DANCE WITH THE DEAD

Gwen’s Ghosts #1

by

H.P. MALLORY

&

J.R. RAIN

Gwen’s Ghosts

Dance with the Dead

Dead and Gone

Dead of Night

Other Books by H.P. Mallory

PARANORMAL WOMEN’S FICTION:

Haven Hollow

Midlife Spirits

Misty Hollow

Trailer Park Vampire

Midlife Mermaid

PARANORMAL ROMANCE:

Witch & Warlock

Vampire Esquire

Ever Dark Academy

FANTASY ROMANCE:

Dark Destinies

Gates of the Underworld

Lily Harper

Dulcie O’Neil

PARANORMAL REVERSE HAREM:

My Five Kings

Happily Never After

SCI-FI ROMANCE:

The Alaskan Detective

TRILOGIES:

Dragon’s Birthright

Crown Of Lies

The Dark Circus

Chasing Demons

Dungeon Raider

Here to There

Arctic Wolves

Wolves of Valhalla

Lucy Westenra

Other Books by J.R. Rain

VAMPIRE FOR HIRE

Moon Dance

Vampire Moon

American Vampire

Moon Child

Christmas Moon (novella)

Vampire Dawn

Vampire Games

Moon Island

Moon River

Vampire Sun

Moon Dragon

Moon Shadow

Vampire Fire

Midnight Moon

Moon Angel

Vampire Sire

Moon Master

Dead Moon

Lost Moon

Vampire Destiny

Infinite Moon

Vampire Empress

Moon Elder

Wicked Moon

Winter Moon

Sasquatch Moon

Wild Moon

Moon Magic

Moon World

Vampire Deep (coming soon)

SAMANTHA MOON ADVENTURES

Banshee Moon

Moon Monster

Moon Ripper

Witch Moon

Moon Goddess

Moon Blaze

Golem Moon

Moon Maidens

SAMANTHA MOON CASE FILES

Moon Bayou

Blood Moon

Parallel Moon

SAMANTHA MOON ORIGINS

New Moon Rising

Moon Mourning

Haunted Moon

Dance With the Dead

Published by Rain Press

Copyright © 2023 by J.R. Rain & H.P. Mallory

All rights reserved.

Ebook Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Reading Sample: The Good Daughter

About H.P. Mallory

About J.R. Rain

Dance With the Dead

Chapter One

Petra and Me

The vacation I took to England’s West Country was one of my best and earliest memories.

I was eight or so at the time and it was my first time on a plane, my first time out of the country and the first time I remember leaving New York and its environs. For a child who’d known nothing but the city and its suburbs, the rolling fields and majestic hills of Somerset and Wiltshire (our American pronunciation of which greatly amused the locals) was a fantasy landscape, like the Shire from The Lord of the Rings.

My parents and I stayed in a bed and breakfast in a village called Morley-on-Avon, through which the river lazily snaked. It was a wonderland that imprinted itself on my young mind and I swore I would someday return.

But the trip was mostly memorable because it was the location where Petra became my constant companion, the ‘imaginary friend’ about whom my parents smiled quietly and for whom they even set a place at the table (as recommended by various parenting guides on the subject of ‘invisible friends’). Of course, that was before I patiently explained that Petra didn’t need to eat.

The day I met Petra is still etched in my mind in such vivid detail, it feels as if it were only yesterday.

“Petra Shearwater,” the tour guide had announced, an almost circular man with a moustache that appeared to be trying to take over his face. He was dressed in a red, velvet outfit that looked as if it was meant to mimic something Henry VIII would have worn, though the guide’s was a cheap imitation. I was fairly sure it was mustard that was staining the ruff around his neck. While the guide’s outward appearance was bland (with the notable exception of his monstrous moustache), he seemed to make up for that blandness with the shrillness of his voice and the theatrical waving of his arms. He looked like a man about to take off for the clouds.

“It was within this house, or just outside it, that she died and some say, she still haunts it.” He pointed at the dirt patch on which he stood and then did a strange little jig, as if Petra were reaching up from her grave to tickle the undersides of his feet. “On this very spot here, that I’m currently standing upon.”

We were standing in the mighty shadow of one of the great stately homes of the county. Not the biggest or most expensive that Britain had to offer (not quite Downton Abbey scale) but an impressive ‘country pile’ never the less. It was called Chambon Hall.

“Though, of course, it only got that name in the sixties when a pair of monied hippies,” the guide raised his eyebrows to show what he thought of said monied hippies, “Lucius and Delphine Chambon—better known as ‘Thor’ and ‘Feather’ to their circle of unwashed ragamuffins—bought it up for a song after the de Crecy family, who had lived on this site since the fifteenth century, went broke following bad investments. On the ponies,” he added with a wink and then did a little twirl that seemed to surprise all those in attendance.

“But back to Petra,” the guide continued. “She didn’t live in Chambon Hall, but she was a guest of the de Crecy family, from back when they were at their peak,” the guide went on, nodding at everyone in turn. “This was in the late nineteenth century, mind you. The Victorian era.” The guide cleared his throat and his voice rang out even louder. “Petra was invited to stay because young Roger de Crecy,” at which point the guide winked at my parents and continued, “Roger by name and Roger by nature—saving your daughter’s presence, aye?” My parents nodded uncertainly, and the guide continued on. “Roger had taken a fancy to Petra, who was renowned as a bit of a looker—which was perhaps exactly what had appealed to Roger. So, Petra was invited to stay and quite quickly into her stay, she died, some say by mysterious circumstances,” (accompanied by much wiggling of fingers). “She fell to her death, right here on this here spot.”

“Not true,” said a woman’s voice from beside me. “I fell over there,” and then she pointed to a place that was a few feet away. When she faced the guide again, she cocked an irritated brow in his direction. “And I certainly do not appreciate the fact that every time you tell this story erroneously, it is my reputation that suffers as you fail to mention that the de Crecy’s were cousins to my family and thus, I was not simply visiting an unattached man with whom I had no affiliation.”

The woman, presumably Petra, appeared to be in her early twenties with dark hair that was done up in curls around her face. She wore a bonnet and was dressed in a long and beautiful, emerald gown with bilious skirts that sashayed around her and touched the ground. I couldn’t help noticing that she was slightly transparent, so I could see through her to the tree line at the fringes of the lawn. Of course, I assumed that had to mean she was a ghost, but I wasn’t in the least bit frightened of her.

“Some believe Petra was killed by Roger’s father, who thought her to be ill-suited to marry his son,” the guide continued.

She, meanwhile, scowled at him. “Yes, yes, always this about my being ill-suited for the rascal Roger de Crecy. The truth was, I had no interest in marrying the scoundrel! And as to the particulars of my death...” the woman went on, shaking her head as she made a dismissive gesture at the guide who had, apparently, gotten it all wrong. “I can’t recall why I was killed or by whom. Perhaps it was simply an accident.” Then she shook her head like the whole thing was one big shame and sighed. “You get the details incorrect every day on every tour and you never listen to me correcting you because you can’t hear me. None of you can.”

“I can hear you,” I said.

The transparent woman looked down at me and her mouth dropped open in shock.

“Well, that’s nice to know, little lady,” smiled the guide. “But I’m over here.”

There’s no need to go over the rest of the conversational cross purposes because you can probably guess how the rest of it went. The important thing is that, at the end of the day, Petra sat beside me in the back of our rental car, heading to the hotel in which we were staying. And it was no surprise either, because for over a hundred years she’d had no one to talk to but other departed spirits, whose conversation was apparently ‘limited and self-involved’, and who usually ‘moved on’ pretty quickly. Now she had a companion, and she wasn’t letting me go.

I was perfectly happy with my strange, new friend, and still happier when Petra regressed to childhood, appearing my own age and dressing in appropriate clothes for a Victorian child. As an only child, I’d sometimes struggled to make friends—now I had one who came with me everywhere. When we left for New York a week later, Petra was in tow.

It should be relatively clear by this point that Petra was not an imaginary friend, she was, for want of a better word, a ghost. But I didn’t really think of her as a ghost because there was nothing about her that was ghostlike or frightening. To me, she was more like a magical fairy who could change her appearance at will and who mostly just wanted to gossip. But she wasn’t the only deceased person I could see.

Maybe it was owing to my first seeing Petra, to whom I had some indefinable connection, but that day in Morley opened the floodgates, and from then on, I saw ghosts on a semi-regular basis. Only a few were like Petra, though: clear and almost solid to look at. Most were varying degrees of flickering translucency, some barely even human-shaped. I don’t recall ever being scared of them, though—they simply became a part of my life.

As I grew older, and began to better understand what it was I was seeing, then I also began to understand, mostly through Petra, what the rules were about the deceased and how it all worked.

The majority of people, after they died, moved on almost instantly, to that incredibly bright light that was the afterlife. Those with some unfinished business might linger around in a place Petra described as a sort of Limbo which existed in its own space and time. The walls between Limbo and the living world were pretty thin though, and those spirits would often manifest here, intentionally or otherwise, usually in the place where they died. Initially, the confusion of death made them unfocused, unable to communicate in words, but only able to radiate their emotions—I called those sorts of spirits ‘apparitions’. The longer they remained in Limbo, the more ‘normal looking’ they became—Petra being the ultimate result, a full-on ghost. Most didn’t stay anywhere in this realm nearly as long as Petra had. Once they understood what had happened to them and accepted it, they went elsewhere.

But even though Petra fully understood that she was dead and had been for a long while, she never seemed interested in moving on. And she never seemed able to recall what exactly had happened to her that caused her death in the first place. At first, I thought she just didn’t like to think about it—that her death had traumatized her and, thus, she didn’t want to focus on it. But as the years went on, I became more and more convinced that she really couldn’t remember the particulars. It was almost as though the whole thing was so terrible, that she’d simply forgotten all details—maybe as a way to protect herself? I wasn’t sure.

But as to moving on to the other side and Petra’s inability to do so, she said she liked things just as they were and that was why she stuck around. That was just fine with me because Petra became the sister I’d never had—only my sister was see-thru.

“Can you look any age you want?” I’d asked her once.

Petra shook her head. “Only an age I’ve been. It’s the same with clothing—I can’t dress like you because such clothes weren’t around when I was. And thank the good Lord for that—what passes as fashion these days should be criminal!”

Petra had many opinions regarding the modern era—most of which weren’t necessarily positive opinions. And I supposed that made sense, seeing as how she was brought up during a time in history that was known for being especially prudish and repressed. The ideal Victorian woman was ‘pure, chaste, refined and modest’ as Petra would tell me time and time again (usually in response to something I’d said or done that was decidedly not pure, chaste, refined or modest).

How much was choice and how much instinct, I never fully understood, but Petra always appeared my age, so as I grew up, she grew up with me. Until, that is, I passed twenty-two, at which age she’d died. And so, somewhat irritatingly, she stopped aging while I continued to do so for another (at the time of writing) twenty years.

By the time Petra and I were twenty-two, I’d already embarked on the career to which I’d devote my life. I’d always written stories, and maybe it was the presence of Petra that dictated the direction those stories would eventually take. Without making a conscious decision, the genre I always seemed drawn to was in the direction of mystery, often with a folk horror twist. I’d become fascinated by mythology and legends, and spun those threads into my books in a way that, without any false modesty, seemed to appeal to the public. And so it was that I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday with a first bestseller under my belt, and at the party thrown for me by my literary agent, I met the man with whom I was to spend much of the next fifteen years.

When talking about Ian, I don’t know whether to speak from my head or my heart. Maybe it’s better to stick to the facts because otherwise I’d be here all day and Ian is a relatively small part of this story—as in, he’s part of the set-up, not the narrative.

Anyway, we never got married, so maybe there was always something in the back of both of our heads telling us this relationship was only for as long as it lasted, not forever. But for as long as it lasted, it was good enough.

In the end, we still liked each other, but we’d ceased to love each other. Maybe you don’t notice that happening when you’re so used to a person, when you see them every single day. Making the final break can be hard, even when it’s preceded by months of tense, sexless silence, while waiting for the other person to step up and say something.

It was Ian who finally stepped up and said something, and my major regret was that I hadn’t said something sooner. Maybe we could have revived our relationship if I’d said something sooner—maybe there would have been something there worth saving if we’d found it in time? I didn’t know and supposed I never would. Regardless, the end of the relationship meant that someone had to move out of the apartment we’d comfortably shared for the last fifteen years. It also coincided with the release of a retrospective anthology of my ‘best’ work.

Looking at that volume, I found myself feeling dissatisfied, not with what I’d done, but with the idea that it was all I was ever going to do. Skimming through stories I’d written a decade earlier, I realized how similar they were to those I’d written last year. And that meant one thing: I was in a rut, and there would never be a better time to make a change.

I told Ian to keep the apartment.

The day after my forty-second birthday, I boarded a plane to keep a promise I’d made to myself when I was just an eight-year-old girl.

I was going back to Morley-on-Avon.

“Going home!” Petra enthused and beamed the biggest grin I’d seen in quite a while.

“Nothing was stopping you from going back a long time ago,” I pointed out.

“It’s quite a long walk.”

“Couldn’t you just go into Limbo and come back out in Morley?” I teased.

She gave me a look. “Gwendolyn,” (she always insisted on calling me as such, even though Gwendolyn wasn’t even my name. It was simply: Gwen). You know that is not how the afterlife works.”

I knew. I wasn’t sure exactly how it did work, but I knew she couldn’t just come and go as she pleased.

A housing agency in the UK had set up some viewings for me in Morley, but there was one place that appealed to me beyond all others, a place that was right in the heart of Morley—a real British cottage. Little and proper and completely adorable. How could I not buy it? And it was almost crazily cheap, presumably because if you’re English, then you don’t appreciate how wonderful such sorts of things are.

“I should imagine there’s quite a bit more to it than that,” said Petra, eyeing me in that way of hers, which meant she knew something I didn’t. Or thought she did. Strangely, for being alive over a hundred years, Petra didn’t really know much more than I did. And the things she did feign to know, were usually wrong. I wasn’t sure if it was owing to the fact that she hadn’t been a very informed person when she was alive, or maybe she just became confused after death, but Petra would quite literally just make stuff up. “The cottage shouldn’t be so inexpensive—you know what they say about such things.”

“Actually, I don’t.”

She responded by propping her nose into the air as she did when she was about to come up with a whopper. “I should imagine it has a... troll problem.”

“A troll problem?” I repeated, frowning.

“Yes, they really are quite beastly creatures—worse than raccoons. And if you’ve a troll problem at that humble little estate you’re considering, they will hardly be done away with easily.”

“I’ll take that bet,” I answered, not really in the mood for any of her shrewd opinions or ridiculous ideas. This was a new adventure, and I was planning on finding myself again in a different country. Not that I’d necessarily lost myself, but sometimes relationships begin to define you (especially the long ones) and pretty soon, you find yourself sans relationship and sans a sense of self. I had a feeling I’d find that self again in Morley-on-Avon. “You’ll see, there’s nothing wrong with it—no trolls and no raccoons.”

