Soldier of Love Read Online Free PDF

impossible. Toni nearly jumped out of her skin every time someone entered a room or said her name. Each morning she served big, farmhand breakfasts to fortify the re-enactors before driving them out to the battlefield. The table talk invariably turned to suddenly freezing cold bedrooms, invisible nudges at the bottom of the staircase, the “unusual” and vivid dreams.
    The morning after her own dream encounter, Toni was forced to face the truth. Over shirred eggs and thin-sliced ham, Jerry Simpson—a portly New Jersey accountant whose alter ego was a Confederate Army private named Tobias Clementine—finally gave voice to what everyone was thinking.
    “Toni, is the inn haunted?”
    Toni was glad for a mouthful of food and took her time chewing as she formulated her answer. She glanced up at the ceiling over the dining room table. Two weeks ago a huge section of the plaster—in roughly the shape of Australia—had liberated itself and crashed down upon the scarred mahogany table in a pile of chunks and powder. The next morning, the ceiling was a perfectly smooth field of freshly-painted white.
    Toni swallowed and swept her gaze over the six visitors at the table. They each leant forward, eagerly awaiting her reply. The months of worry over the inn’s insufficient cash flow drained away. They want it to be haunted , she thought. As it stood, the inn was one of a thousand, a decrepit nineteenth-century house used to lodge history buffs on their annual pilgrimage to Civil War fantasy. But with a resident ghost…
    Toni was well aware of paranormal tourism. There were frequently articles about it in the hospitality trade magazines she subscribed to. Reportedly haunted hotels and inns made a killing. Some hosted Murder Mystery Weekends, séances, and even ghost-hunting conventions complete with guest speakers and mediums. Toni imagined the kind of improvements that she could make with a little ghost money rolling in.
    “Yes,” Toni heard herself say. She was suddenly outside herself, looking down on the yarn-spinner she’d become and the rapt listeners leaning in to hang on her every word. “Yes, Jerry, the inn is haunted.”
    Six chairs creaked as the men sat back tall in their chairs, each with an ‘I knew it!’ expression on his face.
    “The inn is haunted,” Toni paused for effect and caught each man’s gaze in turn, “by the ghost of none other than John Buckman himself.”
    Half a dozen eager faces wore expressions of shocked delight. Mouths hung open. Eyes widened. Heads shook in rapturous disbelief.
    Jerry, who’d become something of an instant hero for daring to ask the question they all harboured, pulled back his sloping shoulders and cleared his throat.
    “Have you actually seen Captain Buckman’s ghost, Toni?” he asked.
    Toni bit the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning at the abrupt change in fortune. She concentrated on sounding sombre. Spin it, Bianchi , she silently coached herself. Spin this right and you’ll have all twelve rooms booked by the weekend.
    Toni felt a shiver of excitement prickle over her skin. She embraced the sensation and allowed her body to shudder. The effect, she knew, was that of a woman terrified by the tale she was about to tell.
    “The other night—the night of the rainstorm, when I dropped you all off at The Slaughtered Lamb after manoeuvres—I saw him. I was trying to open the carriage house door so I could pull in the pickup. The door handle came off in my hand and I was so frustrated, I threw it across the driveway. I actually fell in the mud—flat on my ass.”
    The men responded with a chorus of nervous giggles and nods, urging her to go on.
    “I got up and tried to brush myself off, but I was soaked.”
    Her guests were so silent. Toni supposed they must be holding their collective breath.
    “I was trying to scoop away enough mud to open the door. I looked up, across the alley, and I saw him. At first I thought it was one of your guys, but the uniform