Maybe This Time Read online

  “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.

  Twelve

  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?”

  “Cold. Like she wasn’t really there. She wasn’t like you. It wasn’t like us. Andie, if you’d just be rational about this—”

  “No,” Andie said firmly, but she thought, Weird?

  “So you’re sure,” Will said, sounding annoyed again.

  “Absolutely. Be careful on the ride home,” Andie said, and when she’d closed the door behind him, she headed for the Great Hall. Isolde was there, and so were Flo, Dennis, and Kelly, with Bill on camera.

  “No camera,” Andie began, and Isolde said, “Let her do it. Sometimes things show up on film. It can’t hurt.”

  “It can if she shows the footage on TV,” Andie said.

  “It’s just for atmosphere,” Kelly said. “I wouldn’t do anything to make you look bad.”

  “I wouldn’t trust her an inch,” Dennis said, and Andie realized he was full of brandy. So was Isolde, but she evidently could hold her cognac. Dennis, not so much.

  Well, she’d dry him out later.

  Southie came in and took his place and smiled at Andie. “Sorry, didn’t mean to delay you. We’re not in any hurry, are we?”

  “Did Kelly sleep with you last night?”

  Southie looked at Kelly, who said, “I did not,” and then at Andie.

  “It’s important,” Andie said.

  “Yeah,” Southie said.

  “What?” Bill the cameraman said.

  “I didn’t,” Kelly said, and she sounded honestly outraged.

  “This is interesting,” Dennis said owlishly.

  “She slept with you, too?” Andie said to the cameraman.

  “You said you were done with him,” Bill said to Kelly. “I’ve had it with you.”

  “I didn’t sleep with either one of you,” Kelly said.

  “This