“He’s here!” Candy announced.
“Oh, you mean Aidan,” Mo said. “He— Oh, it’s a long story. There was another murder. He stayed at the house for me. I was kind of a wreck last night. Candy, the victim was someone I knew.”
“She’s not referring to your agent, Mo,” Daniel told her. “His friend is here, the man who was killed. Richard Highsmith.”
Mo stared at them both, threw off her covers and climbed out of bed. She ran to the landing but then paused. She didn’t want to race downstairs like a crazy woman.
She started down quietly on her bare feet.
He was there, indeed. Richard Highsmith. He stood by the fireplace, looking at Aidan with the smile an old friend might give another.
He was speaking in a soft voice.
Mo continued down. At the first sound of a board creaking, Aidan was wide-awake, his hand instantly reaching for his gun.
He saw her and smiled. “Morning, Mo. Did you get some sleep?”
She nodded. “Aidan, Richard is here.”
He was immediately alert, sitting straight up—and yet he didn’t move.
Richard Highsmith turned to her. “He doesn’t see me.”
“He wants to. Richard, we need your help.”
“Ask him what happened,” Aidan said.
Aidan might not hear or see Richard, but Richard heard and saw him. “I was in the greenroom alone. Jilli had just gone out to the stage, and Taylor was talking to our security people. The convention woman—Bari, Bari Macaby—had gone to get me something. I went to wash my hands. I was scrubbing them when...darkness. And then...I saw myself. Saw myself dead in a cavern and I was—in pieces.”
“He never saw who killed him,” Mo interpreted. “They came from behind when he was washing his hands. He doesn’t know who did it.”
“Ask him,” Aidan said quietly, “if he knows why.”
“He can hear you. He’s standing by the fireplace,” Mo pointed out.
Aidan turned in that direction. “Why? And why Wendy, too?”
Mo thought she saw tears in the ghost’s eyes. He lowered his head, obviously finding it difficult to talk.
“For the love of God, I don’t know,” he said. “Wendy was...wonderful.”
Mo didn’t wait for Aidan to ask the next question. “Is J.J. your son?” she blurted out.
Richard raised his head to look at her. “I hope so. I believe so. But Wendy...she didn’t want to trap me. Not when she first found out she was pregnant—and then... I don’t know. We’d seen each other in the city many times...so long ago. We lost contact, and I hadn’t heard from her in years.
“Then, one night last May, we ran into each other, believe it or not, on the street. In the city. We met and talked and I...I was in love all over again. We agreed to spend time together after I came here. I believe she was going to tell me that her child was my child. She said she had some special news that involved me and her child, and she had to give me the opportunity to choose. I think she didn’t want me to face a political scandal. But, yes. She and J.J. were going to come to the convention center. She’d told everyone she was spending a few days in the city—but when the speech was over I was going to be free for the next few days. We were planning to stay at a motel on the highway, talk...”
Mo paraphrased his words for Aidan.
“Ask him why they both had notations about Lizzie grave,” Aidan said.
“I didn’t know about it,” Richard Highsmith replied. “Wendy said she’d been on a field trip with J.J.’s class and that she’d gotten interested in local history. She told me she’d found a reference to a woman who was murdered, a woman who had loved Major Andre.” He paused. “She was aware that the major was an ancestor of mine. We were both going to look into it.”
Again, Mo repeated his words.
Aidan was staring in the right direction. She thought he’d actually seen something of Lizzie and John Andre the other day.
If he would just let himself...
She remembered her dream, the nightmare in which he couldn’t reach her.
Because he couldn’t cross the bridge.
“Ask him—” Aidan began.
“Aidan,” she said. “You ask him. Richard is your friend. He came to you for help. Please, let him talk to you.”
“I can’t...I can’t see anymore.”
“Yes, you can. I know you can—if you let yourself.”
Aidan closed his eyes for a moment and sighed, his head bowed.
Then he looked up, directly at Richard.
Richard looked back at him, a crooked grin on his lips. “They got me, my old friend. They got me,” he said quietly.
Somehow, the words made it through.
Aidan stood. “Richard,” he breathed.
“I came to you because I know you’re the only one who would understand—and the only man who’d believe that a dead man could help.”
14
Aidan could see him.
He could see his old friend, almost as if he were there in the flesh.