Krewe of Hunters 8 The Uninvited (15 page)

“Could the painting have been switched?” Tyler mused.

“I don’t know how,” Allison said. “The board was here most of
the day. They left when I was doing the last tour.”

“Yes, I was back in the house when they were leaving,” Julian
said. He laughed dryly. “I didn’t even have my musket and bayonet when I
listened to them leave. I went to the closet to get it. I wanted to be in full
character when I tried to cajole you into forgiving me,” he told Allison. “I
thought you’d find that charming,” he said sheepishly. “Or proof of my
sincerity. Or…something.”

“All right, so the board was here—the four of them—in the attic
office. They left. You were on the second level?” Logan asked.

“I was on the second level, yes, dodging between the two tours.
I followed Jason’s tour into the house and went upstairs while he was in the
grand salon. I was in Lucy Tarleton’s bedroom while I waited for the board
members to go downstairs. After that I was up in the attic for a while. By the
way, that’s great stuff you’re doing on Lucy and her movements during the war,
Allison. Anyhow, when the last tour went out and Jason and Allison were over in
the pantry area behind the dining room, I snuck into Angus Tarleton’s study.” He
paused, eyes widening. “Weird! I felt like someone had gone up to the attic
after me, kind of like I was being followed.”

Allison shook her head. “There aren’t any secret panels, hidden
rooms or anything like that here,” she said.

“Yes, but I was running around the house with a couple of dozen
people in it, and you didn’t find me,” Julian reminded her.

“That’s true,” Allison murmured. Then she looked up at them and
said, “There
is
one other way to get from the ground
floor to the second—through a servants’ stairway beyond a door in the pantry. I
don’t know if anyone’s ever taken it or not. We never used it. You can only
access it through the pantry, which is our employee area, and guests aren’t
allowed in there. The door on the second floor opens just beside the master
bedroom.”

“Shall we take a look?” Tyler suggested.

“We can do that now,” Logan said, glancing at his watch. “Then
we should finish unloading and setting up, have something to eat and let Allison
go home and get some rest.”

They rose, but Julian sat stubbornly.

“You’re not going to let this slide, are you? Decide that I was
stoned or something and tell everyone it was an accident? I was
murdered.
I’m not lying. My head was pushed down on
that bayonet. It happened while I was staring at the painting. I was
murdered.”

“We have a long way to go here,” Logan said.

“
Were
you stoned?” Kat asked him.
“I’m sorry, but I’m a medical examiner, and I’ll be checking out your autopsy
report tomorrow. And your remains.”

Julian stood, looking at Kat. “I had a few tokes of pot. Hey, I
was at an audition! I wasn’t drinking or anything.” He frowned. “
You’re
an M.E.?”

She nodded.

Julian shrugged. “Well, I guess if someone’s going to be
playing around with my body, I won’t mind so much if it’s you.”

“Julian!” Allison chastised. She turned back to the others.
“I’ll show you the back stairway.”

She told them that once a week a cleaning crew came in—a
carefully selected cleaning crew—to dust the fragile historic pieces.

But when they followed her through the pantry, which was a
tight squeeze with the seven of them and the spiritual remains of Julian
Mitchell, they discovered that the servants’ stairway was extremely dusty.

“They haven’t been in here for a while,” Allison said. “We’ll
have to go one at a time. It’s narrow and has a sharp angle.”

Tyler brought up the rear as they climbed up. The servants’
stairway led to a very small landing by a door, which opened into the hallway
next to the master bedroom.

“This hasn’t been disturbed,” Logan said. “Well, we’re on the
second floor. We might as well decide on bedrooms.”

“I’ve been in the master,” Tyler said. “But I’ll get my stuff
out. There’s more room in there for you and Kelsey. In fact, if no one has a
problem with it, I’ll move into Lucy’s room.”

Allison seemed tense as she watched them choose their rooms.
Sean said he thought maybe he’d just take his sleeping bag up to the attic. Jane
and Kat opted to stay together in Sophia Tarleton-Dandridge’s bedroom.

“How are you?” Tyler asked.

