Always Read online

  “I’m fine,” Darci said, “but then I didn’t fall. I was—Oh!” she said, sitting up straighter. “Oh. I can feel things. I know things.” She sat up, her eyes wide. “That table over there? A woman used to sit at it and sew and cry for the man she loved. He was killed in a war. See that lamp? It was made by a man who was stealing from the company. See that—”

  “I get the picture,” Jack said, still on the bed. “If you have your powers back, can we talk to each other with our minds?”

  Turning to look at him, Darci sent him thoughts about how heroic she thought he’d been when he’d leaped after Lavender. Jack had made it up to her for all the scoundrel things that John Marshall had done to her.

  “Nothing,” Jack said. “I hear nothing.”

  “Then the angry spirit that was around you is gone.”

  “Both of them are gone,” Jack said and looked as though he might cry again. “Lavender’s gone from my life and Millie’s spirit no longer haunts me. I no longer feel that anger inside of me.”

  Darci moved a pillow behind her head and leaned back. Before what they’d been through she would never have allowed Jack to stretch out on the bed beside her, but now it seemed natural. Now it seemed like he was the older brother she’d always wanted. “I guess Millie so wanted to be the woman that you were marrying that she believed she was Lavender. That’s why her spirit lied to us.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Darci felt as tired and sad as Jack looked and sounded, but one of them had to be the person who did the cheering up. “Your aura has changed,” she said, and tried to keep the joy she was feeling out of her voice. Once again, there was color surrounding him—and she could see it! When she’d first met Jack, his aura had been mostly red, the color of anger, and the more he was around Darci the redder his aura became. But now the anger was gone. Now, in spite of his depression about Lavender, his aura was a lovely blue.

  “I’ll find Lavey’s spirit for you,” Darci said, putting her hand on his forearm. “I promise that I’ll do whatever I can to find her.”

  “Before or after you find my father and your husband?” he asked nastily.

  “You know, don’t you, that now I can give you a killer of a headache?”

  Jack didn’t smile. Instead, he got off the bed and stood up. “If you make my head hurt, will it take away my thoughts? My memories?” He ran his hand over his eyes. “Love stinks!”

  “You’re not the first person to say that,” Darci said, smiling.

  He glared at her. “You had a chance with Drayton. Why didn’t you take it?”

  “Why did you love Lavender and not any of the many other women in your life?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said, sitting down on a chair across from the bed. “How long has it been since we had any sleep?”

  “Seems like a month or two,” Darci said, yawning.

  “How about if we sleep now and tomorrow we do what we were sent to this house to do?”

  “Sounds great to me.” He walked to the door, then paused. “Darci?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you think you really could find Lavey? Do you think her spirit has been put into another body?”

  “Probably,” she said, trying to keep her smile intact. She wasn’t going to tell him that it was possible that Lavender’s spirit could have been put into a man’s body or that Lavey was now a cross-dresser, dancing in a gay revue in Vegas. Or maybe she was three years old. Or ninety. “We’ll find her wherever she is.”

  Giving her a smile, Jack left the room.

  When she was alone, Darci lay back against the pillows and thought that she’d make a short trip downstairs to Jack’s father’s bedroom and have another look at those objects hidden in that room. Maybe there was more energy in them than she’d at first thought.

  But the exhaustion of the past two days overwhelmed her and she didn’t wake until Jack drew the curtains back and sunlight hit her face.

  “What time is it?” Darci asked, struggling to sit up, then fell back down when she saw Jack. “I think I need some more sleep, and I know I need some food.”

  “How about this?” Jack asked, holding a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice under her nose.

  “Mmmm,” she said sitting up, reaching for the glass.

  But Jack held it back from her. “Or would you rather have this?”

  Extending his hand, he held out the iron egg that Simone had given her. The energy Darci felt coming from the egg was like nothing she’d ever felt before. “Gimme,” she said, and Jack had to catch the full glass before her enthusiasm made him drop it on the bed.

  He sat on the end of the bed and watched her hold the egg, turning it over in her hands, and helped himself to the food on the tray he’d placed on the side of the bed. “Like it?”

  “How? Where?” she asked in awe as she took the juice from him. “Tom was supposed to have hidden this. Did you bring it back with you?”

  At that, she clutched at her neck and instantly felt that the gold necklace with the key on it was gone.

  “Drayton’s chain isn’t there but the key’s in the box.” Jack nodded toward the silver box on the bedside table. The key was sticking out of it.

  Darci set the juice down, grabbed the box, and removed the key so fast that Jack laughed at her. She looked at him suspiciously. He was fresh out of a shower, had on clean, ironed clothing, and shiny shoes. “What’s up with you?” she asked. “Why are you up so early? Where did these things come from and who made breakfast and why do you look happy?”

  “Dear, dear little sister,” Jack said, pushing the tray toward her, and laughing when she held the iron egg in one hand and ate with the other. “First of all, it’s two o’clock in the afternoon, and although we think it’s been centuries since we were last here, we were actually away only one night. The spell you put on my lazy relatives is still holding. Who would have thought they would make such splendid servants? They’ve cleaned every corner of this house and have cooked enough food to feed half the neighborhood. If we had neighbors, that is. Dear ol’ dad couldn’t bear people close to him so he bought everything within a mile of his ugly old mansion.”

  Jack broke off half of one of Darci’s blueberry muffins and ate it. “Homemade,” he said. “Who would have thought? I sent my relatives and the food to a homeless shelter.”

  “Great idea,” Darci said, eating strawberries floating in cream. She still hadn’t let go of the iron egg. “What about this?” she asked, holding up the egg. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Ah. That. Did you forget that under this lady-killer exterior I’m an FBI agent?”

  “The question is whether or not the FBI remembers. What did you do?”

  “An old-fashioned fax.” He paused, smiling. “Funny to think of a facsimile machine as old-fashioned, isn’t it? What did you miss the most?”

  “My daughter and flush toilets,” Darci said quickly.

  “Could you stop with the foreplay and tell me where you got the egg?”

  “I sent a fax to Greg’s home number and told him to send someone out to the church in Camwell and dig up some items.”

  Darci paused with a bite of quiche to her lips.

  “Don’t give me that look. It’s the FBI, remember? They’re used to secrets and the weird and strange.”

  “Not quite as strange as what you and I’ve been through.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said, starting to take another muffin, but Darci aimed her fork at his hand. “Actually, I thought there would be two things hidden away, the egg and that crucifix you and Drayton found. I didn’t know there’d be more.”

  “More?” Darci asked, wide-eyed.

  “No, just eat. It can wait.”

  “What can wait? Your headache? Or should I paralyze you?”

  “Like you did to Greg?” he asked, smiling. “At the time I was pretty angry, but now it seems funny. His legs were…” Jack leaned back on the bed, bent his legs, and drew them up. “Funny, huh?”