Charon's Crossing

Kathryn sprang to her feet. There had to be candles in the kitchen.

There were. Three boxes of long, ivory tapers. She ripped every box open, stabbed the candles into anything she could find. Saucers. Cups. Jar lids. Then she set the candles on every flat surface in the drawing room and lit them all.

The room blazed with light. Kathryn stood back, arms folded, a look of defiance on her face.

Let the damned lights go out now!

She made a last quick trip through the house. She checked the front door. The back door. The French doors. Just for good measure, she checked the windows in the library and the dining room, the ballroom and the kitchen. Then, satisfied, she scooted back into the drawing room, shut the door after her, dragged a heavy wooden chair across the floor and jammed it under the knob.

"Ready or not," she said, and laughed. At least, she tried to laugh. The sound that escaped her throat seemed more like a croak.

Kathryn settled down on the settee with her sandwich and her tea. Her gaze fell on the splintered remnants of the console table. It really was too bad she didn't have a fireplace. At least, she could have given the antique a Viking funeral.

She smiled wryly. What a nasty display of temper that had been! Matthew hadn't thought twice, he'd just hauled back, given the table one good kick, and...

Kathryn blinked.

Matthew? Since when had she begun thinking of him like that? Just because he claimed he was Matthew McDowell didn't mean he was Matthew McDowell.

Because then, he'd be a ghost. And hadn't she just told herself she didn't believe in ghosts?

Okay. Okay, then maybe the whole thing had been a hallucination. Maybe she'd dreamed him up, complete with costume and...

"Hell."

The sandwich might as well have been rubber. Kathryn chewed and chewed before she could get the mouthful of bread and cheese down her throat.

You were in big trouble when you preferred thinking you'd had a hallucination to thinking you'd seen a ghost. Besides, her shoulders still ached, where his fingers had clasped them. She didn't know much about hallucinations but she doubted if they left bruises as calling cards.

So, what was she saying? That she'd changed her mind about ghosts?

Never. Never, in a thousand years.

So what if she could have read the New York Times through Matthew's hand, when she'd first seen him on the stairs?

So what if he could make the puff-of-smoke disappearances of a great illusionist like David Copperfield look pathetic?

So what if he stared at a telephone as if he'd just stepped off the shuttle from Mars and sounded like a refugee from a history book and wore an outfit that didn't look like a costume but looked real, and sexy, as hell?

"So what?" Kathryn said weakly, and she groaned and put her head in her hands.

All right. Just for the sake of argument, suppose... suppose she accepted the preposterous idea that Matthew was, in fact, a ghost?

Outside, the wind seemed to take a long, sighing breath, as if to say, Well! It's about time you came to your senses!

Kathryn rose impatiently to her feet. She stabbed her hands into the pockets of her sweatpants and paced back and forth.

It couldn't hurt to consider the possibility, could it? Of course it couldn't. There was nothing worse than a closed mind.

After all, once upon a time people had insisted the earth was flat. Where would the world be if nobody back then had ever said, Hey, wait a minute, let's try coming at this from another angle.

So, all right. She'd do just that, come at this from a different perspective. For the sake of argument, she'd assume that ghosts existed.

And that Matthew was one of them.

Why would he haunt Charon's Crossing? And what did he want from her?

The answers had to be in that journal. Where had she left it? Right there, on that table.