Maybe This Time (36 page)

 

It wasn't that simple, of course. She had to put Alice and Carter to bed, Alice protesting, Carter picking up a comic book without a word, and then she had to be polite to the guests in the sitting room, which she did on autopilot because all she could see was North, smiling at her. Southie pulled her aside and whispered, “You're a little obvious there, tone it down some,” but she didn't care. There weren't any ghosts and she was back with North, even if it was just for tonight, she was back with North, so at the earliest possible
moment, she said brightly, “Well, I should go check on the kids. You all have a good night,” and left to run up the stone stairs to the kids' rooms, really meaning to check on them until she heard North's step behind her.

“You should have waited fifteen minutes,” she whispered over the railing to him. “People are going to notice.”

“People already noticed,” North said, gaining on her. “Also, I don't care.”

She picked up speed, but when she got to the landing, she heard music coming from the nursery.

“Damn it,” Andie said as North hit the last stair, and went into the nursery to see Alice dancing to “Make a Move on Me” in the light of the gas fire.

“What are you doing, young lady?”

“I woke up,” Alice said, bopping around the room. “There were noises. So I turned on the music!” She flung her arms over her head and danced wildly, a little savage in her nightgown.

“Noises?” Andie looked around but there was nobody there except for North, standing in the doorway. Waiting.
Not for long,
Andie thought and said to Alice, “Back in bed, it's way too late for you to be up.”

Olivia Newton-John sang, “I'm the one you want,” and North laughed in the doorway.

“What's so funny?” Alice said, annoyed.

“I just recognized the song,” he told her. “Andie and I danced to this once.”

“Really?” Alice said, as Andie pulled back her covers.

“Get into bed,”
Andie said to Alice, and Alice climbed in. “We'll be right in the next room.”

“You and Bad danced to this?”

“Not that I remember,” Andie said, pulling the covers up.

“Arts Ball,” North said, his voice lazy with satisfaction. “The
band was awful, and Southie got his boom box out of the car and set it up in the hall because the girl he was with—”

“Oh,
yes,
” Andie said, remembering the hall, and Southie, and North laughing with her, and how happy she'd been. “The little ballerina. The one who was so damn flexible.”

North laughed again. “That was her. Bridget?”

“No,” Andie said, thinking hard. “Brin. Short for Brinda.” She laughed, too. “Brinda. My God.”

“Right. And Southie said she must have had a dyslexic mother. And she got mad, and he got the boom box, and she wanted this song . . .”

“I remember now. I was wearing the skirt you got me, the green-blue one with the sequins. Alice loves that skirt.”

“I love that skirt,” Alice said solemnly.

“And I dragged you out—”

“And then you danced me down that hall,” Andie said, smiling as she remembered. “All those mirrors. We stayed out there for the rest of the ball. Remember, Southie went and got champagne . . .”

“And we sat on the floor while he fed Brin caviar,” North said. “Charmed the socks right off her.”

“Southie can charm the socks off anybody. That was a good time.”

“I should have been there,” Alice said from her bed.

“You weren't
born
yet, monkey,” Andie said, and then the music changed to Jackson Browne, and the memories came pounding back.

“What's wrong?” Alice said.

“Nothing,” North said, smiling at the little girl now. “This is our song, Andie's and mine.”

“Why is it yours?” Alice scowled at him. “I like it, too.”

“When people fall in love, they get a song.” North didn't look at Andie, just smiled at Alice. “This is the song that was playing when we met.”

“Did you dance?” Alice said.

“Oh, yeah,” North said.

“Show me,” Alice said, and North walked into the room and held out his hand to Andie, and she let him pull her against him because her days of saying no to him were gone.

He held her close and began to move, and she moved with him and the music, full of the memory of him and the reality of him, blanketed by all the satisfaction he'd released in her, feeling again the incredible, irresistible erotic pull he had on her, every cell expanding at his touch, back from the long, cold dead. He twirled her away from him and back to him, catching her the way he always had, holding her tight until the music slowed and then he stood, smiling down at her, heat in his eyes again, always.

“Hey,” Alice said, and North reached over and turned off the tape deck.

“Bedtime,” he said, and she grumped, but she slid back under her covers.

Andie let go of him to kiss Alice good night. “I love you, baby,” she said, “sleep tight,” and pulled the covers up over her.

“Good night, Bad,” Alice called.

“Good night, Alice,” North said.

“Tomorrow, you have to dance with me,” she said.

“Whatever you want, kid,” North said, and Alice nodded as if that was the way she thought things should be, too, and rolled over.

North took Andie's hand and tugged her toward her open bedroom door. “Come here,” he said, and his voice went to her spine.

She followed him through the door, taking one last backward glance at Alice as he closed it, and when she turned back, he bent and kissed her, and it hit hard again, and she clung to him, shaking, drinking in that kiss as if she were dying.

“So,” he whispered when she pulled back, his voice husky, “I think we should take it slower this time—”

She pushed him back onto the bed and climbed on top of him, straddling him.

“Or not,” he said, and May said,
You've got troubles,
and Andie pushed North away and rolled off him to scoot back on the bed, saying, “No,
no
!
”

“What?” North said, sitting up. “What's wrong?”

May floated in the room in front of them and Andie realized they hadn't put the fire on. Because ghosts weren't real. “You're not real.”

That Kelly woman is doing something down in the Great Hall. Sneaking around. I can possess her and stop her if you want.
May smiled, helpful and eager to please.
I don't think she has a soul, so it wouldn't matter.

“I'm hallucinating.” Andie slid off the far side of the bed. “Crumb fed us all salvia, and you are a hallucination.”

“Andie?” North said, alarmed, reaching for her.

