“Restore the house and find a way to use it to benefit the community,” Zachary answered for Jeremy.
“Oh?” she said politely. Looking at the two younger Flynns, she could believe they were sincere, but she suspected things would go quite differently if Aidan had anything to say about it.
“I thought,” Jeremy explained, “that we’d give ourselves the goal of getting it up and running by Halloween, then open it to the public and use the profits to benefit Children’s House.”
“You mean open it as a haunted house?” she asked.
Aidan gave a disgusted snort.
Zachary said, “Well, we’ll have a party, anyway, though a haunted house would be great. We’ll have to give that some thought.”
“I’m sure it would be great,” she said, but a chill seemed to sweep through her.
She wanted to tell him not to do it, and she didn’t know why. All she knew was that the idea of creating a haunted house here was a bad one. A very bad one.
Why? she mocked herself. Did she really think they could wake the dead?
“It could really benefit the kids,” Jeremy told her. “I can take this to a whole new level. And I can use the radio spots I’ve already taped to promote it.”
“It—it sounds good,” she had to admit.
“The party would just be a grand opening,” Zachary said. “I’d like to see this place brought back to its original grandeur, and then we can use it for all kinds of functions to benefit the community.”
Could they really do it? she wondered. She felt the sun on her face at that moment, shining through the odd storm clouds that had gathered earlier, and the breeze suddenly gentled. A good omen? She did love this old house, and it would be nice to see it restored and being used for something important.
She knew this place backwards and forwards. She’d been young when Amelia had entered her life, young enough to fall under the spell of the plantation’s legends and ready to have fun with its spooky history.
“Let’s not get so far ahead of ourselves,” Aidan said firmly, looking at his brothers.
Not just an idiot, a killjoy, too, she decided.
Then he turned to look at her, and for a moment there was a genuine smile on his face.
It changed him. It made him look approachable, human. Sexy. Now where the hell had that thought come from?
“I’m sorry if I was rude earlier, Miss Montgomery. Could you possibly give us the grand tour?” he asked her, and added politely, “If you have the time.”
“I…”
“Please,” he said.
One word didn’t change the fact that he was an idiot, she told herself, even if he was still smiling. Suckering her in. Well, too bad for him, because she was no fool.
On the other hand, she had just been thinking about how well she knew and loved the house—their house now—so what would it hurt to go through it one last time, only with them?
“Sure. Come on.”
She walked past him. Her backpack with her belongings—and the diary—was resting against the entry wall. For a moment she felt a twinge of guilt about the diary, but she told herself to quit worrying about it and kept going. She could hear them following behind her. “As you can see, this is the shotgun hall. It got the name because—”
“A shot fired from the front door would just go straight through and out the back,” Jeremy said. “And will you look at that stairway?”
“Don’t forget to look at the wood rot,” Aidan said.
“Easily fixed,” Zachary assured him. “Honestly, Aidan. I bought a studio that had wood rot. All it took was a decent carpenter to get it fixed.”
The house really was beautiful, Kendall thought as she always did whenever she was there. Its grandeur was decaying, sure, but the elegance was still there behind the peeling paint and the rotting wood. There were floor to ceiling windows in the ballroom. The parlor was still furnished with a Duncan Phyfe love seat and nineteenth-century needlepoint chairs. There was even a grand piano—badly in need of tuning, Kendall warned them—along with elegant occasional tables, a secretary and more. They paused to study the wall of family portraits, some beautifully painted works of art, others less accurate and attractive records of the past.
“Amelia?” Aidan asked, looking at the photo on the far right.
Amelia hadn’t been painted as a young and beautiful girl. She’d had the painting done only a few years ago, and it showed her as Kendall knew her, with a cap of snow-white hair, fine features worn with time, bright eyes and the kindly smile she had always offered.
“She looks like a nice woman,” Zachary said.
“She was,” Kendall assured them.
Upstairs, Aidan tested walls and stomped on the floors. He gave a cursory glance up the stairs into the attic, which was filled with trunks.
“Family history,” Zach assured him.
But even that drew nothing more than a noncommittal “hmm” from Aidan as they headed back downstairs.