Ready & Willing by Elizabeth Bevarly Read Free Book Online Page A

her countertops behind him bisecting him at the waist, along with an occasional droplet of water from her perpetually drippy faucet that fell from just below his heart. When she studied his face closer, she could just discern the branches of the sugar maple outside the window, as craggy and jagged as his eyebrows.
    In spite of her musings the day before about the door to the afterlife sometimes being left ajar, and in spite of what she’d said to Silas’s great-great-however-many-greats grandson, Audrey told herself she couldn’t possibly be seeing what she seemed to be seeing. Her house couldn’t possibly be haunted by the ghost of Silas Summerfield. Not with a manifestation like this. Whenever she saw one of those ghost-hunter shows on TV, the evidence of hauntings was always as nebulous as the spirits themselves. Smudges of gray on camera film, wisps of faint light on video, scratches of sound on tape.
    In spite of all that, too, Audrey heard herself say, in a rather shaky voice, “You’re . . . you’re not real.”
    He arched an eyebrow at that. “Am I not?”
    She shook her head. “No. You’re not.”
    “Then why are you speaking to me?”
    She opened her mouth to reply, told herself that he was just trying to get a rise out of her, and closed it again. Just her luck that she’d have hallucinations that were sarcastic. Just how little sleep had she had last night?
    When she said nothing, Captain Summerfield sighed with something akin to disappointment, and folded his ghostly arms over his ghostly torso.
    Hallucinated arms over his hallucinated torso, Audrey quickly corrected herself.
    “I am not a figment of your imagination, Mrs. Magill,” he told her. “I am Silas Summerfield, and I am standing right before you. And yes, the sunlight does render me somewhat . . . thin,” he finally concluded.
    Oh, she didn’t know about that. The guy seemed to be solid rock. Except, you know, for that translucent thing.
    She said nothing in response, mostly because speaking to a man who wasn’t there would make it seem as if maybe he were there. And if Silas Summerfield was standing in her kitchen, then the door to the afterlife was way more than ajar at the moment. Which meant that maybe, just maybe, Sean Magill could walk through it, too. And Audrey simply could not allow herself to have that hope.
    At her reticence, Silas expelled a soft sigh and said, very quietly, “Please say something, Mrs. Magill.”
    But Audrey only shook her head in silence.
    “What will it take to prove to you that I’m not a hallucination?” he asked. “That I am Silas Summerfield, former owner of this house, dead almost four score years and now returned because I must ensure that my descendant escapes a fate worse than death.”
    A fate worse than death? Audrey echoed to herself. Terrific. Her hallucination was sarcastic and melodramatic.
    Silas nodded in response to her silence this time. “Actually, I had anticipated this reaction,” he told her. “I will prove to you that I am who and what I say I am. Come with me to Bellamy’s room.”
    Audrey hesitated. And not just because she didn’t know which room was Bellamy’s room, either. Or who Bellamy was, for that matter. Was following a hallucination’s orders the same thing as talking back to one? Would she be more crazy or less if she did what he told her to do? Then again, by virtue of this hallucination going on as long as it had, the level of her craziness was probably moot at this point. She just hoped her health insurance covered at least some of the cost of therapy.
    She hesitated a moment, then thought, What the hell. Speaking to a hallucination couldn’t be any crazier than having one in the first place. So she asked, “Who’s Bellamy?”
    He gazed at her blankly for a moment, as if she should know the answer to that. Then his expression cleared, as if he remembered why she didn’t know the answer to that. “Bellamy is . . . was, ” he quickly corrected himself,