He sat very still, and then he said, “Why do you have your hair yanked back like that?” sounding as annoyed as she was.
“Because it’s professional.”
“Not if it keeps falling down.”
“Thank you,” Andie said. “Now butt out. Ten thousand is too much money. You’re still trying to pay me off—”
“Andromeda, I’m asking for a favor, a big one, and I don’t think the money is out of line. We didn’t leave our marriage enemies, so I don’t see why you’re hostile now.”
“I’m not hostile,” Andie said, and then added fairly, “well, okay, I am hostile. You didn’t do anything to save our marriage ten years ago, but every month you send a check so I’ll think of you again. It’s passive-aggressive. Or something. You know the strongest memory I have of you? Sitting right there, behind that desk. You’d think I’d remember you naked with all the mattress time we clocked in that year together, but no, it’s you, staring at me from behind all that walnut as if you weren’t quite sure who I was. You have no idea how many times I wanted to take an ax to that damn desk just to see if you’d notice me.”
North looked down at his desk, perplexed.
“You hide behind it,” Andie said, sitting back now that she wasn’t repressing anything anymore. “You use it to keep from getting emotionally involved.”
“I use it to write on.”
“You know what I mean. It gives you distance.”
“It gives me storage. Have you lost your mind?”
Andie looked at him for a moment, sitting there rigid and polite and completely inaccessible. “Yes. It was a bad idea coming back here. I should go now.” She stood up.
“She said the house is haunted,” North said.
“Excuse me?”
“The last nanny. She said there were ghosts in the house. I asked the local police to look into things to see if somebody was playing tricks, but they found nothing. I think it’s the kids, but if I send another nanny down there like the previous ones, she’s going to quit, too. I need somebody different, somebody who’s tough, somebody who can handle the unexpected. Somebody like you. And you’re the only person like you that I know.” Suddenly he was the old North again, warm and real with that light in his eyes as he looked at her. “They’re little kids, Andie. I can’t get them out of there, and I can’t leave them there, and with Mother in France, I can’t leave the practice long enough to find out what’s going on, and even if I could, I don’t know anything about kids. I need you.”
Ouch. “I don’t—”
“Everybody they’ve ever been close to has died,” North said quietly. “Everybody they’ve ever loved has left them.”
Bastard, Andie thought. “I can’t give you months. That’s ridiculous.”
North nodded, looking calm, but she’d been married to him for a year so she knew: He was going in for the kill. “Give them one month then. You can draw your line under us, we don’t need to talk, you can send reports to Kristin, hell, take your fiancé down there with you.”
“I’m the least maternal person I know,” Andie said, thinking, Ten thousand dollars. And more than that, two helpless kids who’d lost everyone they loved, going crazy in the middle of nowhere.
“I don’t think they need maternal,” he said. “I think they need you.”
“A psychotic little girl and a boy who’s growing up to be a serial killer. He didn’t push his aunt off that tower, did he?”
“They’re growing up alone, Andie,” North said, and Andie thought, Oh, hell.
The problem was, he sounded sincere. Well, he always did, he was good at that, but now that she really looked at him, he had changed. She could see the stress in his face, the lines that hadn’t been there ten years ago, the tightening of the skin over his bones, the age in the hollows under his eyes. His brother Southie probably still looked as smooth as a boiled egg, but North was still trapped behind that damn desk, taking care of everyone in the family. And now there were two more in the family, and he was handling it alone.
And two little kids were even more alone in a big house somewhere in the wilds of southern Ohio.
“Please,” North said, those gray-blue eyes fixed on her.
“Yes,” Andie said.
He drew a deep breath. “Thank you.” Then he put his glasses back on, professional again. “There’s a household account you can draw on for any expenses, and a credit card. The housekeeper will clean and cook for you. If you come by tomorrow, Kristin will give you a copy of this folder with everything you need in it and your first check, of course.”
Andie sat there for a moment, a little stunned that she’d said yes. She’d felt the same way after he’d proposed.
“I’d appreciate it if you could go down as soon as possible.”
“Right.” She shoved her hair back, picked up her purse, and stood up again. “I’ll drive down tomorrow and see what I can do. You have a good winter terrorizing the opposing counsel.”
She headed for the door, refusing to look back. This was good. She’d given back the checks and cut the connection, so she could spare a month to save two orphans. Will was in New York for the next two weeks anyway, and he’d come home to a fiancée with no debt, and then—
“Andie,” North said, and she turned back in the doorway.
“Thank you,” he said, standing now behind his desk, tall and lean and beautiful and looking at her the way he’d used to.
Get out of here. “You’re welcome.”
Then she turned and walked out before he could say or do anything else that made her forget she was done with him.
