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Fiona gave in, unable to resist not only Jamie but the use of his strong shoulders in hauling boxes, and his much bigger SUV. So they drove down the rutted two-lane blacktop off the highway as the sun climbed, slanting thin late-autumn light into their eyes even though it was after nine o’clock. The days were getting shorter, and soon they’d be in the dregs of winter, when the sun never warmed the air no matter how bright, and the light was gone by five.
They talked as they drove, Jamie in jeans and a thick flannel shirt over a T-shirt, his hair combed back, a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee in one hand as he drove with the other. Fiona wore a pullover sweater and jeans, her hair in a ponytail, and leaned against the passenger door, sipping her own coffee as they talked. It had been a while since they’d spent a day together—two weeks, maybe three. Jamie picked up as much overtime as the force’s budget would allow, and Fiona’s schedule was equally offbeat as she wrote one story or another. They usually kept their conversations light, but today it wasn’t going to happen. She had too much on her mind. Jamie, as always, was a good listener, and before she knew it, the words were spilling out.
She told him about her visit to Idlewild. It hadn’t been her finest moment, and she still didn’t know what to make of what she’d seen on the field. But she forced the story out, trying to keep her voice matter-of-fact. Jamie didn’t chide her about trespassing, or not answering his texts, and he took in her account of the ghost with surprised silence.
“Jesus Christ, Fiona,” he said at last.
Fiona gulped her coffee. “Say it,” she prompted him. “If you think I should go on meds, just say it.”
He shook his head. “No meds,” he said. “I can’t say I know what you saw, but I don’t think you’re crazy.”
She stared at him for a long time, waiting for more. But the silence stretched out in the car, the hum of the SUV’s engine the only sound between them. “That’s it?” she said. “You think I actually saw a ghost?”
“Why not?” he said, surprising her. “You want me to say it isn’t possible? How the hell do I know what’s possible or not? Kids have always said that place is haunted.”
“Have you ever heard the name Mary Hand?” Fiona asked.
“No.”
“Margaret Eden has,” she said. “She says there’s a legend about a girl named Mary Hand haunting the grounds. And yet Margaret also says she was never a student, and she isn’t local.” She paused, looking out the passenger window, unseeing. “She knew what I saw, Jamie. She knew.”
“Is there any way she could have been repeating back something you’d already said?”
Fiona thought back over the conversation. “No. Margaret described the black dress and veil. I hadn’t talked about that. I hadn’t admitted anything.”
“A girl with a veil,” Jamie said, musing. “I haven’t heard that particular story before. Then again, I never did a dare to go on the Idlewild grounds, growing up. I was the straight-and-narrow kid, destined to become a cop. What about you?”
Fiona shook her head. “Deb was into friends and boys, not ghost-hunting dares. Which meant I wasn’t, either.” The words cut sharply, the memory still clear. Deb had been three years older, and Fiona had followed everything she did—she’d worn Deb’s hand-me-down clothes, her old shoes, her old winter jackets. She was quieter and more introverted than her outgoing sister, but she’d tried her best not to be. Deb had been a road map of what to be, and when she’d died, that road map had vanished, leaving Fiona adrift. For twenty years and counting.
“If this . . .” It felt strange to talk about a ghost like it was actually a real thing. “If Mary Hand has been there all these years, someone must have seen her besides me. Sarah London told me that everyone at the school lived in fear of something. But she’d never heard of Margaret.”
“So Sarah London knows,” he said. “Maybe Mary Hand was a student. If so, there should be something about her in the records.”
“That’s what Margaret thinks.” Fiona drained the last of her coffee. “She wants these records. She was a cagey old lady. I can’t figure out what her game is—whether it’s money, or ghosts, or something else she wants. But the records are definitely part of what she’s looking for. I think she suspected that I know where they are.”
“Well, we’re one up on her, then,” Jamie said, grinning. “Let’s see what happens when she knows they’re yours. Maybe she’ll come to you with a different game.”
Fiona smiled at him.
“What?” he said, glancing at her.
