The Other Side - J. D. Robb [66]
“Excellent. It wins awards. And I’m not prejudiced, even if the owner is my good friend’s husband.”
Walker Hersh, Editor and Publisher, Henry read to himself, walking backward. The name didn’t ring any bells. Good.
Strolling along the elm-lined streets, passing a white-steepled church about every other block, Henry confirmed the impression of Paulton he’d formed from the train: tidy, pleasant, typical New England village. A bit prettier than most, a little more prosperous. It even had a college; Miss Darlington pointed it out as they passed the archway to a small but handsome enclave of stone buildings. All in all, a fine place to spend a week or two in the fullness of spring. Particularly since he had, at the moment, no other plans.
“You were saying?” she reminded him. “How you came by your calling.”
“Ah, yes. Well, actually, you might say it was passed down to me by blood. My great-grandfather, Baronet Spenser, was practically on speaking terms with the ghosts and spirits in his castle.”
“His castle?”
“Just a small one, in Derbyshire.”
“So you’re a baronet, too?”
He waved his fingers in the air dismissively. “Oh, technically, but I think of America as my home. The family moved to Philadelphia when I was quite small. Where was I?”
“The castle in Derbyshire.”
“Right. The gift skipped a couple of generations—my grandfather was busy shipbuilding, and my father, an amateur biologist, was too much of a natural skeptic to give credence to his own senses. But then it popped up in me.”
“The gift?”
“The gift.”
“How exactly did it pop up?”
“Intuition. Empathy. A mind open to the unexplained and the unexplainable.”
“Aha.”
“Also, I have a degree in engineering from the University of London, so I like to think my temperament embodied both essentials for the work I do: tolerance of the unknowable coupled with rigid adherence to the laws of science.”
Hard to say what she made of all that. She had a way of pursing her lips that might mean she was thinking things over or might mean she was trying not to laugh.
Miss Darlington was anything but conventionally attractive, but he liked the way she looked. Neat and tidy. She’d be the smart one, the kind of girl you’d want on your side in a contest or debate. Or a game. A small, feminine package of humor and intelligence.
Just so she wasn’t too intelligent.
“Your dog is awfully well behaved.” The words were barely out of her mouth when Astra took the opportunity to lift his leg and pee on a lamppost. Instead of blushing or looking away, Miss Darlington pressed down a smile. “A vital part of your investigations, you wrote. So he’s a sort of . . . ghost dog?”
“Exactly. Enormously useful, has a kind of sixth sense about the supernatural. I got him in India.”
“India.”
“Bought him from a shaman in Calcutta.”
“Really. I’m so ignorant—I thought shamanism was more of a northern Asian religion.”
“Well, he wasn’t from Calcutta. He just happened to be in Calcutta.”
“Of course. And you were there . . . ?”
“Studying the occult. Researching.”
She’d have pursued that, he could tell, but luckily they had arrived at their destination. “Here we are,” she said with a small flourish. “This is Willow House.”
Again, not quite what he’d been expecting. In fact, not at all. Quirky Victorian architecture made for the best haunted houses, and ideally they were in isolated locales, preferably near cemeteries. This one was on an elderly but fairly lively street, set back from it by a stone wall and a spread of mature willow trees in full bloom. He admired the stately, Adam-style front, three stories of white-painted brick divided by tall, linteled windows, four up, four down, and two graceful gables on top. “It’s beautiful,” he said truthfully.
Miss Darlington turned to him, her face transformed. “Yes. It is. That portico,” she said, pointing above the front door to a small balcony surrounded by a waist-high balustrade. “That’s where she dances.”
“Who?”
“The ghost.”
Of course.
“One of them,” she clarified. “Let’s go around to the back.”
They went along a flagstone walk between