“Fine.”

“She’s scared.” Julian was standing behind Allison as if
protecting her in a brotherly fashion.

“I was scared of you!”

“I don’t think you should be alone,” Julian said.

“Why? I just told you—
you
were the
one scaring me. Now that I know you’re real—well, not
real
, but real in terms of being a ghost—I’m not scared
anymore.”

Julian placed his hands on her shoulders. Tyler saw her jump
slightly, feeling the strange physical sensation of being “touched” by a ghost.
“They’ll let you stay here. There are two bedrooms left on this floor. Allison,
whoever killed me might be after you.”

“Why would anyone be after me?”

“Why would anyone have killed me?” Julian demanded. “Well,
sure, you probably all said at one time or another that you wanted to kill me,
but you didn’t mean it. Think about it, Ally—why would anyone kill me? It wasn’t
my voice or my guitar playing, I swear!”

Tyler was glad to see her smile at that.

“This is a historic property, Julian. In two of the bedrooms,
the mattresses can’t even be used. They’re kept so visitors can see what the
rope beds were like and how people had to tighten the ropes now and then. The
mattresses on them are made of straw.”

“We carry bedrolls wherever we go,” Tyler said. “Are the ropes
on the beds original?”

Allison shook her head. “No, they’ve been replaced dozens of
times through the decades—centuries. The rooms themselves went through a number
of changes over the years, but when the house became the property of Old Philly
History, the decor was brought back to what it had been during the Colonial era.
The bed frames
are
original, but nothing else.
Except that some of the quilts are from the eighteenth century.”

“We’ll carefully fold up the quilts,” Kat promised her.

“There’s one dingy little shower down in the pantry,” Allison
said. “I can’t stay here. I don’t want to take room away from all of you.”

“Your life—or a shower?” Julian muttered.

“Hey, may I remind you that you were killed here?” Allison said
to him.

“You shouldn’t be alone,” Julian repeated stubbornly.

“And,” Tyler added, “here’s what we know so far. Julian was up
in the attic reading research papers. He felt that someone was watching him. He
came downstairs. The attic—where he’d just been—was trashed. And when he went
into the study, he was killed.”

“Ms. Leigh,” Logan said, joining the group, “or Allison if I
may call you that. I don’t have the authority to tell you what to do. But if
Julian was killed because of something he knew about this house, or something
another person
believed
he knew, you might be in
danger, as well. It would be smart to stay in a house with six trained
agents.”

Allison looked helplessly from one to the other.

“You don’t have anywhere else you have to be,” Julian said.
“You could sit right here and work on your paper with all your precious
Tarleton-Dandridge pieces surrounding you.
And
be
safe.”

“You’re the one who’s going to be helping us, Allison,” Kat
pointed out. “It would be wonderful to have you here.”

For a moment, Tyler didn’t think she’d be persuaded.

“Better safe than dead, and trust me, I know,” Julian said.
“Please, Ally. I was a jerk to you, and you were my friend. Let me be your
friend now. Please, do what I say?”

She threw up her hands. “All right.”

“I’ll walk Allison over to her place so she can pack a bag,”
Tyler said. “We’ll be back soon.”

* * *

It was easier to accept the strange invitation from the
Krewe than Allison had expected.

That was because she was scared.

She didn’t
want
to be scared; she
wanted to be a rational and independent adult. She liked her home. It had been
her home all her life. She’d been excited to leave for college, but when her
parents had talked about selling their house, she knew she wanted it. And they
hadn’t really wanted to sell, so her slowly buying the house from them had made
sense. She loved living there.

She told herself that she was going to be staying just down the
street…and just for a little while.

It was unnerving that someone might want to kill her. She still
couldn’t grasp that fact—and it might not be a fact at all. Julian might’ve been
killed for an entirely different reason. Or he might have imagined that the
painting had talked to him, and he might have imagined that he heard things—old
houses creaked all the time. He might even have imagined that someone had
pressed his head down.

As they walked to her house from the Tarleton-Dandridge
property, she asked Tyler if that might be the case.

