Someone to Love (5 page)

Daisy and Erin were laughing and doing a little jig, but Jace stayed frozen in place, not even blinking as he stared at the woman.

Smiling, the spirit woman turned to look at Daisy and Erin, who didn’t seem to see her. When she saw Jace staring at her, her eyes opened wide in surprise, and for a moment their eyes locked. She was pretty in a quiet way, like someone in an old ad for shampoo or soap. Her eyes were dark blue and her mouth was small and perfectly shaped.

When she realized that Jace could see her, she registered surprise, then for about three seconds, her body had more substance. She wasn’t solid by any means, but he could see more of her and less of the bricks. In the next second, she was gone. No poof of vanishing, just there, then not there.

Jace stood still for a moment, not moving, before he realized that Daisy and Erin were staring at him.

“You look like you saw the ghost, sir.”

Reluctantly, he pulled his eyes away from the wall. “No, just recovering from ten pounds of breakfast. You better get your berries and get out of here before Mrs. Browne returns.”

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir,” they said as they ran out of the fruit cage. At the door in the brick wall, Daisy stopped, smiled prettily, and said, “If you’re needin’ anything, let me know. Anything at all. A foot massage, maybe. Or a—” Erin grabbed her arm and pulled her through the door.

“Make that six months before she’s pregnant,” Jace muttered.

For a while, he stood inside the fruit cage and stared at the spot where the spirit of the woman had been. She had protected the two giggling girls who were raiding the raspberry patch, he thought. She had picked a spider off the wall and blown it into Mrs. Browne’s face so she would run away and not see the girls snitching raspberries.

What amazed Jace was that neither the girls nor Mrs. Browne had seen something that had been so clear to him.

“It’s you,” he heard to his right and turned to see Mrs. Browne opening the cage door. “I thought I saw someone in here.”

“Yes, I confess. I was eating raspberries.” He looked again at the place the woman had appeared. “Did I see you dancing a moment ago?”

“You might call it that. A spider fell off the wall and onto my face. I told Hatch what I thought of his gardening. He lets those boys of his slack off. They do no work.”

“Not like your girls.”

“I make them work, if that’s what you mean.” She was trying to get to the raspberries behind him, but Jace was firmly rooted to the spot. “You have that look on your face.”

“And what look is that?”

“The ghost look. Did you see her? Will you be puttin’ the house up for sale?”

Jace made himself look at her. “Sell? And miss out on your breakfasts? How could I do that?”

She gave her rusty little laugh. “You’re a smooth one, aren’t you, Mr. Montgomery? Why don’t you have a wife and children? Fill this house with young ’uns. That’s what it needs.”

“Are you proposing?” he asked and she smiled.

“Go on now, go find somethin’ to do and leave me to my work.”

Jace went to the cage door, but turned back. “Mrs. Browne,” he said seriously, “about this ghost. Do people see her inside the house or out?”

“Inside. I never heard anybody say they’d seen her outside. Ol’ Hatch would be scared to death of her if she showed herself out here.”

“But didn’t you tell me that some people can see her and some can’t? Maybe she appears outside but no one has seen her—or can see her in the daylight.”

Mrs. Browne squinted up at him. “Are you tryin’ to tell me that you saw Lady Grace outside the house? Maybe here in this garden?”

Jace grinned. “I’m trying to use you as a research tool. If I’m going to be writing a book about Lady Grace, I need to find out all I can about her, don’t I?”

“Write a book about a woman that won’t leave the earth? Well…” she said, “if that’s what you want to do, but I have better things to do with my time.”

“So no one has seen her outside?”

“Not to my knowledge and I know—”

“All there is to know,” Jace said with a sigh. She might know things, but it was difficult to get information out of her. He dreaded trying to find out about Stacy from her. If Stacy had met someone here and Mrs. Browne knew of it, he was more likely to get a morals lecture than information.

“I think I’ll take a run,” he said. “Work off some breakfast in preparation for lunch.”