* * *
After Andie left, North sat for a moment considering the possibility that he’d lost his mind. He’d had the résumés of several excellent nannies on his desk, and he’d hired his ex-wife instead. Fuck, he thought, and deliberately put her out of his mind, which was difficult since she’d mentioned blow jobs. Which were irrelevant because he and Andie were over, had been for ten years. Blow jobs. No, she was right: Draw a line under it. He went back to work, making notes on his newest case as the shadows grew longer and Kristin left for the night, definitely not thinking about Andie, his black capital letters spaced evenly in straight rows, as firm and as clear as his thinking—
He stopped and frowned at the page. Instead of “Indiana” he’d written “Andiana.” He marked an I over the A but the word sat there on the page, misspelled and blotted, a dark spot on the clear pattern of his day.
There was a knock on the door at the same time it opened.
“North!” his brother Sullivan said as he came in, his tie loosened and his face as genial as ever under his flop of brown hair.
Say hi to Southie for me, Andie had said. It had been ten years since anybody had called Sullivan “Southie.”
“You look like hell.” Sullivan lounged into the same chair Andie had taken and put his feet on the desk. “You can’t work round the clock. It’s not healthy.”
Your whole life isn’t the damn law firm, North, Andie had said a month before she’d left him. You have a life. And you have me although not for much longer if you don’t knock off this I-live-for-my-work crap.
“I like my work,” he said to his brother now. “How’s Mother?”
“Now that’s health. That woman was built for distance.”
North pictured their elegant, platinum-haired mother running a marathon in her pearls, kicking any upstarts out of the way with the pointed end of her heels as she crossed the finish line. She’d been thrilled when Andie left.
“It’s you I’m worried about,” Sullivan was saying. “You’re working too hard, too much on your plate, trying to run the whole practice with Mother gone—”
“My plate is fine. However, I am in the middle of—”
“No, no, it’s time I helped out.” Sullivan smiled at him. “I’ve been thinking about what I could do, but I figure you’d fall on your number two pencil before you’d let me help with the practice.”
&n
bsp; North looked down at the black pen mark that made “Andiana” such a blot. A number two pencil would be a good idea if he was going to start making mistakes.
“So I was thinking of something a little more in my area and out of yours,” Sullivan said. “People. You’re not a people person, North. I am.”
“People.” North turned the top sheet on his legal pad over so he didn’t have to look at the blot. Andiana. What the hell?
“You remember those two kids that second cousin left you a while back?”
“Yes,” North said, fairly sure that had been a rhetorical question, although with Sullivan, you never knew.
“I thought I might drop in, check on things for you, see how they’re doing.”
North looked up at that. “You want to ‘drop in’ to the wilds of southern Ohio to visit two children you’ve never met.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Sullivan grinned at him. “I want to see the house.”
“The house isn’t worth anything. It’s in the middle of nowhere.”
“It’s haunted.”
“Sullivan, there are no such things as ghosts,” North said, and for a moment he was twelve again and Sullivan was six, staring wide-eyed into the room where their father was laid out in his coffin. He’s not going to sit up, Southie, North had said then. He’s dead. There’s no such thing as ghosts.
“I know that,” Sullivan said now. “But I want to see a house that everybody thinks is haunted.”
“‘Everybody’ being a nanny who got bored and wanted out.”
“Other people have thought so, lots of rumors. So I thought I’d go down there and talk to some of the people. See what’s going on.”
“And how did you find out about these rumors?”
“I did some research for a friend of mine. She’s interested in hauntings, and she looked me up at a party and talked to me about the house and, you know, it is interesting.”
“She,” North said, Sullivan’s motives becoming much clearer now. The combination of a shiny new hobby and a shiny new girlfriend must have been irresistible.
“Kelly O’Keefe. The ghost thing is fascinating. I’ve talked to—”
“Kelly O’Keefe?” North thought of the tiny, sharp-faced, sharp-tongued newscaster he’d avoided after one viewing. “The little blonde with the teeth on Channel Twelve?”
“They’re very good teeth,” Sullivan said, going for indignant and missing.
“They look like they were very expensive,” North said, and remembered Andie the first time he’d seen her, her big eyes dancing, her curly hair wild, her wide smile flashing her overlapped front teeth. She’d never had her teeth fixed.
“Well, you need good teeth for TV.”
“True.” That had been the first thing his mother had said about her. For God’s sake, North, get her teeth fixed.
“The close-ups are murder,” Sullivan said.
And he’d said, I like her teeth. I like everything about her. And now you do, too, Mother.
Sullivan was looking at him oddly. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” North said.
“Okay. Well, then, I’d like to take Kelly down there and look into the ghosts. I can check on the kids for you while I’m there.”
“I’d prefer you didn’t,” North said bluntly. “I don’t see Kelly O’Keefe being a good experience for them.”
“No, no, she’s not interested in reporting on kids anymore, she’s on to ghosts now. She found out that the house was originally a haunted house in England and she’s very excited about it. Did you know they brought the house over here in pieces and rebuilt it? Kelly could be really grateful if I took her down there. Plus, I’d get to investigate a haunted house. I’ve talked to two highly regarded ghost experts and there’s something behind this stuff. I told the experts that there’s a haunted house in the family, and one of them would like to see it. Kelly would like to see it. I’d like to see it. We won’t talk to the kids.”
