Chapter 1

A ghost was on Francine Findley's roof!

That was my first thought at spotting the figure in white—luminescent in the moonlight outside my bedroom window.

My second thought was that the stress I'd been under lately was finally getting to me. It was not a ghost. Just a girl, wearing a white nightgown, her long red tresses ruffled in the breeze. Could that be Lisa, up on her mother's roof at this hour? Who else had long red hair like that?

No, this girl was taller and older than twelve-year-old Lisa. It was too dark and, with our houses separated by Francine's and my own backyards, too distant for me to be certain, but the girl looked a lot like Willow McAndrews, the college student who was renting a room in the house next door to Francine's. Willow had short blond hair, though.

Still staring out the window, I brushed aside my sheet and comforter, sat up, and struggled to rouse myself from my brain fog. Why would Willow McAndrews don a red wig and climb out onto a neighbor's roof? And how could she or anyone else get onto the roof of the third-floor tower room in the first place?

As an interior designer, I was intimately familiar with Francine Findley's octagonal-shaped room. Francine had hired me recently to renovate her Victorian mansion in preparation for Crestview's annual tour of historic homes. Contrary to my advice, Francine had insisted on keeping the wall that sealed off the only staircase to the roof. Decades ago, previous owners had built that wall after their daughter Abby had fallen to her death, a tragedy that later inspired the rumor that the ghost of Abby haunted the "widow's walk"—a flat roof encircled by banisters. The architectural feature was modeled after homes along New England shores where wives of fishermen stood to watch for their husbands' boats.

This afternoon, Francine had mentioned that she was exhausted and planned to "have an early dinner and collapse in bed." Had she suddenly needed to leave home, however, and asked Willow to stay overnight to watch Lisa? That would at least explain Willow's presence in the house, just not on it. All the windows were dark. Should I call Francine's cell phone? I looked at my clock on my nightstand. The red digital numbers read 1:06 a.m.—a horrid hour to call a single mother who might be in the midst of a real emergency—to report that her sitter was strolling around on the roof.

I looked outside again, but the girl had vanished. She couldn't possibly have eased herself over the railing and climbed down a ladder that fast. She must have dashed down the stairs and was now in the three-by-twelve-foot walled-off space, getting in and out through the window. That window had been boarded up the last time I'd looked, though. Yawning, I rubbed at my eyes as I lay back down, cursing my insomnia, which had left me addled for a full month now. In desperation, I'd poured a small fortune into my bed: Egyptian-cotton sheets with an obscenely high thread count, a silk comforter as light and soft as angel wings, and—

Wait! I bolted upright. There was a second—and horrible—means for someone to vanish from a rooftop in an instant!

I gasped as my cracked door creaked further open. Framed by the doorway, I could make out my black cat's silhouette and see her amber eyes. My heart thudding, I looked out the window again. No one was on the roof. "Oh, Hildi, I have to go check my neighbor's yard!" I informed my cat.

I clicked on the small Tiffany lamp atop my nightstand, sprang from my bed, jammed my arms into the sleeves of my dusty-rose bathrobe to cover my silk teddy, and grabbed the first shoes I could find—black stilettos. If I did have to run to assist some badly injured girl, I'd probably trip on the two-inch heels. I started for the door, then whirled to grab the flashlight by my bed. I raced down the stairs, my confused cat darting out of my path. I threw open the back door, crammed my feet into my shoes, and tore across the lawn. My heels sank into the wet grass, but I didn't slow my pace until I reached the landscape rocks and the row of rosebushes that rimmed the property line.

With the stones crunching beneath my feet, I trotted across the hard-packed dirt alley, stepped over Francine's low wrought-iron fence, and swept my dim beam across her back lawn. "Hello? Is anybody out here?" I asked the silent darkness, my voice barely above a whisper.

No groans. No crumpled bodies clad in white nightgowns. No maniacal cackles, either. My presence did, however, set off Francine's neighbor's dog to barking—Diana Durst's beagle. Diana's attic window was aglow with a yellow light. Was that lamp on earlier, or had I wakened her? Or could that be the room that Willow McAndrews was renting from Diana? Diana had once told me that Willow was a rock climber. Willow was also self-absorbed and immature; perhaps pretending to be the red-haired ghost of some long-dead soul was her idea of humor.

Hildi joined me, her soft fur now brushing against my bare shins. "Let's go back home," I told her over Bugle's ruckus. At least it was reassuring to realize that if anyone had fallen off Francine's roof, Bugle would already have been barking.

Come to think of it, his shrill barks were what had originally awakened me.

Copyright © 2006 by Leslie Caine