“Just because Julian’s a ghost doesn’t mean he knows
everything, right?”

“No, of course not. He only knows now what he knew when he was
living,” Tyler said.

“I can’t believe I’m asking you about ghosts.”

“No one does,” he said lightly.

“Do you always see ghosts? When you’re in the historic
district, say, do you see our founding fathers walking around the Liberty
Bell?”

He laughed. “A ghost can only be in one place at one time, and
not all souls stay grounded to this earth. Of those who do stay, some are here
to help others and some for justice. Some appear to many people, and some just
to a certain few. Some remain shadowy figures for the time they stay—too shy or
locked in their own worlds to make contact with anyone.”

“If there were other ghosts in this house, would Julian see
them?”

“If they chose to be seen.”

“Do you think there are other…entities at the house?”

“Possibly,” he told her.

She shivered. “And if there are…could they move around,
too?”

“Most likely.”

She felt another shiver rip through her. “I don’t know how you
do this,” she said.

He shrugged. “I didn’t really choose it. It chose me. I could
have decided to become a roaring alcoholic—which did occur to me at the time—or
accept that I was seeing things and hearing things that others didn’t.” He
paused, reflective. “But I worked with Logan, and we eventually realized that we
shared certain…abilities? And we were thrown into working with Kat often enough,
and Jane—and even Sean. That’s when we were in Texas.”

“And Kelsey?”

“Kelsey was a U.S. Marshal, as you know, and she was
transferred to Texas specifically to meet Jackson Crow, the head of the first
unit.”

“And she’s—wow, this is nosy. She’s with Logan now?”

“They’re engaged. They’re just waiting for a break between
cases to tie the knot.”

“Oh! They met on a case?”

“Yep.”

“Julian might still have imagined what happened,” Allison said,
returning to the previous subject.

“Hey!”

She nearly jumped a mile high when the voice came from behind
them.

She swung around. She could see Julian walking a few feet to
her side.

“Don’t do that!” she scolded.

“Don’t do what? You know I’m here,” he told her.

“You don’t need to follow me like a shadow.”

“I’m worried about you.”

“Julian, I’m with a federal agent. He carries a gun. He’s a big
Texan. You should be at the house in case they need your help.”

“I’m here now. And it shouldn’t take you long to get a few
things together.”

Allison sighed with aggravation.

Tyler grinned. “I can’t beat him up and tell him not to hang
around.”

“I’m not intruding!” Julian protested. “I don’t follow people
into the shower or anything. Hmm, that’s a thought.”

“Julian!” Allison said.

“Just kidding. I was a jerk, not a peeping Tom!”

When they reached her house, Allison left Julian and Tyler in
her parlor and hurried up the stairs to pack her bag. Luckily, it was a short
walk between her house and the Tarleton-Dandridge. It would be easy to come back
and forth for what she needed or wanted—like a long hot bath now and then. Of
course, Julian had been teasing, but she found it uncomfortable to think that a
ghost
could
follow her anywhere she went.

She glanced in the bathroom mirror. Her eyes were way too wide.
She looked like a cartoon character who’d stuck her finger in an electrical
outlet.

Because she saw a ghost.

She couldn’t think about it; she didn’t dare think about it.
She had to hold on to Tyler’s words.
I could have decided
to become a roaring alcoholic…or accept that I was seeing things and hearing
things that others didn’t.

She could just imagine explaining this situation to some of her
academic colleagues!

She understood why the Krewe kept quiet about what they did and
why information about them could only be surmised by reading between the
lines.

She thought about Adam Harrison, and how kindly and
sane
he had always seemed.

He
was
sane. He just knew what
other people didn’t, that a lot lay beneath the surface of their daily lives,
that the soul did exist and, sometimes, it lingered.

Allison gathered what she needed for a night or two, and
hurried down the stairs.

Tyler stared up at her as she descended. Julian stood behind
him, his tension unmistakable.

“What?” she asked suspiciously.

“I’m glad you decided to stay with us,” he said.

“Why?”

Julian stepped forward. “Mrs. Dixon—Todd’s mother—called Tyler
from the hospital.”