It was still broad daylight. She was wide awake, not dreaming.
“Well, you’re not screaming or running,” he said, moving away from the window to come to the center of the room.
He still looked real. So damned real. And his voice. She could see him speaking just as if he were Liam or Avery or any other living man.
“May I introduce myself?” he asked, sweeping off his hat in a broad and elegant gesture, bending low in a bow. “Captain Bartholomew, privateer, unjustly led to the gallows, though that travesty has since been righted. And still I remain. The Becketts and I are connected, you see.”
She was silent, staring at him, trying to determine if she could possibly be seeing—and hearing—a ghost.
Ghosts. Apparitions. Spirits. They were supposed to be nothing but mist. They roamed the fields of Gettysburg and such places as the Vatican or Westminster Abbey, Notre Dame, the Lizzie Borden house. They went about their spectral existences without stopping to talk to people, for God’s sake, and a man such as Liam, a cop, for God’s sake, did not walk around with a ghost for a friend.
Definitely, it had to be the pressure.
“I am having some kind of a mental breakdown, brought on by the events surrounding my grandfather’s death, and the fact that a man was murdered on my property,” Kelsey said.
He smiled. It was a charming, handsome smile.
“I knew you sensed me before,” he said. “Many people do. Well, they sense me, and others, of course.”
Kelsey made her way to the desk, skirting around the ghost, keeping her eyes on him all the time. She tried to sit calmly and rationally in Cutter’s desk chair.
“If ghosts haunt this house, they should be the ghosts of my mother or grandfather,” she said. “Ghosts are supposed to haunt the places where traumatic things happened.”
He reflected on that. “I’m ever so sorry,” he said.
She swallowed. “Liam—sees you?”
“Yes.”
“We’re sharing a mental breakdown?” she asked.
He walked around and sat at the chair in front of the desk, crossing one stockinged leg over the other. She noted the heels on his shoes and the buckles, the brocade of his coat and the elegance of his waistcoat.
They were so real.
He sighed. “No, I’m quite real. Or surreal, I suppose. For quite a while, I couldn’t begin to imagine why I was still here, but first there was the issue with David Beckett, although I had been attached to Katie O’Hara. She’s quite amazing, with a sight that rivals any I’ve come across. Oh, there are others out there, of course. Liam? He doesn’t have great sight. But he is a Beckett, and he’s been forced to see me, poor boy. It’s just been the way that things have come about.”
“Just how many people are sharing this breakdown?” she asked.
He smiled again, setting his hat on his lap. “Now? Hmm. Well, Katie and Sean and Vanessa and David, Liam—and now you.”
“Are we crazy?”
“Aren’t we all, just a bit?”
Kelsey closed her eyes, keeping them closed. She opened them. He was still there.
She hadn’t even been drinking.
“I’m glad that you see me,” he said. “It does make trying to protect you so much easier.”
“You’re trying to protect me?” she asked.
“Of course. Ghosts aren’t evil. Well, wait, I retract that statement. Most ghosts aren’t evil. But people are in death as they were in life, and sometimes…well, I don’t know what hell is, myself, and I’m hoping I never do. I don’t believe I’m headed in that direction, wherever it may actually be. I have seen the darkness of evil come up to claim its own, but never mind, that’s neither here nor there. As it stands, I believe that I’ve remained though the remnants of the past that directly involved me have been solved in order to see that justice befalls all Becketts.”
“I’m not a Beckett,” Kelsey said.
“No matter. A Beckett has involved himself with you. Oh, please, don’t take that wrong! You’re a lovely young woman. I’m delighted to help in any way that I can.”
“You’re a ghost.”
“Yes, I believe we’ve established that fact.”
Was there such thing as dreaming while one was wide awake? Had she blacked out, blanked out—without knowing it? Maybe she would wake up on the floor, having been hit on the head with a candlestick or a gargoyle or Chinese good luck cat.
“My dear young woman, you’re gaping. Not that you’re unattractive even while staring at me openmouthed, but you are lovelier still with a more customary and benign expression,” he said.
“I still don’t understand.” She suddenly felt tears pricking her eyes. Figment of her imagination, creation of stress or real remnant of the past, she couldn’t understand why she would see an unknown privateer and not her mother or her grandfather.
“I don’t think any of us actually understands,” he said.