“It’s Jamie’s roast chicken,” she said. “With rosemary.”

Smiling, Jace started jogging backward. When he reached the spot in the wall where the ghost had stepped through, he pretended to have a pain in his ankle. Mrs. Browne was watching him intently. As he rubbed his ankle, then stood up, he felt the wall. It was solid and old. There was no doorway there and he didn’t think there ever had been.

J
ace jogged around the parkland for over an hour. He often stopped to look at places. When a piece of land had been occupied for nearly nine hundred years, the people left their marks behind. He came across four sheds, all of them locked, and the ruins of two more. He found a pretty stone shelter with a dome top and a marble floor that was beginning to crumble. To get to it he’d had to fight through rampant vines and run out a family of small, furry creatures that moved too fast for him to see what they were. There were stone half circles next to what he’d been told was a dry riverbed. The monks had kept fish in the stone-lined ponds.

When he got back to the house, he just had time to shower before lunch. He ate in Mrs. Browne’s kitchen and was subjected to a long complaint about the raspberry bushes having been denuded. She questioned Jace closely about who he’d seen. He lied smoothly. Of course to tell her the truth would have been worse than lying. Tell her that the ghost blew a spider on her? Not quite.

After lunch, which was delicious, he went upstairs and called Nigel Smith-Thompson, the estate agent, and asked questions. What Jace wanted to know was whether or not the previous owner had lent the house to anyone in the three years it was last for sale. Who had stayed there? The agent said no one had been there. The owner and his family walked out of the house in the middle of the night and returned to their native country, never to visit the house again.

“Are you
sure
he didn’t lend the house to
any
one?” Jace persisted.

“I can call him and ask,” the agent said, but he obviously didn’t want to.

“Please do,” Jace said, then gave the agent his cell number. “I want to know who had permission to stay here.”

“I can answer that one. Only the housekeeper was allowed to stay. The gardener lives in the small house at the south end of the property.”

“But perhaps the owner had a friend who
used
the house.”

“The previous owner left the care of the house to us and I can assure you that we allowed
no one
to use it.” His voice was becoming strained, as though Jace were accusing him of something bad. “I think, Mr. Montgomery, that you should talk to Mrs. Browne. If anyone who wasn’t supposed to stay there did, then Mrs. Browne knows about it.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Jace said, sighing because he knew he’d get no information out of the woman. “But you will call the owner right away and ask?”

“Yes,” the agent said tiredly. “I’ll call.”

Jace thanked him, then hung up and dressed to go out. On his way out he stopped by the kitchen and asked Mrs. Browne if anyone had stayed in the house while it was empty. As he knew she would, she took offense and told him that
no one
had stayed there. He left in the middle of her lecture and went in search of his car. Outside, hidden behind a turn of the house, was a three-car garage, which he’d somehow missed seeing before.

It took him a while to find his keys in a little box hung on the wall. When he opened his car he saw that dirt had been vacuumed off the floormat and on the passenger seat was a file folder. Inside was a neatly typed piece of paper listing supplies and computer and other equipment needed to set up an office. Jace smiled when he saw that the items came from four different sources. “I tried to get the best prices,” Gladys had written at the bottom. “I could buy it all on Monday and start work on Tuesday at two. I have classes until one.”

Jace had to walk around to the other side of the car to get into the driver’s side. It was going to take him a while to adjust to the steering wheel being on the opposite side of what he was used to.

He backed out of the garage, looked for the device to close the door but couldn’t find it. Out of nowhere, Mick appeared and pulled the door down. Jace put the window down, stuck his head out, and said, “Tell Gladys yes. Tuesday will be fine.” Mick smiled and waved thanks.

On the road into Margate village, Jace’s cell phone—or mobile as it was called in England—rang. Nigel said that the owner had said emphatically that he’d never lent the house to anyone. “Thank you,” Jace said and hung up.

