Charon's Crossing

"You are not," Olive said in a no-nonsense tone. "I knew we should have stayed out of this sun! You need time to acclimate to—"

"Olive? This man. Do you know his name?"

"What man? Honestly, Kathryn..."

"Catherine Russell's handsome lover." Kathryn gripped the realtor's hand. "What was his name?"

Olive clucked her tongue. The girl needed a cold compress, at the very least. Her face was not only pale, it was shiny with sweat, and her fingers felt icy. But it was obvious there would be no convincing her to go indoors until she'd had her foolish question answered.

"I can't see that it matters, Kathryn," she said with a touch of impatience, "but if you must know, his name was Matthew McDowell."

Chapter 5

Kathryn stood at the front door, waving and smiling cheerfully as Olive's red Ford Escort wobbled down the rutted drive. She held the smile until the little car swung around a narrow curve and vanished in a swirl of dust, and then she groaned, slammed the door closed, and slumped back against it.

At least she'd managed to pull that off, though when you came down to it, waving your hand and smiling like an idiot wasn't half as hard as not passing out when you learned that the man who'd paid you a midnight visit had been dead for almost two hundred years.

Of course, she'd come close, but then Olive had taken over and Kathryn had been happy to let her lay the blame on the sun. Otherwise, she might have blurted out the truth and then they could both have spent the rest of the day trying to figure out if she really was going crazy or if she had, in fact, spent the hours before dawn playing hostess to Cat Russell's lover.

Instead, she'd let Olive swoop an arm around her waist, march her inside the house, put her into a chair and bring her a cold compress. Then she'd endured a lecture on fair skins and ultraviolet rays and overheated brain cells which had ended only when Olive had finally run out of breath.

By then, Kathryn had recovered her equilibrium, if not her sanity, though it had taken time to convince Olive.

"I really don't want to leave you, Kathryn," she'd said. "Maybe you want to reconsider rentin' that little house in town for the rest of the week."

Maybe I want to reconsider heading straight back to New York, Kathryn had almost answered, but that would have been out of the question. She had things to accomplish here and she couldn't accomplish them by running away.

Besides, there was nothing to run from. By then, she'd calmed down enough to know that whatever was happening had a perfectly reasonable explanation.

All she had to d

o was find it.

So she'd smiled brightly and assured Olive that she was fine and that she wouldn't set foot out the door until late afternoon, when the heat lessened.

"It's my English ancestors who didn't know enough to keep out of the midday sun," she'd said, "remember? 'Mad dogs and Englishmen'...?"

But coaxing a smile from Olive had been hard.

"Kathryn?" she'd said worriedly, "Is there somethin' troublin' you?"

For just an instant, Kathryn had come close to blurting it all out. But then she thought of what Olive had said about how unfortunate it would be if people started whispering about Charon's Crossing being haunted and about how superstitious islanders could be, and weren't there enough stories about this place already without adding one about a ghost?

So she'd swallowed hard, smiled, and said that the only thing troubling her was how much work the house was going to need.

Two glasses of iced water later, she'd finally managed to ease Olive out the door.

Now, Kathryn took a deep breath and closed every bolt the door possessed which was pretty stupid, all things considered.

What good were locks and bolts against a ghost?

A bubble of wild laughter rose in her throat and she clapped her hands over her mouth before it could escape.

There was nothing funny about any of this, dammit! No way.

There were no such things as ghosts. That was a given. And she had never heard the story of Gat Russell and Matthew McDowell before. So how could he have come wandering into her dream?

It was a reasonable question. Unfortunately, she had no reasonable answer. Not yet, anyway, but she'd be damned if she wouldn't find one.