He rolled his eyes, but before he could leave, Alice ran forward and grabbed his hand. “Come on, you need to dance.”
He let her pull him in, clearly in hell but also clearly unable to say no to Alice.
“It’s easy,” Andie said, hitting the pause button on the boom box as the song ended. “Look. This is the box step. You move in a square…”
She stood beside him and made him take the four steps-“Don’t move on the diagonal, trace the box”-and Alice did it with him, saying, “See? See?” He frowned, concentrating, clearly out of his element, but once Carter understood something, Andie had learned, he didn’t stop until he mastered it. Once he had it, she said, “Okay, now with a partner, and you lead.” She put his hand on her waist and he stiffened, and she realized that was the first time she’d ever touched him. Gotta spend more time with Carter, she thought, and took his other hand. “Lead with your left,” she said, and as he stepped forward, she stepped back, following him, and they walked through the step until Alice hit play and “Man in Love” came on, and Andie remembered North barreling down I-71, singing it at the top of his lungs. It seemed impossible now that he had ever done that, North Archer did not sing, but he had, and she’d just laughed and loved him. She’d been with him all that time, and she hadn’t even realized what it had meant back then, that he’d sing like that.
“This is too fast,” Carter said, and Andie shook herself out of the past and said, “No it isn’t. Just follow the beat,” and to her surprise, he did, finding the music almost immediately.
“That’s it,” she said, “that’s great!” She leaned into his arm, and he automatically led. “You’re a good dancer,” she told him, “you’re a natural,” and he shook his head, but she saw him start to smile, not broadly but a real smile. Alice danced around them, finally yelling, “Me! Me!” Carter let go as Andie twirled under his arm, and Alice grabbed Carter’s hand to finish out the song, and Andie watched them and remembered North singing, “I want the whole world to know,” at the top of his lungs. They’d danced to this in the attic, too. The man had hips, she remembered, closing her eyes and seeing him again with one hand on his longneck beer and the other on her ass, laughing off the workday…
I’d give anything to have that back, she thought, and then the song stopped and she kicked herself because it wasn’t coming back. Keep the good memories but let the past go, that was the key.
Maybe that was the key to May, too. If May could let the past go and move on-
Alice said, “Wait a minute,” and hit rewind on the boom box, and Jackson Browne began to sing again. Alice grabbed Carter’s hand and said, “I like this one,” and he smiled back, amazingly, he really smiled, and they started their own kind of box step, as Alice belted out, “Gonna shine tonight!”
And Andie leaned against the wall and replayed that first night again, how gorgeous North had been with his tie loosened, looking at her like she was the only woman in the room, sliding his arm around her waist when she met him halfway, rocking her to the music while he looked in her eyes, twirling her, then pulling her back to all his heat, and she’d laughed, completely free, warmed by the music and the movement and the light in his eyes even though she didn’t know who he was.
And when the music stopped, he’d said, “I’m North Archer, and I think we should leave,” and she’d thought if he didn’t kiss her right there, she’d die, and he’d pulled her out into the dark street-
“Are you okay?” Carter said, looking concerned.
“Yes,” Andie said, straightening, and thought, No, I haven’t been okay since I saw him again, and all the pent-up need for the only man she’d ever loved swept over her. She was in a haunted house with two lonely kids who needed her and she wanted him there with her, to help her save them and to hold her and to make love to her until they were themselves again, until they’d found everything they’d lost again. Maybe this time we could make it work, she thought, but even as she thought it, she knew she’d go crazy again when he forgot she existed. She was high maintenance, that’s all there was to it.
Move on, she thought. May and I have to move on.
She watched Alice boss Carter through the box step again, but when “Man in Love” came back on, they deserted the box step and just danced, and Andie went to join them because she couldn’t help it, they were so happy. It wouldn’t last, but for right now, they were dancing. At least I got this part right, she thought, and raised her arms above her head to do a hip bop, and Alice saw her and raised her arms, too, then “Layla” came on, the old hard-rock version, and Andie shut off the treacherous tape and said, “Bedtime,” over Alice’s wail, shutting off, too, all the memories that had come with it.
She had a ghost to talk to.
Andie sat up in her bed until past midnight waiting for May, but she never came. There were no voices on Alice’s baby monitor, either, so evidently the undead were taking the night off. Or she’d hallucinated everything. That theory appealed to her, and the next day was normal, too, or as normal as anything ever was at Archer House. It was spoiled only by a heaviness in the air and early darkness from thick cloud cover, a big storm brewing up, the radio said. Just what I need, Andie thought, a dark and stormy night. Still, the ghost was delightfully unpresent, so when the doorknocker sounded at close to five that evening, she made the trek down the long, dim stone entry hall without foreboding. Ghosts didn’t knock on doors.
Outside, thunder rolled, and she thought, Cut me a break here, and opened the door.
Southie’s handsome face beamed at her. “Andie! Wonderful to see you again.”
“Southie,” she said, glad to see him because he was Southie, but also suspicious because he was Southie. “What are you doing here?”
“We’ve come to help!”
“We?” Andie said, looking around for North, but there were strangers coming up the path instead: a bespectacled, worried-looking, middle-aged man in a green argyle cardigan, his basset-hound eyes darting to take in the bleak landscape as it began to rain; a much younger, surly guy in jeans striding past him with a long silver bag, and then pushing past the young guy as if she were speed-walking, a pixieish blonde with the eyes of a hawk, her face set in killer determination…
“Kelly O’Keefe?” Andie said to Southie.
“Yes,” Southie said, and then she was on them, talking over him.
“My God, this place is remote,” she said, stopping in front of Andie. She barely came up to Andie’s shoulder, which may have contributed to her hectic enthusiasm. “Tell me you have indoor plumbing.”
“We have indoor plumbing,” Andie told her. “Would you like to use it before you go back where you came from?”
“This is Andie,” Southie said to Kelly, and the little blonde blinked as if recalculating, and then smiled, all white teeth. Hundreds of them.
“Hello, Andie!”
“Hello.” Andie looked back at Southie. “Why?”
“I was with North when he got your phone call,” Southie said, “and I knew you were out here alone with two kids and could use some help-”
“North sent you?” Why didn’t he come?
“He didn’t exactly send me,” Southie said. “I just got the feeling you needed me.”
“So you brought me a TV reporter?”
“Broadcast journalist,” Kelly said crisply, and followed it up with another blinding smile. “It’s raining. Could we come in?”
Andie looked at the younger guy with the silver bag. “And you are?”
“Cameraman,” he said, bored by the conversation already. “Bill. I drove the truck.”
Andie craned her neck to see a red Miata that had to be Kelly O’Keefe’s parked just this side of the bridge beside a huge satellite truck that said NEWS4 on the side. She spared a moment to wonder how the hell they’d gotten that truck down the drive and how the hell they were going to get it back up again now that the rain was turning dirt to mud, and then she looked at Southie. “A TV reporter, a cameraman, and a…” She smiled at the baggy-eyed man, not sure what he was, but he was glancing around again, his face practically twitching with suspicion over his truly ugly argyle cardigan.