Petra shook her head. “When you reach my age, you’ll be more circumspect.”

“You’re twenty years younger than I am.”

She waved me away with an unconcerned hand. “Only in the physical sense. And since I have no physical presence any longer, that hardly counts, Gwendolyn, dear.”

In Morley-on-Avon we were shown around the houses by an agent, who pointed out each house’s good points and smiled a lot, but my mind wasn’t sold on any of these places.

I wanted the cottage.

The cottage was called Bluebells and looking around it, I found it even more perfect than it had appeared online. Yes, this was where I wanted to live. This was where I wanted to write, and my mind was crowded with the possibilities of the sorts of stories I could dream up in such a place.

“Tell me you don’t like it,” I whispered to Petra as we looked around. I was careful to talk to Petra only when the agent wasn’t within hearing distance. In my long association with her, I’d learned how to avoid appearing as if I were speaking to the air. After all, people get very uncomfortable when you speak to others they can’t see.

“I never said I did not like it, though it is rather small,” Petra answered and she glanced around herself with what appeared to be distaste. “Such accommodations would have been quite substantial for the servants back in my day, but alas... times have certainly changed.” That was a common rejoinder for Petra whenever she was comparing the Victorian age with the modern one and finding the modern lacking. “Do I get my own room?”

“No,” I responded. “You have your own plane of reality.”

Over the years, Petra had become more of a visitor than an actual house guest. As children, we’d lived and played together, but as I got older (as we both got older) that became less comfortable, particularly after Ian and I moved in together. Petra was nothing if not accommodating and always made herself scarce during dates, romantic dinners, and what she primly referred to as ‘amorous congress’. I think it was more along the lines that she was extremely uncomfortable with anything that was ‘taboo’ and simply couldn’t handle displays of affection and certainly not ‘convivial society’ (another of her terms for the horizontal mambo).

Limbo was only ever a footstep away, so she always had somewhere to go and read a book or whatever it was they did in Limbo—it was a subject on which she was cagey for contractual reasons.

“All I said was that there was something wrong with the place,” she insisted, propping her hands on her hips as she glared at me. “A reason it should be so inexpensive,” she repeated.

“Don’t be silly.” I shook my head and hoped she was wrong.

Chapter Two

Morley-on-Avon

“Now,” said the agent, with a certain tone in his voice, “cards on the table...”

“Of course!” Petra answered, throwing her hands into the air. “Did I or did I not tell you there was something wrong with it?” I did my best to ignore her, keeping my attention firmly on the young man and his mop of carrot-orange hair.

“Something... wrong?” I asked.

“There’s a reason this place is going so cheap,” the agent went on and I could feel Petra’s expression of ‘told you so’ even though I still refused to look at her. “The last owner passed away... in the house.”

“Oh,” I shrugged, thinking a death in the house was certainly preferable to a troll infestation.

“Does that... lessen your interest?”

I shrugged again. “I mean... I guess that happens.”

“Violently,” the agent added, nodding as the mop of hair landed in his eyes and he had to push it out of the way again. I was fairly sure he’d introduced himself as Harry, and it was quite a fitting name.

“Murdered?” I asked, suddenly a little anxious.

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Harry reassured me as he laughed and shook his head as if my imagination had run away with me. “Nothing like that, I can assure you.”

“And what about trolls?” Petra asked the man, even though he couldn’t see or hear her. Of course, she knew as much, but this was just her way of letting me know she expected me to ask him the same question. Of course, that wasn’t going to happen.

“What happened then?” I asked him.

“Well.” He scratched the back of his head. “Unfortunately, the last owner tripped, fell down the stairs, and broke her neck.”

“Oh!” I couldn’t help but cringe.

“I told you so!” Petra called out from beside me, but I continued to ignore her. “I just knew there was more to this... shack!”

The agent nodded. “They found her just about where you’re standing now.”

Suddenly I recalled the tour guide from all those years ago, talking about the place where Petra had landed and broken her own neck.

“Freak accident,” Harry continued, hurriedly. “But it has given the place a bit of a reputation with the locals. You know what country folk are like.”

“Not really.”

“No, I suppose coming from New York, you wouldn’t.”

“Right,” I answered. “Was this a while ago?”

“Last month,” admitted the agent. “They wanted to move the cottage on quick.”

I wasn’t sure who ‘they’ were, but I supposed it didn’t matter. A death inside the house certainly wasn’t something that was on my checklist of desirable features in a property, but on the other hand, every property had some sort of a history—especially in a country as old as this one. The point was: you took the rough with the smooth.

“I’ll take it.”

***

Things moved fast, which is what happens when you buy the cursed house no one else wants. Soon enough, I was moving my stuff in, deciding which was my bedroom and which my office, where furniture went, which pictures went where. In between the moving, I took long walks around the village and the country in which it was set, feeling very pleased with my decision to move here.

Morley-on-Avon was everything I remembered and everything I’d treasured as a little girl. While I’d gotten older, it seemed as if Morley had been frozen in time—that everything I remembered as a child was exactly the same now. And that suited me just fine.

I introduced myself at the local shops, spoke to my neighbors, and found everyone friendly and very welcoming of the colonial commoner making her home here. At the end of my first week, I decided to get out of the house and spend an evening in the local pub.

“Do you wish for me to chaperone you to that awful place?” asked Petra. As a proper Victorian woman, she didn’t think highly of alcohol. “I do hope you don’t swizzle yourself until you’re blootered.”

“Up to you.”

“That’s a ‘yes’ then.”

She knew me better than anyone, and she was right—I definitely wanted company, mostly because I didn’t want to drink alone. Of course, I basically was drinking alone because no one else could see or hear Petra, but the point still stood.

***

The local pub was called ‘The Swan’ and had a beer garden out back that stretched down to the river. Inside was noisily convivial and pleasingly absent of the English cliches that Americans abroad expect; no Morris dancers, abusive football fans, or men in smocks with strings around their pant legs and straw sticking out of their sleeves. One of my closer neighbors (I wanted to say their names were Maisie, and her husband, Keith) recognized me and waved which I tentatively returned as I made my way to the bar where I almost collided with a big man who was carrying two pints of cider.

“Whoa! Sorry!” He deftly executed an arabesque of his arms, somehow managing to avoid spilling any of the drinks. “I didn’t see you there.”

“My fault.” I looked up into a pair of blazingly blue eyes set in a rugged, yet desperately apologetic, face. His skin was tan and revealed a spattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose and cheeks, no doubt from spending too much time in the sun. His hair was dark brown and had a certain wave to it, or maybe it was just unbrushed. It was hard to tell. His jaw was square and broad and his forearms were the girth of my thighs. I felt like I’d suddenly walked into the Beauty and the Beast cartoon and nearly collided with Gaston.

“No. The fault is all mine,” Gaston insisted and shook his head, color rising into his cheeks. “I’m clumsy as hell.”

Now it’s a general rule that I like tall men. Ian was over six-foot-two, but this man was taller and thicker set with muscles that seemed simultaneously shy of announcing their presence but too prominent to hide beneath his plaid shirt which looked like it was one bicep curl away from splitting.

I grinned. “No harm done.”

“Oh, my goodness,” murmured Petra to my side, shaking her head, because she knew my type as well as I did.

“Let me buy you a drink to say I’m sorry,” suggested the big man with a slight grin. “And to welcome you to Morley?”

“How did you know I’m new?”

He laughed at that. “I’ve never seen you before.”

“Oh.”

“A drink?” he asked again.

I shook my head. “There’s no need.”

“Oh. Okay.” He obviously didn’t want to push himself on a woman he didn’t know, but I probably would have acquiesced if he’d asked again. “I’m Leo, by the way. Pleased to meet you, Miss?”

He started to reach out to shake my hand, but then seemed to realize there was still a pint of cider in his and so settled for an elbow bump—as in the times of Covid. Even though Covid was now a thing of the not-so-distant-past.

“Gwen. Gwen Dance.”

“Was I right and you are new in town?”

“I am.”

“To live or just traveling through?”

“I just moved here.”

He nodded and even though he was asking me a ton of questions, there was still something shy in his eyes. Something that said conversation didn’t come easily to him, but he was trying on my account.

“And did you happen to move into Vic’s old place, yes?”

“Bluebells? The cottage?” I suggested. I wasn’t sure what ‘Vic’s old place’ was.

“Yes—Vic as in Victoria.” Leo’s features (handsome features if you liked men who looked like they were hewn from oak—and, I had to admit, I did) creased. “And you must be the mystery novelist?”

I felt my eyebrows rise of their own volition. “Apparently, news travels fast.”

Leo chuckled. “Around Morley? Yes, yes, it does.”

“Well, yes, I am the mystery novelist who now lives in Victoria’s cottage.”

“Then I’m sure you probably know the sad story.”

“Yes.” The story about how Victoria and the stairs had been up close and personal. “She was a friend of yours?”

Leo shrugged, managing to spill the cider he’d so dexterously preserved earlier. “Damn,” he said as he frowned down at it. “But yeah. Morley—you know? It’s a town even small towns would call small.” I laughed at that. “Everyone’s a friend. Or at least—I suppose—everyone knows each other. Not necessarily the same thing. But mostly friends.”

“Good to know.” I gave him a smile and tried not to notice how large his hands were, and such long fingers...

“Try not to be so obvious,” Petra chided, as she appeared right beside me. “And even though you’re quite the tart, could you at least pretend to be a lady?”

I ignored her as I was wont to do when other, living, people were around.

“Sorry, I’ve got to…” Leo looked around at a table where some other similarly large men (though none quite on Leo’s scale) sat watching and waiting for their drinks. “But it was nice meeting you, Gwen.”

“Nice meeting you too, Leo.”

“I’m at the smith’s. If you need anything—railings, gates, horseshoes—come by.” Then he chuckled, and it was a deep, baritone sort of sound. One I liked.

I frowned. “Smiths?”

“Blacksmiths?”

“Oh,” I nodded.

Leo smiled, and it was a lopsided smile full of large, white, and straight teeth. It was a smile that was suddenly boyish and shy, yet naughty, all the same. I swallowed hard.

“Blacksmithing—that’s what I do.”

My taste in literature had never leaned towards the crinolined romances in which ladies from the upper crust of polite society developed a socially frowned upon crush on farm hands, chimney sweeps, and blacksmiths, but right now I could see the appeal. An honest to goodness blacksmith. This was a love story that was writing itself and for a moment, it was nice to write it in my mind.

“I’ve never met a blacksmith before.”

Leo shrugged again, spilling again. “I’ve never met a Gwen before.”

I gave him a smile as Petra shook her head. “He’s aiming to go smithing up the valley between your thighs.”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said chidingly out of the side of my mouth.

“What was that?” Leo asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I answered, shaking my head as I remembered myself. “A real blacksmith, huh?”

He nodded. “I don’t suppose you’d have met one before. America—not so many to be found there, I presume. Although iron is iron. There must be a few.”

“Leo!” A call from the table behind him and a waving of empty glasses and Leo smiled a goodbye, his apparent shyness an appealing contrast to his hulking presence.

“That didn’t take long,” said Petra, as I ordered a drink from a friendly woman behind the bar.

“What?”

She gave me that reprimanding look. “You know what.”

I did know what, and I was okay with it. Romance had been missing from my life for too long and with it some of the more fun aspects of being in a relationship. Though we’d parted company recently, Ian and I had been running on fumes for a while. Our sex life hadn’t ground to a complete halt, but it was definitely stuck in traffic.

We’d been reduced to going through the motions on a monthly basis and… damn it, I missed that passion you feel when you’re with someone who’s right there with you, in the moment; the intimacy, the fun, the blind ecstasy when it seems like the world might implode around you. It had been a long time since I’d felt passion, since I’d had a ‘good shagging’ to use an especially British term. And if the person administering that good shagging was sweet and shy and built along the lines of an English castle, all the better. And, who knew—maybe it could be more than much-needed-between-the-sheets action, maybe it could evolve into something with substance, which would be good too.

My new life in England wasn’t limited to a new home and a new book, I was open to new love too. New love at forty-two. And as forty-two-year-olds went, I wasn’t half bad. I still had the same charms I had in my twenties, only now I knew what I wanted and I knew how to go about getting it.

I’d by now found a place to sit and while I had Petra for company, to the rest of the room I was just that woman sitting on her own who seemingly makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable with her aloneness.

“Good evening.”

I looked up to see a man standing over me. And smiling. His hair was as black as a moonless night, his eyes large and dark brown. His symmetry of features was near perfect and he looked like he belonged on the cover of GQ magazine, not in a tiny pub in a tiny town.

“Hi,” I said and figured maybe he was a bartender coming to see if I needed another drink. But, no, mine was still full.

“I heard your American accent and figured you were a stranger in a strange place, so I thought I might see if you wanted company.”

The man was handsome—shockingly so—the kind of handsome you can’t help but notice in the first few seconds of your acquaintance. It wasn’t the sort of handsomeness that grew on you—it was the kind that knocked you over the head. It was a handsomeness that was very different to Leo’s. This man was, for starters, younger—I would have guessed a lot younger than Leo, which in turn meant he was also a lot younger than me—maybe ten or fifteen years younger, even. He had boyish good looks, like the pretty one in a boyband, and was dressed in the sort of casual attire that radiates expense: it costs money to look so matter of fact. He was probably around six-foot-one, considerably shorter than Leo, and he was fit and trim rather than large and hulking like Leo.

I noted all these things because, while this guy looked around twenty-seven (at the most thirty) that meant that surely he wasn’t hitting on forty-two-year-old me. Yet everything about his posture, his smile, and his tone said he was hitting on me. Hmm.

“You’re new in town, aren’t you?”

I’m also old enough to be... your aunt or your older sister. I definitely wasn’t going to go anywhere near the mother category.

“Yes,” I admitted. “I just moved into Bluebells.”

“Oh, no,” Petra commented from where she was floating beside me. “The wolf has come calling.”

“Lovely cottage,” the man answered and smiled with teeth—broad, straight, and white ones. His smile was beautiful. “I’m Bastian.”

“Gwen.”

“What a beautiful name,” he glanced down and motioned to the empty chair beside me. “May I?”

“Sure,” I answered, still pretty amazed he was hitting on me. Or maybe he was just being polite. Maybe he was part of the welcoming team of Morley—those friendly citizens who made a point of welcoming others. Of course, as far as I knew, there was no such thing as the welcoming team of Morley.

“Gwen,” Bastian continued. “The name suits you. Is it short for Gwendolyn? Gwyneth? Guinevere?”

I laughed as images of Lancelot and King Arthur started assaulting my head. “No, just Gwen. Short for nothing.”

“You should insist it’s short for Gwendolyn,” Petra replied. “A proper lady’s name.”

Bastion smiled. “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Um... that’s really nice of you,” I replied, still confused because the age gap between us was obvious to anyone with eyes. And I wasn’t used to getting hit on by much younger men. A few years? Sure. Ten to fifteen years? Not so much. “But not necessary.”

“Not necessary,” agreed Bastian with a quick nod and another languid smile. “But I find it a useful icebreaker and something to do between now and… later.”

