Relative Strangers (12 page)

“I’m sorry now we didn’t splurge,” Donald Ballantyne had said. He sounded remorseful, as if he wished he’d recognized how much such a trip would have meant to his wife. “I thought that’s why you picked the place. Because she’d talked about it to you.”

She never had. Not that Corrie could recall. And wouldn’t she remember if her mother had mentioned seeing a ghost when she was young?

“Corrie?” Her father sounded worried.

“Sorry, Daddy. I was trying to piece a few things together. Do you ever remember seeing an old photograph of Mother and her parents? One that might have been taken here at the Sinclair House?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell, but I could look through Alice’s belongings if you want.” He sighed deeply. “We
need to go through those boxes in the attic. Get some closure.”

Corrie didn’t want to hear this. “Daddy, I—”

“Your sisters-in-law had a few things to say on Christmas Day about the way your brothers and I expected you to take your mother’s place. Opened our eyes a bit.” He hesitated, then said, “I grieve every day for my Alice, and not just because she left me behind to fend for myself, either. I loved your mother, Corrie. I’d have died in her place if I could have.”

An uneasy silence ensued. Corrie didn’t want to talk about her mother, except in the limited context of Alice’s long-ago visit to the Sinclair House. Not now. And not over the phone.

“I have to go, Daddy. I’ll be back home next weekend.”

She broke the connection quickly, then felt guilty for all but hanging up on him.

Soon, she promised herself. Soon she’d gather the courage to tell her father how she felt, why she was having so much trouble forgiving him for her mother’s death. Why she was having so much trouble forgiving herself.

* * * *

That night Corrie tossed restlessly, unsuccessfully courting sleep until she finally abandoned the effort and scooted toward the head of the bed, plumped the pillows behind her, and turned on the lamp on the bedside table. She’d been trying for days to read the novel that lay there. Tonight she vowed she’d succeed.

Then she remembered the red file folder Joyce had sent to the room along with two cartons full of photographs and memorabilia from Adrienne’s era. Corrie had gone through the boxes but found nothing to give her any hint of the ghost’s purpose in returning from the dead.

The folder contained the Sinclair family tree. She had only glanced at it the previous day; now it drew her. She got out of bed, put on her robe, and curled up in the room’s overstuffed chair to study it more closely.

The file contained only one sheet of paper, a hand-drawn chart that included both the Meads and the Sinclairs. Joyce had annotated it here and there to make the connections clearer.

Micah Mead, father to Adrienne and Horatio, was at the top of the page. Corrie saw that Horatio had been more than a decade older than his sister. According to Joyce’s notes, Micah and Horatio had opened the Phoenix Inn in 1868. The next year Adrienne had married their chief competitor, Lucas Sinclair.

Skipping to the next generation, Corrie’s gaze immediately fell on the name Jonathan Mead. She remembered that she’d dreamed about him. Afterward, the dream had faded, and so too had her curiosity about him. She’d never even thought to ask anyone who he was.

According to the family tree, he was Horatio’s son, born in 1875. She glanced back at the line that showed the date of his parents’ marriage. Also 1875
.
No months or days were written on the chart, but it didn’t look to Corrie as if the boy was legally a bastard. That left the other sense of the word, as she’d thought when she first woke up.

What did he have to do with anything? She found no answer, so she read on, skimming the rest of the chart. Jonathan had had a younger sister named Marguerite, born in 1878. According to Joyce’s dates, Marguerite had died when she was only eighteen. Corrie shook her head. So many people had lived such short lives in those days.

For a moment her attention wandered to the other side of the chart. Joyce had mentioned that the Sinclair men were known for their longevity, and Corrie saw at once that this was true. There was Justus Sinclair, Hugh’s father, who’d lived to be ninety. And his father and grandfather before him had achieved similar life spans.

The women hadn’t fared as well. Corrie suspected that they’d been worn out by hard work, since there didn’t seem to be evidence of excessive childbearing. In each generation of Sinclairs there was just one child, a son to carry on the Sinclair name and tradition. A son to run the Sinclair House.

