Ivan grinned. He couldn’t imagine her being boring. She was bright and sexy and talked faster than any two people put together.
Stephanie grimaced at the painful memory of rejection. She’d said too much, but once she’d gotten started, it had all poured out. Not that it mattered. The only thing significant about her personal life was that it was insignificant. “Anyway, I decided to start over. So I cleaned out my paltry savings account and went to Atlantic City to gamble.”
“And you made a big killing?”
“No. My uncle Ed 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 bags from a cubbyhole under the sink. “Lucy wets these and puts them in the oven. She says it brings the temperature down.”
Stephanie soaked the bags and stuffed them in around the ham. She added another tray of cookies, closed the door, and secretly tried to bribe God into lowering the heat. If you just do this one thing for me, she promised, I’ll never say another curseword, I’ll eat all my vegetables, I’ll drive at the speed limit.
Mr. and Mrs. Pease carefully lowered themselves down the fo’c’sle stairs. “Isn’t this cozy?” Mrs. Pease said. “And it smells wonderful down here.”
Mr. Pease poured two mugs of coffee and peered into the bowl of cookie dough. “Did you use oat flour?” he asked Stephanie.
“Nope. Just plain old flour flour.”
He shook his head. “Oat flour’s the secret to a chewy cookie. You have to use some oat flour, and you can’t bake them too long.”
Mrs. Pease took a mug from her husband. “He’s a wonderful cookie baker,” she told Stephanie. “You’d never know they were homemade.”
Stephanie sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “Is it always this smoky in here?” she asked Ace.
“Smoky?” Ace removed his dark glasses. “You’re right. It’s smoky.” He checked the flue and shook his head. “I don’t know what’s wrong. The flue is okay.”
“Maybe something’s burning in the oven,” Mrs. Pease suggested.
Stephanie opened the door and jumped back as a wall of smoke and flame rolled out at her.
“Jeez,” Ace said, “looks like the bags caught fire. That never happened when Lucy did it.”
Stephanie stuck her hand into a thick potholder mitt, pulled the flaming bags out of the oven, and hurled them into the sink.
Mrs. Pease put her hand to her heart. “We’re gonna die. The ship’s gonna burn to a cinder, and we’re gonna drown.”
Stephanie fanned the air with a hand towel. “This is how we lower the temperature in the woodstove,” she said. “Nothing to worry about. We do this all the time.”
Mr. Pease came over to take a closer look at the oven. “I didn’t realize being a ship’s cook was so complicated.”
Ace removed the tray of smoking cookies and set them on the counter. “Man, look at these mothers. They’ve been cremated. And the ham! Looks like a meteor I saw once in the Smithsonian.”
Stephanie squinted at the smoldering ham. “It is sort of black. Maybe it just needs basting,” she said hopefully. She poked at it with a long-handled fork. “Probably we should pick the ashes off it first.” She closed the oven door and checked the gauge. Five hundred degrees. She gave it a whack with the fork to make sure it was working. “Darn.” She turned to Ace. “Any other ideas?”