Bethany was seated behind the desk, talking with a white haired older gentleman standing in front of it. They broke off as Cally ran down the last couple of steps, and Bethany stood to introduce her. “Mr. May,” she said, “This is our guest Callaghan McCarthy. Ms. McCarthy, this is Ian May, the owner of Vale House.”

“Please call me Ian,” the old gentleman said in a beautiful southern accent that was almost an old-time brogue. He reached out his hand to Cally, palm upward. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said graciously, smiling and bowing slightly as she put her hand in his. He was a handsome man for his age, clean shaven, with a thick mane of white hair combed softly back. He was dressed in a crisp windowpane-check shirt tucked into gray slacks. Thick calluses on his hands, however, belied his genteel image. “What an honor to have a famous author as our guest,” he said. “And so lovely, too!” He straightened and gazed into Cally’s eyes, and his own eyes sparkled with genuine pleasure.

“I’m not really famous,” Cally said. “Or lovely,” she also thought but did not say aloud. “I’m very grateful to you for letting me come and stay in your home for a while.”

“We hope you’ll find it inspiring,” Ian said. “We get those paranormal investigators in here sometimes, you see, but never a famous author before.”

“Ghost investigators!” Joan’s voice came from the dining room behind Cally. She clomped into the Hall, a large mug clutched in one hand. “Bunch of quacks, if you ask me. And always trying to get their room and board for free, in exchange for the ‘exposure’!” She made air-quotes with her free hand. Then she smiled and strode over to Ian’s side, positioning herself between him and Bethany. Kissing him on the cheek, she said sweetly, “I hope you’re charging Ms. Callaghan the full rate.”

Ian’s charming smile never dimmed. “Ms. McCarthy is a paying customer,” he said evenly. “I know you’ll treat her with the courtesy for which we are so well known.”

Joan had no reply to this. She marched with her mug to her office door and turned as she went in. “Excuse me, I must get back to work. I have all this paperwork to get through.” She shut the door behind her, but much more softly than she had earlier.

Bethany was frowning and shaking her head, but her smile returned as soon as Ian spoke again. “Now,” he said to Cally, “we don’t normally serve dinner at this bed and breakfast, but my daughter and her husband are in town and so we’re all having a nice family meal this evening. We would all be honored if you would join us.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t impose,” Cally said. “I thought I would just get something in town.”

“It’s no trouble,” Bethany assured her. “Katarina is already expecting you. And the Seven Forks is closed on Sundays – your only other choice would be pizza.”

Ian added, “Besides, my daughter Nell is your biggest fan. She would be disappointed if you didn’t join us tonight.”

Cally winced inwardly at the thought of meeting a Biggest Fan, but the thought of one less meal against her bank balance carried considerably more weight at the moment, so she forced a smile and said, “Alright, then. I mustn’t disappoint a fan, after all.”

“Well, we have plenty of time before dinner,” Ian said. “I was thinking we could have our talk out on the Pirate Ship.” He turned toward the door and offered her his arm. Nodding to Bethany, he said, “Please send Ignacio to find us if we don’t return in time for dinner.”

Bethany smiled like a schoolgirl at him and promised she would.

They stepped out onto the porch, where the scent of freshly mown grass rose on the warm afternoon breeze. “Pirate Ship?” Cally had to ask.

Ian gave a little chuckle as he worked his way down the stairs. He groaned softly with every step and Cally had the feeling she should be supporting him, instead of hanging onto his arm like the lady he seemed to have the impression she was. “It’s a little project of mine,” he explained. “Down by the pond.” At the bottom of the stairs, he lingered a moment with his hand on the railing, steadying himself, and Cally was unable to stop herself moving her hand up his arm to support him. He grinned sheepishly at her. “It’s my knees,” he explained. “They always do this when there’s a storm on the way.” He glanced up at what Cally thought was a perfectly mild summer sky, with just a few large white clouds shining bright white as they climbed higher into the blue.

