Magill, actually.”
His gaze dropped automatically to her hands, which she’d woven together and hooked over her crossed leg. Sure enough, there on the ring finger of her left hand winked a plain gold band.
Married and a potential nut job , he thought. Two major strikes right there . Good thing she had the stunning, no-Wonderbra-necessary-thing going, otherwise, she’d be out the door right now. “Mrs. Magill,” he corrected himself obediently. “No. I don’t believe in ghosts.”
She expelled a soft sound that could have meant anything. “I don’t either, actually.”
Nathaniel expelled a mental sigh of relief. Then he reminded himself she was a Mrs. , so the state of her mental health—or anything else about her—made no difference. He liked women. A lot . He pursued women. A lot . But he drew the line at married. Not necessarily because of any moral leanings, but because the timing was a nightmare.
“I did have the strangest dream last night, though,” she continued. “Your great-great . . . several greats grandfather was in it, and he told me you were—”
Nathaniel must have eyed her suspiciously, because she stopped talking, so suddenly that her mouth remained opened. Then she closed it and smiled in a way that made him think she realized how questionably sane—or sober—she sounded.
“Can I start over?” she asked. “I sound like a raging nut job.”
Which may or may not be indicative of actual nut jobbiness. Willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, however, he said, “Of course.”
She took a deep breath and tried again. “I recently bought a house in Old Louisville that, it turns out, belonged to one of your ancestors.”
“Really,” Nathaniel said, not sure how this was relevant to, oh . . . anything.
“Then yesterday afternoon, I went into an antique shop on Third Street and discovered a portrait of that ancestor—a riverboat captain named Silas Summerfield—for sale. I thought that was an interesting coincidence.”
Nathaniel would have thought it interesting, too. Had he, you know, been interested.
“Naturally, I bought it,” she said.
Naturally, Nathaniel looked at his watch.
“And then last night,” she continued, “I had a very strange dream, and I woke up to an even stranger reality.”
She launched into an account then that promised to take considerably more than the few minutes she’d already used up, something about his great-great-blah-blah-blah grandfather showing up in her dream and telling her that Nathaniel was in danger of losing his soul, followed by something about a break-in to her house that turned out to not be a break-in after all, but some kind of possibly-perhaps-sort-of ghostly mischief, and then . . .
Well, Nathaniel stopped listening at that point—not that he’d ever really started listening all that closely in the first place—so he really wasn’t sure what she said after that. Or, all right , before that, either. All he knew was that she was about to use up his entire lunch hour—which, granted, he never used to actually eat lunch anyway—with some cockamamie story about an ominous warning from beyond the veil that if he entered into his partnership with Edward Dryden, he would lose his soul forever.
Stunning and no-Wonderbra-necessary notwithstanding, Nathaniel didn’t have all day and did have a sound mind. So the next time she paused for a breath, he said, “Ms. Magill, I appreciate your concern, but you’ll understand, I’m sure, when I tell you I don’t share it.”
“Mrs. Magill,” she corrected him again. She studied him in clear confusion. “Why would I understand that? I mean, I know this sounds—”
“Ludicrous?” he finished for her. “Because it doesn’t just sound that. It is that.”
Now she studied him in clear offense. “Look, I realize what happened to me last night and this morning might seem a little out of the ordinary—”
“It doesn’t seem a little out of the ordinary,” Nathaniel
Massimo Carlotto, Anthony Shugaar