Shades of Midnight Read Free Page A

that seemed... rude, even where the dead were concerned. He'd try it downstairs, at the point of the murder, first. If that didn't work, then he would try another, more intrusive method.
    As he carefully assembled the equipment, he listened to the sounds of Eve puttering about in the kitchen. She had forgotten that he had exceptional hearing... or else she didn't care that he heard her occasionally mutter words like jackass and dimwit and another, more vile word he had not imagined she even knew. Those words were complemented by the random banging of pots and a thwack that sounded suspiciously like a knife hitting soundly against a cutting board.
    He smiled as he adjusted the needle on the specter-o-meter. Eve tried to be a proper lady, but thank God she was not. There was too much fire in her blood for proper. And she had always been able to surprise him, with an intelligent comment or a full-throated laugh. At one time he had been looking forward to a lifetime of surprises, with her as his wife. She wasn't like other women, not at all. She didn't waste her time on tedious activities like primping or embroidering or planning unnecessary parties. Intelligence made her eyes sparkle, curiosity made her occasionally brave and often bolder than she should be. Eve Abernathy was a world of surprises, he imagined. He hadn't known she could be so damned unforgiving.
    He hadn't intended to leave her waiting at the altar. He'd been summoned to rid a house of its pesky ghost, and from the information he'd been given he had assumed that the job would take no more than a few days. Usually he was in and out of a house in well under a week.
    But the ghost of Winifred Kent had been resistant. More than that, her hands had been incredibly visible, as she knocked up and down the stairs, apparently unable to move elsewhere. Winifred had broken the specter-o-meter he'd been developing at the time, sending the needle right off the scale. She had tried to talk to him, he knew it, but like most ghosts—unlike Viola and Alistair—she had been unable to make a sound. Mrs. Kent had refused to use his own body to speak through; he had sensed her fear at that prospect. So there they were, needing to communicate but unable to do so, Winifred's hands expressive and insistent, Lucien's powers failing him in a most unusual way. How many hours had he stood on those stairs, knowing that the words the spirit wanted to say were floating just out of reach? Winifred had, eventually, made her wishes known, and Lucien had led her to the other side, where she could rest in peace.
    He never knew what might be holding a ghost on the wrong side, caught between life and death, unable to move on. Sometimes the reasons were shocking. Sometimes, as with Winifred, the reasons were small. Not at all the sort of thing you might expect. Winifred had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck. At first Lucien had, of course, suspected that she had not fallen, but had been pushed. Sometimes a spirit demanded justice, and would not rest until it was delivered.
    But Winifred had not been searching for revenge or justice. In the end it was determined that she had, indeed, fallen. She'd been on her way down the stairs to weed her garden. Winifred had loved her garden. She'd spent hours every day caring for it.
    Once Lucien had discovered that fact, he'd taken a chance and led Winifred down the stairs, into the library, and out the French doors into her beloved garden. They had talked a while—well, he had talked and Winifred had listened—and he'd shown Mrs. Kent how carefully her daughter was now tending the flowers that grew there. The phantom that had been Winifred Kent became still and calm, and then she'd moved on.
    And an hour or so later, Lucien had seen a calendar and remembered Eve and the wedding date that had passed.
    But had she listened to his explanations? No. She'd stood before him still and quiet, downright stony, her spine rigid and her eyes hard as emeralds