Anything's Possible!. Judith McWilliams
not!” The conviction in Cassie’s voice was unmistakable. It was certainly no game, she told herself, quieting her conscience. Her aunt’s livelihood depended on this charade.
“What about you?” Bill asked Dan. “Have you seen this ghost she’s talking about?”
Dan looked into Cassie’s hopeful eyes and felt a curious twisting sensation in his chest. Despite his horror of manufacturing news, he couldn’t quite divorce himself from whatever fantasy she was so carefully creating. And it wasn’t as if it were really news, he decided, appeasing his conscience.
“Well, I’m not sure I actually saw anything. Not exactly,” Dan said slowly.
“Well, what exactly?” Annie leaned over the counter.
“I heard something outside my room, but when I opened the door...” Dan paused.
“Yeah?” Jim demanded.
“I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye, and when I turned, it had disappeared. And there was this smell.”
“What kind of smell?” Annie’s faded blue eyes widened in delighted horror. “Like something out of the grave?”
Cassie blinked. This was getting out of hand. She certainly didn’t want anyone associating China View with corpses.
Dan lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Of ambergris.”
“Ambergris is what those whalers were after, isn’t it?” Jim turned to Cassie in excitement. “And wasn’t the man who built China View a whaling captain?”
“Yes, Jonas Middlebury was his name,” she admitted. “But I’m sure there’s a perfectly normal explanation for it. Like...” She purposefully looked uncertain.
“Cleaning supplies?” Dan offered.
“Yes, cleaning supplies.” Cassie gave him a beaming smile that seemed to wrap around his chest and constrict his breathing.
“You were right.” Dan nodded decisively. “There was a rational explanation.”
“Ha!” Annie gave him a pitying look. “I’ve been cleaning more years than you been alive, and I tell you, there ain’t no cleaning supply that smells like ambergris.”
“Well, I, for one, prefer his explanation to ghosts,” Cassie said.
Annie shivered happily. “Was he handsome?”
Cassie instinctively looked at Dan, and then realized Annie was referring to the supposed ghost. “Well, I didn’t get a clear look at him, but he seemed to have a bushy black beard.”
“Sailing captains all had bushy beards,” Bill offered.
Jim nodded in agreement. “Every picture I ever saw, they did. Cassie, you got yourself a ghost.” He tossed some money down beside his empty plate and headed toward the door, with Bill hot on his heels. No doubt to spread the story, Cassie thought in satisfaction.
“Annie, I’ll have a cup of coffee and a piece of that pie you’re cutting, please,” she said.
“Same for me, plus a hamburger,” Dan ordered, rather surprised to realize he was hungry. It seemed so long since he’d thought about such mundane things as food.
“How can you be thinking about eating with a ghost haunting the inn?” Annie demanded.
“Nonsense,” Cassie said. “Dan just gave us a perfectly adequate explanation for what he smelled, and I probably just saw...” She waved her hand vaguely.
“Ha!” Annie muttered as she poured the coffee, shoved a piece of pie in front of each of them and then hurried back to the kitchen to get the hamburger.
Cassie surreptitiously studied Dan out of the corner of her eye as she added cream and sugar to her coffee. He was meticulously eating the cherries out of his pie. Why had he backed up her story about a ghost? she wondered. He couldn’t have really heard anything. She’d only just hired Jonas. The actor wouldn’t have had time to get upstairs and be seen. Although adding the smell of ambergris was certainly a nice touch, she conceded.
“What does ambergris smell like?” she asked him curiously.
Dan gave her a wide grin. “Cleaning supplies?”
Annie bustled through the swinging doors from the kitchen, plopped a steaming hamburger and a gargantuan pile of fries in front of Dan and then turned to Cassie. “Eppie says she don’t believe in ghosts, and she wants to know if this is something to do with your job.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts, either, and I swear on a stack of Bibles that this has absolutely nothing to do with my job.” Cassie put her hand over her heart. “I’m on vacation for the next month while I recharge my mental batteries.”
“Ha! If you got a ghost out there at China View, it’s more than likely he’ll suck out all your mental energies.”
“I think it’s vampires who suck things out,” Cassie said. “And I would definitely recognize a vampire. They smell like basements and dress in black and have long fangs.”
Dan nodded in agreement. “That’s why they absolutely never smile. Their teeth are a dead giveaway.”
“You two can laugh now, but we’ll see who has the last laugh,” Annie said with ghoulish relish. “You let me know if anything else happens, promise?”
“Promise,” Cassie agreed promptly, well pleased with the results of her afternoon’s work. Unless she very much missed her guess, Jim and Bill were now over at the library spreading the story around the reading room, and Annie would tell everyone who came into the café. Probably with a few embellishments of her own.
“What job?” Dan asked curiously when Annie went to clean away Jim’s and Bill’s dirty dishes.
“What?” Cassie blinked in confusion.
“She wanted to know if the ghost sightings had something to do with your job. What job?”
“I’m in advertising,” Cassie said.
“Advertising?” Dan repeated. His eyes wandered over her impossibly innocent looking features, lingering on the suppressed laughter in the back of her eyes and the upward tilt of her soft lips. She looked like a mischievous sprite. His glance dropped to her small breasts, outlined against her silk shirt. No, she looked like a very sexy, mischievous sprite, he amended. One whose secrets he couldn’t wait to delve into.
“I’m at Welton and Mitchell in New York City. I’m a vice president,” she couldn’t resist adding at his skeptical expression.
He blinked in surprise at her disclosure. People, especially women, didn’t get to be vice presidents of old established firms at her age unless they were very competent as well as very sharp. And very competent, very sharp people didn’t spend their time spreading rumors about ghosts without a very good reason. So what was it? Finding out could be the most fun he’d had in years, he thought, feeling a stab of excitement ripple through him.
Three
“You’re sure you don’t mind seeing to our guest this evening, dear?” Aunt Hannah asked uncertainly.
Mind being left alone with the most intriguing man she’d ever encountered at China View? Cassie thought as she smiled affectionately at her aunt.
“I don’t like to leave you to cope all alone, but poor Jessie—you remember, she retired from teaching at the same time I did,” Hannah added at Cassie’s blank look. “She called while you were in town, and she sounded positively frantic. She got a registered letter this afternoon evicting her. It seems some developer from Portsmouth bought her apartment building and wants to tear it down, to build a fast-food restaurant of all things....” Hannah shook her graying hair in exasperation.