“Yes, she is.”
“Doughnut?” she asked.
“I’d love one.”
“Doughnuts get such a bad rap these days,” she told him.
“Once in a while, they’re good for the soul,” he said.
Melissa looked around the kitchen. “I do love this house so much. Oh!” She blushed, realizing how she sounded. “I’m sorry. I know that your cousin…well, I’m sorry.”
“It’s not the fault of the house, Melissa,” he said.
She leaned toward him, a slightly faraway look in her eyes. “Maybe it is.”
“Pardon?”
“Maybe…I don’t know. This house makes me feel…weird. Can a house be jinxed…or…evil?” she asked.
He arched a brow. “No,” he said firmly.
“Sorry,” she said quickly. “And it’s not bad vibes I get here. In fact, I should get bad vibes, after what happened, but…I get good ones. If the place is haunted, though…it could be Revolutionary War ghosts, or Civil War ghosts, or Irish gang ghosts….” She got a faraway look in her eyes, as if she’d traveled back in time herself.
Joe stared at her, feeling a strange creeping sensation along his nape. Hell. He was six foot three and two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle. He’d faced cold-blooded killers in his time, and he sure as hell wasn’t afraid of the dark. So how the hell had this tiny woman given him the shivers? But it wasn’t her, he realized.
It was the house.
Oh, like hell.
“You weren’t at the party that night, were you?” he asked Melissa.
“Me? No. I’m just the hired help.”
“You’re far more than hired help,” he told her, and watched her flush. She seemed to thrive on the least compliment. Earnest and sincere, and not homely but also not a raving beauty, she had probably worked hard for every achievement in her life. She deserved a few compliments, he decided.
“You weren’t here, either, were you?”
“No, I wasn’t.” A strange sense of cold suddenly washed over him as he spoke. He looked around, thinking there had to be an air-conditioning vent somewhere near, but he didn’t see one.
Then, inexplicably, while he was just standing there, he lost his balance and stumbled.
Disturbed, he frowned and strode past Melissa into the back servants’ pantry, where the explosion had happened. Everything was perfectly restored now, but even so, he walked over and stood by the hearth, wondering exactly where Matt had been standing.
An odd sense of pressure filled his head.
Leslie…
He must be going crazy. He could have sworn he heard her name, but there was no one else in the room.
He felt torn between the urge to stay and discover what was going on here to spook him and the irrational urge to run back to the dig site to see Leslie, as if she were in danger.
He felt almost as if he were pushed to join her, as if a strange whisper in his head was urgently telling him to go to her.
Ridiculous. She was working and perfectly safe.
“What is it?” Melissa asked, looking at him from the doorway.
“Nothing. Nothing at all. Thanks for the doughnut. I’ll be seeing you.”
He was out of the house in a flash and found himself running down the street toward the dig.
She blinked. There was a blinding light shining in her eyes, and for a moment she thought she was staring at a monster, then realized it was a man.
Professor Laymon was staring down at her, the light from his electric lantern reflected in the lenses of his glasses, his gaunt face made eerie by the play of light and shadow.
“She’s fine,” he announced to someone outside her field of vision. “She’s fine.”
A monster? Or a man? Someone had hit her.
She kept silent, suddenly suspicious.
“We need to call 911,” she heard Brad announce worriedly.
“No, no,” she said, waving a hand in the air, sitting up. The dark room swayed for a minute, but then her vision cleared almost instantly. She looked around and frowned. She definitely wasn’t alone anymore. And she wasn’t by the wall anymore, either. She was sitting in a pile of rubble, halfway across the room.
“I don’t see—” she began.
“You got a good clunk on the head,” Brad said.
“A clunk on the head?” she repeated.
“From the ceiling,” Laymon explained. “A chunk of plaster fell on you. We need to install proper safety precautions in here.”
There was a commotion just outside, and suddenly Joe Connolly was pushing through the entrance. He rushed over to her, looking like a fullback ready to face the opponent’s starting line, and stared reproachfully at Brad and Laymon. She followed the direction of his accusing gaze to see Robert Adair standing nearby, looking acutely uncomfortable. And when she squinted toward the entrance, she saw a host of workers and more policemen, including Ken Dryer, looking in at her. Hank Smith was there, too, she noticed.