It shouldn’t have been possible to make the word ‘later’ sound like an indecent proposal and yet... Still, I refused to believe this kid was trying to take me home. “And what comes later?”

“You,” replied Bastian with a shrug, removing all doubt that his intentions were anything but gleefully dishonorable.

“The cad!” Petra said and sucked in a shocked mouthful of air, which was something that always threw me, considering she couldn’t breathe.

“You’re very sure of yourself,” I noted, still somewhat shocked by how forward this man was. Weren’t British men supposed to be bumbling like Hugh Grant or overconcerned with propriety like Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy? Apparently not because Bastian was anything but.

Bastian shrugged. “Landed gentry. We’re not noted for our insecurity.”

“Apparently not,” I answered, and swallowed the rest of my drink.

“If a man spoke to me like that,” Petra started, shaking her head. “I’d wash his mouth out with soap!”

“So, back to attempting to sell you on myself,” Bastian considered with that wolfish smile. “Here you have a man,” he started, and then pointed to himself. “Thirty-one years old.”

“I thought you weren’t a day over eighteen,” I laughed.

“Old enough to know my way around a woman’s body,” he continued, apparently deciding to ignore my little barb. “A man who’s fit, quite wealthy, comes from a noble family, intelligent, funny, charming, well-educated, well-bred, and well-endowed.”

“My goodness!” Petra announced, and then promptly disappeared as she was apt to do when she was faced with anything that contradicted her strict, Victorian ideals. But my attention was mainly centered on Bastion as I tried to understand whether he was being serious with all of this, or just trying to get a laugh out of me.

“And well filled with a sense of self-importance,” I finished for him, to which he laughed and extended his hand.

“My name is Bastian Chambon—ask around and you can verify any and all of those facts. Particularly the last one.”

“Chambon of Chambon Hall?” I asked, remembering the name of the house where I’d first met Petra as a child.

“The very same,” Bastian answered with a flourish of a bow. “How about that drink now—after my long list of credentials. We can continue my interview?”

I laughed and shook my head. “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”

“On the interview or on me?”

“On both,” I replied with an apologetic smile and then cheered him with my empty glass.

“Well said,” Petra commented from where she had just blinked back into existence and was now sitting across from me.

“A shame,” Bastian responded, shaking his head. “You had me quite excited. It’s not every day we have yanks showing up in Morley.”

“Yanks?” I repeated, laughing.

“Americans, colonists, betrayers,” Bastian answered, waving his hand like they were all one and the same.

“Betrayers?” I repeated, frowning in confusion.

“Ask any Redcoat around the time of the Revolutionary War and I’d wager he’d think you a rebel and betrayer.”

“Um, you’re like three hundred years too late with that point,” I laughed.

“Better late than never,” Bastian answered with a shrug before he honed in on my empty glass. “You’re sure—”

“I’m old enough to be your mother.” Only just, but still.

“But you’re not my mother,” Bastian pointed out. “And what you are is an extremely beautiful woman to whom I’m quite sensibly attracted.”

“Quite sensibly?” I repeated. “No wonder you get all the women with descriptions like that!”

He nodded and acted as if my comment had bounced right off him. “Age has no bearing on this whatsoever.”

“Doesn’t it?”

He shook his head. “I can’t think of one good reason why we shouldn’t go to my car right now (it’s a McClaren and is, I assure you, compensating for nothing), and drive someplace more secluded.”

“Or not.”

He nodded. “I’m not forcing the issue or pressing you.” He glanced down at his hands, which were clasped in his lap. “You will note I keep my hands to myself despite all temptation.”

“I’d give you an award, but I’m fresh out.”

He chuckled. “I’m not proposing anything more than fun, Gwen, the lovely American.”

I wouldn’t lie to myself: I was flattered. Maybe I was even a little tempted—I mean, he was as good-looking as he thought he was (which was incredibly good-looking) and his arrogance was weirdly endearing, even if you just wanted to test out how deserved it was. And I hadn’t experienced sexual passion in years. But still.

“Thank you for your interest, Bastian, but no thanks.”

Bastian shrugged. “I feel like we’re both missing out, but it’s, of course, your decision.”

“Of course.”

“And I respect that entirely, besides… Oh, Karen’s finished with her phone call.”

A blonde girl had just entered the room and was now looking around the bar for someone. She spotted Bastian and smiled as he stood up and returned her happy expression.

“Karen?” I asked at the same time Petra did. Even though I didn’t want to care or to let Bastian know I cared, I was trying to reason out what in the world was going through his head—all this time he was picking up on me, he already had a date? Truly, the man had balls and then some.

“So, you hit on me while you were on a date?” I asked, just wanting to make sure I fully understood.

“It’s not as though she was in the room,” Bastian pointed out with a shrug. “That would have been inconsiderate.”

I had to ask. “What would you have done if I’d said yes?”

“I’d have been very grateful,” said Bastian with a huge smile. “And I’m sure I would have come up with some solution to the logistical issue.”

“Quite logistical,” Petra repeated.

“One rather entertaining solution springs to mind,” Bastian continued, but then shook his head. “But I find very few women go for that.”

“Understandably so,” I said, figuring exactly what that solution was—the three of us.

“If nothing else, I’m free tomorrow night.” Then he winked. “That is to say, I’m still free tomorrow night.”

“Duly noted,” I answered.

As he began to walk away, there was a commotion in a corner of the room, nearest the bar, and the sharp cry of a woman. I looked across to see a man, maybe a little the worse for drink, grabbing a girl by the wrist.

“What’s the matter? It’s a compliment,” the man said, slurring every syllable.

“You wouldn’t speak to your mother like that!” The girl yelled at him.

“An’ you wouldn’t dress like that if you didn’t want attention,” the man responded.

Bastian was across the room in the blink of an eye, throwing himself in between the man and the woman. And his expression wasn’t a pleasant one—he looked like he was out for blood. “Let her go and apologize.”

The drunk snarled. “It’s got nothing to do with you, you prissy little shit.”

As the man gestured, he yanked the girl’s arm, again making her cry out, which was apparently enough for Bastian. His fist moved almost faster than I could see and the drunk was suddenly on the ground, looking as shocked as he probably felt. But he was back up a moment later, this time flanked by his friends. Bastian stood his ground as Petra and I looked on in a mix of horror and amazement.

“What has Morley become?” Petra asked, shaking her head.

“Bear in mind what the story tomorrow will be; you all had your asses handed to you by that spoilt Chambon brat,” Bastian said, glaring at the drunk and his two friends. “Is that really how you want this to go down? Three of you and you still couldn’t win? How would that look?”

“What if we do win?” asked drunk number two.

Bastian waved him away. “I discount that possibility.”

“So do I.” Suddenly, Bastian wasn’t alone. Leo loomed behind the smaller man, crossing his arms against his immense chest as they both glared down at their opposition.

When the drunks backed down, Bastian turned to the girl. “Are you alright, Stacey?”

The girl nodded.

There were two sides to everyone, even someone as apparently shallow and self-involved as Bastian Chambon. But it had been nice to see Leo step up to defend the woman. As the confrontation ended, the two men who had spoken to me that evening nodded to each other as passing acquaintances and all the fuss was apparently forgotten.

***

“I think I’m going to like living here,” I judged, as Petra and I walked home down the cobbled street that had no doubt seen wagons, carriages, and horses for hundreds of years.

“It’s certainly going to be interesting,” nodded Petra.

As we entered the cottage, Petra froze and shivered as she hovered above the threshold. “Something’s not right.”

I looked around myself sharply.

A dim glow came from the top of the stairs, not from a light but from a shape that hovered there.

Occasionally, its flickering form resembled that of a person—a woman.

Chapter Three

Victoria Falls

A moment after I first saw her, the apparition fell down the stairs, violently, bouncing from side to side and landing in a heap at the bottom, her neck at an angle that precluded life.

“Gwendolyn…” Petra whispered from beside me.

She didn’t need to say any more than that; we both knew we were seeing the final moments of Victoria’s life played out before us. It happened sometimes in violent death, the dead couldn’t get past it, and so they relived the moment of their end, over and over again.

Even as we stood there, Victoria vanished from the heap at the bottom of the stairs and reappeared at the top.               Down she went again, but this time I was watching more closely.

“She was pushed.”

“You think so?” Petra asked as she studied Victoria, who rolled down the stairs before disappearing and reappearing at the top again.

“Look,” I said and pointed at the top of the stairs. Victoria’s back was to us. “Why would you go down the stairs backward?”

“Ah, very astute,” Petra answered, eyeing the spirit with interest.

There could be no question, the way Victoria moved, made it clear that hands had pushed her chest to send her down. But whose hands?

“See the way she looks like she’s been thrust down?” I asked.

Petra nodded. “I do.”

“Can you interact with her and ask her what happened?”

Petra disappeared for a moment and then reappeared, looking at me as she shook her head sadly. “I tried to reach her, but I don’t believe she’s sentient. She appears to be one of those spirits who simply replays her death over and over again,” Petra finished on a sigh.

But there was more to it than that. At least, I felt something more. If I hadn’t known the circumstances of Victoria’s death, I wouldn’t have been able to identify this vague apparition, that was barely more than a translucent shape, lines of ethereal feedback shimmering across it. The more shocking the death, the longer it took for the spirit to adapt to what had happened to him or her. The manifestations of accident and murder victims hardly looked human at all, they were more like emotions given a rough shape, and while they couldn’t communicate in any coherent way, they radiated feeling. And right now, I could feel Victoria’s anger and her craving for justice. Even if I hadn’t been able to see that she’d been pushed, I still would’ve known it was murder that radiated these types of feelings—this sort of outrage and hurt.

For the first time, Victoria seemed to see us, because she turned her head to face us when she reappeared at the top of the stairs for the fourth time.

“Oh... perhaps she can see us,” Petra said and seemed surprised. Then she floated closer to Victoria and said, “Good evening.”

The ghost of Victoria then turned toward the kitchen, lifted her arm, and extended her index finger as if she were pointing toward the oven. Then she shrieked and vanished.

***

“Given time, she will just go,” said Petra, as I ate breakfast the following morning.

“And you’d be happy leaving her like that—when she’s clearly under duress?”

Petra shrugged. “I don’t know what other options we have. Violent death is not nice to look at, Gwendolyn. But Victoria will move past it eventually and once she does, she’ll be gone before she can even say ‘the man who killed me is…’.”

“Hmm.” Finishing my toast, I walked my dish over to the sink and rinsed it before laying it down on the drying mat on top of the counter.

“Trust me, as I’m quite familiar with these things.”

“And then her killer just walks free,” I said grimly.

“One thing you learn as a spirit,” mused Petra. “There are killers walking free wherever you go. Getting away with murder is easier than you might think.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“What is the alternative?”

“I don’t know.”

It was then that I remembered the way Victoria had lifted her hand and seemingly pointed toward something. I wasn’t sure if she had, in fact, because as I mentioned earlier, most spirits didn’t appear as delineated as Petra did. So what might have seemed to be Victoria’s arm, could have simply been her dress or her vanishing and leaving behind a trace of where she’d previously been.

Yet... yet, I felt like she was trying to pull my attention to something that was within the kitchen, or thereabouts. In the hopes I might uncover some clue, I decided to listen to my hunch. Yes, it might have been a silly thought or a waste of time, but the thought wouldn’t leave me so after another twenty minutes of wrestling with it, I stopped trying to unload my box of kitchen gadgets and instead, started searching the kitchen. Petra, meanwhile, floated nearby and watched me, arms crossed against her chest.

“You don’t think someone would have done this already?” asked Petra. “Before they sold the house?”

“You saw the amount of dust that was covering everything,” I answered, looking up at her as I shook my head. “Clearly, no one cleaned anything.”

She nodded. “It does appear as if the house is probably just as Victoria left it.” As an example, a surprising amount of Victoria’s stuff had been left behind—stuff I was still trying to sort through.

“And you saw Victoria,” I added. “I’m pretty sure she was pointing at something in the kitchen.”

“That is debatable,” Petra said, one eyebrow arched exaggeratingly.

I didn’t necessarily expect to find anything, but I figured it was still worth taking a look. I mean, what did it hurt to try? I’d seen Victoria fall. I’d heard her scream. Someone had killed that woman and, apparently, only I knew it.

“What if you do find something?” Petra asked as I leaned down and started opening the kitchen cupboards. “What then?”

“Then I can go to the police and let them handle it.”

I dropped down to all fours and peered beneath the oven, where it seemed a matted wad of black fibrous... stuff was gathered there and stuck to the underside of the oven.

“What are you doing down there?” Petra asked. “Have you found something?”

“Maybe just something that needs cleaning,” I answered as, against my better judgement, I reached for the strange mound of what looked like a black dust-bunny and then regretted the fact that I wasn’t wearing gloves.

“Calling card from the murderer?” suggested Petra.

I shook my head. “Some sort of weird dust.”

“Not exactly a smoking gun.”

The dust, if that’s what it was, was black and rough to the touch. It wasn’t fluffy like dust, but more gritty and heavier. But the most notable thing about it was that it was stuck to the bottom of the oven. Looking around, I found more elsewhere, also stuck to the metal—like the filings of magnets.

“I think whatever it is, it’s magnetic.”

“Let me see,” Petra leaned forward and inspected the stuff with an expression bordering on interest but still laced with ennui. “I know what that is.”

“Do you?”

She nodded and I wondered what was going to come out of her mouth next. Hopefully nothing about trolls.

“I can’t quite remember what it’s called—but it’s the detritus from a smithy.”

“The what?”

She frowned at me like I was slow. “When blacksmiths are working, iron sparks fly off and then cool and this is what you get.”

I shook my head. “You are full of unlikely information.” Only this time, it seemed as if that information might actually be logical.

“Well, there were more blacksmiths in my day, weren’t there?”

“I guess so,” I said and sat back on my heels. “Doesn’t seem like most people would have iron filings just lying around in their houses though, does it?” Could these filings be the thing Victoria was pointing at?

“I would concur. Sounds to me as if it’s completely unrelated to our case.”

“And yet... we just met a blacksmith.”

“You... you just met a blacksmith,” Petra corrected.

“Right.” I looked at the iron filings between my fingers. “Maybe we should go and ask him about these?”

Petra studied me for a moment or two. “Do you know what I believe?”

“What do you believe?”

“That you are just aching to find a reason to go visit the blacksmith again and you consider yourself lucky to have just stumbled upon one.”

She wasn’t wrong but I shrugged anyway. “Hey, I didn’t identify this as blacksmith stuff, you did.”

“My point still remains.”

And her point still remained mostly right. I did want to see Leo again and this gave me an excuse to do so, even if it was a somewhat grim one. Not to mention the fact that if Victoria had been pointing the shavings out, was she trying to say that Leo had something to do with her death? Of course, that was a stretch but it was also all I had. Yet, in my heart of hearts, I didn’t believe Leo had anything to do with it. When he’d mentioned Victoria, there had been nothing but sadness in his eyes—pity.

