Ready & Willing by Elizabeth Bevarly Page B

the wardrobe aside. She started to add that at least children weren’t forced to work in sweatshops in this country anymore, as they had been in Silas’s time, then she remembered that that was only because those sweatshop children’s jobs had been outsourced to children in sweatshops in other countries. Craftsmanship may have suffered, she thought morosely, but corporate greed had advanced with enormous strides. Yay, progress.
    There was nothing behind the wardrobe, so she turned to look at Silas questioningly.
    “There,” he told her.
    She looked where he was pointing and saw an air vent cut into the hardwood floor, covered by a square, filigreed grate fashioned from black wrought-iron.
    “Remove that,” he told her. Then, when she snapped her head back to look at him with, she hoped, venom, he hastily added, “ Please remove that, Mrs. Magill.”
    The grill was screwed onto the vent, so she went to a box upon which she’d scrawled the words MISCELLANEOUS KITCHEN and picked through it, until she located a set of screwdrivers she normally kept in a drawer for easy access, but which she hadn’t yet unpacked. She chose the one she knew would be the right size, then returned to the grate and effortlessly loosened each screw. She had to tug hard twice to free the thing, and after she did, a rather large spider came scurrying out to greet her. She immediately stepped on it, went back to the box to retrieve a roll of paper towels, then scooped up its squishy remains. When she turned to look at Silas again, to see why he’d wanted the grate removed from the air vent, he was eyeing her with something akin to admiration.
    “What?” she asked.
    “You dispatched that spider rather well,” he told her. “And without squealing or some other feminine rubbish.
    You also used that tool with aplomb. As well as any man would.”
    “So?”
    “So, Mrs. Magill,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a woman who could do both so comfortably.”
    “Yeah, well, I’ve come a long way, baby and all that.”
    His expression turned puzzled again, but Audrey didn’t bother to explain. If this was a nervous breakdown, she wanted to get on with it and get it over with as quickly as possible. “What next?” she asked wearily.
    “I’m afraid you’re going to have to reach in there,” he said.
    “What for?”
    “Because there’s a pair of gold cuff links in there that Bellamy evidently stole from my room and stashed there, and you need to retrieve them for me.”
    This time Audrey was the one to be puzzled. “Cuff links?”
    “Yes.”
    “You need cuff links in the afterlife?”
    “No, Mrs. Magill. But they’re rather unusual cuff links, and I shall describe them for you before you locate them, and then, when you do locate them, you’ll have no choice but to accept the reality of my . . .”
    “Haunting?” she said, even though she still wasn’t convinced of that.
    “Visitation,” he corrected her.
    “Why will that prove anything?” she asked.
    He crossed his arms over his chest again. “Because right now, you can’t possibly know what these cuff links will look like,” he told her. “For that matter, you can’t even know for sure there are cuff links down there. Once you discover them and see that they are exactly as I described them, you’ll have to accept that the only way that could be is due to the fact that I, Captain Silas Leyton Summerfield, am standing here, speaking to you, and you are not enjoying a hallucination.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t exactly say I’m enjoying this,” she told him. Whatever this was. Still, what he said did make sense. In a weird, beyond-the-veil, maybe-it-wasn’t-the-Chunky-Monkey-after-all kind of way. “Okay, so what are they going to look like, these cuff links?”
    “They are solid gold,” he told her, “each with a lapis lazuli inset fashioned to look like a paddlewheel from the side. What appears to be a coil of rope surrounds the design.”
    Audrey