Ready & Willing by Elizabeth Bevarly Page A

boxes, and a few odd pieces of furniture—chairs and tables mostly—were pushed against the walls. There was a plastic wardrobe full of her old suits shoved into one corner, and it was beside that that the good captain currently stood.
    “Move this,” he said of the rolling wardrobe.
    Immediately, Audrey’s back went up. It was the same sort of command, spoken in the same sort of voice, that had been commonplace at her former company, an old-boy accounting firm that had only changed its hiring practices at some point after World War II because the federal government had required them by law to do so. Their attitudes, however, had remained unchanged. Women, her old boss had firmly believed, should only work in offices to type, file, and make coffee. And to pick up dry cleaning and order lunch and make travel arrangements. And be leered at whenever the urge struck.
    “Move it yourself,” Audrey retorted, dropping her fists to her hips in much the way he had earlier.
    His dark brows shot up at that. “I beg your pardon?”
    She jutted up her chin at the wardrobe. “You want it moved, move it yourself,” she repeated. “I don’t follow orders.”
    He gazed at her distastefully. “Obviously not.”
    Point to the woman with the mental impairment.
    Now Silas dispelled a sound of exasperation. “I can’t move it,” he told her. Then, to illustrate why, he placed his hand beside it and gave it a push, only to have his arm disappear into the wardrobe, up to his elbow. “I’m not corporeal,” he said unnecessarily.
    “Then how did you move the painting and toss my hats around?” she asked in a voice she hoped told him how much that had pissed her off. “That was three thousand dollars’ worth of work you almost destroyed.”
    His mouth dropped open at that. “Three thousand dollars? For a bunch of hats?” he asked, aghast. “Madam, I paid less than that for my house.”
    “Yeah, inflation sucks,” Audrey said blandly. Then, before he could ask for clarification, she told him. “Inflation is bad. So how come you were able to move the painting and hats? And open the newspaper on my kitchen table?”
    He hesitated for a moment, as if he didn’t know, actually. Then he said, “I don’t know, actually. I wanted them moved, and they were moved. But afterward, I was exhausted to the point where I was unable to do anything for some time. I’m not certain of the mechanics involved. Only that I wanted something done, and it was done. But at great expense to my . . . presence.” He made a pushing motion with his hand again, and, again, it went straight through the wardrobe. “I’m not certain how long it will be before I can do something like that again.”
    “But why did you want those particular things done in the first place?” Audrey asked.
    He inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly. “Because . . . because I returned to my home and realized it was no longer my home. In a moment of terrible frustration, I tried to put things back the way they were when I was alive. Then I realized things could never go back to being that way.” He made a face. “It was a childish thing to do. I apologize. I should have returned everything to its proper place.”
    Audrey could tell by the way he’d apologized that it was something he wasn’t used to doing. So the fact that he had done it went a long way toward making her more amenable to him. And his edicts.
    Nevertheless, she told him, “Well, the least you could do is say please.”
    He looked confused for a moment, then backtracked to the place in their conversation where he’d uttered his command. Then he gritted his teeth at her. In spite of that, he said, “Please move this . . . this . . . this thing.”
    “It’s a wardrobe,” she told him as she covered what little distance remained between them.
    He looked at it with antipathy. “Craftsmanship has suffered greatly in the last century, I see.”
    “You have no idea,” Audrey muttered as she pushed