“You’re sucked in,” she said. “Just like I am. Admit it.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe,” she mocked him.
He pulled into Sarah London’s gravel drive and turned off the ignition. Her heart gave a little pop, because she knew that look in his eyes. Still, she watched as he put his cup down, leaned over, and took her face in his hands.
He kissed her slowly, properly, taking his time. She tried to stay unaffected, but he was oh so good at it; she felt the rasp of his beard and the press of his thumbs, and before she knew it, she was gripping his wrists and kissing him back, letting her teeth slide over his bottom lip as he made a sound in her mouth and kissed her harder. Sometimes their kisses were complicated, a kind of conversation on their own, but this one wasn’t—this was just Jamie, kissing her in his car as the bright sunlight slanted in, making the moment spin on and on.
Finally, they paused for breath. “Come to dinner at my parents’ tonight,” he said, still holding her face, his breath on her cheek.
She felt herself stiffen. She’d met Jamie’s parents once, briefly, and she was pretty sure a journalist was not whom they wanted for their precious son. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Sure it is.” He kissed her neck and she tried not to shiver. “We’ve been dating for a year, Fee. Having dinner with the parents is part of the deal.”
It was. She knew it was. But a meet-the-parents evening— Jesus. She wasn’t ready for this. “I’m no good at it,” she warned him. “The girlfriend thing. I’m terrible at it, actually.”
“I know,” he said, and he laughed softly when he felt her stiffen in offense. “But they’ve been asking about you. My mother especially. She wants to feed you pot roast and ask leading questions about what your intentions are.”
“Oh, my God.” Fiona didn’t even like pot roast. She’d had pretzels for dinner last night.
“I know we’ve taken it slow, Fee,” he said. “I get it. I wanted to take it slow, too. But it’s time.”
Damn it. He was right. There was only so long she would have gotten away with putting this off. “Look, I can endure it, but if we do this, they’re going to think we’re serious.”
She regretted the words—this could lead to the are we serious conversation—and thought he might argue, but Jamie just exhaled a sigh and leaned against the seat next to her. “I know,” he said. “But I have to give them something. My mother actually asked me when I’m going to find a nice girl and settle down.”
Fiona paused, surprised at how that alarmed her. The words bubbled up—Is that what you want? To get married and settle down?—but she bit them back. What if he said, Yes, it is?
They were not having this conversation.
It had been only a year. That wasn’t long; this was 2014. People weren’t expected to court and get married anymore like it was 1950. But Jamie was younger than she was, and he hadn’t grown up with freethinking hippie parents. He didn’t ask her for much. As much as she hated the idea of dinner with his parents, she could do it. For him. Just suck it up and go.
“Fine,” she finally said, halfheartedly shoving against his chest. “I’ll go, all right? I’ll eat pot roast. Now let’s get moving. You’re going to give that old lady a heart attack if she’s looking out the window.”
He grinned and grabbed his coat from the backseat.
Miss London wasn’t watching from the window. She didn’t come to the door, either, even after repeated knocking. Worried, Fiona pulled out her cell phone and walked to the end of the drive, looking for cell reception. She was partway down the street when she lucked into enough bars to call Cathy.
“I had to take Aunt Sairy for a checkup,” Cathy said. “The doctor changed the time, and she can’t miss her checkups. Just go around back to the shed. I left the key under the old gnome.”
So they walked around the house to the backyard. Miss London had no neighbors behind her, and her backyard sloped away into a thicket of huge pine trees, stark and black now against the gray sky. Beyond that were a few tangled fields and a power station crisscrossed with metal towers. Crows shouted somewhere overhead, and a truck engine roared from the nearby two-lane highway.
Standing behind the old house was a shed covered with vinyl siding in avocado green. Fiona felt for the key beneath the garden gnome on the back porch while Jamie cleared the shed doorway of the snow shovel and the wheelbarrow leaning against it. The door was rusted, held shut by a padlock that was dulled with age and exposure. Fiona had a moment of doubt that the old lock would even work, but the key slid in easily and Jamie popped off the lock and swung open the door.
