Relative Strangers Part 6

"Do the Meads still own it?" Rachel asked.

"A descendant does. Stanley Kelvin." Joyce blushed. "You might have seen him at the Christmas Eve party. I'm afraid Lucas left you to try to kick him out, but he didn't do it, of course. Not from an open house. Poor Stanley. His mother insisted that he take over the hotel after the death of her father, Erastus Mead. Erastus was Horatio's grandson. Poor old Horatio must have been spinning in his grave when Stanley ran the place into the ground. Which brings me back to what you saw, Corrie. Why on earth would Horatio have come to the Sinclair House?"

A flash of memory provided the answer. "He was looking for his daughter."

"Really?" Joyce seemed intrigued by that notion.

Corrie suddenly felt self-conscious. "I wish I knew how I know that." What she'd seen and heard in the dining room was coming back to her in bits and pieces like a dream. She could not remember all of it, though.

"Oh, this is wonderful. Our hotel with its very own ghosts." But Joyce's awe and delight turned to dismay at a sound behind them. A man in a wheelchair, the man Lucas had stopped to talk to at the Christmas Eve party, had entered the room without any of them noticing.

"Hugh!" Joyce exclaimed, rus.h.i.+ng to his side. He was Lucas's father, Corrie realized. And she saw, too, that Lucas was not the only one to inherit striking good looks from a previous generation. What in his younger days must have been thick dark hair was now snowy white. Hugh's facial features, even ravaged by age and illness, were still handsome. His eyes, the same hazel color as his son's, looked alert and intelligent . . . and deeply concerned.

When Joyce knelt beside his wheelchair, Hugh made a strangled sound, plainly trying to speak. All that came out was an alarming rattling noise deep in his throat.

"Oh, my! You aren't supposed to upset yourself." Sounding shaken, Joyce sprang to her feet once more and wheeled him from the room.

The devotion of wife to husband was obvious, and painfully reminiscent of the way Corrie's mother had tended to drop everything to cater to Donald Ballantyne's whims. Corrie knew this wasn't the same. Hugh was ill and needed attention. Still, Joyce's behavior made her uncomfortable.

"Maybe we should leave," she said to Rachel.

They were in the hallway when Lucas walked through the front door. Corrie froze as his startled gaze went first to his mother, just disappearing into another room with the wheelchair, then to her.

"What the h.e.l.l is going on here?" he demanded.

"Your father's a little upset," Joyce told him, popping back out into the hail at the sound of her son s voice.

Corrie cleared her throat, prepared to explain, but Lucas brushed past her to follow Joyce into what was apparently Hugh's room.

"Yup. Definitely time to leave," Rachel said.

They retrieved their coats and already had the front door open when Lucas reappeared. His piercing glare impaled Corrie, making flight impossible.

"We'll talk later," he said. "At the hotel."

For a promise, it felt suspiciously like a threat.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Overcast skies, merely threatening earlier, had by midafternoon produced freezing rain rather than snow. Lucas stopped beneath the portico outside the front entrance of the Sinclair House to brush moisture from his coat and glower at the precipitation. Sleet meant slippery roads and an atmosphere of doom and gloom. Bad for skiing. Bad for tourism. Bad for the Sinclair House.

Perfect weather for ghosts, though.

He entered the lobby to find Corrie Ballantyne occupying a chair near the registration desk. She was only pretending to read a novel. He watched her for a few minutes as she stared at one page, never turning to the next.

After all the trouble she was causing, how could he still want to look after her? Protective instincts warred with his natural wariness of women. The whole situation was so preposterous that his normal decisiveness had deserted him.

"Ms. Ballantyne," he said softly. "Would you come into my office, please?"

A guilty start was her first reaction. Then she complied with his request.

Lucas's inner sanctum was furnished much as it had been in his great-great-grandfather's time, with a ma.s.sive oak rolltop desk, chairs covered in garnet-colored leather, and framed maps showing nineteenth-century street plans for the state's major cities. A computer terminal was discreetly hidden in the shadows behind a four-drawer wooden file cabinet.

"Is your father all right?" Corrie asked.

Lucas hung his coat on the coatrack and seated himself in the ma.s.sive chair behind the desk, waving Corrie into a smaller version situated to one side. He picked up a pencil, tapped it on the blotter, then tossed it away. He didn't want to look at Corrie. He was already too aware of her. The atmosphere in the office had the same charge that preceded an electrical storm.

"Pop managed a few words after you left the house," he said. "That's the first time he's spoken since his stroke."

"Lucas, that's wonderful." Her voice hummed with sincerity.

"He said 'ghost' and then 'girl saw her.'"

Corrie sat up straighter, drawing his gaze to her in spite of his resolve. "Girl? What girl?"

"That's what I'd like to know. Mom and I are pretty sure he didn't mean you, but he couldn't manage to say any more. He nearly made himself ill trying."