The Mead side of the chart wasn’t much more prolific. Erastus Mead, Jonathan’s son, had produced one daughter, another Marguerite, who had become Stanley Kelvin’s mother. Joyce had put the nickname Rita in parentheses after Marguerite.

There were no answers on this chart, Corrie decided, though she continued to stare at it until her eyelids grew heavy. Before she realized what was happening, she fell asleep in the chair.

She woke with a start. Again.

She’d been dreaming. Again.

And again she could not remember much of the dream, except that Marguerite, Horatio’s daughter, had been in it. Adrienne and her niece had been discussing the paltry wages paid to hotel workers in the 1890s.

A glimmer of a memory from her own childhood surfaced in Corrie’s mind. Her mother’s mother, Mary Hanover Todd, had been the one to tell Corrie and her brothers about her own mother, Daisy. As a young woman, Daisy Hanover had done what Grandma Mary called “slave labor” in the kitchen of a resort hotel in the Catskills. She’d stood, hour after hour, washing dishes until her hands were nothing but red blotches and peeling skin.

As Rachel had recently reminded her, the story had a romantic and happy ending. At least Corrie had thought so when she was young. In their free time, the hotel employees had been permitted to socialize with one another. A young man who worked at the resort had courted Daisy, spending hours with her in one of the huge hammocks strung between giant trees on the hotel grounds. Eventually, he’d married her and taken her away from the drudgery of working for strangers.

Corrie reached for the family tree that had fallen to the floor while she slept. There was Marguerite, all right, the young woman who had died at eighteen. Corrie wondered if she’d lived long enough to fall in love. How sad it was to have had such a short life, and to have that life reduced to two lines on a chart.

Sighing, Corrie stood and stretched. It was almost dawn. She might as well stay up. And today, she remembered, was Monday, when she’d planned to go digging for information about Adrienne at the local library.

Was it worth the effort? What if there wasn’t any ghost? What if it had all been her imagination?

If she had any common sense, she thought, she’d abandon this fruitless quest and concentrate on finding out where her attraction to Lucas Sinclair might lead. One thing was certain. All this paranormal business was doing more to drive them apart than bring them together.

Focus on the possible, she lectured herself. Forget romance. Stop remembering how right it had felt to kiss Lucas Sinclair.

She had a connection to Adrienne in her mother’s visit to the hotel. At the moment that only produced more questions, but Corrie thought she might be able to discover something at the library about events in 1947, something that would give her a clue.

Having a specific goal gave a lightness to her steps as she headed for the bathroom and a long, leisurely soak in the tub. It was a new day. She’d make a fresh start. She’d figure this out.

And she’d find a way to deal with her irrational fondness for Lucas Sinclair too.

* * * *

Adrienne muttered an unladylike curse.

If only she could gather strength enough to project everything into Corrie Ballantyne’s consciousness at once. This hit-or-miss, stop-and-start communication frustrated her no end.

Corrie kept missing essential bits of information.

Try as she might, Adrienne could not control what got through and what didn’t. Just the effort was exhausting.

Sighing as deeply as Corrie had, Adrienne worried she might not succeed, after all. Would she ever resolve the guilt she’d felt during the last year of her own lifetime and after?

For a hundred years she’d been separated from the man she loved. Wasn’t that enough to expiate a sin of omission?

* * * *

Corrie was in the car, about to leave the hotel for the public library, when Lucas slid into the passenger seat. “No sense taking two vehicles,” he said, “though we could walk.”

“Walking seems to get me into trouble,” she informed him.

So did riding in a sleigh, but Lucas had the good sense not to remind her of that. Neither did he bring up his own skepticism about her “sightings.” Instead he gave her directions to the library, then played the quintessential gentleman when they reached their destination by taking her elbow to squire her through the heavy oak doors that guarded its contents.

Any excuse to touch her, he thought, grinning wryly. Did she have the slightest idea how she affected him? Probably not. And probably just as well. He had to laugh at himself now for thinking, on the night they first met, that he could resist her. Even her strange aberration, the fact that she thought she saw things that weren’t there, wasn’t enough to keep him away from her.

The dour-faced doyenne of the Waycross Springs Public Library was waiting for them just inside. “Ah, Mrs. Prentiss,” Lucas greeted her. “You’re looking well this morning.”