Either someone was lying or Stacy and whomever she’d met had broken into the house. Or had they? Jace had no proof she’d kept her meeting. Maybe she’d gone to the house, waited for the person, but he didn’t show up. Maybe in despair she’d taken her own life.

“But if she loved
him
so much, why was she marrying
me?”
he said out loud, then swerved to miss an oncoming car. Out of habit, he’d moved to the right side of the road.

Jace pulled his Range Rover to the side, stopped, and put his head on the steering wheel. Short of taking Stacy’s photo into the village and asking questions, he wasn’t sure how to proceed. He’d read the reports on her death. No one had visited her at the pub that night. She’d arrived late, the owner’s wife said she’d given Stacy a key, and that she’d nearly fallen on her way up the stairs. The woman also said Stacy looked as though she’d been crying. The owner had asked if she could help. “No, I’m fine,” Stacy said. “I just need a good, long sleep.”

When Jace had driven to the house before, he’d turned into Priory House before reaching the village, so he’d not seen it. Now he saw that it was quaint and cute, but then most English villages were. All the grocery shops were divided, so there was a butcher shop, a bakery, a fruitier, a greengrocer, and a wine shop. At one end of the main street, named High Street as it was in most villages, was a pub and another one stood at the other end of the street.

Which pub was it? Jace wondered. His copy of the police report was hidden in the back of his photo of Stacy and he hadn’t thought to bring it. Maybe he could visit the place where Stacy had…died—he could hardly even think the word—and find out…Find out what, he didn’t know.

When he passed a small brick building that said Margate Historical Library, Jace had an idea.

He parked his car on the street and walked toward the library. Everyone he passed stared at him, then nodded. He had no doubt that they knew he was the latest owner of Priory House. He could almost hear their wanting to ask if he’d seen the ghost yet. He thought he’d answer, “Yes, but she got scared of me and vanished.”

When he got to the library door, he realized he hadn’t so much as a pen with him. He couldn’t pretend to be an author doing research if he didn’t have pen and paper.

Turning, he looked about the village, and across the street was a stationer’s shop. He crossed the street and went inside. As with most shops in English villages, it had two of each item rather than twenty-five of each as American stores carried, and there wasn’t a piece of Plexiglas in sight.

“Here you are,” said a tall, thin, gray-haired woman from behind the counter as she shoved a box toward him.

“I beg your pardon.”

“It’s all there,” she said. “Take a look.”

“I think there’s been a mistake. I haven’t purchased anything.”

“Alice Browne called and said you’d seen the ghost outside in the garden. No one’s done that before, so we knew your next stop would be the library to find out about her, and of course you’d be wanting something to take notes on, so here’s everything you need.”

When Jace didn’t move, she pushed the box until it was about to fall off the counter.

“Go on,” she said. “It’s been put on your account and I’ll send young Gladys Arnold a statement at the end of the month. Mind you, though, I don’t take kindly to her buying some of her supplies in Aylesbury. You can tell her from me that it doesn’t pay to antagonize the local vendors.”

When Jace still didn’t move, she looked impatient. “Is there something else you want?”

“No,” Jace said slowly, then took the box and headed for his car. Shoving the box onto the passenger seat, he got behind the steering wheel. He needed some time to calm himself. Even though he’d told Mrs. Browne that he had
not
seen the ghost in the garden, she hadn’t believed him. She’d called the local stationer’s shop and told the clerk that Jace would stop in there on the way to the library.

His impulse was to call Mrs. Browne and tell her off, even to fire her. How dare she blab to the whole village what he was doing?

After a few minutes of anger, it occurred to him that this was good. He wouldn’t have to work to make people believe he was interested in the ghost and thereby cover his real interest. No, it was assumed that Jace was just like everyone else.

“Good,” Jace said. “This is good. A premade cover.”

Relaxing his tight muscles, he looked at the box on the seat beside him and began to go through it, shaking his head in wonder. It was filled with all that a researcher could want: six black pens, four colored pens, two notebooks, one with lines, one without. On and on. There was even a little battery-powered book-light in the bottom.

