The Uninvited

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“How are you doing?”

“I lost my guide,” Tyler told him.

“I can call someone else.”

Tyler hesitated. Maybe that was the right thing to do. Bring in someone who hadn’t discovered a dead friend at the house. Someone who wasn’t derisive of the investigation.

But he realized he didn’t want anyone else.

And as far as her attitude was concerned… It didn’t matter if you believed the world was round or not, because it was round regardless of what you believed.

Eventually, Allison would accept the fact that something existed in the Tarleton-Dandridge House.

And as Todd had suggested, it liked her.

“Thanks, Adam. I’ll move along on my own for a bit, see if Ms. Leigh begins to show some interest. I’m sure her heart is in the right place. I’ll give her more time. The rest of the team will be in tomorrow night, and we’ll see where we are then.”

Adam agreed with him and they hung up. Tyler immediately went to the guides’ room; the key hung on a peg there, so access to the attic was ridiculously easy. He returned to the study, picking up the folders that held information on the board members. Pausing, he looked at the painting of Beast Bradley.

He’d been perceived so differently by the two artists.

He stood, fascinated by the painting, and walked over to it. A Plexiglas cover protected it and he saw that, apparently from the time it had been hung, it had resided on that wall to avoid direct sunlight.

He tried to read the signature of the artist and was surprised to realize that the name was T. Dandridge. He squinted to find the date; the painting had been done in 1781. The year the Colonies had finally achieved their independence.

He smiled. Yes, the artist of this particular likeness had truly loathed his subject.

Tyler left the study and went up the stairs, back to Lucy Tarleton’s room, and looked at the painting there. The signature appeared to be Josiah Bell. The work was dated 1777.

Thoughtful, Tyler returned to the study once more. A truism in life was that everyone perceived others in their own way. Where one person saw kindness in someone, another saw weakness. Where one saw cruelty, another saw strength.

Perception. Always nine-tenths of reality.

He smiled. Sadly, he was certain, Allison Leigh saw him as an oversize quack. A pretentious hick.

Amused, he considered his own perceptions of her. A woman with a lot of pride and yet humility. A lover of truth and honor, but stubborn and determined. Stunning with her pitch-dark hair and bright blue eyes, but dismissive of her looks. The woman was a scholar, after all, and took her work seriously.

He hoped she’d come around. There was just something about her—something in the helpless look she’d given Todd, something that was kind and empathetic.

And despite the situation—despite her exhausted, annoyed and bewildered behavior toward him—he still found her…sensual.

The ghost likes her, Todd had said. Yes, sometimes ghosts watched a person, and just as the living did, they knew who they liked—and who they didn’t.

He stared at the painting. It didn’t move, but Todd was right. The eyes had been well-painted, giving the illusion that the painting could watch someone moving about the room.

He leaned back in his chair. “I am here,” he said softly.

He was greeted by silence. There were secrets in this house, but so far, the ghostly inhabitants were guarding those secrets.

Some of his coworkers had known from the time they were children that they had an extra sense, whether they saw it as a gift or a curse. They’d had grandparents or friends who’d appeared at their own funerals or talked to them in the middle of the night, or even showed up in other places.

Tyler, however, had no clue he had any unusual abilities until he’d done a stint in the service and then come home to become a Texas Ranger. He’d loved stories about the Rangers all his life; becoming a Ranger had been a dream. It was when he’d been a Ranger for a year that he’d first experienced the unusual. The situation had been especially poignant. Drug runners had kidnapped their mule’s younger sister. The older sister had become a heroin addict, and when she hadn’t been able to produce the money they’d wanted quickly enough, they’d killed her with an overdose. The younger sister had been left to rot at the bottom of a cistern out on the dusty Texas plain. A desperate, state-wide search had been instigated to find the seventeen-year-old. Tyler was standing in the middle of the sprawling ranch house where the drug runners were based when the older sister, pathetic, shaking and twitching, had appeared to him, begging him to help.

He thought he’d been drinking too much; he tried to tell himself that he wasn’t seeing what he was seeing. She followed him. She was next to him even when he was with other officers. She didn’t know where her sister was, but he had to help her, she said.

He was trying. He was trying so damned hard.

He stayed on his shift for several extra hours, searching the house, the barn, the stables, everywhere. He headed back to a bar for the night and discovered the dead woman on the stool next to him. He went home and she invaded his bedroom.

The next morning he got up and joined the search again, quizzing his ghost relentlessly about the property.

In the end, he found the younger sister in the cistern. He found her alive—shaken and dehydrated, but alive. His crying, grateful ghost left him, and for months afterward, he wondered if the pressure of the case hadn’t made him delusional.

Then he’d walked into his office one day to see an old man sitting by his desk. No one else saw this old man, who wanted Tyler to find his murderer. Eventually he did.

The poor guy’s son-in-law had figured he wasn’t leaving the world soon enough and had helped him meet his Maker.

For a long time, he’d thought he was crazy. But as he and Logan Raintree worked together, they each learned that the other saw unusual things. That they both did. When Logan was approached by Jackson Crow, head of the first Krewe, and then Tyler was asked to join, as well, he felt it was the right thing to do. And it had been. They’d solved cases. Saved lives.

And they uncovered the truth.

