Imprisoned at Werewolf Keep (Werewolf Keep Trilogy) (21 page)

‘Psychics? Clairvoyants? I’m not one of those fruitcakes. Fran enjoyed a tarot reading every so often, but I always saw that stuff as rubbish.’

‘No, not psychics. We had ghost hunters in here once, but they couldn’t find anything. It’s just ordinary people who see him. You don’t have to be a sensitive or anything. I… I must get back to dinner.’ Marnie climbed to her feet and hurried back to the stove where something was merrily steaming. ‘Are you ready to eat now? You have to start putting some flesh on those bones again. You’re so thin…’

This was a familiar refrain
, and Cassie just nodded and smiled. She would do her best to eat, but since chemo, when she’d gotten sick after eating anything but dry crackers, she’d found food less than appealing. And she looked thin because she no longer had breasts. Her body was now that of a twelve year old.

They’d wanted her to have reconstruction at the same time as the bilateral mastectomy
, but she hadn’t wanted that. There was already too much to get used to. A set of plastic, Barbie boobs would have been just one too many. There was no hurry. There’d be time for that later… if she survived.

‘Will you tell me if you see him again?’ Marnie asked, as she took what turned out to be pasta off the agar and poured it into a metal colander on the sink. The steam fogged up the windowpane above.

‘Him? The ghost? Of course. But I still can’t believe you think that’s what I saw. You’re usually so level-headed.’

‘And so are the others who’ve seen him. Dad was the first, we think. When Dad saw him, Hawk was leaning against the oak smoking, just as you described. Dad had never met him. He and his brother had returned to active service a month or so before Hawk came to Leconfield.

‘At first, Gran thought Hawk had come back for a visit and she’d missed him, but when she checked, she found out he’d died over France in 1944. He’d become an ace by then. Fifteen kills. Few pilots matched him. Then she saw him a few years after Dad died. My Gran was down-to-earth Yorkshire, without a superstitious bone in her body. If she said she saw a ghost pilot in the garden, then there was a ghost pilot in the garden.’ The steam from the pasta was adding to Marnie’s sheen, and her hands were shaking more than usual as she put the empty saucepan in the sink beside the colander.

‘Couldn’t it have been someone else? One of the other pilots who’d survived? How could she remember him so well if he’d only been here a few times?’

‘Hawk was memorable. You must realise that, now that you’ve seen him. Gran never forgot him, and neither did Gramps or I. Gramps saw him about ten years later, but I was living in London then. I rang him one night, and he was very rattled. Not much rattled Gramps. He’d seen it all in World War I. But seeing Hawk… well… I came up straight away, but by the time I got here, he was dead. A heart attack in his sleep, the doctor said.’

‘Oh, how sad. You didn’t get to say goodbye.’

‘Oh yes, we said our goodbyes. By then we’d started to suspect what seeing Hawk meant.’ She looked flustered, as if she’d said too much. Opening the bottom cupboard, she began rummaging around for a smaller saucepan.

‘What did it mean?’ Cassie asked, not willing to be sidetracked again. This was the sort of mystery that fascinated her. No
t the ghost aspect of the story, because she didn’t believe in ghosts, but the multiple sightings did indicate that something odd was happening here, and she wanted to understand it more fully.

‘Don’t listen to me. I’m just a silly old woman. I’ll be putting the milk in the pantry instead of the fridge next.’

‘Marnie, you’re not silly. What did seeing Hawk mean?’

Marnie turned to her slowly, eyes troubled, as their gazes meshed. ‘Don’t press me, dear. You don’t want to know.’

‘Yes, I do. I saw him… I saw your ghost pilot. I want to know what it means.’

Marnie’s face crumpled and she let out a gasping sob. ‘It means death, Cassie dear. It means death to the person who sees him.’