Someone to Love by Jude Deveraux Read Free Book Online Page A

you tell me that some people can see her and some can’t? Maybe she appears outside but no one has seen her—or can see her in the daylight.”
    Mrs. Browne squinted up at him. “Are you tryin’ to tell me that you saw Lady Grace outside the house? Maybe here in this garden?”
    Jace grinned. “I’m trying to use you as a research tool. If I’m going to be writing a book about Lady Grace, I need to find out all I can about her, don’t I?”
    “Write a book about a woman that won’t leave the earth? Well…” she said, “if that’s what you want to do, but I have better things to do with my time.”
    “So no one has seen her outside?”
    “Not to my knowledge and I know—”
    “All there is to know,” Jace said with a sigh. She might know things, but it was difficult to get information out of her. He dreaded trying to find out about Stacy from her. If Stacy had met someone here and Mrs. Browne knew of it, he was more likely to get a morals lecture than information.
    “I think I’ll take a run,” he said. “Work off some breakfast in preparation for lunch.”
    “It’s Jamie’s roast chicken,” she said. “With rosemary.”
    Smiling, Jace started jogging backward. When he reached the spot in the wall where the ghost had stepped through, he pretended to have a pain in his ankle. Mrs. Browne was watching him intently. As he rubbed his ankle, then stood up, he felt the wall. It was solid and old. There was no doorway there and he didn’t think there ever had been.

3
    J ace jogged around the parkland for over an hour. He often stopped to look at places. When a piece of land had been occupied for nearly nine hundred years, the people left their marks behind. He came across four sheds, all of them locked, and the ruins of two more. He found a pretty stone shelter with a dome top and a marble floor that was beginning to crumble. To get to it he’d had to fight through rampant vines and run out a family of small, furry creatures that moved too fast for him to see what they were. There were stone half circles next to what he’d been told was a dry riverbed. The monks had kept fish in the stone-lined ponds.
    When he got back to the house, he just had time to shower before lunch. He ate in Mrs. Browne’s kitchen and was subjected to a long complaint about the raspberry bushes having been denuded. She questioned Jace closely about who he’d seen. He lied smoothly. Of course to tell her the truth would have been worse than lying. Tell her that the ghost blew a spider on her? Not quite.
    After lunch, which was delicious, he went upstairs and called Nigel Smith-Thompson, the estate agent, and asked questions. What Jace wanted to know was whether or not the previous owner had lent the house to anyone in the three years it was last for sale. Who had stayed there? The agent said no one had been there. The owner and his family walked out of the house in the middle of the night and returned to their native country, never to visit the house again.
    “Are you sure he didn’t lend the house to any one?” Jace persisted.
    “I can call him and ask,” the agent said, but he obviously didn’t want to.
    “Please do,” Jace said, then gave the agent his cell number. “I want to know who had permission to stay here.”
    “I can answer that one. Only the housekeeper was allowed to stay. The gardener lives in the small house at the south end of the property.”
    “But perhaps the owner had a friend who used the house.”
    “The previous owner left the care of the house to us and I can assure you that we allowed no one to use it.” His voice was becoming strained, as though Jace were accusing him of something bad. “I think, Mr. Montgomery, that you should talk to Mrs. Browne. If anyone who wasn’t supposed to stay there did, then Mrs. Browne knows about it.”
    “I’ll talk to her,” Jace said, sighing because he knew he’d get no information out of the woman. “But you will call the owner right away and