Love Overboard - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,9
died while I was there and left me all his money. That’s how I bought your house… with Uncle Ed’s money.”
It had seemed like the perfect move. It was the antithesis of her former life. It was calm, cozy, normal. It would give her a chance to meet people who weren’t staring back at her down the snub-nosed barrel of her service revolver.
She turned, pulled herself halfway up the ladder, and stopped. She looked at Ivan over her shoulder. “Is the house really haunted?”
“Some people think so.”
“Do you?”
He put a friendly hand on her backside and encouraged her to go topside. “I think you’d better check on Ace. Make sure he doesn’t knead anything other than bread dough. He’s hell on divorced women, and we have three of them on this cruise.”
Stephanie scooted up the ladder and blinked in the bright sunshine. “You avoided my original question.”
“Does it bother you that the house might be haunted?”
She paused at the hatch to the galley. “I don’t know. I guess it would depend on who was haunting it. And you still haven’t answered my question.”
“There’s a very fine line between imagination and reality when it comes to things like ghosts. I think it’s just a matter of what you choose to believe.”
“So what you’re telling me is that my house is haunted.”
“Definitely. But don’t worry about it. It’s only my aunt Tess. She’s an old lady.”
“How old?”
“About three hundred years. She’s hardly noticeable. She prowls the widow’s walk in the fog, and sometimes she sits on the window seat in the master bedroom.” He waved his hand in a dismissive gesture when he saw the look of horror on her face. “Actually, she hardly ever sits on the window seat. Once or twice a year, maybe.”
“She hates me,” Stephanie said.
“What?”
“She’s undoubtedly the one who pushed me down the hill.”
“Aunt Tess wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“Oh! A lot you know about your aunt Tess. Suddenly it all makes perfect sense. The woman is vicious! She probably broke my toilet. I’d bet money on it.”
“Ghosts don’t go around breaking toilets.
They moan and drag chains and walk through walls.”
“Then how else would you explain my house problems?”
“If you’re trying to get me to admit to negligence, it isn’t working. It’s an old house, and things break. Although I have to admit it is strange. That porch was in good condition when I moved out. Wood just doesn’t rot that fast. Tell you what, as soon as we get back to Camden, I’ll have a talk with Aunt Tess. See if I can calm her down.”
Stephanie gave him a black look. “You’re just humoring me. You don’t really think she broke my toilet, do you?”
The grin widened. “She was the wife of a pirate. She could be capable of anything.”
“You think I need Ghostbusters?”
“I think you need to go below and make sure Ace doesn’t have a woman stowed in his bunk.”
An hour later Stephanie was up to her elbows in chocolate chip cookie batter. “You mean to tell me Lucy bakes cookies like this every day?”
Ace picked a handful of chocolate morsels out of the huge bowl and popped them into his mouth.
“Yup. She gets up about five and starts the stove. By six o’clock she’s made hot coffee, and she starts chucking trays of cookies in. Lucy just keeps the cookies going all day while she bakes other stuff. Usually she makes the dough the night before.”
Stephanie dropped a glob of dough onto a cookie sheet. “Don’t these poor people ever get any real cookies? You know, like Oreos and Fig Newtons?”
“Nope. We force them to eat homemade,” Ace said, reaching for more chocolate.
Stephanie opened the oven door and felt her mind go momentarily slack at the sight of wall-to-wall ham. Hot air rushed out at her, carrying the spicy smell of cloves and Lucy’s special honey glaze. There was just enough room at the top for one tray of cookies, so she slid it in.
Stephanie closed the door on the ham and cookies and threw a skeptical glance at Ace. “You think this is going to work?”
“Sure. Just watch the little temperature gauge on the front of the stove.”
Stephanie squinted at the gauge. Five hundred degrees. You could probably bake a brick at that temperature, she thought. She stared at the stove for five minutes, then opened the door and took out a tray of charred cookies. “How do we get this sucker cooled off? Fast.”
Ace pulled a stack of paper shopping