***

Living in a town that boasted a blacksmith was pretty cool as far as I was concerned, even if the smithy was, to some extent, just there for the tourists. In some countries they have living national treasures, people who are paid to preserve ancestral traditions—Britain didn’t have that necessarily, but if it did, then Leo would have qualified.

He worked for a living, making fire surrounds, ornamental benches, gates, fences, and anything else that could be constructed from twisted iron, but at the peak of the tourist season—so I was told—you would struggle to get near the forge because tourists (usually Americans like me) were too busy craning their necks to see him at work. Shy as he was, I imagined this was a kind of living hell for Leo. But he seemed cheerful enough and apparently made a good trade in wrought iron souvenirs.

As I approached the smithy, I could hear the rhythmic thumping of the hammer and the heat became noticeable long before I reached the broad, permanently open doors. Peering in, I could see Leo at work. In my head, when I imagined him working his trade, he’d been shirtless and covered in soot (even though I wasn’t sure whether blacksmiths would be covered in soot—maybe that was chimney sweeps. Apologies, Dickens) but that probably wouldn’t have been safe with sparks flying everywhere. So, I supposed it wasn’t a big surprise that he was actually sensibly dressed in long sleeves and long pants, with a leather apron protecting his front.

I just stood there, allowing him to work, and figuring you shouldn’t disturb a man with a lump hammer in one hand and a bar of red-hot metal in the other. Finally, the metal was shaped to his satisfaction and he doused it in a bucket of water from which a gush of superheated steam shot up with a roaring hiss.

“Wow,” I said finally, figuring it was now safe to do so.

Leo turned and once he recognized me, a huge smile overtook his face. “Gwen! Hello.”

“Hi, Leo.”

“Nice to see you.”

“It’s nice to see you.”

Then we both just stood there for another second or so, smiling at each other and saying nothing.

“Can I help you with something?” Leo finally asked.

“Oh, right, yes,” I smiled and blushed, as if his shyness was so aggressive as to be infectious. “I think... maybe you can help me. I mean... I hope so.”

“Come in.”

At the back of the forge was a little workshop that wasn’t open to the public and from what I could tell, this was the place where Leo doodled designs and could relax in private. A collapsed couch in red leather, horse hair stuffing popping from between its button fastenings, slouched against one wall and Leo offered me a seat and a cup of tea which I accepted.

As he washed out a cup with hands blackened from heat, I quickly explained about the magnetic dust I’d found in my house.

“Oh, yeah, that stuff gets everywhere,” Leo confirmed with a quick nod. There was nothing like suspicion or worry clouding his big, blue eyes. “Clings to everything, even if it’s not metal.”

To demonstrate his point, he brushed his pants and a heavy cloud of the black dust fell to the floor.

“But how’d it get in my house?” I asked, tentative but pressing. “Victoria’s house, I mean.”

“I fitted a new gate there not long before… well, not long before,” Leo explained, slopping milk into his cup and stirring the tea as he lost his words.

“Right... not long before she died.”

He nodded and then sighed. “She asked me in for a coffee after I was finished. Think I had an orange juice actually. It was quite hot.”

“I can imagine.” Although I didn’t imagine his English version of ‘hot’ could quite compare with the muggy humidity of a New York summer. But I wasn’t about to argue that point with him.

“I’d guess that was when the filings happened to end up in your house.” He gave a ‘what can you do?’ shrug. “Once it’s in the house, that stuff’s hard to get rid of. Sticks to everything, as I said.”

“And the cleaners did a very poor job at Victoria’s place,” noted Petra, leaning by the wall.

Maybe I looked disappointed at my only lead having such a prosaic explanation, because Leo spoke again. “Why the interest?”

“Just…” What could I reasonably tell him? That I’d seen Victoria in her ghost form as she was pushed down the stairs and she’d pointed at the kitchen, as if trying to tell me there was a clue there? And that I’d partly considered that he might have been involved? Yeah, no. Even if I left out the fact that my suspicions had brought me to see him, the fact that those suspicions were founded on a supernatural sighting would just make him think I was crazy.

But as those blazingly blue eyes looked at me and that lopsided, boyish smile was back in place, I found I wanted to tell him everything.

“So… and this is going to sound crazy…”

“This is a horrible idea,” noted Petra.

I tried to ignore her—over the years I’d gotten pretty good at conducting a conversation with that other voice continually in my ear.

“I’m sure you’re exaggerating.” Leo smiled but couldn’t quite meet my gaze. There was something so appealing about that blend of strength and sensitivity. Yep, I needed to be careful with this one or I might find myself head over heels in no time at all. Which might sound silly coming from a forty-two-year-old woman but, again, romance and I hadn’t been acquainted in years.

“Well, see if you think I’m exaggerating after I tell you my story,” I suggested with a smile as I rubbed the back of my neck and wondered if this were a huge mistake. “So... the cleaners didn’t do the best job of clearing Victoria’s place—hence the iron filings I found stuck to the oven. Plus, I’ve got a bunch of her clothes still hanging in the closet, some furniture, and a ton of boxes in the attic.”

“Right.”

I struggled with what I could say that might tell him my suspicions without me sounding nuts and the more I thought about the subject, the more I decided against just coming out with the ghost part. “Right—lots of junk in the garage too—all sorts of stuff, you know? And the more I look through it, the better idea I get of Victoria and the type of woman she was…”

“Where in the world are you going with this?” Petra asked.

I swallowed hard. I wasn’t sure where I was going with it and Leo looked confused. “And... I don’t know... but, well, Leo... I’m just not convinced she fell down those stairs.”

Leo nodded quietly for a while before answering in his low, husky voice, “How does someone’s household items give you an idea of whether or not they might have fallen down the stairs?”

Now wasn’t that just a fantastic question? It had obviously been a stupid thing to say and it was very polite of him not to point that stupidity out. After all, there really is no type of person to fall down stairs.

“I don’t know,” I had to admit.

“Don’t tell him you saw her ghost,” Petra advised.

“Just… how long she’d lived there.” Hmm, maybe I could make this sound almost plausible if I tried again?

“How long she lived there?” Leo questioned me and his eyebrows met in the middle of his handsome face and I realized I sounded completely off my rocker.

“Well, I hadn’t realized how long she’d lived there until I started looking at some of her stuff. I mean, really looking at it. Did you know she’d been in Bluebells like twenty years?”

Leo shook his head. “She was here when I moved here, but that was only five years ago.”

I’d have put money on Leo having grown up here and taken over his father’s forge—somehow he just seemed like a permanent fixture.

“So, yeah,” I went on. “And I just thought—okay, accidents can happen—but how many thousand times must she have gone up and down those stairs, Leo? If she’d lived in this house for twenty years, shouldn’t she have known those stairs like the back of her hand?” Okay, yes, it was a weak assumption, but the ghost card was out.

Leo nodded, but still looked a little confused. “Quite often, I’d assume.”

“And one day she just falls down them? Backward?”

And then he looked at me and narrowed his eyes. “How did you know she fell backwards?”

“Now you’ve done it,” Petra said, shaking her head theatrically.

“Oh,” I answered and swallowed hard. “I um... read... an article about it. And that’s what the article said.”

“Oh,” Leo said, and I suddenly panicked as I wondered if Morley even had a newspaper. Maybe they had an online presence...

“Online,” I quickly added. “The article was online.”

“I see,” he answered, and then looked at me blankly.

I smiled. “I guess one can fall down one’s own stairs,” I continued, figuring it was better to stick with the facts. “But... those stairs... well, they aren’t slippery. They’re carpeted. There’s nothing to trip on.”

“Perhaps she tripped on something else?” Leo suggested.

“Perhaps she was pushed,” Petra offered.

“Maybe it’s just my fears, as someone living alone,” I answered with an embarrassed, little laugh. “I’m single, you know.” Was that unsubtle? Well, it was out there now.

Leo nodded. “I actually see what you mean.”

“You do?” Frankly, I’d thought my argument was pretty tenuous at best.

But Leo nodded. “I’ve got a job in which a terrible accident is only ever a moment away, and there are days when my mind’s not on it and I’m on autopilot. But I’ve never even once come close to an accident. My hands,” he held up his large, workman’s hands that were covered with scrapes and callouses and were somehow the sexiest things I’d seen in years. “My hands know what they’re doing and they do it. Accidents happen, but you have a point, Gwen. If you do something day on day, you tend to do it right.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

He looked pensive for a moment, no doubt considering what this might mean. “You believe she might have been… pushed, then?” He was quiet for a moment. “And the fact that she fell down backwards... well, I hadn’t known that.”

I nodded. “I don’t believe it was... widely known. I had to do quite a bit of digging.”

“And you are a mystery novelist, aren’t you?” Leo asked, as I nodded. “Which means you must look for things that ordinary people wouldn’t—you’d pick up on such discordances.”

“Right,” I said, figuring he was giving me a bone, so I should take it. “I mean, it’s all just a theory, of course,” I replied on a shrug, trying to appear casual. It was more than that, of course, but I couldn’t justify my certainty.

“So, what do we do next with this theory of yours?”

There was only one word in that sentence to which I paid any attention. “We?”

“Well… if you don’t mind?” Leo hedged. “I mean… I liked Victoria and if something untoward happened to her, I would definitely like to get to the bottom of it. I can’t claim I knew her that well, but she was a good customer.” He paused. He’d absently picked up a tool from his bench and was now turning it in his hands as if it gave him comfort. “She appreciated iron.”

For a brief moment that I wasn’t proud of, I was quite grateful to Victoria Willis for having died and provided a means to bring Leo and me together. I suppressed the thought instantly though; it was very sad that she’d died, but she had died and while I didn’t welcome it, if some good came out of her death, then that was surely a good thing... right? Unless, of course, Leo had been the one to kill her. Which I still didn’t believe he was... yet. What had she been pointing at?

“I’d appreciate any help I can get,” I nodded, perhaps a little too eagerly. “I don’t know the town at all yet and certainly not the people.”

“Well, then, I’d be happy to help.” His smile was shy but creased his rugged face in appealing ways. “But I do have one question for you first.”

“Okay?”

“You must have thought I was a suspect?”

I swallowed harder than I had all the other times. “Um, not so much a suspect. I just found the iron filings in the house and decided to investigate, and you were my first stop.”

“Well, let’s get one thing out of the way first: I didn’t kill Victoria.”

I gave him a smile. “I didn’t assume you had.”

Chapter Four

The Bull

There were precedents for writers of detective and mystery fiction getting involved in real-life crimes, both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie had done so with varying degrees of success.

Whether or not either of those genre-defining luminaries had been aided by an ability to see the dead, I wasn’t in a position to say. Presumably not, so it reasoned that I’d be better at it than they were.

“Do you think involving the overlarge smithy on whom you have a crush is such a good idea?” asked Petra, as we walked through town. Well, I walked and she floated.

With Leo there, I couldn’t answer her, and she well knew it, but I shot a glance at her, all the same. It did nothing to silence her, as usual.

“As long as you’re trying to solve this crime,” she continued. “And you seem dead set on that even though I’m not sure that’s the smartest move either—then you should probably be aware that your Mr. Blacksmith should still be considered a suspect.”

She was probably right on both accounts. I felt a moral duty to look into Victoria’s murder on the basis that no one else had or presumably would (because everyone else deemed it an accident). And I felt a personal duty to get to know Leo better because I was fairly sure that opportunities like him didn’t walk into the life of a forty-two-year-old woman every day. But Petra was correct in assuming that Leo could still be a suspect—after all, it was his filings I’d found in Victoria’s kitchen.

“What’s her name—the woman we’re going to visit?” I asked Leo, as we passed into the outskirts of the little town, buildings becoming more spaced out and fields starting to dominate.

“Joanne,” Leo replied. “Joanne Packer. She was Victoria’s closest friend that I’m aware of. Both single women, of about my age, give or take five or so years,” (how polite not to say ‘our age’). “They used to meet for a drink most Friday nights and had coffee and cake most Tuesday mornings.”

I looked over at him. “And how in the world do you know that?”

He shrugged. “Victoria told me.”

“She told you such... boring details?”

He chuckled at that. “You certainly have no problem stating things as you see them.”

I blushed. “Well, I guess you could say that’s the New Yorker in me.”

He gave me an arched eyebrow in response, but then nodded. “Victoria was a friendly woman—lots of friends—but I’d guess Joanne knew her best.”

“And she lives out this way?”

“Runs a dairy farm up Birchill,” confirmed Leo. “You can see it up there, just past the ridge.” He pointed in the direction of the dairy farm, presumably. “Bit of a walk, I’m afraid.”

I squinted up at the distant farmhouse, rolling pasture spilling away from it on all sides, dotted with cows. ‘Bit of a walk’ was an understatement.

“Why don’t we cut across the fields?” I wasn’t a country girl by any stretch, but it seemed to me that hopping the fence and taking the straight route would cut miles out of our journey and I was all for cutting miles out of our journey.

Leo frowned, sucked at his teeth, and pointed to a sign. “That’s why.”

The sign proclaimed in big red letters, ‘BEWARE OF THE BULL!’

I walked over to the fence and climbed up onto the second bar to get a vantage of the whole immense field. “I don’t see any bulls.”

“Doesn’t mean he’s not there. Might be asleep under a tree.”

“In which case, we’d still be safe.”

“Unless he wakes up.”

I shook my head. “Imagine; a big guy like you scared of a little, silly bull.”

Leo raised his eyebrows. “He’s not exactly little or silly and, besides, have you ever been chased by a bull?”

“No. We don’t get so many in Manhattan.” I hadn’t actually lived in Manhattan, but it was a place he’d have heard of, so I went with it.

“It’s not something you want to experience.”

I kept climbing, swinging a leg over the fence. “Well, I’m fairly sure the bull and I won’t be introduced this morning. You coming?”

“Are you trying to kill yourself?” Petra asked, glaring at me. “You heard the man—there’s a bull!”

I didn’t say anything in response, as Leo was right there, but I frowned at her, all the same.

“Need I remind you that I’m dead enough for the both of us?” Petra continued, frowning at me in that mother-hen way of hers. I just looked over at her and smiled.

Leo sighed and followed me over the fence. “If the bull charges, I’m going to leave you behind and save myself.”

I grinned. “We both know you wouldn’t do that.”

Another sigh. “You’re right. Irritatingly, I wouldn’t. I’d distract the bull so you could get away. Which seems very unfair when I think about it.”

“Really? I can see an upside.”

We both laughed at that. How much of a threat the bull posed, I couldn’t say, but I was very grateful for it because it gave us something to joke about and talk about an adventure! I figured I might be able to use this exact scenario in one of my stories. Not to mention the fact that Leo and I now felt less like comparative strangers who’d met less than twenty-four hours ago, and more like two people out to break the law. And speaking of the law, yes, I still had to remind myself that Leo was a suspect in all of this, but somehow I didn’t believe he’d actually done it. There was just something about him that was soft, something shy, and something kind. I didn’t imagine murderers could possess such qualities but then, what did I really know about murderers? In short? Not much.

