“I’m jealous and my rival is a two-hundred-year-old ghost. How do I compete with that?”
“He’s not really a rival!” Alix said. “I like you better than—” She stopped because Jared’s eyes were dancing with merriment. He was teasing her! Alix gave him a look of disgust. “You’re a lot like him, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told.” His face got serious. “Alix, what I know is that right now you have a choice. You can go the horror movie way and be scared out of your mind. You can even leave Nantucket forever if you want to. Or you can take my haunted house with its meddling old ghost in stride and I’ll help you deal with it. I can answer any questions you have, tell you any stories you want to hear. Whatever information I know, I’ll share with you.”
With the engine no longer running, Tyler began to wake up. Jared took him out of the seat and got out of the truck. But he stood there, holding the child, looking at her, waiting for her decision.
Alix opened her mouth to ask questions, but there were too many of them. Where to start? Finally, she said, “Do you want children?”
Jared gave her a smile of such complete and total happiness—and joyous relief—that Alix’s bones seemed to start melting.
“Yeah,” he said. “At least three of them.” His eyes were boring into hers. “But Granddad says I’m so late getting started that no woman will have me.”
The last part of that sentence was so absurd she didn’t consider it. “This is that grandfather?”
“Same one you spent the day dancing with,” Jared said. “Why don’t you go make us some drinks while I take Tyler home? And break out the good rum that Dilys hides in the back of the cabinet over the fridge.” He turned away, but then looked back. “Alix, you’re not a washashore. I don’t understand it, but I’ve never met anyone who belonged to Nantucket more than you do. You see the Kingsley ghost, guzzle rum like a whaler, and you move about my old house like you were born there.”
His words were making her calm down and she gave a small smile. “I belong here even if I’m not actually a Kingsley?”
“Oh, well,” he said. “The last name’s easy enough to change in a woman. See you in a few minutes.”
Alix sat back in the truck. What did that mean? Change a woman’s name? She knew but she couldn’t possibly be right.
Chapter Twenty-four
Alix sat at the breakfast table watching Jared at the stove. Last night she’d been too tired and too overwhelmed to think clearly. He’d grilled fish and made a salad while she took a shower. When they’d returned from the construction site there’d been a stack of clean clothes and a bag of toiletries for Alix on the bed. A note said:
I hope these are all right. Ken helped me choose them. Jilly
Even the evidence of her father with someone hadn’t interested her. As soon as Alix had eaten, she went to bed. Between the exhaustion from Tyler, the excitement of finding the journal, and the shock of hearing that she’d been dancing with a ghost, she slept heavily.
When she awoke, Jared was already up and dressed and in the kitchen making breakfast. The wonderful aroma of coffee filled the house. In the middle of the table, on a folded dish towel, was the box with the unopened journal inside. But what Alix had found out about Caleb had overridden her interest in the book. Jared kissed her good morning, held her for a long time, and said they could stay there all day if she wanted to. He again said that he’d answer every question she could come up with.
“Can Dilys? See him, I mean?” Alix asked, but then she put her fingertips to her temples. “No, Dilys was asking me about Caleb, so she can’t … But then everyone seems to have been in on this secret so maybe she can.” She looked at Jared as he poured batter from a carton onto a grill. “Can Lexie see him?”
“I’m certain Dilys can’t, but I don’t know about Lexie. She keeps things to herself. All of the first-born men in each generation have been able to see and speak to him. The men with numbers for nicknames, that is.”
She thought about that continuity and the longevity of the man she’d danced with. “I assume you know that in most families the numbers at the end of a name are dropped when someone dies.”
“True,” Jared said as he turned a pancake. “Which means that by off-island standards I’d be back to number one since none of the others are alive. But Granddad needed help distinguishing one from another so we kept the numbers.”
“I see,” she said, looking at the back of him, trying to take it all in. “Do you think my mother knows about him?”
“I have no idea, but she and Aunt Addy were awfully chummy, so my guess is yes.”
Alix nodded. “What happened to the man Valentina married?”
“He … I don’t think you want to know.”
“Go ahead and tell me. I can take it.”
“Obed beat Caleb’s son severely because the boy was talking to someone Obed couldn’t see.”
“Was he talking to his father? To Caleb?”
“Yes, he was, and that night Obed died. It’s been passed down in my family that the expression of terror on his face was so horrible that he could only have died of fright.”
Alix drew in her breath. “So Caleb can do bad things.”