Fine,
May said, swishing her skirt and scowling.
But you might want to look downstairs anyway because she's got that camera guy and they're filming. And I think Carter's got trouble, too. Although he's used to it.

“Carter?” Andie said. “What's wrong with Carter?”

May swished her skirt again.
That was good stuff you did down in the pantry, but it's stirred things up. You better go look.

“Andie,” North said, putting his hand on her arm. “It's okay. I'm here. Maybe it'll take a while until the salvia's out of your system, but whatever you're seeing isn't real.”

May swished her skirt again and said,
I may not be real, but you'd better go look anyway.

“She's not real,” Andie said to herself out loud.

“Right,” North said, trying to pull her back to bed. “Come on, you just need to sleep it off—”

I'm real, Andie,
May said, and Andie knew it was true.

She pulled her hand free from North's grasp. “Kelly's filming in the Great Hall,” she said as she headed for the door. “And Carter's in trouble. You go stop Kelly, and I'll help Carter.”

She went through the nursery, where Alice was still sleeping, and out into the gallery, thinking,
She's not real, she's not real.

Then she saw a flickering light from Carter's room and ran.

 

North left the bedroom, trying to get some blood back to his brain. He almost followed Andie to Carter's room, but he saw a glow from downstairs and looked over the railing to see lights and Bill the cameraman pointing his camera at something under the gallery.

Kelly O'Keefe really was filming again.

He hit the back stairs at a run.

“A
little girl,
” Kelly was saying into her microphone when he ran into the Great Hall, “in tears,
terror-stricken,
while her guardian
ignores
her and her nanny
talks to ghosts,
” and then North pulled the plug on Bill's extension cord and flipped on the big chandelier overhead. “What the hell?” Kelly snapped at Bill, who nodded toward North.

Kelly turned on him angrily and then saw who it was. Her smile flashed back on. “North! We were just—”

“Finished,” North held out his hand to Bill. “Give me the tape.”

“That's the property of the station,” Kelly said righteously.

“Give me the tape or I'll take it,” North said, really wanting to hit something.

Bill pulled the tape out and handed it over.

“Bill!”
Kelly snapped and then she turned to North. “You're violating my First Amendment rights!”

“I hope it was as good for you as it was for me,” North said. “You're out of here. Now. If you're still here in the morning, I'll call the police and have you arrested for trespassing.”

Bill nodded and began to break down equipment.

“You'll be hearing from our lawyers,” Kelly snapped.

“That'll be fun,” North said and waited until they were out of the house. Then he took the tape upstairs with him, trying to figure out how the hell Andie had known Kelly was at work again.

“What's going on?” Lydia said, meeting him in the back hall on the second floor as he headed for the third. “I heard something.”

“Kelly and her cameraman are leaving. Andie's checking on Carter. Alice is asleep. I'm going back to bed.”

“So everything's all right?” Lydia said.

“Yes,” North said, and went upstairs to talk Andie down from her ghost fixation again.

 

Andie stopped in Carter's doorway.

The boy was sitting cross-legged on the bed, staring at the door, looking thin in his flannel pajamas, his wrists dangling over his knees, his head lowered so that his eyes were dark and shadowed under his brows.

He had candles burning on tables on both sides of his bed, a dozen of them at least.

“Carter? What the
hell
are you doing?”

He ignored her, and she felt a chill rise as she saw that he was shaking. Whatever was going on, he was concentrating hard on not being terrified, and not doing very well at it.

She walked over to the bed and sat down beside him. “Carter?” she said softly, and reached for his hand.

“Get out,” he said, staring at the door.
“Get out.”

“What—why?”

His breathing quickened and his eyes widened, staring at something beyond her, and Andie felt cold air on her back.

When she turned, an icy blue fog was taking shape in the open door.

“Smoke?” she said, her heart kicking up, but she knew it wasn't, the cold in the room was growing, crystallizing the night air on the windows, chilling her through and through.

Carter shivered beside her in his pajamas, and the fog rose up clumsily and took the rough shape of the man in the old-fashioned
coat, stronger, more solid than ever before, his face a blur with holes for eyes.

He leaned forward and his face became sharper, grinning at them, blocking the door.

“No!”
Andie said, scrambling onto the bed in front of Carter.

“Get out,”
Carter whispered to her. “He comes for me.
Get out.
”

“No.”
She knelt on the bed between the thing and Carter, facing it down over the foot of the bed. “Go
away. You can't have him.
”

The thing moved closer, losing definition as it moved, re-forming into the man as it came closer, giving her vertigo again.

Andie scooted back against Carter, spreading out her arms to shield him. “
No.
This kid is off limits. Go haunt somebody your own age, you pervert.
No.
”

The thing arched over them, and Andie felt the cold in her bones, and then something went sailing over her shoulder and another and another, and she realized that Carter was throwing lit candles, the old singed carpet igniting again, flames shooting up. She swung her arm through the thing, tearing through its definition yelling, “
This kid is mine!
” her arm searing with cold. She grabbed Carter by the back of his pajama collar and dragged him around the icy mist that was re-forming above the flames, through the door and the halls to the nursery where she slammed the door behind them both.

She shoved the boy in front of the fireplace.
“You stay here.”

Then she grabbed the small fire extinguisher from the mantel and ran back down the gallery and into Carter's bedroom, terrified that the flames would have ignited the bed by now, but the fire was out and the room was empty and cold, cold beyond anything natural, so she slammed the door and ran back to the nursery.

Carter was shaking so hard his teeth were chattering.

“Oh, baby.” She sank down next to him on the hearth and pulled him into her arms. “I'm so sorry. I should have been there.”

He was rigid in her arms, unyielding the way Alice used to be, but Carter didn't scream, he just endured.

“I'll take care of it,” Andie told him, holding him tightly. “I'll get rid of them. I'll get you out of here—”