Maybe This Time Read online

  Andie sat there for a moment, a little stunned that she’d said yes. She’d felt the same way after he’d proposed.

  “I’d appreciate it if you could go down as soon as possible.”

  “Right.” She shoved her hair back, picked up her purse, and stood up again. “I’ll drive down tomorrow and see what I can do. You have a good winter terrorizing the opposing counsel.”

  She headed for the door, refusing to look back. This was good. She’d given back the checks and cut the connection, so she could spare a month to save two orphans. Will was in New York for the next two weeks anyway, and he’d come home to a fiancée with no debt, and then—

  “Andie,” North said, and she turned back in the doorway.

  “Thank you,” he said, standing now behind his desk, tall and lean and beautiful and looking at her the way he’d used to.

  Get out of here. “You’re welcome.”

  Then she turned and walked out before he could say or do anything else that made her forget she was done with him.

  • • •

  After Andie left, North sat for a moment considering the possibility that he’d lost his mind. He’d had the résumés of several excellent nannies on his desk, and he’d hired his ex-wife instead. Fuck, he thought, and deliberately put her out of his mind, which was difficult since she’d mentioned blow jobs. Which were irrelevant because he and Andie were over, had been for ten years. Blow jobs. No, she was right: Draw a line under it. He went back to work, making notes on his newest case as the shadows grew longer and Kristin left for the night, definitely not thinking about Andie, his black capital letters spaced evenly in straight rows, as firm and as clear as his thinking—

  He stopped and frowned at the page. Instead of “Indiana” he’d written “Andiana.” He marked an I over the A but the word sat there on the page, misspelled and blotted, a dark spot on the clear pattern of his day.

  There was a knock on the door at the same time it opened.

  “North!” his brother Sullivan said as he came in, his tie loosened and his face as genial as ever under his flop of brown hair.

  Say hi to Southie for me, Andie had said. It had been ten years since anybody had called Sullivan “Southie.”

  “You look like hell.” Sullivan lounged into the same chair Andie had taken and put his feet on the desk. “You can’t work round the clock. It’s not healthy.”

  Your whole life isn’t the damn law firm, North, Andie had said a month before she’d left him. You have a life. And you have me although not for much longer if you don’t knock off this I-live-for-my-work crap.

  “I like my work,” he said to his brother now. “How’s Mother?”

  “Now that’s health. That woman was built for distance.”

  North pictured their elegant, platinum-haired mother running a marathon in her pearls, kicking any upstarts out of the way with the pointed end of her heels as she crossed the finish line. She’d been thrilled when Andie left.

  “It’s you I’m worried about,” Sullivan was saying. “You’re working too hard, too much on your plate, trying to run the whole practice with Mother gone—”

  “My plate is fine. However, I am in the middle of—”

  “No, no, it’s time I helped out.” Sullivan smiled at him. “I’ve been thinking about what I could do, but I figure you’d fall on your number two pencil before you’d let me help with the practice.”

  North looked down at the black pen mark that made “Andiana” such a blot. A number two pencil would be a good idea if he was going to start making mistakes.

  “So I was thinking of something a little more in my area and out of yours,” Sullivan said. “People. You’re not a people person, North. I am.”

  “People.” North turned the top sheet on his legal pad over so he didn’t have to look at the blot. Andiana. What the hell?

  “You remember those two kids that second cousin left you a while back?”

  “Yes,” North said, fairly sure that had been a rhetorical question, although with Sullivan, you never knew.

  “I thought I might drop in, check on things for you, see how they’re doing.”

  North looked up at that. “You want to ‘drop in’ to the wilds of southern Ohio to visit two children you’ve never met.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Sullivan grinned at him. “I want to see the house.”

  “The house isn’t worth anything. It’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  “It’s haunted.”

  “Sullivan, there are no such things as ghosts,” North said, and for a moment he was twelve again and Sullivan was six, staring wide-eyed into the room where their father was laid out in his coffin. He’s not going to sit up, Southie, North had said then. He’s dead. There’s no such thing as ghosts.

  “I know that,” Sullivan said now. “But I want to see a house that everybody thinks is haunted.”

  “ ‘Everybody’ being a nanny who got bored and wanted out.”

  “Other people have thought so, lots of rumors. So I thought I’d go down there and talk to some of the people. See what’s going on.”

  “And how did you find out about these rumors?”

  “I did some research for a friend of mine. She’s interested in hauntings, and she looked me up at a party and talked to me about the house and, you know, it is interesting.”

  “She,” North said, Sullivan’s motives becoming much clearer now. The combination of a shiny new hobby and a shiny new girlfriend must have been irresistible.

  “Kelly O’Keefe. The ghost thing is fascinating. I’ve talked to—”

  “Kelly O’Keefe?” North thought of the tiny, sharp-faced, sharp-tongued newscaster he’d avoided after one viewing. “The little blonde with the teeth on Channel Twelve?”

  “They’re very good teeth,” Sullivan said, going for indignant and missing.

  “They look like they were very expensive,” North said, and remembered Andie the first time he’d seen her, her big eyes dancing, her curly hair wild, her wide smile flashing her overlapped front teeth. She’d never had her teeth fixed.

  “Well, you need good teeth for TV.”

  “True.” That had been the first thing his mother had said about her. For God’s sake, North, get her teeth fixed.

  “The close-ups are murder,” Sullivan said.

  And he’d said, I like her teeth. I like everything about her. And now you do, too, Mother.

  Sullivan was looking at him oddly. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” North said.

  “Okay. Well, then, I’d like to take Kelly down there and look into the ghosts. I can check on the kids for you while I’m there.”

  “I’d prefer you didn’t,” North said bluntly. “I don’t see Kelly O’Keefe being a good experience for them.”

  “No, no, she’s not interested in reporting on kids anymore, she’s on to ghosts now. She found out that the house was originally a haunted house in England and she’s very excited about it. Did you know they brought the house over here in pieces and rebuilt it? Kelly could be really grateful if I took her down there. Plus, I’d get to investigate a haunted house. I’ve talked to two highly regarded ghost experts and there’s something behind this stuff. I told the experts that there’s a haunted house in the family, and one of them would like to see it. Kelly would like to see it. I’d like to see it. We won’t talk to the kids.”

  “The children own the house, so it’s not in our immediate family,” North said, picking up his pencil again. “And you’re not going to disrupt their lives because you think you might like to be a Ghostbuster.”

  “No, no, I told you, we won’t bother the kids. My plan is that I take Kelly and Dennis, the expert, down there, we talk to people—not the kids, adults only—I see what’s going on and report back to you, you get to know the kids are safe, Dennis gets more research, Kelly gets her video whatsis . . .” Sullivan shrugged. “We all win. Plus, I get away from Columbus before Mother gets