The Uninvited

4

Tyler stood in the attic of the Tarleton-Dandridge House looking at the disarray.

Someone had been searching—for what?

He wanted to straighten up the room; it was far easier to figure out what was missing when everything else was in the right place. He’d need to involve others with that, which he didn’t want to do quite yet. He’d had offers from the board to come in and help, but he’d turned them down. He’d actually lied to Nathan Pierson, telling him he preferred to wait until he was sure the police were finished with their forensics before bringing anyone else in.

The police were finished. And after speaking with Detective Jenson, he knew they weren’t expecting to find anything useful, unless by some unlikely chance they were to lift foreign prints—those not associated with the four guides or the board members, whose prints they’d already taken. If they were really lucky, they’d come up with prints belonging to someone with a criminal record.

He wanted to work with Allison Leigh for the obvious reasons. She was the one who’d found the body and who knew this house backward and forward, along with the history. He’d gone through the biographies and résumés of the employees and the board, and there was no one better qualified to help him than Allison. She was in denial right now; he assumed that would change.

So far, although he had a sense of being watched in the house, Tyler hadn’t seen a single movement, felt a brush of cold air or even heard an old board creak.

The house was waiting—or those within it were. Waiting and watching.

He left the attic and walked back down to the second floor, taking a few minutes to go into every room. He’d been glad to hear from Nathan Pierson that there was no plan by the board to give up the house. It was on the national historic register, of course, so there was virtually no threat that it would be bulldozed. Meticulously restored, the Tarleton-Dandridge House was one of the finest examples of early Americana he’d ever seen. It would be a shame if it was closed to the public to become the offices of an accounting agency or a bank.

Tyler paused at Lucy Tarleton’s room. He walked inside to look at the painting of Beast Bradley.

Here, as Tyler had observed before, he was portrayed as a thoughtful man. He appeared to be strong, but almost saddened by the weight of responsibility. He’d been a man with well-arranged features, handsome in youth.

Interesting.

Next he studied the painting of a young and innocent Lucy Tarleton, a woman as yet untouched by death and bloodshed. He noted that there was something about Lucy’s eyes that made him think of Allison. There was definitely a resemblance, although it was true that many young women, dressed as Lucy, might look like the long-gone heroine.

Tyler stood very still, allowing himself to feel the house.

Again he experienced the sensation of being watched, but there were no sounds from the old place, nor did he see anything or notice any drafts.

He headed down to the study where he’d left his briefcase with his computer and the records Adam had arranged for him to receive.

They recorded many instances of normal life and death—many births had taken place in the house, although sadly two of the mothers had died in childbirth. A number of people had died in their beds of natural causes, one Dandridge at the grand old age of a hundred and five.

During the War of 1812, Sophia Tarleton-Dandridge and her husband had owned the house; they’d taken in a wounded soldier and he had passed away. He was buried with the family in the graveyard behind the stables. A family friend had come to the house after the Battle of Gettysburg. He was also buried in the family graveyard.

Sad and tragic deaths due to warfare, Tyler thought. Not unexpected and not the kind of thing that would produce anything terrible.

But then, Beast Bradley had been the terror that touched the house....

Looking further into the family history, Tyler saw that another death had been that of a young Dandridge girl in 1863. He wondered if she’d been in love with the Civil War soldier who’d died. She’d taken rat poison and killed herself soon after his death.

He shuddered. Hard way to die, rat poison.

And another hard way to die—a bayonet through the chin. He tried to imagine how it had happened. Julian had sat down, his musket held between his legs. He’d leaned forward and set the soft flesh behind his jawbone on the blade of the bayonet. Then he’d lowered his head with enough force for the blade to go through that soft flesh and his throat? It seemed almost impossible.

Unless he’d been helped.

Fascinating though the historical events were, Tyler was more interested in Julian’s death and the deaths of people who had died closer to the present. There’d been several of those, starting in the late 1970s.

One of the docents, Bill Hall, had been found at the foot of the staircase. While closing up at night, he’d apparently tripped and fallen down the stairs, landing at an angle that had snapped his neck.

Eight years ago, a college student, Sam Daily, had told friends he was going to break into a historic house and rearrange a few items as a joke. It hadn’t gone so well; he’d tried to dismantle the alarm and a wire had shorted out, sending electric volts shooting through him. He’d been discovered on the ground near the back door the following morning.

Tragically the joke had been on him.

Just three years ago, another of the older docents or tour guides, Angela Wilson, had been found dead in Tarleton’s study. She’d been sitting in the same chair, in the same position, as Julian Mitchell. She had died of a massive heart attack.

One death from a fall, one from electrocution and one from what might well be a perfectly natural cause for someone of Angela’s age, a heart attack.

And now a man dead of a bayonet shoved through his throat—as if he’d set his own chin atop it for the blade to run through.

Tyler drummed his fingers on the desk.

He was here because of Adam Harrison. Adam had a love of and connection to various historic properties. Technically, the Krewes were Adam’s teams, so they went where Adam Harrison requested they go. Everything that had happened here could have been natural or accidental.

But Adam had a knack of knowing when things weren’t right.

Add in the trashing of the small office in the attic….

Someone had been looking for something. What? And why?

And how did any of it relate to the fact that Artie Dixon was in a coma?

Tyler pulled out his cell phone and called Logan Raintree, one of his best friends, a fellow Ranger at one time, and now the head of their unit.

“Is it something—or nothing?” Logan asked. “Do you need the rest of the Krewe?”

“Something,” Tyler said. “And yes. I’d like you to come here.”

“Any idea as to what’s going on?”

“Nope. But the house has been closed down for the interim. I think we should set up here.”

“We’ll be in tomorrow night,” Logan promised him.

Tyler hung up and put through another call. When he reached Adam Harrison, he asked about keys to the attic.

“The board members all have a key, and so does Allison. There’s also a key in the small pantry or storage room, where the employees have their lockers and keep their street clothing. It’s always hung on a peg there.”

“Is the pantry locked during the day?” Tyler asked.

“No, not from what I understand. The employees slip in and out when they have a break or need to get to their own belongings. No member of the public goes into the house without a docent or tour guide, and they’ve never had trouble before.”

“I’ll see if that key is still in place, but a lot of people have keys. They could have been used—or copied at a previous date.”

“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.”

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