Chapter 2 Breakfast for the Dead

Lenora

By dawn, I had acquired six ghosts, a headache behind my left eye, and strong evidence that death did not improve anyone's manners.

"The eggs are burning," said the dead cook.

"The eggs are not burning."

"Then they are practicing."

I shoved the pan away from the hottest part of the range. Behind me, five translucent strangers occupied my kitchen as if they had been invited to inspect it. The storm had weakened to a cold rain, but water still ticked into three strategically placed pots in the dining room. Mr. Pindle slept upstairs. Or had fled through a window. Either possibility seemed restful.

The cook had introduced herself as Rosamund Alder, called Rue by everyone who preferred breathing. She sat on my worktable with her boots passing through a sack of onions and criticized my knife technique.

Beside her stood Jasper Quill, a narrow man in a postal waistcoat with brass buttons and a frown arranged in alphabetical order. He had been the village postmaster until his death forty-one years earlier. He claimed to remember every address in Bellweather Hollow and none of the circumstances of his death, a gap he treated as clerical rather than alarming.

Captain Ivo Wren leaned against the pantry door, broad-shouldered and bearded, the toes of his sea boots hovering an inch above the floor. Bellweather was fifty miles from the nearest navigable river, but Ivo insisted this was the village's failing, not his.

Lydia and Samuel Finch occupied one chair together. Lydia sat properly in it. Samuel sat through the left arm. They wore clothes from my great-grandmother's youth and had spent the last hour arguing about which of them had died first.

"Three minutes," Lydia said.

"Two at most," Samuel replied.

"You never could tell time."

"I was dead, darling. My attention wandered."

The sixth ghost stood apart near the garden door. Theo March appeared younger than the others, perhaps twenty-seven, with a poet's untidy hair and a coat too thin for the season. He kept rubbing a thumb over the place where a ring might once have been.

He was also the only one not looking delighted by my collapse of reason.

"You truly could not see us before?" he asked.

"If I had seen six dead people in my kitchen before, I feel I would remember."

"She did speak to the bread bin for an entire winter," Jasper said.

"I was testing whether encouragement improved the yeast."

Rue snorted. "Did it?"

"Marginally."

The eggs began to burn.

I rescued them and began plating breakfast because routine was the narrow plank between myself and hysteria. Six ghosts were impossible. Six ghosts who knew where I stored the good marmalade were an invasion. Yet plates still needed warming. Coffee still needed grinding. My single guest, if he remained alive and solvent, would expect food at eight.

"How long?" I asked.

"The eggs? Too long," Rue said.

"How long have you been here?"

They looked at one another.

"I came in the winter of 'eighty-three," Jasper said.

"Ninety-one," said Ivo. "During the flood."

"There was no flood in ninety-one," Lydia said.

"There was in my room."

Samuel lifted a hazy hand. "Nell welcomed us formally after the old hearth cracked. Before that, we came and went."

The cup in my hand clicked against its saucer.

"My grandmother knew."

Rue's expression softened. "Of course she knew."

"And she never thought to mention that the inn was full of dead tenants?"

"Residents," Jasper corrected.

"You do not pay rent."

"Neither does the roof, and you accommodate it endlessly."

I set the cup down before I threw it through him. "Why can I see you now?"

That silenced everyone.

Outside, wheels hissed along the wet road, then faded toward the square. The hearth popped. My birthmark gave another low throb.

Theo glanced at my wrist. "The storm opened something."

"Storms open shutters. They do not open people."

"This one did both," said Rue.

Jasper crossed to the pantry, or attempted to. His shoulder blurred through Ivo's arm, provoking a complaint from both men. He crouched where black frost had marked the floor during the night.

"This was not here yesterday," he said.

"You can touch it?"

"No. But I can dislike it."

I knelt beside him. The frost had vanished, leaving a faint black stain between two floorboards. A small brass ring was set into the wood, so tarnished I had always mistaken it for a nail head.

"There is a door beneath this floor," Jasper said.