Ian turned around to face the house, clearing his throat and making a wide gesture toward its columned porch and the belvedere above. “Vale House,” he said, “is a classic example of antebellum architecture. The original structure...” He launched into a thorough explanation of architectural styles in the south, and the various fires and remodelings Vale House had endured over the years. It seemed to be a well-rehearsed speech he had made often, and it was clear he enjoyed making it.

“How did the house get its name?” Cally asked him, fishing in her purse for her notebook. “Was the original builder named Vale?”

“No, no,” he said, turning to lead her across the lawn to the hill sloping down behind the barn. Willow trees at the bottom revealed glimpses of a shady green pond. “This entire place was called The Vale, once upon a time.” He swept his arm to indicate everything around them: the house and grounds, fields and woods on the far side of the pond, the meadow, even the town beyond the house.

“My family’s relationship with this land goes back many generations. This house was once the only building around. They grew cotton here, for a long time, and after the war it was a tobacco farm. When my great, great grandfather inherited the place, he sold a lot of the land for what eventually became the town of Wood Leigh, until...”

Cally tried – mostly in vain – to write in her notebook as they walked. Ian continued to talk about the history of the area until they reached the bottom of the hill. There they rounded a group of three large willows, and Cally saw what must be the Pirate Ship. It was really more of a derelict fishing trawler, half grounded on the bank of the pond, with trees grown up around and probably through its stern.

“It’s not really a Pirate Ship,” Ian admitted, grinning as if apologizing for having made a bad joke. “My guests just started calling it that, and made up legends about why it’s haunted.”

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“It’s haunted?” Cally asked, trying to wrangle her pen and notebook.

Ian laughed. “Well,” he said, “not that I’m aware of. But some of my guests want it to be, so I let them think what they like. It’s really just an old fishing boat I had brought here in pieces from my uncle’s place on the outer banks. My wife...” His eyes went misty, and he gazed across the pond to the fields beyond it. “Well, I wanted to move out to the coast, and she said all I really ever did, whenever I was there, was sit on Uncle Jim’s boat and fish, so all I really needed was the boat. She was right, of course.” He looked back and smiled at Cally. “She was very wise, then, in her own way.”

Cally smiled awkwardly and said, “I’m so sorry she’s not with you anymore.”

“Oh, she is,” he said softly. “She is. In her own way, of course.” He stepped onto a wooden walkway connecting the bank to the half of the boat protruding over the water. “Would you like a beer?”

Cally stammered a little. She had pegged Ian May as the kind of southern gentleman who would sip mint juleps on a veranda, but he disappeared into the boat’s cabin and she could hear the clank of bottles in ice. When he emerged again, he was holding two dripping brown bottles, which he carried to a pair of folding chairs on the boat’s narrow deck. Cally sat down carefully in one of the chairs; the deck was far from level, and the chairs leaned backward against the bulkhead. Ian sat down next to her and used a yellow plastic cigarette lighter as a bottle-opener. He handed her one of the frosty bottles, and clinked his own against hers. “To your next bestseller!” he said.

Cally took a big swallow to that. The cold beer did feel good going down. She thought she would have liked to sit there all afternoon and watch dragonflies landing on cattails at the pond’s edge, and the family of ducks paddling among them. She suspected this was exactly how Ian spent most of his afternoons. With an effort, she reminded herself she was there to get work done.

Balancing her notepad on her knee, she poised her pen above it and began. “Mr. May,” she said, “I can’t tell whether you actually believe in ghosts, yourself, or not. Have you ever seen any of the spirits they say live at Vale House?”

“Call me Ian,” he reminded her. He was gazing dreamily across the pond to the trees on the other bank. “Well,” he said. “I certainly don’t see any reason why ghosts shouldn’t exist. But I’ve never met one, myself.

“I have, however, met my neighbor, Rum. Can you see him?”

He made a gesture like a salute with his bottle toward the other shore of the pond. There Cally thought at first she could see only the broken-off stump of a tree sticking up from the muddy bank. As she continued to look, however, the stump blinked, and smiled, and then Cally could make out a grizzled brown face above a long, white beard tucked behind the bib of greasy denim overalls. The little man waved a crooked walking stick at them before turning to walk away, up the hill she and Ian had just come down, until he was out of sight beyond the barn.

