“A commode? Oh, right. No bathroom back then, I guess.” Ruby frowned. “Hey, wait a minute. How do you know all this stuff?”
“There were some photos in that carton we found in the storeroom upstairs. Shots of the garden, plus several of the interior. This room was a bedroom. Your shop was the dining room, with a long table and six chairs. My shop was the parlor, where the neighborhood ladies got together to do fancy needlework and listen to Mrs. Duncan read to them—sort of like a sewing circle, I guess.”
Back in the shop, the bell began to ring fast and hard, as if it were disagreeing with me. Jenna came to the door and said helplessly, “Sorry. It’s just doing that. All by itself. I don’t know how to make it stop.”
“We know, dear,” Ruby said. “Thank you.”
“If that’s our ghost,” I said crossly, “I wish she’d find another way to communicate.” And then I had another thought.
“Excuse me,” I said. I got up, stepped into the shop, and looked at the bulletin board. FALL CLASSES had been pushed up to the top of the board, and a whole new arrangement was in place: HELLO .
Tucked behind the smiley-face magnet was a sprig of fresh lavender.
I went back to the tearoom and sat down at the table again. “She did,” I said flatly.
Ruby raised both eyebrows. “Who did? What did she do?”
“The ghost,” I said. “She has found another way to communicate. She’s left me a message on the bulletin board.”
Ruby got up, went to look at the bulletin board, and sat back down. “I noticed that this morning. I thought you put it there. It’s cute. The smiley face, I mean. Cheery.”
“Oh, it’s cheery all right,” I said. “But I didn’t do it.”
And then I told her the whole thing, start to finish. The humming I’d heard in the storeroom, the photos and lavender and letters rearranged on the bulletin board, Ethel’s sighting of the woman in a long skirt in the garden. And of course the bell over the door, which Ruby already knew about. I left out the scary dreams, feeling that they were probably a product of my overanxious imagination. In fact, it seemed easy now to think of all this as the work of a ghost. But even without the dreams, there was plenty to tell, and the story took a while.
“Well, good,” Ruby said with satisfaction, when I had finished. “I guess we do have us a ghost, huh?”
My lawyerly self leapt to her feet. Facts not in evidence, Your Honor! But she knew when she was defeated. She sat down and put her head in her hands.
“I suppose we do,” I said, feeling a deep sympathy for the lawyerly part of me. It’s hard to give up treasured assumptions. “The question I’ve been trying to answer is why? Why now? And why me?” I pointed at Ruby. “You’re usually the one who attracts ghosties and conjures up supernatural doings. But these messages seem to be directed at me.”
“Maybe because this is your building?” Ruby asked reasonably. “You’re the owner.”
“I suppose,” I said with a shrug. “Makes sense, since our ghost must be Mrs. Duncan, the first owner.”
In the shop, the bell gave a series of irritated peals.
I crossed my arms on the table and raised my voice. “Well, then, if you’re not Mrs. Duncan, just who the devil are you? The Historical Society says this is the Duncan family house.”
Ruby and I stared at each other while the bell fired off another loud volley of exasperated dings.
“Sounds like she’s expecting you to figure out what her name is,” Ruby said. “Would the Historical Society have any clues?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I can take another look in that carton of photographs. There are some newspaper clippings.”
Ruby cocked her head, listening, but the bell was silent. “She has no objection to that, I guess.” She gave me a small smile and pushed back her chair. “I have to go. I’m teaching a meditation class this afternoon.”
I began picking up our dishes. “Tell Jenna I’ll be back in a few minutes. I have to check things out at the cottage. We have a new guest arriving tomorrow.”
“Oh, really? Who is she?” Ruby always makes a point of stopping to say hello to our bed-and-breakfast guests.
“I don’t know much about her,” I said over my shoulder, on my way to the kitchen. “She filled in the rental form online. She’s from out of state.”
As I rinsed the dishes and headed out to the cottage, I thought about the photos I had studied the night before. One of the out-of-doors shots had shown two little girls—twins, I thought—standing beside the stable on a long-ago summer day of sunshine and sunflowers, feeding a carrot to a fat pony. Were the girls my ghost’s daughters? And if she wasn’t Mrs. Duncan, who was she? I was itching to know. Maybe the answer was in those newspaper clippings. I would go through the carton tonight.
• • •
THE stone stable is long gone, of course. In the years after World War I, most people gave up horses in favor of automobiles, and it was turned into a large garage. Later, when the architect bought and remodeled my building, he reincarnated the stable-cum-garage as a lovely one-bedroom guesthouse with a fireplace in the living room, a small built-in kitchen, and a hot tub on its own private deck. I list it as a rental in the Pecan Springs Bed-and-Breakfast Guide and on the Internet. It comes with linens, towels, and a ready-to-eat breakfast that Cass assembles each afternoon and stashes in the cottage refrigerator, so our guest can pop it in the microwave while she’s brewing her morning coffee.
There’s extra work connected with the cottage, of course—a bit of light housekeeping, laundry, bed-making, and so on. But it’s proving to be a welcome source of income, so I don’t mind the chores. I had
