She saw a slight smile on Aidan’s lips as he said, “So the wife killed the gorgeous housekeeper—or the housekeeper killed the wife—and now she’s haunting the place, right? Better yet—they killed each other and now they’re both haunting the place.”
Kendall looked at him and finished the story. “The wife demanded that the housekeeper be hanged. The Klan had a lot of influence in the area then, so they took care of it. Her head…she was decapitated when she was hanged. They say she haunts the property, looking for it. Oh, and she cursed the wife as she was being dragged over to that oak—” she pointed to a huge tree on the left side of the house “—to meet her death. The curse apparently worked. The wife died, falling down the grand stairway, one year to the day after the maid was executed.”
“Great story,” Jeremy said, smiling. “Is it for real?”
“I’m not sure. You’d have to check with the historical society. To be honest, several of the plantations claim that or a similar legend. I grew up here and heard all the stories about the local plantations. I can’t guarantee the truth of any of the tales about this place—except the one about the cousins and the Civil War. That story’s in the history books.”
Aidan turned his hawklike stare from her face and directed it at the house, shaking his head. “I’m back to thinking we should sell it and get the hell out,” he said to his brothers.
“Just look at it,” Jeremy said, opening his arms to the house, as if in greeting. “It’s beautiful. It’s our heritage. Hey, we’re related to those ghosts.”
“Maybe not,” Aidan said.
“Maybe not?” Jeremy echoed questioningly.
He shrugged. “Who knows if one of the mistresses of the house was fooling around on the side?” Was that a sense of humor he was demonstrating? Kendall wondered. “The men were known to fool around with the servants, so maybe their wives were fooling around with the grooms. Who knows what could have happened?”
Jeremy laughed. “My brother is a cynic, in case you hadn’t noticed,” he said.
“So it seems,” she agreed pleasantly.
“He’s different on the inside,” Jeremy assured her.
“Really? I was actually thinking that he’s just plain old nasty on the inside.”
She couldn’t believe that the words she had been thinking escaped her lips. Not that she expected to see any of these men again, but still, she was usually civil.
Her words had clearly startled Aidan. His eyebrow hiked up, and she would have sworn that he almost smiled.
“That’s calling a spade a spade,” he said. “I’m sorry, Miss Montgomery, that I seem to have made such a poor impression on you. Anyway, thank you for the tour, and now we’ll let you go.”
“Thanks.”
“Wait. Did you ever see anything happen here?” Aidan asked, his eyes hard again and his voice flat and emotionless, as if he were grilling her in an interrogation room.
She stared back at him. “No,” she said.
She was lying. And judging from the way he was assessing her, she had a feeling that he knew it.
She had seen something. She just didn’t know what. She wasn’t even sure that Amelia’s words and fears hadn’t crept into her mind, and made her think that there were…
That there were strange lights in the darkness, and that the noises that had awakened her in the middle of the night had no earthly cause. As if something—or someone—was being dragged across the lawn below her window. That there were whispers of sound in the middle of the night, eerie and unfathomable, as if some mad scientist were at work on the property.
“No, of course not,” she said with more certainty, tossing her hair back with feigned impatience.
Because all those things were imaginary, she insisted to herself.
She knew the explanation. Hadn’t she managed to graduate with a three-point-nine average, and degrees in both psychology and drama? She understood the depths of the human mind. She had simply been sharing Amelia’s nightmares, which were themselves a very understandable manifestation of her fear of death.
Kendall couldn’t allow herself to believe—ever—that any of it had been true.
Because Kendall was a fraud. She was an excellent performer, and she was a total fraud.
Although there had been a few times when…
The psychologist in her kicked in and insisted that there had been nothing inexplicable about those few times, either. She had been trained as an actress, pure and simple, and now she made both psychology and theater pay by playing psychic for a living. And “playing” was the operative word, she reminded herself. She wasn’t a real psychic, if such a thing even existed. Everything she had experienced could be explained. The mind was an amazing combination of logic and imagination, and it was the logical part’s job to kick in when the imagination became too fanciful.
“Guess what we want to do with the place?” Jeremy asked her.
“It’s not what we want to do,” Aidan corrected before she could answer him.
“I have no idea,” she said to Jeremy, ignoring Aidan.