The Haunting of Josie Read online

  “They’re knitting just fine, thanks to Neil—and no thanks to you. That jigsaw puzzle you sent nearly drove me out of my mind, and I’d like to know how the hell I was supposed to play that damned video game with my good hand in a cast.”

  “I was just trying to challenge you,” Tucker explained innocently.

  “You were trying to drive me crazy.”

  Tucker chuckled. “It sounds like I succeeded. Is the country exile getting to you?”

  “Let’s just say that the sounds of traffic would be music to my ears right now. Tucker, I need my car.”

  “Sorry, chum, but Neil promised to break a few of my bones if I gave in to you. When the cast comes off your arm, and not before, you know that.”

  Marc made a sound of exasperation. “Look, I’m practically healed—eleven days until the cast comes off—”

  “Counting down, I see.”

  “Tucker.”

  With another chuckle, Tucker said, “Hey, don’t snap at me. Neil is determined to make sure you stay far away from your office or any courtroom, and since he’s my doctor as well as yours, I’d rather not upset him. He might do something nasty to me. Typhoid germs or something.”

  “You have a writer’s imagination,” Marc told him ruefully.

  “Most writers do.”

  “Yeah, but yours works overtime.”

  “Which is probably why my books do so well.” In a more serious tone, Tucker added, “Aside from helping you escape the wilds of the country, what can I do? If you’re worried about your shiny new BMW, don’t; it’s nice and safe in my garage.”

  “No, I’m not worried about it, I just want it.” Marc sighed. “I’d like to know what Neil has on you to make you so obedient to his commands.”

  Tucker didn’t take the bait. “If you need anything, you know I’m available. I happen to be between books at the moment anyway, so I’ve got time on my hands. So?”

  Marc hesitated, but only for an instant. He’d had this in the back of his mind all along, he realized. There was no one he knew who was better than Tucker at digging up information—and he could be counted on for discretion.

  “How do you feel about doing a little research for me?” Marc asked slowly.

  “You better not be working on a case.”

  “I’m not. This is something…personal.”

  “Oh, yeah?” There was immediate interest in Tucker’s voice. “How personal?”

  Marc cleared his throat. “Well, I have a new tenant in the house. She just moved in on Tuesday, and—”

  “She?”

  “Yes, she. Will you let me finish?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Convalescence made a man touchy, Marc thought defensively, conscious of snapping at his friend once again. “The thing is, I need to have her background checked out.”

  “Why?”

  Marc couldn’t think of a single reason he was willing to give to his friend, and so he fell back on a flat and unanswerable response. “Because.”

  “Um. Is this a young woman, by any chance?”

  “Late twenties.”

  “And attractive, I suppose?”

  “Some would consider her…pretty.” And any man in his right mind would consider that the understatement of the year, Marc reflected silently.

  “Uh-huh. Are you worried about her stealing the silver?”

  “No.”

  “Tearing up your house?”

  “No.”

  “Disturbing your peace with wild parties?”

  “If she threw a wild party, I’d be the first in line,” Marc muttered.

  There was a moment of silence, and then Tucker said musingly, “So this is personal. How about that. I’ve never known you to be so devious in finding out about a woman. The usual procedure, you know, is to ask. Invite her to dinner, make some of your legendary spaghetti sauce, ply her with wine.”

  “Yeah, well, I somehow doubt that would work.”

  “Already tried it, huh?”

  Marc sighed. “Tucker, must I remind you that my patience is worn a bit thin these days?”

  “All right, all right, I was just asking. Obviously, this lady requires a more delicate touch. So you want me to do a little research into her life. Fine, I’d be glad to. What am I looking for? Hobbies you can discuss with her? Political affiliations? A criminal record?”

  “I don’t know, dammit.” Marc hesitated, then said, “Look, there’s just something…off center. I’ve dealt with enough witnesses to know when somebody is hiding something—and she is. She seems very reluctant to discuss her background, for one thing. And when I doubted something she’d said, she went into a deep freeze so fast I nearly got frostbitten.”

  “Sounds like an interesting lady.”

  Warningly, Marc said, “I don’t want you coming out here, Tucker.”

  “You’re hurting my feelings. Why not?”

  “Because you’re predatory.”

  “I resent that.”

  “I imagine you might, but it’s the truth. The last time I introduced you to a lady, she broke a date with me to accompany you to the racetrack.”

  “My fatal charm. She was wrong for you anyway. Come to think of it, she was wrong for me too.”

  Their mostly good-natured competition over women had been going on since junior high, and though there had been one actual fight that Marc could remember, the contest generally ended with the amicable concession of one or the other. To date, the honors were fairly equally divided between them.

  Marc was a bit surprised at himself now to realize that he definitely did not want Tucker anywhere near Josie.

  FOUR

  TUCKER WAS SURPRISED as well—and thoughtful.

  “So you want the lady all to yourself, huh?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yes, you did.” Before Marc could retort, Tucker went on cheerfully. “Okay, give me her particulars. Name, age, height and coloring, measurements, her car’s tag number, if you know it. Stuff like that.”

