On our right, where the road turned the corner toward us, was an outdoor urinal that gave me a shudder of another sort, both funny and repulsive with its fancy iron sign that read URINOL and a steel silhouette of a young boy pissing off the top of the sign against the thousand-year-old stone wall. Steel privacy screens ended two feet above the tiled road. The smell was unmistakable.
Catching my breath at last, I muttered, “Out of the frying pan . . .”
“And into the pissoir,” Quinton added.
But ahead I could see the freestanding arch I’d walked under as I came down the steep road from the castle. “I know where we are,” I said.
“Oh, good, because I’m lost.”
TEN
I put my hand over Quinton’s bag and rubbed the surface, pressing just hard enough to feel the rough shapes of the objects within. Most were rectangular, flat, or tubular. One wasn’t. He watched me with a wary look.
“So,” I said, leaving my hand over the odd shape, “is that a gun in your bag or are you just happy to see me?”
Quinton’s expression grew more tense. “Better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it. At least with my dad and his creeps in town. Does it bother you?”
“No. I’m just not sure how helpful it’ll be. And they’re a liability here, aren’t they?”
He shook his head. “Not really. Unless someone searches me, then I might be in trouble.”
I was still out of breath, so I took a step away from him and leaned against the wall, far enough away from the outdoor urinal to avoid anything that might have splashed, but still too close to avoid the smell. It did bother me a little—usually I’m the one carrying while Quinton relies on his brains and ability to adapt. I wasn’t sure the reversal was comfortable, but there was no reason to object that I could see. “We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.”
“OK. My turn: You have any better idea what that thing was that fell from the sky?” he asked.
“No. It’s familiar, but I’m not sure about it. Another thing to discuss with Carlos. He should be up by the time we reach the house.”
Quinton nodded and I walked to him to put my arm back around his waist and start up the hill.
Even without Rafa’s map, I remembered the route back to the house below the castle and we made it up the steep, twisty streets in the swiftly falling dusk with no further trouble. The problem arose when I didn’t have the gate key. There was no light, camera, or intercom box and the gate was locked, but there was a very old-fashioned bellpull of the sort that looks like an ornate handle on a stiff iron rod. I yanked on it, leaving Quinton to stand peering in through the iron vines of the gate.
“I think someone’s coming,” he said after my third try.
In a few minutes, a man with a flashlight approached the gate and shone his beam on us. “Boa tarde. O que é que você quer aqui?”
“Rafa?” I asked. “Is Rafa here? I lost my key.”
“Rafa? The old housekeeper?” The man scowled. “She retired in 1992 and died in 2000. She was eighty-five. When did you receive a key from her?”
“Will you think I’m crazy if I say this morning?”
He seemed to consider it, but decided I wasn’t. “Is your name Harper?”
I nodded, disturbed and frowning.
“Then, you had better come in.”
I looked at Quinton, knowing he’d heard the conversation.
He shook his head. “I’m not much help if it’s a ghost thing and I don’t get along with that timey-wimey stuff if it’s not. It’s better if I wait here until you’re done.”
“All right,” I said, feeling reluctant to walk away from him but sure I didn’t have a lot of choice. I put my hand into my purse and held on to the other key, knowing how it must work and hoping it would help me find the right temporacline through which to reach Rafa or Carlos. I followed the man with the flashlight toward the house.
“I was concerned when your box was empty,” he said.
“Rafa helped me out.”
He grunted. “I’ve never heard of the ghosts doing much here before. They break things once in a while, but otherwise, you’d never know the place was haunted.” He gave me an odd, sideways glance and amended, “Well, you might.” Apparently someone had told him more than my name.
The female ghost I’d seen on the stairs that afternoon rushed me as I stepped into the entry. It was much darker now, and only a small lamp near the stairs was lit, so I hadn’t seen her before she was on me. She shoved me backward and then dragged me forward again, leaving my guide to stand, openmouthed, at the doorway as the ghost whisked me up to the gallery. She pulled me up the stairs and I could hear the man coming along behind us, shouting, “Where are you going?”
The ghostly woman dragged me up the last flight, to the door of my room. I put the key in the lock and twisted. . . .
The sound of the man behind me ceased and the formerly dark hallway was illuminated with dim bulbs in distant lamps from another decade. Rafa came down the hall toward me from the back of the house. She didn’t look like a ghost, but they never do when seen in their native temporacline.
“I feared you were lost.”
“I was. My gate key was stolen and I couldn’t get back in the right way.”
“But you have found another. Dom Carlos will be asking for you in a few minutes, I think.”
“I have a friend downstairs at the gate. He needs to come in, too.”
“Oh. I shall have to find more keys,” Rafa said, and turned to go to the stairs and walk down.
She left me at my door without another word. I stared after her, then turned my head to see the ghost who had dragged me upstairs still standing by my side. She had a thin face framed in elaborate dark braids and curls, and her clothes were easier to see now—something like an elegant nightgown with a wide, scooped neck that barely covered the hard line of a long corset, and a voluminous silk robe thrown loosely over it all. She looked grave and pale, even for a ghost, as she studied me.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What do you want from me?”
“Amélia. I do not forget,” came her thoughts into my head, not really words, but the meaning as clear as if spoken. She vanished like a blown-out candle, leaving only a curl of mist to mark her place.
“Damned capricious spooks,” I muttered. I relocked the door and the illumination instantly flickered down to just two dim night lamps. The man who’d let me in turned around from where he’d been standing farther down the hall, looking startled, and walked toward me, flipping a wall switch as he came, which turned on a newer, brighter set of bulbs in antique-styled sconces along the walls.
In the light, I could see he was an older man, in good health and with excellent posture that had made him seem younger in the dimmer illumination. He was puzzled by me, but not scared. “There you are!”
“I’m sorry to have vanished like that.”
“I guess I’ll get used to it. I just can’t keep up on those stairs. What are you doing up at this room?”
“I have the key—another one Rafa gave me that I didn’t lose.”
“Funny . . . It’s not the room we made up for you, but all your things disappeared out of the room downstairs. This is the room guests never stay in—and the room in the tower.”
“Guests?”
“Usually the house is leased to travelers—business people or long-term visitors. It’s been empty a lot recently with the economy and the EU problems. We never tell people not to use this room, but for some reason, they just don’t. The tower is locked, though. We don’t even mention it exists most of the time, since the stair is hidden. You can see it outside, but most people aren’t curious enough to try to find the way up. They assume it’s a false front, I think. We don’t lease to people with kids—they’re much too curious and destructive.”