“Where’s this big, bad bull then?” I asked, once I hopped down onto the verdant pasture and faced Leo, who was busily scanning the perimeter for said bull.

“I didn’t say it would attack, I said it could.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“Strangely, I am.”

“And why is that?”

He shrugged. “This is lose-lose for me. If the bull doesn’t attack, I look a fool and if it does, I get gored.”

I laughed. “That really is lose-lose.”

“On balance, this is the best result, but I feel embarrassed.”

“You’ve got nothing to feel embarrassed about,” I smiled.

“At least if the bull attacked, I’d be able to save you, which would make me look good.”

“And I would most definitely visit you in the hospital.”

“Unless I’m dead.”

I cocked my head to the side. “In which case, I would visit you in the morgue.”

“Delightful,” he grunted.

We continued up the hill, across the fields, over another fence, and through another field occupied by largely docile cattle, and reached the farmhouse beyond the ridge. The barns around the house were modern structures of breeze block and corrugated metal, but the house itself looked as if it had been there for centuries, patched here and extended there but with the same ramshackle house at its center, defying time and the elements. As we approached, a black and white collie dog with an expression of manic excitement ran towards us and sprang up at Leo.

“Hello, Mickey!”

Since Leo didn’t appear to have anything edible on him, Mickey tried his luck with me instead, bouncing up, his paws leaving muddy prints on my jeans.

“Friendliest dog in the world,” commented Leo.

“Leo?” From the house, a woman had emerged. She had thick russet hair and looked exactly as I’d expect a dairy farmer to look. She had a milk sort of look with her white skin and light eyes. There were lines around those eyes and her mouth which spoke to the years she’d survived thus far. If I’d had to guess, I would have put her around fifty or thereabouts.

“Morning, Joanne!” Leo called back. “Sorry to come by unannounced. Have you got a few minutes?”

She had, and not long after, we were all sitting in her big farmhouse kitchen, while Mickey ran rings around the table, scanning for any treats that might be coming his way, either offered or dropped.

Joanne exhaled and wrapped her hands around the mug of hot tea in front of her.

“Everything I know about Victoria? That’s a big question with a small answer.” She leveled a stare at me. “Why?”

“I just had some questions,” I replied.

“Well, we’ve established that,” said Joanne dismissively. “I think the question is: why have you got some questions?”

“Well…” I wondered if telling a different lie to her than the one I’d already told Leo would hurt me with him. “Living in the house of someone… I mean, I suppose any place you move—any place old—you’re moving into the home of someone dead.”

“True enough,” Joanne answered.

“But it was so recent. And so much of Victoria is still left behind in all her things and in the house, itself. I suppose I just... well, I wanted to know her better. And Leo said you knew her best.”

“He’s looking at you funny,” said Petra. One of the great advantages of Petra was that she could read people’s faces while I was looking at someone else. Back when I was starting out as a writer, I remember her keeping an eye on my first agent while I was talking to a possible publisher. Petra’s observations let me know that I might be needing a new agent shortly.

“Knew her best?” Joanne shrugged. “Maybe.” Then she sighed. “Still, I feel I barely knew her at all.” She shook her head. “It’s Tuesdays that do it. And Fridays.”

“Tuesdays and Fridays?” I asked, confused.

She nodded. “For years we met up—not religiously, but usually. Now we don’t and I miss it. It’s on those days that I realize she’s not here anymore.”

As a writer, it’s so easy to kill people, and you don’t have to deal with the emotional collateral if you don’t wish to. Investigators don’t have that luxury. Not that I was really an investigator, per se, but I supposed in this one instance, I was investigating and that made me an investigator. Still, the title felt bulky and awkward.

“But did I really know her?” Joanne continued as she shook her head again, sipped her tea, and fed a biscuit to the waiting Mickey. “I don’t know. Vic had lots of friends. She was easy-going and personable, a kind word for everyone. She’d walk through Morley and everyone’d stop to say hello and exchange a few pleasantries with her. But I don’t know of anyone who knew more about her than her name and address. Me included, to a point. She was one of those people you’d spend a few hours talking to and realize that, although the talking was fifty-fifty, you’d bared your soul and she’d revealed nothing. So much of her life was a closed book.”

“Oh,” I said and didn’t mean to sound disappointed, but there it was.

“I don’t know why that was,” Joanne continued, a wistful expression on her face. “Just how she was, I guess. I always…” she paused, sipped her tea again, and gave another treat to the eager dog. “I always thought I’d learn more about her in time. I guess that’ll never happen now.”

It felt wrong to push her. In fact, it was starting to feel wrong to be here at all. But I was here for Victoria, I reminded myself. I was here to try to get to the bottom of what had happened to her and, hopefully, to rule Leo out. Because I really, really wanted to rule Leo out. I couldn’t say why exactly—as I’d only just met him, so it was silly to say I had a crush on him or something (even though Petra might disagree). I just—liked him. I liked his soft manner, his boyish smile, and the way he smiled shyly at me.

“Where was Victoria from originally?” I asked, reminding myself that this outing wasn’t about the reasons I liked Leo.

“Good case in point,” said Joanne with a nod. “You’d think I’d know that. Or at least know more than I do know. ‘Up north,’ she’d said. Twenty years and I never knew more than that. She never talked about her life before Morley. I must have asked, I suppose, and I don’t recall her ever refusing to answer necessarily.” She furrowed her brows. “She just talked her way around things like that. She was good at not answering a question in a way that you didn’t realize she hadn’t answered it. Her personal life was the same. She must have had one, but she kept it very much to herself. She never told me anything.”

Something about the way Joanne phrased her last comment made me ask, “She never told you anything?”

“No.” Joanne looked back down.

“But maybe there was something she didn’t tell you? Something you suspected?” I didn’t mean to sound so nosy, but the words came out, anyway.

Joanne looked up again, instantly suspicious. “And this is all just ‘cause you want to better understand the dead woman whose house you moved into?”

“I just... yes, I suppose you could say that’s exactly it,” I suggested.

Joanne’s eyes flicked from me to Leo and back again. “Leo trusts you—I can tell—and that’s the only reason I’ll tell you this, because I don’t like to gossip about people, living or dead.” She paused, making up her mind. “I wondered if maybe Vic had started... seeing someone.”

Interesting. I had a feeling this information was central to Victoria’s fate. Or maybe it was the only real information I’d gotten about her so far, so I was narrowing in on it. “Was there something specific that made you think that?” I asked.

“Who?” asked Leo, at the same time.

“I don’t know who.” Joanne shook her head and sighed. “All I saw was a man’s silhouette in her living room one evening when I was walking by. A late afternoon visitor.”

“How often did you see this man?” I asked.

“Just that one time,” said Joanne. “But… there were evenings when Vic wasn’t available and wouldn’t say why. When she’d hurry back home after one of our get-togethers. I remember seeing her diary once—when I was over for tea. And in the diary, there were a few instances where I noticed a cross drawn in the bottom left-hand corner of the page.”

“Hmm,” I said as I made a mental note to myself to search for this diary as soon as I got home.

Joanne nodded. “Vic was very organized with paperwork (she used to be a bookkeeper of some sort—that’s one thing I do know about her past). Her diary was laid out immaculately and very clearly. She used shorthand, but nothing as oblique as a cross. If something was in the bottom left-hand corner, then it meant something.”

“And maybe it was something she didn’t want other people to see?” suggested Petra.

“And maybe it was something she didn’t want other people to see?” I repeated.

“Maybe.”

“Told you,” nodded Petra.

“There aren’t many secret relationships in Morley,” mused Leo.

“That’s the truth,” nodded Joanne with a little laugh. “Look at that kid from the hall; Bastian. What he wouldn’t give for a little privacy, but it’s practically common knowledge how many different beds he’s stopping in a week. It’s only when it’s a married woman (and there’s been a few of those) that there’s any sort of secrecy and even then, it’s usually gossip and it’s usually right.”

“You met him last night,” Leo commented as he looked over at me and gave me that sweet, shy smile. “He’s a solid chap.”

“I remember.” Maybe I spoke a little too sharply.

Joanne smiled. “A new, pretty woman in town. I bet he put the moves on you.”

“Um, I guess you could say that’s basically what happened,” I answered on a smile.

Joanne nodded. “Randy little sod’s like that with anything in a skirt. He’d be a decent kid if he didn’t keep his brains between his legs, but there you go. And, apparently, he’s a generous and discreet friend to a bored housewife.” She paused. “Of course, I wouldn’t know.”

“Of course not,” I echoed.

While it had been flattering when Bastian came on to me, it wasn’t anything more than that. I wasn’t interested in him and, while he was very attractive in his boyish way, he wasn’t my type—way too forward. But then learning he was the town’s resident philanderer, and no woman was safe from his advances, no marriage sacred, I felt a stone of irritable disappointment in the pit of my stomach.

Of course, a man his age had a right to be sexually overactive, and one who looked like Bastian and had the money to match could probably have his pick. It was actually very egalitarian the way he hadn’t confined himself to women his own age but could see the attractions of the more mature woman, as well—all very laudable. In a way. But maybe it took the shine off his interest in me.

And maybe I’d been thinking one crazy night of passionate and meaningless sex would be fun, but now I wasn’t quite sure if my one crazy night was Bastian’s regular Saturday night.

“We seem to have got off-track,” said Leo.

“My point was,” Joanne went on, “if Vic had a secret boyfriend, then she must have tried hard to keep it secret, because it’s not easy to have secrets around here.”

Chapter Five

Aftermath

“What do you think?” asked Leo, as we hopped the fence and headed back the way we’d come.

“I think I could use some lunch.”

He looked at me and laughed. “That wasn’t what I meant.”

“No.” I paused. What the hell; life was short and if you didn’t ask, you didn’t get. “Do you want to come back to my house for lunch? I’ve got… food. Of some sort. Probably enough for two. And Keith from next door gave me some bottles of cider as a housewarming present... so, there’s that.”

Leo performed his usual trick of pausing and then looking away. He seemed to be looking away for longer than usual on this occasion, but still came back with a smile.

“That sounds nice.”

“Good.”

“‘Nice’ isn’t exactly that encouraging though, is it?” Petra asked as she appeared beside me. Even though I didn’t respond (because Leo was right there)—I was thinking along the same lines. ‘Nice’ wasn’t very encouraging, and I had to wonder if he would have preferred that I hadn’t asked. Maybe I’d misread him and he actually wasn’t interested in me, but was just being friendly. Maybe just being neighborly?

“What about Victoria? Any thoughts?” Leo’s voice sounded as if he had some of his own thoughts, but wanted to hear mine first.

“I think that anyone who can go twenty years without revealing anything about her past, even in passing, has a reason for not wanting to talk about it.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” nodded Leo. “And similar on the subject of the boyfriend.”

“Yeah.” Whether it was a boyfriend or a late night visitor of some other description, whoever the man was—it seemed Victoria had kept him deliberately secret and there had to be a reason for that. From what I knew, usually people who were in relationships wanted other people to know they were in relationships. Unless they had a reason why they wouldn’t want such a fact known. Things that make you go hmm...

I had more to say on the subject, but as we entered the last field before rejoining the road that led back into town, a noise pulled my attention.

“What is that?”

Leo was looking out beyond me as Petra spoke: “Bulls were a lot bigger in my day.”

Regardless, this one looked pretty damn big to me. The noise I’d heard was the bull’s snorting breath and its front hoof pawing at the ground, its tiny eyes fixed on us with a look that was anything but benign.

“How fast can you run?” asked Leo, mostly from the side of his mouth.

“Probably not as fast as him.”

“Glad you’re keeping your sense of humor, but when I say run; run.”

“Leo…”

“Now is not the time to argue.” He was slipping his jacket off.

The bull lowered its head.

Leo looked at me. “Run.”

Universe forgive me, but I did what he said. Which might seem cowardly and probably was, but I was scared.

“Faster, Gwendolyn!” Petra called beside me.

“Jesus, at a time like this, can’t you call me by my name?” I yelled back at her.

“No!” she replied.

Behind me, I could hear Leo shouting, and I looked back over my shoulder as I ran to see him yelling at the bull and waving his jacket at it. Drawn by the movement, the bull was charging straight for him. Scared out of my wits that the man I was quickly forming a liking on was about to get gored by an angry bull, I kept looking at him rather than forward and tripped in my headlong dash down the hill.

“Shit!” I went flying, landing on my shoulder and tumbling.

“Gwendolyn! The bull!” Petra yelled.

Apparently, me rolling down the hill was a much more interesting target for the bull than Leo’s jacket, because the big beast skidded to a halt in its pursuit of Leo and took off after me instead.

“Gwen, get up! Get up!” Leo bellowed, chasing after the bull as fast as he could.

But the bull had a start and a surprising turn of speed for its size. It was bearing down on me, its massive, sharp hooves tearing up the ground beneath it. I, meanwhile, was completely frozen in terror, even as I pushed off the ground and then took a step forward before a horrible pain in my ankle made me pause.

“Go!” Petra yelled at me.

I glanced back at the bull and watched it veer off again, distracted by something else.

“You stop chasing her this instant, you appalling beast!” Out to my right, Petra was doing an animated dance, leaping around for all she was worth.

Exactly what animals saw when they looked at Petra, I couldn’t say, but she and I had established over the years that most of them saw something. Dogs didn’t seem to—Mickey had ignored her completely—but dogs were perhaps too close to humans to see spirits? Or maybe it was just Petra they couldn’t see? Or maybe they saw her but didn’t think much of her? I wasn’t sure. Cats—who would kill you in your sleep if they thought there was something in it for them—always reacted to Petra. Whether they saw what I saw or some other apparition, I could only guess, but right now I was just grateful that bulls could also see ghosts. Because Petra was the only reason the bull wasn’t getting up close and personal with me.

Reaching me, Leo skidded to the ground at my side.

“Are you okay?”

“My ankle,” I answered and with that, Leo leaned down, gathered me around my shoulders and below my knees, and picked me up into his arms as if I didn’t weigh a thing. Then he carried me back to the fence, moving as quickly as he was able. I wasn’t sure what to do with my arms, so I looped them around his neck and tried not to look as flustered as I felt.

“Something distracted him, er, the bull,” I managed.

Looking across the field, I saw the bull charge Petra, going straight through her spectral form.

“That’s right! You thought you were going to get me but no!” She yelled at him. The bull tried again, with the same result.

The bull seemed to cotton onto the fact that Petra wasn’t actually there, because it soon lost interest in trying to ram her and turned from Petra and leveled its narrow-eyed stare on Leo and me.

“It sees us,” I whispered to him.

Immediately, he started running, going for the fence for all he was worth, the bull gaining ground behind us. As we reached the fence, Leo gingerly placed me on the opposite side and I held onto the fence to avoid putting any weight on my injured ankle. A second later, he vaulted himself over it and then bent over and caught his breath just before the bull came to a screeching halt with an angry snort. It stared at us through the bars, tossed its head, then wandered off.

“You okay over there?” called Petra.

“Yeah,” I answered without thinking.