  “Her name’s Josie Douglas; I have no idea if Josie is short for Josephine, and I don’t know if that’s her first or her middle name. She’s twenty-eight. About five-foot-five and very slender. Red hair, violet eyes.”

  “Violet?” Tucker asked in surprise.

  “Yeah.”

  “Unusual. Measurements?”

  “Forget it, Tucker.”

  “Well, can’t blame a man for trying.” Tucker laughed. “Did you happen to get a look at her car tag?”

  Marc, who had an almost uncanny memory for numbers, rattled off the tag number of Josie’s van and described the vehicle. “I don’t know much more,” he said. “She says she’s an elementary teacher taking a year off to try and write.”

  “That sounds like I’d have more in common with her than—”

  “Forget it, Tucker.”

  “I was just making an observation.”

  “I know what you were just doing. Forget it. If you show up out here, I’ll tell Josie you’re an ex-felon I helped put away years ago.”

  “You’re a defense attorney.”

  “In order to get my client off, I found out and was able to prove you’d done it.”

  “Done what?”

  Exasperated, Marc said, “I’ll think of something dire. And I’ll make her believe it.”

  “Ummm. I suppose you would, at that.”

  “Can we get back to the point, please?”

  “Sure we can. You were telling me what you knew about Josie. She’s taken a year off to try and write, and…?”

  “And she used to live and teach in D.C., although I don’t know if she was born there. Father died about ten years ago, mother left about five years before that. No siblings. Oh, and she went to Wellesley.”

  “The spaghetti must have worked a little,” Tucker noted dryly, “since you do know a few things about her.”

  Marc ignored the comment. “How long do you think it’ll take you to find out anything?”

&nbs
p; “Oh, hell, at least a few days. Maybe even a week or two. Thanks to one of my hacker friends, I can tap into a few data banks most people don’t have access to, but even with the computer it’s going to take a little time, Marc.”

  “Will you call me as soon as you have something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Thanks, Tucker.”

  “Don’t thank me yet—I might not be able to find out any more than you already know. But I’ll try. And if you don’t mind a bit of advice from an old friend—or even if you do—you might try to forget you’re a lawyer when you’re with the lady, okay? She might not like being on the witness stand.”

  “I never—”

  “Sure you do. You always do. Bye, Marc.”

  He listened to the dial tone for a moment, then turned the phone off and set it on the end table, frowning. Did he tend to pounce on people, automatically probing for the truth even in a casual situation? It was an unsettling possibility.

  Resolving to try to watch that, Marc turned his attention to the problem of Josie. The problem of how to get closer to Josie. His intuition told him that if he pressed her to confide in him before she was ready to do so, she would simply fold up her tent and leave; she didn’t trust him. In fact, a reluctance to trust anybody might well turn out to be one of her problems, and only time and knowledge would prove to her that he was trustworthy.

  So he would have to walk a fine line, refusing to be frozen out while at the same time fighting his instincts to dig for the truth.

  Great.

  He looked down at his left arm, absently flexing his fingers. Maybe being forced into patience was a good thing, he thought. With this awkward plaster weighing him down, he felt like a bird with a broken wing, and no man liked to feel that way with a lovely woman about—unless, of course, he wanted to appeal to her maternal instinct.

  Marc grimaced. No. The last thing he wanted from Josie was mothering.

  So—in eleven days, the cast would be off and he’d be virtually back to normal. Sometime during those eleven days, Tucker would probably have at least some information about Josie’s background, information that Marc could use to get through her frozen shell.

  She was not going to like finding out that he’d had her background researched, he knew that. But he wasn’t doing anything unscrupulous, he told himself, since whatever information Tucker found found—most of it anyway—would be a matter of public record, available to anyone who wanted to look for it. And it wasn’t as if he meant in any way to hurt her or shout her secrets to the world. No, he only wanted to understand.

  Already rehearsing my defense. That alone told him he wasn’t comfortable with what he was doing—but he couldn’t pull back now. Having once chosen a particular course, Marc tended to stick with it all the way.

  He looked up to find the big black cat watching him intently with Siamese eyes, and almost unconsciously spoke aloud to his feline companion.

  “I have a feeling I’m going to risk frostbite again unless I can convince her I don’t believe she imagined seeing the ghost of my illustrious ancestor. So…how do I convince myself that she could have seen him? I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Yaaah,” Pendragon commented succinctly.

  “Well, that’s probably excellent advice, but I don’t happen to speak cat,” Marc told him dryly.

  Pendragon uttered a throaty murmur and jumped down from his chair. He stretched languidly, unexpectedly distinct muscles rippling under the glossy black coat, then yawned. He looked at Marc for a moment, then abruptly pounced on nothing at all and began to play with it.

  Marc had observed other cats chasing figments of their imaginations, a pastime that seemed to provide exercise as well as entertainment, and he watched Pendragon absently as the cat batted his invisible prize here and there. Around a leg of the coffee table, under a chair, even bounding over the couch in an athletic leap, Pendragon happily chased his figment. He cornered it at the bookshelves by the window, and a moment later a thud announced that in wrestling with his figment, he had somehow dislodged a book.