“Rum?” Cally asked. “That’s an odd name.”

“He’s lived around here a long time,” Ian said. “He passes through my property often on his way to his other job.”

“Other job?” Cally thought Rum had looked like he should have retired from any job ages ago. “Well, good for him, I guess.”

Ian regarded her quietly for a long while. At length he said, “But that’s not what you came here to hear about. Over the years people have told me many stories, about ghosts they say they’ve seen in my house. Would you like to hear those stories?”

“I’ve read a few of them,” Cally said. “Mostly on the internet. I was hoping to get some personal, first-hand accounts.”

“In that case, you might want to bring the subject up at the dinner table tonight,” he said. “They all have stories they love to tell. I’ll invite Bethany to join us; she’s had a few interesting experiences. She doesn’t really like to talk about them, but I have a feeling she won’t mind telling you.

“And tell me, Miss Callaghan McCarthy, author of Escape the Haunted Heart: what about you? Do you believe in ghosts?”

Maybe it was the beer, or maybe it was his gentle and genuinely interested demeanor, but whatever it was, the Inevitable Question didn’t put Cally on the defensive the way it usually did. She didn’t give him the canned, non-committal answer she had developed over the years to fend off talk-show hosts and Biggest Fans. She told him the truth.

“No,” she said. “I don’t believe in ghosts at all. The whole idea is preposterous. When I wrote my book, I meant it as a metaphor. It was sort of biographical, you know? The ghost was symbolic for the elephant in the room of which everyone is aware but about which nobody wants to talk. The spirits, which my main character didn’t want to believe existed, were a metaphor for all the things I was seeing, in my own life, which I conveniently explained away, the affairs my husband was having, and other things to which I deliberately blinded myself. The ghosts that wouldn’t let the heroine leave the house were my own self-doubts and recriminations, things I had to work so hard for years to exorcise. The heroine’s escape was my own escape from my denial of what a mess my life had become. I wrote the book to heal my heart. I never meant to have it published. But my daughter found it and said it was very good and encouraged me to send it to a friend of a friend of hers who was a literary agent and... well, I figured why not. I thought maybe it would help someone else as it had helped me, to let go of old ghosts. But that’s not how it turned out. People don’t want to let go of old ghosts. They want to believe in things that aren’t real.”

“And why do you suppose that is?” Ian asked her.

The afternoon flew away. Cally’s notebook sat unused on her knee, and somehow she had become the interviewee rather than the interviewer. She found herself telling Ian May her whole life story.

She told him about the nerdy girl who had been swept off her feet by a handsome jock who had turned into a jerk as soon as he’d married her and got her away from her friends and family. She told him about giving up her own dreams without having quite figured out first what they were, and raising her children and taking care of her household like a good girl should, until finally leaving her train-wreck of a marriage and assuming a career writing product manuals and advertising copy. She told him about the windfall of an unexpected best-selling novel, and using the money from it to put her children through college, about running out of money and having her agent breathing down her neck for a sequel, until finally she loaded everything she owned into her car and struck out across the country to a place that had been recommended to her by a friend she had only ever met on the internet, in one final bid to find out what she wanted to be when she grew up. She sensed she should stop talking and give Ian a chance to speak, but his patient gaze encouraged her to go on until the dregs of the beer had grown warm and bitter in the bottom of the bottle.

“Mr. May! Ian, sir!” A voice was calling from the top of the hill near the barn. Ignacio stood there, waving. “Kat says to tell you, dinner is almost ready!”

Ian grasped the railing and pulled himself up out of his chair. “Best not to keep the cook waiting, “ he advised, offering Cally a hand to help her up. “I’ve been most charmed by our conversation.”

They returned slowly to the house, with Ian explaining to Cally the history of every outbuilding and ancient willow-oak they passed. The clouds above them were definitely building higher into the sky now, joining hands overhead as the sun moved westward, throwing the long shadow of Vale House across the front yard and on into the meadow. It occurred to Cally this sort of thing would make for some very good, atmospheric description with which to build tension in a ghost story, but then she dismissed the idea as just a bit too trite.