“Yeah, what?” asked Leo as he glanced up and looked at me, still in the process of trying to catch his breath.

“Just… yeah.”

We stood there together in the long grass and bracken of the roadside verge, so exhausted that I didn’t even consider the proximity of our bodies.

“Do you want to say ‘I told you so’?” I suggested.

“I don’t think I need to.”

I laughed and Leo joined in. And then we both kept laughing as Leo finally stood up and raised his arms above his head, stretched as he shook his head, and then laughed some more. The laughter was of relief as much as anything. Both of us were exhilarated to have survived. Now that we were safe on the opposite side of the fence, it seemed funny and ridiculous that we’d both just been charged by a bull.

Our eyes met, and I don’t know what in the world prompted me to do what I did next. Maybe it was the elation of having survived a near death experience, or the fact that I owed my life to Leo. Or maybe it was the ridiculousness of Petra as her dance pulled the bull’s attention away from us. Whatever the reason, I took the step that separated us, and leaning up on my foot that wasn’t hurting, I kissed him right on the mouth.

For a moment, I thought I felt Leo respond, but it was only just a moment and afterward, I wondered if I’d imagined even that, because he pulled back almost instantly.

“I’m sorry, I can’t, I…”

“Oh, my God, I’m so sorry,” I pulled back too, and could feel the flush of embarrassment staining my entire face. Had I really just kissed him? A man I didn’t really even know? And had he really just turned me down flat? Yes, yes, he had. “I shouldn’t have done that. I should have…”

“No, it’s not that I didn’t want you to or that I... don’t want you to. I…” Leo seemed to lose his train of thought as he looked skyward and sighed. When he looked back down at me, there was guilt in his eyes. “It’s just that I’m... well, I’m married.”

The shattering noise that might vaguely have been heard over the pleasant background sounds of the English countryside was my hastily constructed dreams crashing to the ground into a million pieces. I’d met Leo less than a day ago so it was true that I had little real investment in him, but it’s amazing how much you can build a potential relationship up in your mind in a short time, particularly if your life has been thin on romance.

“I’m sorry,” Leo muttered again, “I should have mentioned…”

“I shouldn’t have assumed.”

“Yes, but I allowed you to think…” He cleared his throat. “That is, I never...” He cleared his throat again. “I believe I led you on and for that, I am sorry.”

“I never asked…” And then I thought of something and looked down at his left hand. There was no wedding band.

“I don’t wear the ring because the forge heats up…”

“You don’t have to explain…”

He looked at me, and there was real regret in his eyes. He sighed. “The sad bloody truth is that I do like you, Gwen…”

It was nothing but the awkward, broken aftermath this sort of situation always leaves in its wake: both parties tripping over themselves to take responsibility for something that never should have happened in the first place.

The truth was, I shouldn’t have kissed him like I had (if a man kissed a woman in that sudden, unasked for way, then there would, quite rightly, be hell to pay). But Leo might have mentioned he was married from the moment I’d met him or thereabouts, especially as… maybe it was my imagination, but we did seem to be getting along pretty well.

“Didn’t see that coming,” said Petra, confirming what I’d thought.

“I should explain,” Leo started.

“There’s nothing to explain,” I answered on a shrug. “You’re married, and I made a mistake in thinking you were... interested.”

“I am interested,” he insisted, before he shook his head. “That’s the damned regrettable truth. I am interested in you, Gwen, but I... I can’t be.”

“Right,” I answered and gave him a little smile I certainly didn’t feel. “The point is: we don’t have to overanalyze something that’s pretty clear.” I didn’t want to dwell on it; I wanted to go home.

“Shona and I…” He was apparently going to explain whether I needed to hear it or not. Maybe he needed to say the words to make himself feel better about the fact that he hadn’t mentioned he had a wife until now. “We’ve been having problems. It’s been…” He breathed in deeply.

“Leo, you don’t have to tell me. It’s none of my business.”

“I want to tell you,” he insisted, shaking his head. “She’s still my wife and I still care about—I still love her, I suppose. It’s just difficult sometimes and…” He looked down. “I think I got carried away being around a woman… being around you—when being around you isn’t difficult. It’s actually quite... easy.”

“I’m easy?” I suggested with a smile, trying to lighten the mood.

“Not what I meant. You’re fun and different and... American.”

“I suppose I am that—American.”

He glanced down at the ground and shook his head again. “I enjoyed talking to you, and I didn’t want it to stop, and I thought that if I told you I was married, then you might not want to be friends with me. Which, now I think about it, was pretty arrogant of me.”

“But,” I added, “given what just happened, also pretty accurate.”

He looked at me then and smiled that lopsided, boyish, yet now sad, smile. “Still.”

Would I have stopped being friendly with him if I’d known he was married? Would I have sought him out so eagerly this morning or accepted his help so readily? Probably not. No, definitely not. I wasn’t someone who wanted to come between anyone’s marriage, whether it was a ‘difficult’ marriage or not. I definitely wasn’t a home wrecker.

“I think, in the circumstances,” said Leo, carefully. “Lunch might be a bad idea.”

I laughed. “I think you’re right.”

“It’s not that I wouldn’t like to.”

“No. It’s that you can’t and... I won’t let you.”

“And it’s not that I think a man and a woman can’t have lunch together without it being…”

“I understand.”

He cleared his throat. Again. “It’s not that I think you’d try to kiss me again.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“Right.”

“Right.”

“I just—”

“Do you think this is making the situation any less awkward?” I asked.

“Possibly not. I just didn’t want you to think…”

“I don’t.”

“… that…”

“Leo, I don’t think anything.”

A pause.

“Another time…”

“For sure.”

“When it’s all sunk in.”

I didn’t know what that meant. “Definitely.”

I looked back along the road into town. There was only the one route, and we both had to take it.

“So… we should probably talk more about Victoria,” I offered as I took a step and then winced as I remembered my ankle.

“Your ankle.”

“I can manage,” I said and took another step that hurt worse than the first.

“I can still carry you.”

I shook my head. “No, that’s a bad idea.”

“Gwen, you can’t walk.”

“Leo, you’re married.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“It means I can manage on my own,” I answered, and gave him a little smile.

“At least let me be your crutch,” he said as he offered me his arm. I figured holding onto his elbow wasn’t breaking any rules, so I took it. He felt warm and smelled of man, and it was all I could do to breathe through my mouth.

“I think you’re a beautiful woman,” he said in a soft voice.

“Can we please not do this?”

He nodded. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.”

“So, Victoria then?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes. There’s plenty to talk about where she’s concerned.”

“Indeed.”

“Where to start?”

The walk back into Morley-on-Avon was excruciating, both in its length and silence. It was hard to believe that two people walking side by side (well, one using the other as a crutch) had ever done so for so long without a word being said between them. It wasn’t that I wasn’t trying, but suddenly it seemed as if there was nothing to say, as if there were no topics on which we even could hold a conversation, Victoria included.

Literally, all I could think to talk about was his wife, and that wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have. And I was fairly sure he didn’t want to have it either.

Finally (and it really did feel final) we reached the crossroads in the center of Morley, where he’d go one way and I the other.

“I should assist you home,” he said.

I immediately shook my head, even though my ankle was screaming at me to agree.

“No, I can make it if I just walk slowly,” I argued.

“You’re sure?”

I nodded. “I’m sure.”

“Well, this was nice,” said Leo, which, given how long he’d had to think about how to say goodbye, seemed the most ridiculous thing he could possibly have said.

“Which part specifically?” I asked.

Leo considered my question. “The start more than the end?”

I couldn’t help laughing. It didn’t help to be reminded that he was a genuinely nice guy whose company I really enjoyed. “I’m pretty sure we have more nice days ahead of us,” I managed, even though I didn’t believe my words at all. It was just a nice way of saying goodbye. “I think we’ll be good friends... eventually. When everything cools down.”

I put out my hand, and Leo shook it.

“I would like that very much,” he said in a soft, wistful voice. “You’re... you’re special, I’m pretty sure.”

“Well, I appreciate that.” He didn’t let go of my hand until we both looked down at our joined ones. Then he dropped it like it was scalding hot. “But maybe we give it a week,” I finished.

“Or two.”

“Or three.”

We went our separate ways and though I was now alone, the world suddenly seemed louder than it had thirty seconds ago.

“That was awkward,” said Petra.

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have kissed him, Gwendolyn, it was most certainly not ladylike.”

“Right.”

“Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned here.”

“Thank you, Petra.”

The ghost shrugged. “I was brought up being told that kissing men was wrong—entirely too forward. Now, I had a somewhat strict upbringing—very strict by your modern standards—but perhaps it was situations like this that my governess was trying to avoid.”

“Maybe.”

We got back to Bluebells and I was relieved to be home.

Though, to be honest, it still didn’t feel like home. Which was natural, given how recently I’d moved in. But it felt oddly less like home than it had this morning when I’d left. Partly I thought that was because the ill-advised kiss had made me wish I lived anywhere other than this small town in which I was likely to run into my mistake on a daily basis. But I thought it was also a factor of what I’d learned about Victoria. I hadn’t learned much about her to be sure, but what I had found out made me feel more like a lodger in her house rather than a resident in my own. She seemed to have been happy enough with her life, but it was hard to ignore the streak of loneliness that ran through it. Why had she kept such secrets? About her past? About this man in her life? What had she been afraid of?

Suddenly the walls of my new home seemed to radiate the same questions, as if over the years of her occupancy, they’d absorbed something of their previous owner. As if she’d asked herself these very same questions.

“Maybe we should take another look through Victoria’s stuff?” I suggested, thinking particularly of the diary of Victoria’s that Joanne had mentioned.

“Have we finished discussing the kiss and your total humiliation?” asked Petra, seemingly completely unaware of how rude she sounded.

I couldn’t help but laugh. “What’s to talk about?” I asked with a shrug. “It happened and I can’t think of anything I regret more.”

“Well, while your regrets are quite understandable, I will tell you that Leo closed his eyes when you kissed him,” Petra said, and I frowned over at her.

“So what?”

“So a man doesn’t close his eyes during a kiss unless he likes said kiss.”

“Well, he also pulled away a split second later, so it’s a moot point.”

“True, but my point was just that he liked it, and that means he likes you.”

“Doesn’t matter—he’s married and I’m not going there.”

She nodded. “I agree.”

It was my turn to nod. “Good. Now that the subject of Leo and me is dead and buried, let’s talk about the woman who was killed here.”

“Good to have a distraction,” nodded Petra.

Chapter Six

The Lady of the House

The things of Victoria’s that remained in the house—bits and pieces that had been no use to thrift stores—somehow seemed wrong to throw out.

Somewhere, in among the detritus of existence, I thought there might be something that could tell us where she’d come from or something that might hint at the man whom she’d been seeing. Both seemed like the main questions to solve at the present. And I was fairly sure that ‘something’ was her diary. Which, as of yet, had not announced itself anywhere.

The tidy household budgets, preserved with her financial records, went back years, maybe even all the way back to when Victoria moved to Morley-on-Avon, but no further. For someone who seemed to keep records as a matter of course, all itemized and properly filed, the absence of anything from before her move seemed both significant and suspicious.

“Perhaps she was on the run from an abusive husband,” suggested Petra. “Such things happened quite often in my day.” She paused. “Or perhaps there was an illegitimate child involved.”

I looked at her. “I doubt that was the case.”

“Perhaps Victoria was addicted to gambling or to liquor.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It shows she was of a poor constitution and easily given to drink and play.”

It looked more like Victoria had been in witness protection; her whole life starting in Morley, as if she simply hadn’t existed before moving here. “Can you just... look for something that resembles a diary?” I asked, figuring I should try to put Petra to good use.

“Did she have an occupation?” asked Petra.

“She must have had an income of some kind.” Petra didn’t always grasp the concept of women going to work. “I guess I should have asked Joanne.”

Everyone I’d spoken to since arriving in Morley had inevitably mentioned Victoria, even if it was just in passing, most probably because I was living in her house. And yet not one had mentioned what she did for a living. And, as far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything left in the house that might indicate what she’d done for work. It seemed like she’d just gotten by somehow in fine style without actually doing anything.

“Didn’t that Joanne woman say something about book-keeping?” asked Petra.

“She said that was what Victoria used to do, but she didn’t make it sound like Victoria was a bookkeeper while she lived in Morley,” I nodded, looking at another sheet of diligently laid-out numbers. “Everything here is so carefully recorded.”

“Perhaps she was fiddling the accounts for a large corporation? If she were a gambler with a bit of a drinking problem, that would certainly make sense.”

“I think we’d need a little more evidence before we go accusing of her of any of that.” I looked up at Petra, who was currently wearing a blue dress she often wore during the evening. “I don’t suppose you could just ask her?”

“How many times must I tell you, Gwendolyn?” Petra sighed. “That’s not how it works.”

I did know that, but I still felt the need to ask every now and then because, while I was familiar with how it didn’t work, I was still very vague on how it did.

When she wasn’t here, hanging out with me, Petra was in Limbo, that waiting room of the dead occupied by those who didn’t exit quickly after death. It was from Limbo that ghosts manifested into our world. That much I grasped, but a description of what Limbo entailed was something Petra had never been able to convey; apparently it simply defied words. It wasn’t just a ghostly version of earth—that I got. The dead didn’t hang out as if they were in a members-only club until their time came to leave this plane in a more permanent way. That said, they did mix, and they did get to know one another in some sense.

“So, why can’t you ask them a specific question?” I’d asked Petra on many occasions.

She would always shrug. “We don’t talk.”

“Must be a very quiet place.”

And Petra would pull a face. “We communicate. We just don’t talk.”

“So, what—you use sign language?”

And that would earn me a frown.

Apparently, communication in Limbo was more geared to the spiritual than the corporeal—you needed to get out of the habit of using your mouth and tongue to form words, but apparently body language was also out. You also needed to jettison the idea that communication involved talking about the weather, where you came from, or what sort of music you were into—such things had no value in Limbo. Communication was on an instinctive and emotional level—spirits ‘understood’ each other, though not through an exchange of ideas but through ‘generated waves of self’ as Petra had referred to it. I wondered if it was akin to dogs sniffing each other’s butts in order to find out their life histories.

“I don’t understand,” I said, not for the first time.

“Me neither,” admitted Petra. “At least I don’t understand it here, on this plain. Maybe not there either. But when I’m there—in Limbo—when anyone is there, you just do it. You don’t think about it and you don’t have to understand it because thinking and understanding don’t mean much in Limbo. There is only existence. Together, apart, it’s all the same.”

“Sounds awful,” I judged.

Petra shook her head. “It’s really rather wonderful.”

“Then why do you keep coming back here?” This was another regular question and one I felt she was unwilling to answer rather than unable.

“I suppose I like your company.”

There was more to it than that, I was pretty sure. Petra Shearwater probably had as many secrets as Victoria Willis, but right now, it was Victoria’s that were occupying my thoughts.

I wrote down what we knew about Victoria thus far, which didn’t take long, and Petra and I stared at the paper for a while. But every time I tried to focus on the words, I heard some others in my head.

