of burning her corpse.

“Evidently she spent a lot of time there. I got the impression she had a drinking problem. The night she died, her friends had to drive her home because she was too drunk to drive. The last they saw of her, she was on the tower, waving at them.”

“Good work,” North said. “Thank you.”

“When will you be back?” Kristin sounded a little frazzled. “People are becoming… demanding.”

“I’m hoping by Monday. If I’m not there Monday morning, Southie will be.”

“Whatever you say,” Kristin said, with a lot of this is not a good idea in her voice. “Don’t forget to call Simon.”

North hung up, thinking, May Younger got drunk and fell off the tower. Tragic, but not supernatural. So far, so good.

He dialed England, and Simon answered on the first ring.

“It’s North Archer,” he said. “Did you find the graves?”

“This is a long story,” Simon said, but North could tell from the sound of his voice that he was enjoying it.

“Make it shorter,” North said.

“The people you were asking about were a governess and a valet who died in 1847. The governess, Mary Jessel, gave birth to a stillborn baby and drowned two days later. Peter Quint the valet died from a fall after he’d been drinking and then headed home down an icy hill.”

“Where are the bodies?” North asked.

“Someone dug them up and burned them in 1898. The vicar was walking through the graveyard and found the graves opened, full of bone and ash. Scandal. They closed the graves and put the headstones back.”

“Burned,” North said. “Anybody know why?”

“There’s a legend that if you burn a corpse, the spirit will not walk.”

“Had they been walking?”

“Not that anybody remembers, although that was ninety-four years ago.”

“Fine. This takes care of most of my problem anyway. Thank-”

“Not so fast. Forty years later, 1938, the next vicar walks through the graveyard and sees the graves covered in salt. He told the current vicar it looked like a snowfall.”

“Salt?”

“There’s a legend that ghosts can’t cross salt.”

“So the people in the town think the graveyard is haunted?”

“No, that’s what’s odd. There’s no legend here of haunting, nothing about these graves except that they’ve been disturbed three times.”

“Three?”

“Two years ago. 1990. The current vicar caught two men digging up the graves and turned them over to the police. They’d been hired by an American named Theodore Archer.”

“My second cousin,” North said, thinking, Two years ago? “What did they charge Theodore with?”

“Nothing. He died before they could contact him. In fact, he died whilst the men were digging up the graves.”

Coincidence, North thought, but he didn’t believe in coincidences. Somebody who was here two years ago is faking a haunting here now. And Theodore had investigated, and they’d killed him.

No, that was insane. Theodore had been alone in the car when he’d had a heart attack. A heart attack at forty-eight was not out of the range of the ordinary. People had seen him in the car before it went off the road and he’d been alone. He’d just died, nobody killed him.

“North?”

“Sorry, trying to think this through. Thank you. I owe you.”

“Nonsense,” Simon said. “You kept me out of an Ohio jail. My gratitude is limitless.”

North hung up and looked at the situation from all sides.

People had been trying to put those bodies to rest for decades. Possibly even before that. So faking the haunting wasn’t a new idea.

Maybe back in the beginning, in England, the haunting had been useful to keep the house private. Smuggling maybe. And somebody had believed the fake enough to dig the bodies up and burn them.

And then every ensuing generation that wanted privacy kept the tradition going, so the rumors followed the house to America. Given the kind of personality that would transport a haunted house stone by stone across an ocean, the original Archer had probably spread the legend just to make himself more interesting. “Brought myself a haunted house over from England, yes, I did.” And then somebody in America believed the rumors enough to hire somebody back in England to spread salt on the grave? That was less plausible.

And then Cousin Theodore hired grave robbers and died the same night.

The clock on the kitchen wall chimed and North realized it was almost four. The séance would be starting. He headed for the Great Hall to stop it and Southie met him by the servant stairs.

“We need to stop the séance,” he told Southie.

“No,” Southie said, handing him a set of keys. “We need to keep the séance going as long as possible so you and Gabe can get any videotape out of the satellite truck.”

North looked at the keys. “These are the keys to the truck?”

“I told Bill I’d dropped my wallet in there. He’s so mad at Kelly, he’d probably just have given them to me. Don’t hurt the equipment, just get the tapes. I’ll keep the séance going as long as possible.”

Gabe came up behind them, and said, “I know what’s going on. Come with me to the pantry and I’ll show you.”

“We have to rob a satellite truck first,” North said.

“Okay,” Gabe said.

When the cookies had come out of the oven, Andie had asked Lydia to sit with the kids in the library so Kelly couldn’t get to them, and Lydia said, “No problem,” with enough grimness in her voice that Andie didn’t worry about the kids again. Lydia would put a stake through Kelly’s heart before she’d let her near Carter and Alice.

Then she and Flo went to join the others in the Great Hall, but Will stopped her, his overnight bag in his hand.

“I’m leaving,” he said, his face sulky.

“Good,” Flo said, and went into the Great Hall.

Good, Andie thought at the same time. “Be careful getting out of the drive. It’s really dangerous.”

He nodded. But first, “I have to tell you something.”

Andie looked toward the arch to the Great Hall. “Can you make it fast?”

“Sure,” he snapped. “I slept with Kelly last night.”

Andie swung back to him. “Really? With Kelly?”

“I was just so upset with you, with the way you handled-”

“Yeah, yeah,” Andie said, “it doesn’t matter, we’re done, you can sleep with anybody you want, but… Kelly?”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Will said. “She came to my room. I tried to tell her no, but she said, ‘Andie’s in love with North, and I’m right here,’ and I thought, ‘She’s right-’ ”

“Perfectly understandable,” Andie said, still confused. “Best of luck in the future-”

“There’s not going to be any future,” Will said, sounding exasperated again. “She was weird.”

“I really don’t want to know,” Andie began and then remembered Southie saying the same thing. “Weird how?”