Someone to Love Read online

  Jace took a long drink of his beer. “She was funny and smart and loved marshmallows. She liked them toasted, plain, in chocolate, however she could figure out a way to use them. She had a photographic memory. She was very kind and I was mad about her. When she died I wanted to die with her. She wasn’t crazy and I think she was murdered.”

  Clive looked at Jace for a while and thought about what he’d said. He lowered his voice. “Who else knows who you are and why you’re here?”

  “Only you know and I didn’t mean for you to find out.”

  “I won’t give you away. If someone did kill Stacy, then they might come after you.”

  “Do you have any suspicions of who did it?”

  “None whatever. Not a clue.” Clive was talking so low that Jace could hardly hear him. “I showed her photo around for a year, asking questions anywhere I went, but no one admitted seeing her. I had to ask questions in secret because if the superintendent found out about it, he would have tossed me out. He didn’t want to have anything to do with me in the first place because of my past here in Margate, but—”

  “Why didn’t you go somewhere else? Is your family here?”

  “Don’t have one. Orphaned young, passed around. I did some damage here when I was a kid and I wanted to repay it, so I came back here to work,” Clive said.

  “You wanted to show the people who’d said you’d never amount to much that you could achieve something.”

  “Exactly,” Clive said, smiling. “Exactly.”

  “But you couldn’t show anybody anything about Stacy if you were caught disobeying an order, could you?”

  “No. So what have you found out?”

  “Nothing,” Jace said, then decided to take a chance. He really wanted someone to talk to about what had been going on in his life lately. “I’ve been trying to get Ann Stuart to tell me something, but she says she hates me, so I don’t know where to go from here.”

  “Ann Stuart? I don’t believe I know her. She an American?”

  “Ann Stuart is the ghost in Priory House.”

  Clive’s expression changed little, but then he’d had a lot of practice pretending to believe preposterous stories. “Rides about the hall on her horse, does she?”

  “Sorry I said anything,” Jace said, but he knew it was too late. “To answer your question, I haven’t found out anything that isn’t in the newspapers. I’ve had to deal with Mrs. Browne and her two snooping friends and—”

  “So what’s your ghost look like?” Clive asked, smirking. “Rotting clothes? Missing eyeballs, that sort of thing?”

  Jace signaled George that he wanted his bill so he could leave. “I trust, Constable Sefton, that you’ll keep what we discussed to yourself.”

  “Sure,” Clive said, still smiling. “I’ll keep everything—if you know what I mean—to myself.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” Jace said as he left the pub.

  7

  The next morning Jace awoke before daylight and lay there thinking about what he’d learned so far. He was elated that Clive also believed Stacy had been murdered, but Jace was no closer to finding out who or why than he had been. He wished he hadn’t told Clive about Ann. She was Jace’s secret and he shouldn’t have said anything.

  He got up, dressed, and tried to figure out where to go next.

  Mrs. Browne was in her kitchen and she was in a snit. “I never saw such a mess,” she was saying. “Dirty dishes everywhere when I came in and my larder emptied. You must’ve had a party with twenty people here.”

  It was obvious she was trying to get information out of him. “We had an orgy,” he said seriously. “Naked Americans running everywhere.”

  “Humph!” she said, then put a platter of bacon, eggs, tomatoes, toast, and mushrooms before him. “If you were naked you’d’ve got wallpaper paste on you. What did you do to that lovely room upstairs?”

  Another request for information. “You mean the room the last owners used to store boxes? That lovely room?”

  “They had no taste. Horrible people. I was glad when she scared them away.”

  “She who?”

  “The ghost, of course,” she snapped. “The one you saw in the garden.”

  “Ah, that one. Big woman? Flaming red hair? I didn’t want to tell you this, Mrs. B, but she was riding a huge black horse and coming right at you. She doesn’t have any reason to be angry at you, does she?”

  “No, of course not,” she said, but her face went pale, then turned red as she realized he was teasing her. “Go on, get out of here. I have work to do.”

  Smiling, Jace went upstairs, got his laptop, and took it outside to sit in the shade of a rose-covered arbor. He pulled up his word processor, started an outline, and began to write down all that he knew about Stacy.

  When he had two pages of facts, he saw that there were some things that puzzled him. Stacy’s sister and stepmother had shown the English police a stack of papers from psychiatrists saying Stacy had serious “problems.” The only problem he knew she’d had was an inability to sleep for more than three hours at a time. But as soon as Stacy had moved in with Jace and he’d begun blocking her family from getting to her, the sleep problems had stopped. Before Jace stepped in, her sister would call her at 3:00 a.m. She was up with her kids, so she called Stacy for “support.” “True sisters support each other,” Regina would say. Of course, Stacy would never think of calling anyone at 3:00 a.m. Jace began unplugging the phone at night. His family had his cell number, but no one in Stacy’s family had it.

  Up until the day of Stacy’s death he would have sworn that there were no secrets between them, but he’d found out that she had spent years in therapy. Considering that her mother had died when Stacy was young and that her father hadn’t bothered to make time for her, therapy was understandable. But how had she been labeled as “troubled”?

  He closed his eyes for a moment. He was being brainwashed by Regina’s family’s lies. He and Stacy had been in love. They’d told each other everything.

  But they hadn’t. She hadn’t told him about knowing of Margate and when she’d been there before.

  Yet again, it came to him that the ghost of Ann Stuart would know if Stacy had visited the house. She saw everything, but she wasn’t speaking to him, and he hadn’t felt her presence all day.

  After lunch (Jamie Oliver’s stuffed chicken breast), Jace wandered about the chintz room and idly pushed on every panel. The lady highwayman story had been a lie, but maybe it was based on some fact. Maybe the hidden staircase was real, and maybe if he found it, he’d find out something about Ann, which would lead him to—

  A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. Frowning, he opened the door to see pretty little Daisy standing there, her face flushed, as though she’d run up the stairs. She was looking over her shoulder like she expected Mrs. Browne to jump out from behind the cabinets. Not now and not this, Jace thought, and opened his mouth to begin a lecture on her age and his.

  Daisy thrust a tightly rolled newspaper at him. “I think you should see this, sir.”

  “What is it?”

  She looked over her shoulder again, then took a step closer to him. Jace held his stance in front of the door. He wasn’t about to let her inside the room.

  “It’s the village paper,” she whispered, holding it out to him. It was rolled into a tight little tube and seemed to have something clear and gelatinous on it. “Sorry about the egg,” Daisy said, “but I pulled it from Mrs. B’s rubbish bin. Don’t let her see that you have it and you wouldn’t tell her I gave it to you, would you?”

  Jace frowned harder. This fear of the housekeeper had to stop! “No, I won’t tell her,” he said in a normal voice, not a whisper. “But not because I’m afraid to but because you asked me to. Truthfully, I think—” He broke off because Daisy heard a sound from downstairs and took off running down the hall.

  Sighing at the absurdity of it all, Jace took the newspaper into the room and closed the door. His frown turne