‘I’m married.’ And then I pictured the guilty look on Leo’s face. And I thought about how Petra had said he’d closed his eyes when we kissed.

I breathed out a long breath. “I’m going for a drink.”

Petra said nothing, but she knew me well enough to know that I was going to drown my embarrassment in alcohol. She gave me some space, and I appreciated it.

***

The Swan was quieter tonight, and I strolled to the bar and ordered a cider, because this was the West Country and… when in Rome.

I paid and then walked over to the same table I’d occupied last night.

“Alone again.”

It was Bastian Chambon, of course. Smiling and looking just as handsome as he had the night before.

“Long day,” I replied, before frowning at him. “So, do you live here or something?”

He chuckled. “No.” Then he shook his head. “But there’s not a lot to do in Morley, so here I am.”

I nodded but didn’t say anything. Just stared down into the amber liquid of my glass.

“Want to talk about it?” Bastian asked.

“Depends.” I raised my eyebrows. “Will our conversation be punctuated by thinly veiled attempts to get me into the sack?”

“Certainly not,” said Bastian, stoutly. “I never veil anything, thinly or otherwise.” I couldn’t help but smile at that, even if I did shake my head and sigh. “If my intentions last night were vague, then I apologize.”

“They weren’t vague.”

“Good, because I was one hundred percent trying to sleep with you. Sorry if that didn’t come across.”

I couldn’t help smiling; how did he manage to make comments like that charming? Or was I just so far away from the dating scene that I couldn’t recognize an asshole when I saw one? Probably the latter. I definitely hadn’t been able to recognize a married man when I’d seen one...

“But,” Bastian shrugged, “if you don’t want me to mention how attractive I find you, how much I do want to get you into bed, and the amount of fun I think we’d both have there, then we can talk about whatever’s bothering you.”

“Wow, what an offer!”

“I’m nothing if not a gentleman.”

I rolled my eyes at that, but couldn’t help my smirk. Or maybe I just wanted company and, after today, it was nice to get that company from someone who found me attractive and was definitely not married. Or...

“Are you married?”

Bastian looked at me like I’d just asked him if was a eunuch. “Married?” he repeated, frowning. “Um, have you listened to a word I’ve said?”

I shrugged. “You could be married and still trying to get me into bed.”

He shook his head. “I’m not married.” Then he lifted up his left hand. “See?”

I nodded. “Just wanted to make sure.”

“Does that mean—”

“No,” I interrupted. “It doesn’t mean anything other than the fact that I didn’t want to talk to you if you were married.”

“Well, fair lady, worry yourself not, for I’m unmarried,” he answered in a sing-song voice. If he was trying to impersonate someone, I wasn’t sure who that person was.

***

It was an unexpectedly pleasant evening.

Bastian was as good as his word and never made a move on me. He didn’t bring up anything sexual, didn’t lean in uncomfortably close, he didn’t even mention how well-endowed he was—something he’d mentioned in the conversation we’d had the night before. When it came time for more drinks, we each paid for two rounds, as if to make clear that this was a meeting of friends and nothing else.

When he wasn’t thinking with his little head, Bastian Chambon turned out to be surprisingly good company. Although I didn’t tell him exactly what had happened earlier in the day, he was a good listener, and I soon found myself pouring out my recent woes; the end of my relationship with Ian, my move here, my plan for new books (for which, at the moment, I had no ideas). He listened, he sympathized, he laughed, and he offered advice. Overall, he was nice.

We talked a little about him too, more so as the evening wore on and he began to open up a bit, letting the façade of the rogue drop away. I got the impression that Bastian liked being thought of as the town stud almost as much as he liked being it, and it was a part he took great pleasure in playing. It came with certain expectations and one of them was that he shouldn’t have any real interest in the women whom he pursued beyond the obvious. And yet it was clear that there was more to him, no matter how hard he tried to hide it.

“So, there’s never been anyone special?” I lightly pressed, because in our short acquaintance, I’d learned that if you pushed Bastian too much, you just got the silly, cocksure answer from Morley-on-Avon’s resident lothario.

“They’re all special. In their own way.”

“Is that right?” I grinned.

“Actually, yes,” he nodded, as if he was admitting something. “I like women. And I mean that sincerely. I like sex too. Obviously. Enormously. But I like women, as well. And…” he paused, ordering his thoughts. “… I wouldn’t like sex if not for women, but I still like women, even without the sex.”

“Then why so many?”

He spread his hands. “Just more to like.”

“Really?”

Another, almost guilty look. “No.”

“Then?”

He shook his head. “I guess you could just say I’m cliche.”

“How are you cliche?”

He shrugged. “I just haven’t found that one yet?”

“Oh, that cliche.”

He chuckled. “Maybe I haven’t been looking all that hard or all that well, though. Maybe my reputation means that the right one isn’t looking for me, or wouldn’t want me if she found me.”

I cocked my head to the side as I thought about it. “That could definitely be. Women don’t take men like you seriously.”

He nodded and didn’t seem surprised by my comment. “Much as I enjoy my life—and I really do—that is a disadvantage. And it may be too late to fix it now.” He sounded almost wistful. He looked up at me. “But I’m not done looking.”

“Maybe think about what you really want in your life—whether it’s just one-night stands—”

“I very rarely have a one-night stand,” he corrected me. “I like repeat visits.”

I laughed at that. “Well, think about whether you want to keep the women you bed at arm’s length where your heart is concerned or whether you might like something... longer lasting.”

He nodded. “Eventually, I’ll find her. The one. One thing I’m good at is looking for her.” He shook his head and then made a strange pouting sort of expression that seemed in opposition with the rest of him. “My biggest fear is that I met her already and let her go with a pleasant memory and a pat on the bottom.”

As the bell behind the bar rang to signal last orders, we stood and made our way to the door, definitely tipsy but definitely not drunk.

“I’ll walk you back,” said Bastian. “And before you can say it, I know what you’re thinking, and normally you’d be correct. But I made a promise and I stand by it.”

“Okay.”

It wasn’t far to my little cottage, but I still felt better having an escort. Or maybe…

Now that Bastian wasn’t hitting on me, I suddenly felt a blow to my ego. Which made absolutely zero sense, and I was fairly sure that had I been thinking with an alcohol untainted mind, I would have been thinking more rationally. But c’est la vie.

“I’ll say goodnight,” said Bastian when we reached my front door. “I... well, thanks for tonight. I actually really enjoyed myself.”

“You sound surprised.”

His eyebrows arched for the evening sky. “I guess I am. Usually, I try to get through the talking as quickly as possible.”

I had to laugh at that. “Well, thanks for listening.”

“It was my pleasure,” said Bastian. “And since the evening is officially over and the restrictions you placed on me are no longer…”

Even though you’d think I’d already learned my lesson, I leaned into him and kissed him on the mouth.

Bastian didn’t lose a second but responded instantly, opening his mouth as his tongue invaded mine, his hands cupping my body and pressing me more tightly to him. If I’d had any doubt about his attraction for me, then those doubts were quickly dispelled.

I broke the kiss, but Bastian still held me, and I made no move to get away. He kissed my mouth, my cheek, and then down my neck, whispering as he did so, his voice low and soft and apparently hard-wired to my libido.

“I think I told you yesterday that I had no plans for tonight,” he whispered. “Guess what?”

“What?”

He pulled away and looked down at me, a smirk playing with the ends of his lips. “I still have no plans.”

He was still young and arrogant and had apparently worked his way through a decent number of the town’s women. But he was also pleasant and surprisingly sweet. Plus, it was flattering to be desired by such a handsome and younger man. Sex with Bastian was bound to be fun, and it wouldn’t mean anything—there wouldn’t be any strings attached. It could just be a fun night of consequenceless passion. Not to mention the fact that I hadn’t had sex, or exciting sex, in years. All told, it didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world.

***

I woke up and glanced at the illuminated numbers of the clock by my bed: 4.05.

Not when I wanted to be waking up and not when I usually did (you develop pretty lazy sleeping patterns when your commute is from the bed to your desk) but maybe I’d gotten unused to sleeping with someone else in the bed, and I was certainly unused to sleeping with someone else in the bed who wasn’t my ex-boyfriend, Ian.

Turning over, careful not to move too sharply, I looked at the man who was lightly snoring beside me. Bastian Chambon contrived to be irritatingly handsome even when he was asleep, which is something few people can pull off. Actually, he slept with a smile, and managed to look pretty pleased with himself, which shouldn’t have been possible. Then again, he did have a reason to look that way; he’d gone to sleep, safe in the knowledge of a job well done.

What was that British phrase again? ‘A damn good seeing to’. Yeah, that about covered it. I guess you could put it down to practice making perfect—by all accounts, Bastian had put in the man hours and so he knew his way around a bed, and around a woman. You could also say that a man who loves his job never works a day in his life and, though I was flattering myself, I took pride in the fact that Bastian had enjoyed last night as much as I had (which was a lot). All that might make it sound like the sex had been textbook box-filling (so to speak), going through the motions. Fun, but nothing more. And that really didn’t do it justice.

I’d never been with a ‘player’ before (or at least not since college) and Bastian earned his reputation both in his skill between the sheets and his physical attributes (which, it turned out, weren’t just idle bragging). He did everything with style; taking the trouble to point out that his condoms were imported from Europe by a company called ‘El Toro Grande’, successfully undoing my buttons with his teeth as if he did the same every day, and athletically changing positions as if to prove he knew them all and was quite the sportsman. But that considerate sweetness I’d noted in the bar was clearly more than a way to ‘pull the birds’.

It wasn’t just that Bastian was a generous lover, he was also a surprisingly intimate one. I didn’t feel like I was just another woman in a line of unending conquests. And I also didn’t feel like I’d gotten the same performance as Karen had the night before or whichever bored house wife he’d been with last week. I was sure he had his moves, his signature trademarks, but I never felt like just one more woman in a long and neverending line.

At the very least, Bastian offered a bespoke love-making service tailored to the woman he happened to be with. But I also felt that, in contrast to his reputation, he actually cared about me. And I was fairly sure he hadn’t been lying—he did care about the women he made love to. Maybe he didn’t love them, but I didn’t think he slept with anyone he didn’t genuinely like. I had, when I was young, as most people had, a certain amount of casual sex—some of it even anonymous because college had been a wild time. But this wasn’t that; this was Bastian and me, together, and even if it was just for one night (and I was sure it wouldn’t repeat because my itch had been scratched and that was all she wrote), then it still meant something.

That said, it was also just the stress release I’d needed. All that sweetness and intimacy to one side, it was good (in fact great) for someone who’d been a little lonely in that area for the last few years, to find herself in the hands of someone who could take care of business so thoroughly, so satisfyingly and so repeatedly. At the end, I just felt that beautiful, exhausted calm that washes over you after a really great romp between the sheets, and I wondered how long it had been since I’d felt like this.

“You’re welcome,” Bastian had said, because he was still Bastian Chambon and was invested in the reputation he’d built up—if people found out that he cared about the women he slept with then where would he be?

So that was nice. A nice way to end my first week in my new home, and maybe a nice way to draw a line under my old one. All good.

Except… that raised a point; all was good. Bastian wasn’t a restless sleeper, so he hadn’t woken me up. He’d done a very good job of tiring me out enough that I should have slept through. And yet here I was awake.

What had woken me?

A flicker from the doorway and I clamped my hand over my mouth to stop from crying out in shock. I’d never really been shocked to see ghosts because I’d started seeing them at such a young age that it had quickly become normal to me. But when apparitions appeared suddenly in the night, rousing me from sleep then hovering nearby, waves of anger passing across their fluctuating forms, then that was still enough to make me jump.

Beside me, Bastian stirred in response to my sudden movement, but he didn’t wake up.

I slipped quietly out of bed, tugging on the robe that hung on the front of the armoire, and pulled on a pair of bed socks because the floor was cold, but I hadn’t yet reached an age at which I was ready for slippers.

Onto the landing I padded out, looking around for the apparition of Victoria. And I spotted her at the head of the stairs. I could feel the urgent distress radiating from her. This time she didn’t fall down the staircase, but glided down halfway, rushed back to the top, and then down again. I had the distinct feeling that she wanted me to follow her.

Even for someone as accustomed to the dead as I was, being asked to follow them in the dead of night was a little disconcerting, but I summoned up my limited courage and went after her, down the stairs. As I went, I couldn’t help thinking that my fluffy bed socks afforded no grip whatsoever and yet I was nowhere near slipping down the stairs to meet my fate at the bottom. It underlined how unlikely it was that Victoria had slipped, yet everyone had written her death off as an accident.

It was dark downstairs, the only light coming from the luminescent presence of Victoria herself. She turned at the bottom of the stairs, still moving in fast, staccato bursts; impatiently urging me to follow her, which I did a little nervously. What did she want to show me? And why now when I had company?

I’d always been very grateful that Petra had, from my first time, made a point of making herself scarce when ‘conjugal congress’ was occurring. In my naivety, I’d thought that maybe ghosts had a rule not to play peeping Tom on the living. But based on Victoria, maybe that wasn’t a hard and fast rule.

The window in the kitchen was open as we went in, and I breathed in the scent of jasmine that was wafting in from the garden. It showed how much of a hurry Bastian and I must have been in last night because normally I was one of those people who goes around the house three times checking every door, window, and electrical switch before going to bed—or at least, I had been that sort of a person. In a way, it was nice that Bastian had also cleansed me of that artificial pressure.

A little moonlight also crept in through the window. The blind was still raised (another thing I hadn’t had time to lower) and I cinched my robe more tightly around me, not wanting to give an inadvertent eyeful to any nocturnal passers-by.

“What is it?” I whispered, not wanting to wake Bastian, and aware that if I did wake him, then I’d have some serious explaining to do about who I’d been talking to.

Naturally, Victoria didn’t answer; couldn’t answer. When the constantly shifting image of her face coalesced into something recognizable, I could make out her mouth moving, as if she was trying to tell me something, but no sound came out.

Petra had explained to me that new spirits still think too much like humans to make themselves understood as spirits, either in this realm or in Limbo. These things take time and calm, and the victims of violent death never had the calm to figure out how to communicate with the living. They were fractured and fraught expressions of confusion and anger, unable, for the present, to exist in any other terms.

The harder Victoria tried to communicate her point to me, the more indistinct she became, barely looking like a figure now, more like a blob of shifting energy, shivering with indignation and frustration.

I felt for her, but there wasn’t much I could do when I couldn’t understand what she was trying to tell me.

“Is there something in here? Something you need me to see?”

The apparition raced around the kitchen, but conveyed nothing helpful. She rushed over to where the fridge stood beside the big walk-in pantry. And she hovered there, apparently pointing like she had the other night, when I’d thought she was pointing at the oven. But maybe it wasn’t the oven at all, but the fridge. I walked over and stooped to look beneath the fridge.

Frowning, I got back up again to turn on the light—it had looked like there was something under there, something I’d missed in the perfunctory search I’d done earlier.

With the light on, I hurried back to the fridge and looked again. What was that?

