Maybe This Time Read online

  “I still want North.”

  As soon as she said it, she slumped, as if the tension of denial had been keeping her upright. God, that felt good, she thought. The truth really does set you free. Then she looked across the table at Will as the silence stretched out and thought, Oh, hell.

  “I’m sorry,” she began, and then somebody rapped on the window and Andie jerked around.

  Flo was outside, waving.

  “Wonderful,” Andie said, and got up.

  “Wait a minute,” Will said, looking furious.

  “No,” Andie said. “I am so sorry I did this to you, I am so sorry I’m doing this now, but . . . no.”

  She turned and walked away, out of the restaurant and around to Frankfort Street where Flo was waiting.

  “I saw your car,” she said. “You look awful. What’s going on?”

  “I just broke it off with Will.”

  “Good.” Flo patted her arm.

  The sympathy was almost too much. “I think I might still be in love with North.”

  “I know, honey.” Flo put her arm around her. “Come on back to the house and I’ll make some cocoa.”

  That sounded so good that Andie almost said yes, just to be able to go back home with her mother, put her head down on the old wood kitchen table, and cry like a baby from all the released tension while Flo made soothing noises and put marshmallows in her hot chocolate.

  “I can’t,” she said. “I have to get back to the kids.”

  “Then I’ll walk you to the car,” Flo said, and made soothing noises for a block and a half.

  “Thank you for not saying ‘I told you so,’ ” Andie told her when they reached her car.

  “Like I would.” Flo stretched up and kissed her cheek. “If you need me, you call.”

  “Right,” Andie said. “I will. I really will. Thank you, Mom.”

  She kissed her mother good-bye and then made good time heading south, turning off onto the ever-more-deserted roads and then finally onto the narrow lane to the house, taking that insane drop to the driveway that Bruce still had not gotten around to fixing—“I’ll probably be out in a couple of days or so,” he said whenever she called—all the while thinking about North. Not Will, the nice guy she’d just dumped who would have been a good, steady, loving husband who’d never neglect her, but the rat bastard who’d deserted her for his career, just left her upstairs in their attic apartment to rot . . .

  I have to stop thinking about this, she told herself, and drove out of the trees and started around the curve to the house and then hit the brakes, her heart pounding.

  The girl from her dreams was dancing on the lawn, translucent and glowing faintly blue in the dark night, her skirt flowing around her.

  Alice’s blue princess who danced.

  Andie drove on slowly, trying to see better, but as she rounded the curve, the headlights hit the dancing girl for a second and she wasn’t there anymore, and when Andie drove on, the lawn was empty, even after the headlights had passed.

  “I’m not asleep,” Andie said out loud, her heart pounding, “and that was a ghost.”

  More than that, it was a ghost Alice knew. Just like Alice knew the woman across the pond and the man on the tower. If she was hallucinating, she was hallucinating with Alice.

  “This can’t be happening,” Andie said, trying to jar herself back to reality with the sound of her own voice. It was late, she was tired, she was upset, she was . . .

  That was a ghost.

  She drove on around the house automatically, thinking furiously. Tomorrow she was calling the experts. And talking to Alice. And . . .

  “Oh, Christ,” Andie said, and parked the car, looking for ghosts everywhere before she bolted for the house.

  Six

  Andie spent a sleepless night expecting to see the blue girl at any moment and fighting the urge to call North—There are ghosts!—and when the sun came up, she wasn’t sure if she was grateful she’d spent the night without a visit from the girl or not. She was awake so the girl must have been a dream, but she hadn’t been asleep at the wheel so had that been a hallucination?

  We have to get out of here, Andie thought, and went down to the kitchen to begin talking Carter and Alice into a move to Columbus, but they didn’t come down for breakfast, and when she looked in their rooms, they weren’t there, either. She finally tracked them down in the library.

  “Hey,” she said. “Breakfast.”

  Alice stared at Andie, an odd look on her face, something between anger and relief.

  “We thought you left,” Carter said.

  “I did, I went to the university library in Columbus.” Andie came into the room and sat down on a chair closer to them. “I was home by midnight last night.”

  “Mrs. Crumb said you weren’t coming back,” Carter said.

  “And you didn’t tuck me in,” Alice said, wounded. “Nobody tucked me in.”

  “Well, that’s the last time Mrs. Crumb babysits,” Andie said, feeling the now-familiar urge to kick the old lady. “Of course I was coming back. I told you I was coming back when I left. Want some breakfast?”

  Alice looked outraged. “And you didn’t leave me your skirt with the sequins and you promised.”

  “I came back,” Andie said. “That was only if I left for good. What is it with you guys?”

  Alice stood up and went for the door, but Carter hung back. “What were you looking up in the library?”

  “Ghosts,” Andie said, watching for his reaction.

  Carter nodded and headed for the kitchen, too.

  “See, I thought you’d be more surprised,” Andie called after him, and went to fix them pancakes, which Alice smothered in butter and syrup and slurped down. Andie brought up moving to Columbus as artfully as possible, but Alice said, “No,” and went on eating and Carter ignored her, so she regrouped. When the kids were done and back in the library working, she called the two numbers in her notes. For Boston Ulrich in Cincinnati, the author of the not-much-use ghostbuster book, she got an answering machine and left a message. For Dennis Graff in Cleveland, the there’s-no-such-thing-as-ghosts guy, the phone just rang until she finally gave up. “Damn it,” she said to nobody, and checked that Carter and Alice were doing their morning work. “I should get a cookie for this,” Alice said. “Let’s see how it all works out,” Andie told her, and went upstairs to find Mrs. Crumb. The whole idea of ghosts seemed ludicrous in the daylight, but it was going to be night again and when it hit, she was going to be prepared.

  Andie found the housekeeper in the upstairs hall, dumping Carter’s wastebasket into a trash bag. “I need to talk to you,” she said, and startled the old lady so that she dropped the basket, spilling papers to the floor.

  Andie bent to pick them up. “Why did you tell the kids I wasn’t coming back?” she said, and then stopped to look at the drawings Carter had thrown out.

  Mixed in with the copies of comic book characters were amazing rough portraits, capturing Alice laughing, something Andie had never seen, and Mrs. Crumb looking surly, and . . .

  Andie straightened.

  And the blue girl who’d visited her every night and danced on the lawn.

  “Who is this?” she said, holding up the page for Mrs. Crumb to see, the blue girl with her wildly curling hair and big eyes and that generous laughing mouth . . .

  “That’s nobody,” Mrs. Crumb said, and picked up the garbage bag and walked away, leaving the mess on the floor behind her.

  “Right,” Andie said, and went downstairs to the library to find Carter, but the only one there was Alice, reading a butterfly book in the window seat. Andie held up the drawing. “Alice, who is this?”

  “That’s Aunt May,” Alice said. “Carter is very good at drawing.”

  “Yes, he is,” Andie said automatically, and looked at the drawing again, a little breathless. “This is the aunt who took care of you?”

  “Yes,” Alice said. “She died.”

  “Right.” Andie sat