“The children own the house, so it’s not in our immediate family,” North said, picking up his pencil again. “And you’re not going to disrupt their lives because you think you might like to be a Ghostbuster.”
“No, no, I told you, we won’t bother the kids. My plan is that I take Kelly and Dennis, the expert, down there, we talk to people—not the kids, adults only—I see what’s going on and report back to you, you get to know the kids are safe, Dennis gets more research, Kelly gets her video whatsis…” Sullivan shrugged. “We all win. Plus, I get away from Columbus before Mother gets back from Paris. She doesn’t like Kelly. Says she’s all teeth and hair.”
North looked at his little brother with an exasperation he hadn’t felt in years. Southie’s permanently thirteen, Andie had said. Thirty-four hobbies and a hard-on. But she’d been laughing when she’d said it … “Southie, when are you going to stand up to Mother?”
“Southie?” Sullivan said.
“What?”
“You called me ‘Southie.’ You haven’t called me that in years.”
“Well, grow up and I’ll never call you that again. You’re running down there because you don’t want to face Mother with your latest career plan or girlfriend. It’s not much of a rebellion if you keep running away.”
“I’m not rebelling. I don’t have anything to rebel against. I have a great life. And to keep my life great, I’d like to avoid unpleasantness while learning about something that interests me and makes my girlfriend happy. Plus the last nanny quit last week so the kids are there alone. That’s not—”
“The children are not alone.”
“You hired another nanny?” Sullivan shook his head. “She won’t last. Better I should go—”
“This one will last.” North hesitated and then said, “I sent Andromeda.”
“Andie?” Sullivan whistled and then grinned. “Ghosts versus Andie. The supernatural is going to get its ass kicked. I didn’t even know she was back in town. When did you talk to her?”
“Today. She’s going down there tomorrow.”
Sullivan smiled. “Called me ‘Southie,’ did she?”
“What?”
“That’s why you called me ‘Southie.’ Andie did it first.”
“Yes,” North said, realizing it was true. Half an hour with Andie and ten years were yesterday. “She sent her regards.”
“She changed much?”
“Her hair’s … different,” North said, remembering her sitting in that chair, bundled up in an awful suit jacket, all those crazy curls yanked back, her face scowling as she argued with him. And then that one lock of hair, sliding down her neck—
“Her hair’s different?” Southie said. “You see your ex-wife for the first time in ten years and that’s all you got?”
“She looked…” Serious. Tense. Her old smile gone. “… quiet. She looked tired.” He shook that thought out of his head. “She was only here for twenty minutes. I didn’t pay that much attention.”
“Twenty minutes in the old days, and she’d have had you on your knees.”
“Southie,” North said repressively.
“I remember the first time I saw her,” Southie went on, ignoring him. “I was supposed to talk you into an annulment, and her old clunker of a car pulled up, and you said, ‘There she is,’ and she got out and came walking toward us, and I knew there wasn’t going to be an annulment. I told you she looked like there was music playing in her head, and you said, ‘Yeah, it’s—’”
“‘Layla,’” North said, seeing her again, moving across the lawn that bright summer day, the bounce in her step translating to the bounce in her hips, everything about her electric and alive and smiling at him …
“So does she still move to ‘Layla’?”
“Yes,” North said, remembering her walking across the carpet to him. “Except now it’s the acoustic version.”
Southie grinned. “I can’t wait to see her again. So we’ll go down this weekend—”
North thought of Andie opening the door and finding Southie and his toothy, microphone-wielding girlfriend on the step with some charlatan ghost expert. “No.”
“Maybe she could use your help,” Southie said. “The two of you used to—”
“She’s getting married again. Now if we’re finished here…” North looked back to his notes as a hint, but when Southie didn’t say anything, he looked up.
“I’m sorry,” Southie said, his face kind. “I really am.”
The twinge North had felt when she’d told him stabbed at him again and he put a lid on it again. “Why? We’ve been divorced for ten years. It’s not as if I thought she was coming back.”
“Yeah, but it’s still a shock. At least it is to me. Maybe I thought she was coming back.”
“Well, she’s not,” North said, more sharply than he’d intended.
“So, who’s the guy? What do we know about him?”
Southie looked serious now, which was always a bad sign.
“Will Spenser. The writer.”
“The true crime guy?” Southie said, raising his eyebrows.
“I think he writes mystery fiction, too.”
“Probably not much difference. What did the McKennas find out about him?”
North gathered his patience. “I did not put a private detective on my ex-wife’s fiancé.”
“Right, she was just here, you haven’t had time. Want me to call Gabe for you?”
“No.”
Southie shook his head. “You know, she used to be family. As far as I’m concerned she still is. We need to look out for her. This guy could have anything in his past. He’s a writer, for Christ’s sake.”
“No,” North said.
“And I should go down and check on her in that house,” Southie went on as if North hadn’t spoken. “I can’t believe you sent her down there without backup. God knows what’s down there.”