Maybe This Time Read online

  “You’ll be hearing from our lawyers,” Kelly snapped.

  “That’ll be fun,” North said and waited until they were out of the house. Then he took the tape upstairs with him, trying to figure out how the hell Andie had known Kelly was at work again.

  “What’s going on?” Lydia said, meeting him in the back hall on the second floor as he headed for the third. “I heard something.”

  “Kelly and her cameraman are leaving. Andie’s checking on Carter. Alice is asleep. I’m going back to bed.”

  “So everything’s all right?” Lydia said.

  “Yes,” North said, and went upstairs to talk Andie down from her ghost fixation again.

  Andie stopped in Carter’s doorway.

  The boy was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring at the door, looking thin in his flannel pajamas, his wrists dangling over his knees, his head lowered so that his eyes were dark and shadowed under his brows.

  He had candles burning on tables on both sides of his bed, a dozen of them at least.

  “Carter? What the hell are you doing?”

  He ignored her, and she felt a chill rise as she saw that he was shaking. Whatever was going on, he was concentrating hard on not being terrified, and not doing very well at it.

  She walked over to the bed and sat down beside him. “Carter?” she said softly, and reached for his hand.

  “Get out,” he said, staring at the door. “Get out.”

  “What—why?”

  His breathing quickened and his eyes widened, staring at something beyond her, and Andie felt cold air on her back.

  When she turned, an icy blue fog was taking shape in the open door.

  “Smoke?” she said, her heart kicking up, but she knew it wasn’t, the cold in the room was growing, crystallizing the night air on the windows, chilling her through and through.

  Carter shivered beside her in his pajamas, and the fog rose up clumsily and took the rough shape of the man in the old-fashioned coat, stronger, more solid than ever before, his face a blur with holes for eyes.

  He leaned forward and his face became sharper, grinning at them, blocking the door.

  “No!” Andie said, scrambling onto the bed in front of Carter.

  “Get out,” Carter whispered to her. “He comes for me. Get out.”

  “No.” She knelt on the bed between the thing and Carter, facing it down over the foot of the bed. “Go away. You can’t have him.”

  The thing moved closer, losing definition as it moved, re-forming into the man as it came closer, giving her vertigo again.

  Andie scooted back against Carter, spreading out her arms to shield him. “No. This kid is off limits. Go haunt somebody your own age, you pervert. No.”

  The thing arched over them, and Andie felt the cold in her bones, and then something went sailing over her shoulder and another and another, and she realized that Carter was throwing lit candles, the old singed carpet igniting again, flames shooting up. She swung her arm through the thing, tearing through its definition yelling, “This kid is mine!” her arm searing with cold. She grabbed Carter by the back of his pajama collar and dragged him around the icy mist that was re-forming above the flames, through the door and the halls to the nursery where she slammed the door behind them both.

  She shoved the boy in front of the fireplace. “You stay here.”

  Then she grabbed the small fire extinguisher from the mantel and ran back down the gallery and into Carter’s bedroom, terrified that the flames would have ignited the bed by now, but the fire was out and the room was empty and cold, cold beyond anything natural, so she slammed the door and ran back to the nursery.

  Carter was shaking so hard his teeth were chattering.

  “Oh, baby.” She sank down next to him on the hearth and pulled him into her arms. “I’m so sorry. I should have been there.”

  He was rigid in her arms, unyielding the way Alice used to be, but Carter didn’t scream, he just endured.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Andie told him, holding him tightly. “I’ll get rid of them. I’ll get you out of here—”

  “What’s wrong?” Alice said, from her bed, sitting up, groggy with sleep.

  “There was a ghost in Carter’s room,” Andie said.

  Alice slid off the bed. “Is he okay? Was it Peter?”

  “Peter,” Andie said, thinking, Fucking hallucination, my ass.

  “The ghost who wants the house,” Carter said.

  “Why didn’t you keep your fireplace lit?” Andie said. He was still so cold in her arms, and she rocked him a little bit, just because she was so guilt-stricken about leaving him to handle his ghost alone.

  “It doesn’t work,” Carter said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Andie said, thinking, Why didn’t you tell me?, thinking, Crumb knew that fireplace didn’t work and still put him in there, thinking, I let him down so badly. “I’m so sorry, Carter, I’m so sorry.”

  “You didn’t do anything,” he said, still stiff in her arms.

  “That’s why I’m sorry.”

  He pulled away from her, and she let go, almost in tears because she’d done so badly by him.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  She nodded. “We’ll move your stuff in from your room later. You’re never going back there.”

  “I’m okay,” he said again, that flat look back in his eyes.

  She grabbed his arms, as if she could shake some response into him. “Carter, it’s going to be different, I swear. I’m going to get you out of here. I know Miss J killed May because she was trying to take you away—”

  “That wasn’t why,” Carter said.

  Andie waited.

  He swallowed and then he started to talk and it was as if once he started, he couldn’t stop. “Alice was screaming in the hall by the bathroom because we’d been alone all night while Aunt May was out, and Alice was scared. Aunt May came home and went up on the tower and yelled at her friends, and then she came down and said, ‘Shut up, Alice,’ but Alice couldn’t stop crying. Aunt May put on her prom dress and swished around and said, ‘See, Alice? See how pretty?’ but Alice couldn’t stop, and Aunt May was drunk, and I tried to get Alice to stop, but she couldn’t, and Aunt May slapped her . . .”

  He took a deep shuddering breath, his eyes bleak, and Andie thought, Fucking May.

  “I grabbed Alice, and Aunt May said she was sorry. She said she was just so lonely, she talked about some guy who wouldn’t pay attention to her. She said she was doing a good job, but he wouldn’t come back, he wouldn’t love her, and I didn’t care.” His voice hardened. “She’d slapped Alice.”

  “Right,” Andie said. “You were right.”

  “Then she started to cry and went out into the gallery, and Alice followed her, crying, telling her not to cry, and I heard them both scream.” He swallowed hard. “When I got out there, Alice was by the gallery rail, screaming, and the railing was broken, and Aunt May was . . . down in the hall.” He looked sick for a minute. “I looked over the edge and she was all . . . Her neck was wrong and there was blood . . . under her head. A lot of it. Alice said it was Miss J, that Miss J had come up out of the carpet, but then Crumb came out and saw me. She told me to shut Alice up and to keep my mouth shut and go back to bed.”

  Andie put her arm around him again and pulled him close, and this time he leaned against her. “Crumb’s gone, your uncle North threw her out of the house this afternoon. And you’re not alone anymore. I’m here, I know there are ghosts, and I’m not leaving you. You never have to go through that again.”

  He looked at her with eyes as flat as ever, a twelve-year-old who’d seen too much. “The police said Aunt May fell into the moat, but Crumb dragged her body there and then washed up the blood. After that, the nannies came.”

  Andie nodded. “And that’s when Alice started to scream all the time.”

  “She’s afraid somebody else will die. That’s why we get rid of the nannies. The ghosts aren’t going to kill C