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legitimate client?
    Then again, why did she think Silas Summerfield was trying to tell her something? She’d had a weird—okay, a bizarre—dream, that was all. Induced, no doubt, by the fact that she’d bought a portrait of a handsome man who’d been dead for three quarters of a century. And, okay , maybe too much Chunky Monkey ice cream. But she’d had bizarre dreams before and had never thought someone was trying to tell her something.
    Audrey Fine Magill wasn’t the type of woman to buy wholly into supernatural hoo-ha. Then again, neither was she the type to completely discount it. She believed that everything in the universe was connected, even if in some small, tenuous way, and that anything that happened in some far corner of the world could potentially have an impact on everyone in it. And she believed, too, that there were some people in the world who were able to . . . access things . . . that other people couldn’t. Not that she thought she was a likely conduit to the other side herself, but . . .
    Well. There had been times after Sean’s death three years ago when Audrey had felt and heard things she would have thought impossible. Times when she had felt as if her husband—or some afterglow of him—was in the same room with her, watching her go about her daily life. And there had been mornings when she’d awoken and felt as if she could turn over in bed and find him lying right there beside her. And once, she would have sworn she heard the soft murmur of her name from behind her, spoken in Sean’s voice.
    Naturally, each of those experiences could have been explained away as a product of her grief. Of her desire to have him back. Some seemingly real hallucination manufactured by her brain because she couldn’t cope with his absence. But maybe, just maybe, those experiences had been the result of something else.
    Nothing like that had happened for some time now, but there had been enough instances of Sean’s “return” in the year after his death that Audrey had adopted the opinion that the door to the afterlife was sometimes left ajar.
    Had Captain Summerfield slipped through it? she wondered. Had he taken advantage of her presence in his house—his home—to relay a message to his great-great . . . however many greats . . . grandson? And, hey, while she was at it, had he been responsible for the moved painting? Had it been his ghostly hand that swept her hats to the floor?
    Or had Audrey gone well and truly off the deep end?
    She sipped her coffee and looked at the photograph of Nathaniel Summerfield again. And from some very dim corner of her brain, she recalled Captain Summerfield’s admonition from her dream: The boy is in terrible danger from himself.
    Audrey understood what that was like, too. There had been a time in her own life—though, granted, she’d been considerably younger than Nathaniel Summerfield—when she’d been in a similar state. Fortunately, Sean Magill had come along and helped her find her way again. She wondered if Nathaniel had anyone to help him. Anyone besides a long-dead ancestor who showed up uninvited in people’s dreams.
    And she wondered, too, if maybe she should check up on him herself. Just in case.

Three
    NATHANIEL SUMMERFIELD WAS ALREADY HAVING A rough day when his assistant Irene announced that he had a visitor who hadn’t made an appointment. Normally, he would have told Irene to tell the person to come back when they did, even if it wasn’t a day when his phone was ringing off the hook and he was fielding all kinds of obstacles to his about-to-be-signed contract with Edward Dryden. Man, everyone from the Fair Housing Commission to the Small Business Owners Association was breathing down his neck over this thing. Edward would be at Nathaniel’s office in less than three hours, and he still had to review part of the contract before the man’s arrival.
    But it was just past noon when Irene informed him of Audrey Magill’s need to speak to him, and