I slid my hand under and with one extended finger, I could just get a hold of whatever it was. It felt like a wrapper, and I realized that I was probably going to a lot of trouble to establish that Victoria had shown up in the middle of the night because she had the munchies for a chocolate treat she could no longer obtain in Limbo and was trying to tell me what that treat was. She flitted up and down beside me, faster and faster, her frustration growing.

“I’m going as fast as I can.”

But the wrapper that slid out from under the fridge, and which I now held up, wasn’t a chocolate wrapper. It wasn’t the wrapper of anything you’d eat, except in certain specific circumstances.

It was an empty condom wrapper, left from when Victoria had been living here, and I recognized it instantly as the twin of the wrapper that was currently in the trash basket in my bedroom. El Toro Grande. A brand that had to be specially imported from Europe. And how many people had either the money, the need, or the inclination to do that?

My head suddenly snapped up to look at the ceiling because I’d heard movement from the bedroom.

The End

~~~~~

Gwen and Petra return in:

Dead and Gone

Gwen’s Ghosts #2

by J.R. Rain and H.P. Mallory

Coming Soon!

Amazon Kindle * Amazon UK

Return to the Table of Contents

Also available:

The Good Daughter

Dragon’s Birthright #1

by H.P. Mallory and J.R. Rain

(read on for a sample)

Chapter One

The Wilderness

I woke when I rolled over onto a rock.

It seemed there was no way the rock was there the night before when I went to sleep or surely I would have noticed it. I mean—why would I go to sleep on a rock? Which left three options: either some mischievous animal was screwing with me, or perhaps rocks led a secret nocturnal existence I knew nothing about, or I simply remained the punching bag of the gods.

Option three seemed most likely. Recently it felt as if my life was a catalogue of ‘if it can go wrong, it will go wrong’ and it was so much more satisfying to be able to blame the gods rather than fate or simple bad luck.

Sitting up, feeling various joints click in a way that a twenty-one-year-old’s really shouldn’t, I looked for the man who had slept beside me, out here in the wilderness under the stars.

“Uther…?”

He was gone.

“Uther!?”

The thick, rough grass was still pressed flat to show where he’d slept but there was no sign of the man himself.

I sprang to my feet, as quickly as I was able, other bits of my body complaining bitterly, and scanned the endless skyline. The wilderness was vast, and it rose and fell in ways that were topographically interesting but very unhelpful if you were trying to find a man who had wandered off.

“Uther!”

No response. I rushed towards the apex of the mound in the lee of which we’d slumbered, still yelling, now in desperation.

“FATHER!”

But that was probably futile; he’d ceased to respond to that name a while ago.

From the top of the mound, I got a somewhat better view, and I cast about desperately. At first, he seemed to have been swallowed up into the constant movement of the waving grasslands, but then I caught a flash of color amongst the dull greens, greys, and yellows.

“Fath… Uther?!”

I ran towards him, calling his name, and as I got closer, I saw him look around mildly, as if hearing me for the first time and wondering what all the shouting was about. He put a thin finger to his lips, and I skidded to a halt.

“Look…” The old man who I used to call ‘father’ pointed at a butterfly.

As he pointed, the insect took to the air and, with a cry of childlike delight, my father chased after it, laughing and clapping his hands.

“Wonderful! Wonderful!”

The sight had a sweetness and innocence about it, yet also a horror that nearly broke my heart. I steeled myself against the tears that threatened; I had to be strong. For him.

“Uther…” I laid a hand on his shoulder and he turned to me.

The beatific smile faded to a frown of confusion as he looked at me. “I know you. Don’t I?”

My heart started thumping in my ears. “Yes. Yes, you do. It’s me—Selena. Your…”

I paused. Several times over the past week I’d tried to explain to him that I was his daughter, that he was my father, but he always became upset or even angry, beating me with his weak fists, screaming at me, calling me a liar and dissolving into floods of tears insisting ‘I have no daughter!’ In fact, he had three daughters, but perhaps I couldn’t blame him for blocking all of us out.

“I’m Selena,” I finished.

“Selena,” he tried out the word. “Yes. I know you. You saved me.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Selena. I’ll remember you. My name is Uther.”

“I… I know. I know.”

We went through something similar every morning as his disordered mind put itself back together enough to at least recall the previous few days. But his past beyond that remained a tangle that he couldn’t unravel.

“Would you like some breakfast?” I suggested. Our supplies were getting low—we’d have to pick something up the next time we were near a town, and that would come with problems of its own.

Uther nodded. “That would be lovely.”

Yes, I’d started thinking of him as ‘Uther’ rather than ‘father’. Frankly, it made things easier because this vague, troubled creature in front of me was not the father I remembered. That father had been far from perfect, but he was still mine, and to see him reduced to this low state tore at my heart. So, I buried it and told myself this wasn’t my father, just a stranger named Uther.

Breakfast was in fact a long way from lovely because my rations were running low and I didn’t feel like I could leave ‘Uther’ alone so I could go off to do some proper hunting or foraging. There was a real danger of him wandering off or, worse still, talking to strangers. I was sure there were plenty of good people living out here, eking out what meager living they could in the wilderness, but right now, everyone who saw us was a potential enemy, if only because of who they might tell.

Uther didn’t seem to mind a breakfast that was more half-hearted than hearty. I wondered if he tasted it at all, or if in his mind he was eating sides of bacon or thick, rich porridge with honey. It was so hard to tell what was going on behind the vacant stare.

“Horses…”

Though he sometimes seemed immeasurably distant, Uther was right there, it was just that his ‘right there’ was not in the same place as the rest of us. Even so, he heard the approaching hooves before I did and I cursed myself for not paying proper attention.

“Come on.” I grabbed Uther’s arm and dragged him to where a hollow in the side of a hummock created a natural hiding place.

“But… Horses…” Uther protested, pointing back. He wanted to see the horses. He’d always liked horses as a boy. I remembered him teaching me to ride, so proud when I wasn’t scared of the horses that seemed so huge to me. I remembered how jealous my sisters had been.

“You need to be quiet.” I pressed a finger to his lips. “It’s a game. Understand?”

His eyes lit up at the word ‘game’ and he clamped both hands over his mouth.

Leaving him, I crawled through the long grass to peer around the edge of the hummock across the broad, uneven landscape of the wilderness.

At first, I saw no one—that was the problem with the wilderness; it was good for hiding but that cut both ways. Then, from behind one of the more prominent hillocks, a quintet of horsemen road into view. Even at this distance, I could tell they were soldiers, and the bright, armorial colors they wore identified them as coming from Gaunt. Not that their origin mattered that much right now; Gaunt, Latran, or even Wincham, soldiers of any stripe equaled bad news for us.

The horses stopped as their riders, armed with pikes, stood up in their stirrups to survey the landscape. I ducked back down, my head nestled against something prickly that I hoped was vegetable rather than animal, as vegetables won’t bite you.

When I dared to look back up again, the horses were already trotting away. I wondered which way they were heading. By night I could get my bearings by the stars and by day the sun was a useful, if limited, guide, but knowing what rough direction we were heading was not the same as knowing where we were going. Though I’d grown up in Wincham, I hadn’t lived here for five years and even when I had, I hadn’t immersed myself in the wilderness much.

Now, it all looked the same. To those who lived here, its rough contours were like signposts and they could navigate the wastes like a salmon finding its way home. But to me, no—it all looked alike. I knew there were towns and villages out there—some surprisingly large—but I had no idea where, so the best I could do was chart a course for the mountains and hope we arrived before we ran out of food.

The mountains represented safety.

Actually, that was absurdly optimistic; the mountains truly represented not so much safety, but less danger, and that would have to do for now.

“Did we win?” hissed Uther with childlike excitement.

“Win?”

“The game. With the horses. Did we win?”

“Oh. Yes. Yes, we won.”

My father beamed, happy even if he didn’t understand why, or perhaps because he didn’t understand why. It was horrible to see my father, who in his youth had been thought the quickest mind in the kingdom and even as he grew older had remained sharp, reduced to this. On the other hand, he did at least seem happy, and I wasn’t sure when I’d last seen that. Not for five years, of course, but not for some time before that either, not really happy anyway.

We struck out through the wilderness, always keeping the mountains ahead of us, which was a nice big target to aim for but I wanted to head specifically for Greville’s Pass, and at this distance, I couldn’t be sure if we were going the right way. It could mean a long detour if I got my bearings wrong. Complicating matters still further was the topography of the wilderness; it was impossible to go in a straight line. We kept getting side-tracked while wandering around the steeper humps, and those we climbed always seemed to descend at a different angle, throwing us off course.

And of course there was Uther himself, easily distracted by wild dogs or a soaring buzzard. After lunch (another meager affair) I turned my back a moment to pack things up and when I turned back, he was off gathering wild flowers by the armful.

“For you,” he said, smiling as he handed me the bundle.

I hid my tears. It was a nice gesture, but he didn’t know who he was giving the flowers to. To him, I was just some woman called Selena, nothing more. Still, it was a nice gesture. In fact, it was a lot nicer than many of the things he’d said and done when he still knew who I was. We hadn’t spoken at all for the last five years, and that parting had been… well, neither of us had come out of it well.

As the sun declined in the sky, I saw a small town nestled into the landscape as if the hills had been built around it rather than vice versa.

“Let’s have a proper meal this evening,” I suggested, smiling. “Real food for once.”

“And a bed?” asked Uther hopefully.

“We’ll see,” I replied, cagily, hoping he would forget asking. Yes, sleeping so roughly was no good for his old bones, but spending a night in town made us more vulnerable to discovery. Even a meal was a risk, but a quick in-and-out seemed a risk worth taking when our supplies were so low.

Uther looked at me. Alongside the childlike joy that was the main symptom of his distraction, there was also an uncomfortable melancholy. That melancholy probably occurred as he struggled to get his mind back—this was the time when he was most aware that there was something wrong, something missing. In that respect, I supposed it was a good thing as it showed that the father I’d known was still in there somewhere. But it was almost unbearable to witness.

“Are you… Are you Cara?” He looked at me, sure he was wrong but unable to get the name out of his head.

“No. I’m Selena. Remember?”

“Selena. Of course. Selena.” He frowned. “Where is Cara?”

My mother had died when I was still very young, and though he’d put on a brave face for his children, I’d grown up knowing that my father felt my mother’s loss every day.

But I couldn’t say that to him now; I would just be forcing him to relive the pain.

“I’m sure she’ll be waiting for us when we get where we’re going.”

That probably wasn’t a very helpful thing to say either. But Uther nodded and was quiet again, though the tortured expressions passing back and forth across his face showed that he was still trying to put the broken fragments of his mind back together, and still failing. When we got back and Cara wasn’t there waiting for him, then I’d have to tell him the truth. I’d break my father’s heart all over again and run the risk of shattering his fragile mind still further.

The madness could be cruel as well as kind.

***

The town’s name, according to the sign on its outskirts, was ‘Casper’s Relief’, presumably an allusion to some local figure of history or legend. All the wilderness towns seemed to have names like ‘Drake’s Hideout’, ‘Mary’s Repentance’, and, most intriguingly ‘Roger’s Shaft’—names that told a story. Even when the original story was lost to time, they were names that invited you to make up a new story.

Casper’s Relief was pretty typical of wilderness towns; a market that had grown up over time to become a permanent home for those who serviced the nomads and herders who traversed the steppe. There were blacksmiths to get your horse shod, tailors to get your clothes mended, bath houses where you could get a bath (with a happy ending if you slipped a coin to the right girl), tanners, butchers, dairies and, of course, taverns.

The herders spent long months out in the wilderness with nothing but sheep, goats, or the hardy longhorn cattle for company. When they came back to town, they wanted three things, two of which they could get at the ‘bath houses’, and the third was a drink. The wilderness taverns sold dreck, the sort of drink that makes up for months of nothing but water and goats’ milk by knocking you out cold with one draft. They said that if you left the dreck in the tankard too long, it started to corrode the metal. It was a wilderness rite of passage that a young herder would take his first sip of dreck at the end of his first stint—if he was still able to see the following morning, then he was judged to be a proper man.

“Put your hood up,” I whispered to Uther as we passed through the bustling throng—every day was market day in a place like Casper’s Relief.

“Is it another game?”

“No.” Sometimes it was better to be clear—to let Uther know this was serious.

Uther nodded and pulled the hood of his woolen robe over his head. The robe had been woven for him specially and when new, had cost a pretty penny. It had been a gift from my mother and Uther had worn it until it was worn almost through. He’d never let it go—even now it seemed to mean something to him, even if he could no longer explain why or what that something was.

Hooded and, hopefully anonymous, we wandered, looking for a quieter tavern—with so many, there surely had to be one. Occasionally people would look in our direction and my whole body seemed to tense and contract at the feel of their eyes on us, but it was always no more than a glance. No one was looking too closely.

Truth be told, even if anyone had gotten a good look at Uther’s face, it was unlikely that they’d recognize him, because what would he be doing here? In a place like this? They’d write it up as one of those coincidences—everyone is said to have their doppelgänger.

“Here looks alright.”

‘Alright’ might have been stretching—what the tavern looked like was quiet, which was my main criteria, although you did have to wonder what was wrong with it when every other place seemed to be heaving the seams. Still, beggars could not be choosers, so we went in.

Even with hoods up, Uther and I stood out among a clientele that was overwhelmingly male, between the ages of sixteen and sixty, and drunk.

“What’ll it be?” The barman gave us a funny look but had apparently seen enough not to ask questions.

“What’s good to eat?” I asked.

“I don’t know about ‘good’ but I’ll tell you what’s on.”

“Okay.”

“There’s goat stew,” announced the barman as if beginning a list, but then fell silent.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“Well,” I shrugged. “Two goat stews then please.”

“Excellent choice. And to drink?”

I looked at the row of tankards along the bar and the row of faces wavering above them in varying shades of red.

“What’s not lethal?”

“Milk,” advised the barman. “Steer clear of the dreck, young lady—it’ll have you off your feet and then one of these reprobates will have you on your back. And you sir, stay away from the water. There’s not a well worth shit in these parts. Someone offers you water then he’s a liar. Either that or it’s liable to get up an’ get outta the glass by itself.”

“Two milks.”

We found a table, and we ate and drank. At first, we attracted more attention than I was comfortable with as an anomaly, but pretty soon the novelty wore off and the drinkers returned to killing their brain cells with dreck.

All bar one.

There was one man on the far side of the bar who kept looking our way. He seemed to be with a group of rowdies who stood out themselves, but our observer was different. While his friends made merry, he sat quiet, watching us.

He noticed me looking back and gave me a roguish smile that made me blush and return my attention to the goat stew (which was actually pretty good—kudos to the goat).

After a while, I chanced another look and found the man still watching. There was something about him that…

He was quite handsome in a rough sort of way (again, ‘rogue’ was the word that came to mind), but that wasn’t it. There was something in his eyes that made me think back to…

It was an odd connection, but I found myself remembering a day five years ago.

The day my life changed.

The Good Daughter

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