“Thank you, dear boy.” She poked self-consciously at a strand of iron-gray hair that had tumbled across her forehead, but her attention was fixed on. Corrie. “Who have we here?”

“This is Corrie Ballantyne, a guest at the hotel and a friend of the family. She’s interested in local history.”

“Family come from here?” Mrs. Prentiss asked.

“Not that I know of,” Corrie answered.

The inquisition might have gone on for some time had Lucas not reminded Mrs. Prentiss she’d promised to direct them to any documents that concerned either Adrienne or her brother Horatio.

Corrie also asked for newspapers from 1947.

A short time later, she was ensconced at one of the long worktables in the reading room, surrounded by yellowing, slightly musty-smelling pages. Decades behind the times, this small, underfunded local facility couldn’t afford microfilm. Fortunately, the
Waycross Springs Gazette
was a weekly and rarely more than eight pages long.

Seated at her side, Lucas paused in his own research to watch her scan issues from October of 1947. What was it that drew him to her? She had a quiet dignity that was appealing, yet he knew she was not at all placid when dealing with something she cared about. Perhaps that was it. He wanted to delve beneath the surface, to tap into the passion she tried to keep hidden. He wanted to
be
the something she cared passionately about.

He was getting fanciful. As bad as Corrie herself. How could he let himself fall for a woman who thought she saw ghosts? A woman who wasn’t able to tell reality from illusion?

She looked up just then and smiled at him, and his heart raced. Whatever was between them, it was powerful. And it wasn’t likely to go away anytime soon.

“This isn’t helping, but it’s kind of fascinating,” she said, gesturing to the page spread out in front of her. “In 1947 I could have bought a washing machine and had it delivered for one hundred and twenty-nine dollars and fifty cents.”

Lucas glanced at the other ads on the page. Quart bottles of ginger ale, root beer, sarsaparilla, and Moxie were offered for fifteen cents each, plus deposit. Swimsuits for toddlers sold for fifty-nine cents and up.

Reaching past Corrie, he picked up the next issue, dated October 17th. The middle of the front page carried a story about closing down the woods due to fire danger. At the movie theater Joan Crawford was starring in
Possessed,
a double feature with
Jesse James Rides Again.

Intensely aware of Corrie watching him, he read about a barn destroyed in a flash fire. Volunteers had fought the blaze with Indian pumps and brooms, but their efforts had been severely limited by lack of water. Finally some had been brought in using maple syrup tanks, but not before nine cows, a pair of horses, a bull, and a calf had perished.

Not a single mention was made of a ghost having appeared to a guest at the Sinclair House.

“Oh, well. It was always a long shot,” Corrie murmured.

She looked so forlorn that he wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her. Hell, he wanted to do far more than that! He was trying to think of some way to get past the barrier of her belief in the supernatural when Mrs. Prentiss appeared at his elbow.

“Lucas,” she said. “There’s a phone call for you.”

Corrie watched him leave with a sense of growing dismay. She’d been so enthralled by his presence at her side that she hadn’t even heard the telephone ringing.

Why did the man have to be so attractive? She wanted to keep the intellectual puzzle, the mysteries of Adrienne and of her own mother’s apparent sighting, separate from how she felt about Lucas. She couldn’t do it. He was inextricably bound up in what had gone before and, somehow, so was she.

Frowning, Corrie tried to sort out what that meant. What was the connection? Why did Adrienne only appear to women in Corrie’s family?

Or was that assumption wrong? Apparently her own mother hadn’t told anyone she’d seen a ghost, except Hugh Sinclair and maybe her parents. Perhaps dozens of other people over the years had seen Adrienne but had kept quiet about it, fearing ridicule or simply refusing to believe the evidence of their own eyes.

A sudden conviction came to Corrie that the answers weren’t there at the library. They were at the hotel. Somehow she had to find a better way to communicate with the Sinclair House ghost.

“I have to go back,” Lucas announced as he returned. “Minor emergency at the hotel.”

“I’ll drive you,” she said.

“You don’t want to stay here? You haven’t even started on the material from the 1890s.”