Someone to Love Read Online Free PDF

long had he been asleep? Since he passed out under what Mr. Hatch called “her” tree? The man said he was going to tell Jace about the ghost, but he hadn’t. He’d spent their short time together enumerating all that needed to be done to the outside. There were ditches that needed to be cleaned, plants that needed replacing, things like manure that needed to be bought. “You need some animals around here,” Mr. Hatch said, draining his cup of the potent wine. “We need the manure. That a place this size should have to buy cow dung goes against what’s right.” Thirty minutes later, Jace found out that there were a lot of things that Mr. Hatch thought went “against what’s right.”
    Now, lying in the bed, he thought, Someone is doing this. Someone is making me feel calm. Part of him thought that was absurd, but another part knew that he hadn’t felt this calm since Stacy died. “If you’re here, please talk to me,” he said.
    There was a rustle of fabric near the window and he turned, fully expecting to see a transparent white shape, but there was nothing. However, there was no wind in the room to make the curtain move.
    Sighing, Jace swung his bare feet off the bed. He was fully dressed, but his shoes and socks had been removed. Wonder who took them off? he thought.
    He went in search of the nearest bathroom. One thing he’d learned about English houses was that no matter how much they cost, a bathroom that wasn’t “down the hall” was a rare thing. On the Internet, he’d seen twelve-million-dollar houses with a third floor that had seven bedrooms and only a powder room to share. To bathe, people had to go downstairs.
    He found a bathroom en suite, as the English say, meaning that a door opened into the bedroom. As his head began to clear, he realized that the room he had slept in was one of the bedrooms that the previous owners had used for storage. When Jace had seen the room, it had been full of big packing boxes and racks full of garments in zippered bags. His visit had been cursory and his mind hadn’t been on the house itself, so he’d not realized the room was as beautiful as it was.
    When he saw that his toiletries were on the sink, he realized he was in the master bathroom. He was glad to see that there was a shower as well as a huge tub. He stripped off his clothes, took a long shower, brushed his teeth eleven times, then put a towel around his waist and went in search of his clothes. While he slept, someone had taken his suitcases out of his car and unpacked them.
    Suddenly, his calmness was gone, replaced by panic. Where was his suitcase? With a growing sense of foreboding, he searched for his large case. It took him a while, but he found it in the back of a built-in cupboard in one of the closet-bedrooms. He pulled the suitcase out and opened it, then searched the lining. When he felt the leather case of the photo, he breathed a sigh of relief. He had brought only one photo of Stacy and he’d hidden it under the lining of his suitcase. He’d decided that it would be better if he kept what he was doing and why a secret. He would tell people he was interested in their lady swashbuckler ghost rather than in a woman who’d committed suicide just a few years ago. Jace feared that if he showed the photo and asked questions, someone would warn the person Stacy had met to get out of town. He wasn’t sure how he was going to do it, but he knew that his questions had to be subtle and he had to work around what he actually wanted to know.
    “So you found me!” Mrs. Browne said when Jace at last found her kitchen.
    “No problem,” he said, lying. Once again, he’d taken a wrong turn. Frustrated, he’d gone outside and tried to find another way in. For such a big house, it had extraordinarily few exterior doors. In the end, he had to circle the entire house before he found the door that Mrs. Browne had pushed him out of the day before. Seeing that the long walk had made his heart beat