He'd gotten so agitated that Lucas had insisted they drop the subject. He'd feared a second stroke was imminent and called Hugh's doctor. Fortunately, Doc lived only two doors away. Semi-retired, he was Hugh's friend as well as his physician. He'd advised rest and a.s.sured them all would be well if Hugh avoided getting overexcited.

"Just how much of my conversation with your mother did he overhear?" Corrie asked.

"Only the last part, what Mom said about ghosts, but she was filling him in on the rest when I returned from seeing you out."

Lucas had tried to stop his mother. She had overruled his objections and insisted on telling the tale, which had riveted his father's attention.

"After she finished," Lucas went on "Mom asked Pop if he thought you were telling the truth. He nodded his head. Then he managed those few words. That's more progress than we've seen in weeks, but I can't say I'm pleased by the cause."

Corrie leaned forward. Her fingers came to rest on his arm in a gesture of comfort. Surprised, he stared at them as waves of heat surged up his arm and into his chest.

When she started to pull away, to release her hold, he couldn't stop himself from capturing her hand. Seemingly of its own volition, his thumb brushed across her palm. He felt her delicate s.h.i.+ver. His own reaction was both immediate and powerful.

He stared at her, thunderstruck. Why her? Why now?

For Corrie, the erotic shock waves began as a tingling sensation in her hand, then shuddered through her entire system. The embarra.s.singly sensual reaction was even more powerful than what she'd felt the day before when he'd touched her at the cabin, or kissed her in her room. She had to fight an urge to close her eyes and moan aloud.

She knew the smart move would be to extricate herself from his grip, but her willpower just wasn't up to the task. Instead she cleared her throat and tried to pretend he wasn't affecting her at all. The effort seemed futile when she realized he must be feeling the pulse leap in her wrist.

Slowly, he released her, his hand curling into a fist on top of his blotter. Corrie struggled against the temptation to reach out again, to seize his hand and restore that tantalizing contact.

Bad idea! Get back on track, she warned herself.

"As I was sitting in the lobby just now," she said in a voice that sounded a trifle breathless, "I was trying to think of an explanation for what I've experienced. Something other than the supernatural one."

"Any luck?" The huskiness in his own voice betrayed him. He was as affected by the chemistry between them as she was.

"Not unless someone's trying to trick me," she said.

"How?" He put more distance between them by rolling his chair to the far end of the huge desk. Absently, he aligned the day-by-day calendar with the edge of the blotter. Anything, she surmised, to avoid meeting her eyes.

The theory she'd devised while waiting for him was a last-ditch, rather desperate attempt to explain Adrienne away. She didn't hold out much hope it would wash, but she voiced it anyhow.

"Could a ghost be faked by using a hidden projector or something? I don't know a thing about high-tech special effects, but I've heard people talk about lasers and holograms. Sometimes it seems to me that just about anything is possible."

"Other people would have seen something if that were the case."

He was right. She should have realized that herself. "I guess it was silly to think anyone would go to that much trouble just to set up a hoax." She managed a weak, self-deprecating smile.

"One person might," Lucas muttered. "I'd love to be able to pin this on Stanley Kelvin, but I can't see him having the know-how to rig special effects. He doesn't have the cash to hire someone who would be able to do it, either."

Stanley Kelvin, Corrie thought. The man who'd kissed Joyce's hand.

At the image, she again felt the tingling sensation of Lucas's thumb on her own palm. A ghostly caress. How appropriate!

In spite of jangled nerves, she managed to speak calmly. "Will you tell me about him, Lucas? I saw the way you two looked at each other at the party. I could feel the animosity between you from all the way across the room."

"There's not much to tell. Some years ago, my father gave Kelvin a job here. Pop felt sorry for him and, I suppose, he might have been hoping to mend some fences."

"Your mother told us about the feud."

"Pop should have known better." With a sound of disgust, Lucas at last looked at her. His eyes were hard and lacked their usual sparkle. "Kelvin repaid his kindness by embezzling a small fortune from the Sinclair House. By the time Pop discovered what Kelvin was up to and fired him, we were nearly ruined."

Genuinely shocked, Corrie sagged back in her chair. "How awful." Almost as awful was the way her attention kept wandering. She'd come in there to sort out the facts about a ghost, but she was having a hard time keeping her eyes off Lucas's broad shoulders.

"He was prosecuted and did some time, but the money was never recovered."

If Lucas had seemed tense earlier, now he was drawn tight as a bowstring, but it was anger at Kelvin, not a reaction to her. Corrie told herself she should be relieved, that she didn't want his attention fixed on her that way.

"He came right back to Waycross Springs when he got out of jail. He was on probation for a while, but he's off it now. He's free to do whatever he likes, go wherever he wants. Until he's caught committing another crime.

It took Corrie a moment to sort that out. "You think he's up to no good?"