He’d also learned that not all ghosts walked over to a man and started up a conversation. Some chose to speak only to certain people.

Just like the living did.

He shook off his memories and returned to the information on the four board members who ran the private Old Philly History Corporation.

Nathan Pierson, forty-five, real estate broker by day, financially comfortable with excellent stock investments.

Sarah Vining, fifty-one, philanthropist, wealthy due to an oil inheritance.

Cherry Addison, forty-three, a direct descendent of the Tarleton-Dandridge family on the maternal side, a former model and sometime actress with family money. Married to an artist of increasing renown.

Ethan Oxford, seventy-two, lawyer and politician.

He needed to meet them all. The best way to do that might be to call an impromptu board meeting.

Tyler realized he wasn’t giving the attention he should to the folders. He rose and stretched. As he did, he thought he heard something from the rear of the house.

He left the study, looking at the rooms and the elegant entry as he walked to the front door. Nothing seemed to have changed. He strode through the rooms and then to the back door, unlocking it to step outside.

The moon was waning, but it still seemed to be full. And beneath that light, in the middle of the yard between the kitchen and the stables, he saw a horse. A majestic animal, huge, black and sleek.

He walked over to the horse and the animal gazed at him. He felt a cold sensation as a large black head nuzzled his chest. He stroked the cool air, seeing the animal’s dark eyes and fine brow.

“Hey, fellow, still pounding the beat, eh?” he murmured.

The horse whinnied but couldn’t answer any questions for him. A ghost horse couldn’t speak any more than a living one could. But he was encouraged. If the horse was here, the house itself was opening to him.

He heard another sound—whining. He glanced down. There was a dog by his feet. a hound, large and tawny in color, with huge brown eyes that looked up at him trustingly. He hunkered down to touch the dog, feeling air, but aware that the hound knew it was being stroked. “Thank you, boy. Thank you for coming to me,” he said softly. “If I can help, I will.”

He was so involved with visions of the family creatures that he was startled when his phone rang.

“Montague,” he said quickly, grinning to himself. The ghost hound had pushed him—nothing but a blast of air or imagination, but it had almost knocked him over.

“Agent Montague, it’s Allison Leigh. I’ve, uh, had a nap. If you want to talk, I’m willing.”

“I’ll be right by to get you,” he said.

* * *

Allison had managed to convince herself that she was totally sane; she was just under intense pressure.

And she was going to do the sane and intelligent thing. See a shrink.

Annette Fanning sat on a stool at the counter, looking at her with concern.

She was grateful to Annette. Her friend had arrived just as she’d come to, and when she’d let Annette in and continued to run through her house searching for a sign that someone had been there, Annette had kept quiet and helped. Now, she stared at Allison.

“You’re making more tea? What you need is a good shot,” Annette told her sagely. “And if you won’t have one, I will. You’d barely gotten off the floor when I got here. You could have hurt yourself! I still don’t understand what happened. You saw someone in your house, or you think you saw someone?”

“I don’t think anyone was really here. I’m sure I’m just mourning Julian, which is something I wasn’t able to do before. I mean, I found him, and then the rest of the night I was with the cops and at the station and back at the house, and then we found the office trashed....”

“You need a good shot of whiskey,” Annette said again, getting up and going to the cabinet.

“I don’t want any whiskey. I just called that agent and said I’d go out with him.”

“Now that’s a plan. He’s really hot-looking, Allison.”

Allison frowned at her. “I don’t mean go out in that sense. I’m going to answer questions for him and tell him about people. It’s not a date.”

“That’s a pity,” Annette said. She was tiny and blonde and struggled to reach the bottle shoved at the back of the cabinet. “You should get a real life, you know. You can’t spend your life in the past.”

“I don’t spend my life in the past,” Allison said, getting the bottle for her. “And I don’t want a shot, really.”

“I do—really!” Annette accepted the whiskey bottle and poured herself a measure. “You haven’t gone out since you were dating Peter Aubrey, right? I thought you two were great together.”

“When he was clean, we were great. I cared about Pete and it was fun being with him. But I didn’t have the power to change him. I picked him up from various gigs three times when his friends called to say he’d passed out and needed help. And I went back to him twice when he said he’d kill himself if I left him. I learned. It has nothing to do with me—he has to find a way to face his demons. I went to Narcotics Anonymous and learned that I can’t change him. Only he can do that. If he ever gets cleaned up, goes into rehab and is serious about it, I’ll consider seeing him again,” Allison told her. “I’m not antisocial. I’m not lonely. And now is not the time to worry about my social life. Julian is dead, Annette, and the house is in the middle of some investigation....” She let her voice fade away; Annette’s big brown eyes were moist again.

“I still can’t believe it,” Annette said. “I can’t believe that Julian’s dead.”

“I’m sorry, Annette, I didn’t mean—”

“No, no, I know.” She let out a long sigh. “I called Nathan to find out if the board knew anything about funeral arrangements but no one’s heard anything. The family wants the body shipped back to Indiana, but the morgue isn’t going to release him until…until whatever, I don’t know. There are still tests being done, I guess. Do you think he’d been drinking or that he was high or something? This is all so mysterious. Oh! Nathan did say he’d make sure we have a memorial in the next few weeks, no matter what. Julian had a lot of fans in the city.”