  Curious, Marc went to see, and found the cat innocently washing a forepaw with his other one planted firmly on the book lying on the floor. Nothing else on the shelf had been disturbed, and Marc frowned as he bent down and picked up the book.

  It was an old book, long out of print, since it had been published in the forties. It was a biography of Luke Westbrook, the only one in existence that had been written by someone who had actually known the mystery writer; Marc knew of the book, even though he’d never read it.

  It also happened to be the only book about Luke Westbrook on the shelf—and in the cottage.

  “Coincidence,” Marc heard himself say in a rather peculiar tone. “Pure coincidence.” He looked at the cat, who uttered another of those throaty murmurs of his and then went placidly back to his favorite chair.

  Marc returned to his own place on the couch, holding the book and gazing between it and Pendragon. It had to be a coincidence, of course. As much as he loved and appreciated cats, and as much as he would have liked to believe they were unusually intelligent creatures, he didn’t think they could read or suggest solutions to human problems—even if they understood said problems, which was doubtful.

  Still…He looked at the book, shrugged, and opened it. God knew he had time on his hands. And maybe he’d find something useful. Maybe. At the very least he owed it to his ancestor to know all the facts….

  It was quite some time later when Marc was roused by an imperative demand from Pendragon. The cat waited until his human companion marked his place and laid the book aside, then repeated his demand and went briskly to the door. Obediently, Marc followed him and opened the door for him.

  The crunch of tires on gravel reached his ears as Marc stepped out onto the porch, and he looked down at the cat thoughtfully. “So that’s why you wanted out, because she’s home.”

  “Yaaah.” Pendragon stood looking up at him, waiting so obviously that he might as well have been tapping an impatient paw.

  “She doesn’t want to see me,” he told the cat.

  “Yaaah,” Pendragon repeated in the same commanding tone.

  “I should help with the groceries, I know, and there’s my stuff to bring over, but…” He frowned down at the cat. “Why am I discussing this with you?”

  “Ppprupt.”

  “No doubt.” Marc looked across the garden toward the house. His aching bones hadn’t been wrong; the afternoon had turned gray and very damp, with the smell of rain in the air. He hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged and headed across the garden, following behind Pendragon as the cat led the way. All he could do, he decided, was gauge Josie’s mood and behave accordingly; if she had thawed or had second thoughts during the shopping trip, great, and if she was still freezing him, he’d do his best to chip away at the ice without pressing too hard.

  As easy as walking a highwire. Without a net.

  For just an instant, as he considered the task ahead of him, Marc thought there was actually a lot to be said for the peace and quiet and lack of undue complications of being completely alone out here—but then he caught sight of Josie. And seeing her, he suddenly felt a jolt of all his senses that was becoming a familiar sensation.

  He had felt it the first time he had seen her, the sensations so strong and unexpected that he had been instantly wary of them. His imagination, surely; it had to be. He told himself each time that he wouldn’t feel it again, not again, but each time he saw her he felt it. Like an electric shock that left him acutely alive and aware, his heart beating faster and his breathing somehow more difficult than it had been.

  There was a part of him that didn’t want to be wary of it, a part already fascinated by and absorbed in her. Do you feel this too? Have you ever felt it before? Please say you feel it too. Because it would be the most painful thing in the world to feel this alone, I think….

  But he couldn’t say that to Josie, of course. She’d think he was crazy, or els
e handing her a line—and either way her likely response would be a hasty retreat, possibly faster and farther than he could go in pursuit.

  So he hid what he felt under a calm surface. His courtroom experience had taught him to master whatever he felt, to control body language and inflection, and by now he was able to do so automatically, even outside a courtroom. Without even thinking about it, he made himself low-key and unthreatening, casual and friendly without stepping over the line she had drawn between them. As if he had never held her in his arms.

  “Hi. I came to help.”

  “I could have managed.” Her voice was calm, not so frozen as before, but definitely cool.

  “I know, but since you did my shopping as well, it’s the least I could do.” He gathered a couple of grocery bags from the van and followed her into the house. Once in the kitchen, she immediately began putting things away while he returned to the van for the last of the bags.

  “It’s raining,” he reported as he rejoined her in the kitchen and set the bags on the counter. “Sort of, anyway. More of an enthusiastic mist than anything else.”

  “According to the weather reports,” Josie said, “it’s going to rain until Sunday.”

  “Miserable weather, good only for staying indoors. All the fireplaces are in good shape, if you want to build a fire,” Marc told her. “And there’s plenty of extra wood stacked by the back porch, in case you didn’t see it.”

  “I saw it, thanks. You didn’t say how much milk, so I got you a gallon—is that okay?”

  “Fine…”

  The conversation went on, casual and inconsequential, both of them being just polite enough to make the effort obvious. Josie finished putting away her groceries and separated Marc’s into a couple of bags on the counter. He opened a package containing a catnip mouse and enticed Pendragon, who showed himself to be a normal feline when it came to catnip and soon happily carried his treat away to play with it by himself.

  “Have you had lunch?” Josie asked.

  Marc looked at his watch, surprised to find that it was after two. “As a matter of fact, I forgot all about it. I’ve been…reading.”