"I know he is, but I have no proof." As he told her of several instances of petty vandalism and crank phone calls, Lucas toyed with another pencil, then set it carefully aside, as if he feared he'd end up snapping it in two. "Kelvin would love to see us go under," he continued, "but he's not your ghost. He specializes in plain old-fas.h.i.+oned villainy."

"So that brings us back to a haunted hotel," Corrie said. "Your mother thinks the ghost has great potential as a publicity stunt."

Lucas looked as if he'd just bitten down hard on a particularly sour slice of lemon. "Oh, great," he muttered.

"She could be right."

"We don't need the off-the-wall clientele that kind of gimmick would attract." His eyes narrowed. "Why did Mom invite you and Rachel to the house?"

"Can't you guess? She was matchmaking again." It seemed horribly obvious to her now. "What better way to throw us together than to solicit my professional advice and then suggest, since I know nothing about the hotel business, that you show me the ropes?"

Lucas's expression was shuttered. "There's an easy way to extricate yourself from any plans my mother has for you."

"And that is?"

"Leave. I'll call around and find you accommodations elsewhere." He actually reached for the phone and started to punch in a number. "There's a nice old inn in Bethel, or you could cross the border into New Hamps.h.i.+re and stay at the-"

"I'm not going anywhere." Corrie didn't like having plans made for her in any circ.u.mstances, but Lucas's offhand suggestion made her stomach knot.

It was because she couldn't abandon Adrienne, she told herself. Nothing to do with the infuriating man behind the desk.

"If you leave you'll also be free of these sightings." Lucas still held the phone in one hand but he'd stopped dialing.

"You won't, however," she said. "Adrienne isn't a problem you're going to get rid of so easily. Sending me packing sure won't do it. If Adrienne is real," she explained, "then there has to be some reason she's haunting the hotel. I mean, everything I've ever heard about ghosts indicates that they walk because something horrible happened to them while they were alive. She must want to communicate with the living, and for some reason she's singled me out as her messenger."

Peculiar as it seemed to Corrie, the Sinclair House's ghost had chosen her. Adrienne needed her help.

Emotions flicked rapidly across Lucas's face. He looked as if he wanted to argue with her conclusion. She was sure he didn't believe she'd seen anything. But he couldn't be a hundred percent sure she was imagining things, either. Not after Hugh's odd behavior.

Corrie pressed her advantage. "Apparently I'm not the first to see Adrienne. You can't a.s.sume I'll be the last, either. If this matter can be settled now, with me, you'd be foolish to send me away."

He slammed his fist down on the desk, making the paper-clip holder jump. "d.a.m.n! I wish Pop could have told us what he meant. Who the h.e.l.l was this girl? When did she claim to see Adrienne? What happened to her?"

"Let's try to find out," Corrie said. "There must be records other than those in Joyce's sc.r.a.pbooks and photo alb.u.ms. Newspapers. Local histories. The hotel registers. Somewhere there's an ident.i.ty for this mysterious girl. And maybe a clue as to what Adrienne wants as well."

Corrie no longer had any doubt that she'd had a brush with the supernatural. She might have imagined Adrienne after seeing her portrait. She might even have guessed correctly that Lucas's great-great-grandfather would be his look-alike as well as his namesake. But she realized now, remembering Joyce's photo alb.u.m, that there was no way she could have seen Horatio Mead's face before he appeared to her in the dining room.

"We know Adrienne wasn't murdered." Lucas sounded calmer and seemed to be taking her proposal seriously. "If I remember right, she died of influenza. They had terrible epidemics in those days, and no antibiotics."

Corrie nodded. She felt herself warming toward him again and decided she must be six kinds of fool. He was all wrong for her. But when she opened her mouth, it was to issue an invitation. "I need to know why she's haunting me. Will you help me discover the reason?"

Something that looked like speculation danced in the depths of Lucas's eyes, but it vanished before Corrie could a.n.a.lyze it. After contemplating her for a moment longer, he appeared to come to a decision.

"All right. Let me make some phone calls. I'll find out what resources are available. We may be able to start running down leads as early as tomorrow."

His words sounded like a dismissal, but they felt like an invitation. The man was wreaking havoc on her emotions. Her own confusion about just what it was she wanted from him made her decide this might be a good time for a strategic retreat.

As she stood, intending to leave, a slight movement near the file cabinet caught her eye. She froze, doing a cla.s.sic double take. Adrienne stood there, her eyes fixed on Lucas.

"Lucas?" Corrie whispered.

"What now, Corrie?" Lucas's question was tinged with impatience.

Mutely, she pointed toward the oak file cabinet, but even as he glanced that way, Adrienne began to fade. A second later, she'd vanished into thin air.

"d.a.m.n," Corrie muttered. "You didn't see a thing, did you?"

"What am I supposed to have seen?"

"Adrienne. She was here, but now she's gone again."