"There is a cellar beneath the kitchen."

"Not here. Here, there is something else."

He pressed his palm flat over the boards. For an instant his outline broke into pale sparks. His face emptied.

"Jasper?"

Rue slid from the table. "Quill. Come away."

Jasper remained still.

Then he blinked and snatched his hand back. "I beg your pardon. What were we discussing?"

Theo moved closer. "The door."

"What door?"

A draft passed through the pantry. The little hairs rose along my arms.

Before I could question him, a bell jangled overhead. Room three.

Living people. Breakfast. Money.

I stood so quickly my knees objected. "Nobody frighten the guest. Nobody enter the dining room. Nobody walk through anyone, living or otherwise."

"That seems needlessly restrictive," Ivo said.

"And nobody rings anything."

The six ghosts exchanged looks of such polished innocence that I knew at once they had spent years ignoring me on purpose.

Mr. Pindle descended in his traveling coat. He paused at the dining-room threshold, sniffed the air, and glanced toward Rue, who was standing directly beside him with her arms folded.

He saw nothing.

The realization should have comforted me. Instead, the loneliness of it moved through me like another cold draft.

"Terrible night," he said.

"I have had quieter ones."

I served him eggs and toast. Rue leaned over his shoulder to inspect the plate.

"Too brown," she pronounced.

"Then do not eat them," I muttered.

Mr. Pindle frowned. "I beg your pardon?"

"I said the town is very sweet in autumn."

Theo laughed. It was a small sound, rusty with disuse.

Mr. Pindle ate in suspicious silence, paid his account, and left ten minutes before eight. I watched his coach disappear through the rain with half my week's expected income.

"Well," I said. "The advantage of a haunted inn is apparently privacy."

"We have helped this place more than you know," Samuel said.

"The blue clock stopped entirely last winter," Lydia added. "I push the minute hand every morning."

Jasper straightened a stack of booking cards without touching them. "I keep the ledgers from mildew."

"I chase mice," said Ivo.

"He encourages mice," Rue said. "I chase them."

Theo looked toward the window. "I sit with guests who cannot sleep."

Their quiet admission unsettled me more than the haunting. I thought of lonely nights at the reception desk when a page had turned by itself just as my eyes grew heavy. Of bread that had not burned although I forgot the oven. Of Nell's blue clock, faithfully wrong but never stopped.

My inn had been held together by more hands than I had known to count.

"Why stay?" I asked.

Lydia and Samuel looked at each other. Ivo studied his boots. Jasper inspected the pantry floor. Theo's shape thinned near the edges.

Rue answered.

"Because Nell said we could."

The simple words pressed against an old, tender place beneath my ribs. Nell had collected cracked cups, stray cats, and travelers unable to pay. I had inherited the collection and mistaken it for clutter.

"Then you may stay," I said, before caution could catch me. "Provided we establish rules."

The hearth flared bright gold.

For one breath, all six ghosts became solid. Color warmed Rue's cheeks. Jasper's buttons shone. Lydia's dress was green, Samuel's cravat badly tied, and Theo's eyes a startling gray.

My birthmark burned.

Then the light settled and they were pale again.

No one spoke.

Rue's eyes filled. She covered it by pointing at me. "Your first rule should concern those eggs."

A knock sounded at the front door.

"We are closed," I called.

The knock came again, unhurried and precise.

Through the rain-streaked window, I saw a tall man beneath the copper lantern. His coat was black, his hair darker, and one gloved hand rested on the handle of a travel case. He looked less like a guest than a verdict delivered in excellent tailoring.

Rue drifted to my shoulder.

"Handsome," she observed.

"Inconvenient," I said.

"Those qualities often travel together."

The man lifted his face toward the window.

His gaze passed over me and fixed directly on Rue.

She was still holding my carving knife.

He opened the door before I reached it, bringing rain and the scent of cold iron into the hall.

"Good morning," he said to me.

Then he looked at Rue.

"Would the dead cook mind lowering the knife?"