Free Relative Strangers by Kathy Lynn Emerson

already.” Rachel poked Corrie in the ribs. “Tell her the whole story.”
    Reluctantly, Corrie recounted the details of her three sightings. When her story was finished, Joyce leapt to her feet and ran to the bookshelves. She pulled out an old photo album and quickly found the page she wanted. “Was this the man you saw?”
    Corrie looked down at an older Lucas, handsome as the devil with a touch of gray at his temples. “The first Lucas? Adrienne’s husband?”
    “Yes.The resemblance to our Lucas is remarkable, isn’t it? Now, what about him?” Joyce flipped back a dozen pages and held the album out again.
    And there he was, the man who’d been yelling at Adrienne in the dining room. “Who is he?” Corrie whispered.
    “Horatio Mead. Adrienne’s brother.” Joyce frowned. “I wouldn’t have thought he’d have crossed the threshold of the Sinclair House, not for any reason. There was a feud between the Meads and the Sinclairs, you see. Each family owned a hotel. Adrienne abandoned her family’s place, the Phoenix Inn, to marry the owner of the Sinclair House. The Phoenix is still in business, more or less. It’s a ramshackle old place on the other side of town.”
    “Do the Meads still own it?” Rachel asked.
    “A descendant does. Stanley Kelvin.” Joyce blushed. “You might have seen him at the Christmas Eve party. I’m afraid Lucas left you to try to kick him out, but he didn’t do it, of course. Not from an open house. Poor Stanley. His mother insisted that he take over the hotel after the death of her father, Erastus Mead. Erastus was Horatio’s grandson. Poor old Horatio must have been spinning in his grave when Stanley ran the place into the ground. Which brings me back to what you saw, Corrie. Why on earth would Horatio have come to the Sinclair House?”
    A flash of memory provided the answer. “He was looking for his daughter.”
    “Really?” Joyce seemed intrigued by that notion.
    Corrie suddenly felt self-conscious. “I wish I knew how I know that.” What she’d seen and heard in the dining room was coming back to her in bits and pieces like a dream. She could not remember all of it, though.
    “Oh, this is wonderful. Our hotel with its very own ghosts.” But Joyce’s awe and delight turned to dismay at a sound behind them. A man in a wheelchair, the man Lucas had stopped to talk to at the Christmas Eve party, had entered the room without any of them noticing.
    “Hugh!” Joyce exclaimed, rushing to his side. He was Lucas’s father, Corrie realized. And she saw, too, that Lucas was not the only one to inherit striking good looks from a previous generation. What in his younger days must have been thick dark hair was now snowy white. Hugh’s facial features, even ravaged by age and illness, were still handsome. His eyes, the same hazel color as his son’s, looked alert and intelligent . . . and deeply concerned.
    When Joyce knelt beside his wheelchair, Hugh made a strangled sound, plainly trying to speak. All that came out was an alarming rattling noise deep in his throat.
    “Oh, my! You aren’t supposed to upset yourself.” Sounding shaken, Joyce sprang to her feet once more and wheeled him from the room.
    The devotion of wife to husband was obvious, and painfully reminiscent of the way Corrie’s mother had tended to drop everything to cater to Donald Ballantyne’s whims. Corrie knew this wasn’t the same. Hugh was ill and needed attention. Still, Joyce’s behavior made her uncomfortable.
    “Maybe we should leave,” she said to Rachel.
    They were in the hallway when Lucas walked through the front door. Corrie froze as his startled gaze went first to his mother, just disappearing into another room with the wheelchair, then to her.
    “What the hell is going on here?” he demanded.
    “Your father’s a little upset,” Joyce told him, popping back out into the hail at the sound of her son s voice.
    Corrie cleared her throat, prepared to explain, but Lucas brushed past