Maybe This Time Read online

  “North sent you?” Why didn’t he come?

  “He didn’t exactly send me,” Southie said. “I just got the feeling you needed me.”

  “So you brought me a TV reporter?”

  “Broadcast journalist,” Kelly said crisply, and followed it up with another blinding smile. “It’s raining. Could we come in?”

  Andie looked at the younger guy with the silver bag. “And you are?”

  “Cameraman,” he said, bored by the conversation already. “Bill. I drove the truck.”

  Andie craned her neck to see a red Miata that had to be Kelly O’Keefe’s parked just this side of the bridge beside a huge satellite truck that said NEWS4 on the side. She spared a moment to wonder how the hell they’d gotten that truck down the drive and how the hell they were going to get it back up again now that the rain was turning dirt to mud, and then she looked at Southie. “A TV reporter, a cameraman, and a . . .” She smiled at the baggy-eyed man, not sure what he was, but he was glancing around again, his face practically twitching with suspicion over his truly ugly argyle cardigan.

  “Professor,” Southie said. “Professor Dennis Graff.”

  Andie nodded at the professor and then turned back to Southie. “And again, why?”

  “He’s bringing you . . . the chance of a lifetime,” Kelly said, practically singing the words.

  “No, thank you.” Andie stared at Southie, still waiting for an explanation.

  Southie tried another smile. “Let’s go inside and—”

  “You are not filming anything here,” Andie told him. “Especially not my ki . . . these kids. Forget it.”

  Dennis looked from Andie to Southie and back again. “Weren’t we invited? I thought we were expected.”

  “Honestly, Sullivan,” Kelly said, giving him a playful little push. “You mean you didn’t call? You didn’t ask about the séance?”

  “Séance?” Andie said.

  “It’ll be wonderful,” Kelly enthused. “I’ve hired the best medium in Ohio—Isolde Hammersmith, she’s coming later—and Dennis is here to provide the counterpoint! Could we come in? It’s raining.”

  “Counterpoint?” Andie said. “What counterpoint? What the hell, Southie?”

  “We can talk about all that later,” Southie said hastily. “But now we should go inside because you want to hear everything Dennis has to say.” He clapped the professor on the back and made him stumble forward a little bit. “Sorry, Dennis.”

  “Wait a minute—” Andie said.

  “Who are they?” Alice said from behind her.

  Andie sighed. “Hello, Alice. This is your uncle Southie.”

  “Hi, Alice,” Southie said, with that smile that had charmed thousands of females. “What’s new?”

  Alice considered it. “I like nuts now.”

  “So do I,” Southie said, evidently willing to bond over damn near anything.

  “Hey, there, honey.” Kelly crouched down in front of Alice in faux-equality. “I’m Kelly.”

  “You have a lot of teeth,” Alice said.

  “Aren’t you just precious?” Kelly said, her smile fixed in place.

  “No,” Alice said, and looked past her. “Who are they?”

  “This is Bill,” Kelly said, gesturing to the younger guy as she stood up again, still in that too bright voice. “He’s a cameraman!”

  Alice and Bill looked at each other with an equal lack of enthusiasm.

  “I’ll get the pizzas,” Bill said, and went back to the truck, ignoring the rain.

  “Pizza?” Alice said, perking up.

  “And this is Dennis. He knows about ghosts!”

  Alice froze.

  “Hello,” Dennis said to Alice, politely but with no enthusiasm.

  Alice moved closer to Andie. “Why is he here?”

  “I don’t know,” Andie said, looking at Southie, now really alert. “Why is he here?”

  “Because he’s an expert,” Southie said, leaning on the last word so hard it almost broke. “Tell her, Dennis.”

  “I’m a parapsychologist.” Dennis frowned as Bill came back up the walk with four pizzas. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Archer, I thought we were expected here.”

  “Wait, you actually, academically, know about ghosts?” Andie said to him, and then the name finally registered. “You’re Dennis Graff? From Cleveland? Professor Dennis Graff?” The buzzkill from the panel who doesn’t believe in ghosts?

  He nodded, taken aback.

  Thunder rolled again and Andie opened the door wide.

  “Come on in, Dennis,” she said. “We need to talk.”

  Seven

  They’d filed into the entrance hall and then into the Great Hall—“This is amazing,” Kelly had said, beaming at Andie as she shook the rain off her coat; “Terrible light,” Bill groused, shaking his head at the mullioned windows in front; “Early seventeenth century,” the professor said, gazing at the gallery—and Andie led them into the dining room, directed them to chairs, called on a hostile Mrs. Crumb to leave her gin rummy game and bring paper plates and sodas. She put the professor at one end of the long dining room table and Kelly at the other end, while Kelly tried to give Andie forty reasons why it was her duty to invite the undead to dinner or at least to a séance the next day.

  “Not now,” Andie said to her, and when Southie called the little blonde back down to the other end of the table, Andie sat the professor down on her right and Alice on her left, put pizza in front of both of them, made sure Alice’s was cut into smaller pieces, that her jewelry and the front of her already grubby black T-shirt were covered with a paper napkin, and that her stocking-tied hair wasn’t flopping in her face or her dinner, checked to make sure that Carter had pizza and wasn’t sitting next to Kelly-the-child-interviewer, and sat down beside her ticket to enlightenment.

  “So, Dr. Graff,” she said. “You’re a parapsychologist.”

  “Uh, yes. Yes. I am.” He raised the pizza to his mouth and then stopped and said, “You can call me Dennis. It’s, well, you know. No classroom.” He laughed for a second—a reserved little heh-heh sound that was almost spooky in its weirdness—and then frowned and bit into his pizza, dripping tomato sauce onto his green argyle cardigan.

  “Right,” Andie said, thinking, Well, the normal ones probably don’t go into parapsychology. She resisted the urge to wipe the sauce off him as if he were Alice and bit into her pizza, savoring the spices and the crunch of the crust, but keeping her eyes on the prize. “I’ve read about you. You’re a ghost expert.”

  Dennis shook his head, trying to chew the gluey cheese and wipe the tomato sauce from his mouth at the same time. “No,” he said, when he’d swallowed. “I study ESP, telepathy, remote viewing, that kind of thing, which is how I got into poltergeists. Well, not into . . .” He shook his head, did that little insane laugh thing, and bit into his pizza again.

  “So you don’t do ghosts,” Andie said. Damn.

  “I’m well versed in general psychic phenomena.” Dennis reached for his Coke and noticed the sauce on his sweater. He dabbed at it with a napkin, making the spot bigger and the sweater uglier. “I have not, however, personally seen any kind of supernatural apparition, nor have I seen any irrefutable documentation.”

  “That must be disappointing. I—”

  “Not really. It stands to reason. Dr. Gertrude Schmeidler showed that skepticism suppresses psychic abilities.” Dennis gave up on the tomato sauce spot and went back to his pizza. “The very fact that I’m a scientist makes it impossible for me to see that which I most wish to study.”

  “So you don’t think they exist,” Andie said. “The thing is—”

  “I would doubt they exist except for one thing: Every culture has ghosts.” Dennis took another bite of pizza.

  Andie frowned. “I don’t see—”

  “Every culture in every millennium has had people from all social classes, all age groups, all degrees of education and intelligence see ghosts. Unless you’re a believer in an ongoing wo