Jace took out a large paper wallet with a string tie, and stuck in the unlined notebook and two black pens, then headed toward the library.

The librarian, a woman about the same age as the stationer clerk and Mrs. Browne, greeted him with, “I have everything you want right here.” She pushed a box toward him. “We call it the Priory House box and we don’t even put the books away anymore. I hope you have a video player. Alice said you don’t have much in the way of furniture, just the leftovers of the last owner. If you need video equipment, we can rent some to you.”

“Thank you,” Jace said as sincerely as he could, but it was difficult not to make a smart retort. “I have video equipment on order.”

“Oh? Alice didn’t tell me—”

“Mrs. Browne doesn’t know everything about my life,” Jace said stiffly.

The woman blinked at Jace a couple of times. “I see. Perhaps you don’t want these books,” she said and started to take them off the counter.

In spite of his intentions, it seemed that Jace had offended yet another English person. “I very much want the books,” he said, picking up the box before she could take it away. “And it was kind of you to assemble this for me.”

She didn’t soften. “I didn’t do it for you. I put them together for Mrs. Grant.”

“Oh?” Jace asked, smiling, trying to ingratiate himself. “I don’t know her.”

“Of course not! She was four owners ago.” The woman was glaring at him as though he was taking up too much of her time. “Now, if you don’t need anything else…”

“Actually, I’d like to look around. At other subjects. If I might be allowed to do so, that is.”

She didn’t answer, just turned away. Jace took the box and set it on a table. What he really wanted to see was a local newspaper for the day after Stacy died. He wanted to know what had been written about her and who had been involved.

He knew the librarian could answer many of his questions about where to start looking, but he also knew she’d probably call Mrs. Browne five minutes later. And ask her permission? Jace wondered. Would the librarian ask Mrs. Browne if it was all right for Jace to look at three-year-old newspapers?

He found what he wanted without asking and put the newspaper on the microfilm reader.

The day after Stacy’s body was found, the headlines had been about the local garden contest, so her death was on the bottom of the second page. He felt some resentment that her death wasn’t front-page news, but he was also glad that speculation about Stacy hadn’t been made the center of attention. Her death had been dealt with quietly and with dignity, he thought.

The story was written by Ralph Barker. The paper was written, edited, and printed by him. He wrote the name and address down in his notebook.

He knew he was dawdling to postpone reading the story. Taking a deep breath, he began. It was a straight news story, just the facts given, no melodrama, no speculation.

At 3:00 p.m. on 12 May 2002, the body of Miss Stacy Evans, an American woman aged twenty-seven years, had been found above the Leaping Stag pub by the owner’s wife, Mrs. Emma Carew. Mrs. Carew told constable Clive Sefton that Miss Evans had come into the pub about midnight and asked if she could rent a room for the night. Mrs. Carew said that Miss Evans looked the “worse for wear” as her blouse was torn at the shoulder and she had makeup under her eyes as though she’d been crying. Mrs. Carew asked her if she was all right. Miss Evans said she was, just that she was very tired and wanted a long sleep. She asked not to be disturbed the next morning and said that if she had to pay for two nights she would. Mrs. Carew said she could smell liquor on her breath, so she figured the woman had been drinking and didn’t trust herself to drive. As Miss Evans went up the stairs, she tripped.

The next day, when Mrs. Carew heard nothing from Miss Evans, she began to worry. Her husband, pub owner George Carew, told her to leave Miss Evans alone, but Mrs. Carew wouldn’t. She used her master key to open the door, but found it chained shut. She said she could see Miss Evans sprawled across the bed and her instinct told her the woman was dead. She called the police.

Constable Clive Sefton arrived on the scene at 3:06 p.m. and he and Mr. Carew broke into the room. Miss Evans was dead.

Constable Sefton found Miss Evans’s handbag, removed her passport, then called the number listed to be used in case of an emergency.

The article said that, pending investigation, Miss Stacy Evans’s death was apparently a suicide.