Barnabas opened the first book. "The house now known as Collinwood is the second house to be built on that site. The first house was a half-timbered house; an exact duplicate of the one that the Collins family owned in England, in fact."

"Half-timbered?"

"I think the style is more commonly called Tudor?"

When Sally nodded her understanding, Barnabas continued, "the house was built by Brutus Collins. He and his wife, Amanda, had three sons, twins named Amos and Obadiah, and their younger brother, Isaiah. Amos inherited the half-timbered house, Isaiah moved to Boston, and Obadiah purchased the plot of land next to Amos', where he built the house that the current-day Collins family called the Old House, until it was destroyed in a fire in 1993."

"Why didn't they call it the 'New House,' since it was built after the first house?"

"Although the current Collins family uses term 'the Old House' in comparison to Collinwood, originally, it was used in comparison to a house that Nathaniel Collins, one of Obadiah's descendants, built in Bedford in 1755."

"Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of Brutus, Amanda or Obadiah Collins. I do have a very nice portrait of Amos, however." Barnabas held the book out so that Sally could see the handsome dark- haired man.

"He looks like you," she told him after she looked at Amos.

"Well, I'll show you a picture that looks even more like me later on," Barnabas never liked to look at pictures of Joshua, Naomi, Jeremiah, or, most of all, his dear, departed sister Sarah, but he had committed himself to telling Sally about the family history, and Barnabas Collins was nothing if not a man of his word.

"I won't spend a lot of time on the collateral lines of the Collins family, because that could take weeks," he smiled at her, "and I'm sure you have better things to do than sit here listening to an old man talk about the past."

"No, it's fascinating. Really."

"Amos had two children, Isaac and Miriam. Isaac is the one who concerns us at the moment, although you may want to research Miriam. She married a Bradford, and she may very well be Peter Bradford's paternal grandmother. Isaac had three children. Joshua and Abigail were the children of Isaac's first wife, Prudence, and by his second wife, Rebecca, he had a son, named Jeremiah.

"Joshua is the man who built Collinwood," Barnabas leaned over and picked up the book that contained the portrait of his father. After leafing to the correct page, he held it out for Sally to see and was surprised when she blanched at the sight of it.

"Are you all right?" he asked, concerned.

"I think I'll take that water you offered."

After Barnabas returned with a glass of ice water, he asked Sally, again, what had upset her.

She took a deep drink of water, "I was just surprised. He looks so much like Roger Collins."

"How do you know Roger?"

"I don't, unless seeing his ghost last night constitutes a formal introduction." Her complexion took on a green cast again.

Barnabas felt slightly guilty as he thanked whatever power it was that gave him the excuse to avoid seeing the pictures of his family again. "In order to avoid upsetting you further, I'll spare you more pictures for the moment and just tell you the story of what happened."

After Sally finished the water, Barnabas took the glass back into the kitchen and resumed his tale. "Joshua married Naomi Collins, a descendant of Obadiah. Her twin brother, Nathaniel, is the one who built Rose Cottage, the house in Bedford. When Naomi's parents passed away, they left the Old House to her.

"Joshua and Naomi married in 1760, and their son, Barnabas, my great-great-great grandfather was born in 1765. They continued to live in the half-timbered house until 1786, when their daughter, Sarah, was born.

"In 1786, the entire family -- Joshua, Naomi, Barnabas, Sarah, and Joshua's siblings, Abigail and Jeremiah, moved into the Old House while a house more suited to their expanding family was built. Originally, the plan was to enlarge the original house. However, the workers accidentally damaged one of the bearing walls and they had to demolish the entire house. When they did so, they found two dead bodies in a hidden room below the master bedroom."

Sally shivered, "How gruesome!"

"Yes, it was," Barnabas almost got caught up in the memory of the day they found the bodies of James Forsyth and Amanda Collins, but he brought himself back to the present and continued on. "As you can understand, construction had to be halted while they investigated. No one ever thought that any of the Collinses had killed them, but an investigation nevertheless had to be held. As it turned out, the bodies were over a hundred years old."

"Did they ever find out who they were?"

Barnabas nodded. "Brutus Collins' wife, Amanda, and his business partner, James Forsyth. They interred the bodies at Eagle Hill Cemetery."

"Where?"

"You haven't been to Eagle Hill Cemetery yet? Well, if you're interested in family history, you must go up there. Nearly all of the Collins ancestors are buried there, including Miriam Collins Bradford, as I recall."

Barnabas spent the next hour regaling Sally with tales about the construction of Collinwood, from the day one of the workers was found necking in the woods with one of the maids (they eventually married and moved to Philadelphia) to the time that the paneling for the drawing room very nearly was lost to pirates.

"And then, in 1797 just after construction had finished, tragedy struck. Naomi, Abigail, Jeremiah and Sarah were all killed. Barnabas was so disturbed by these events that he and his wife moved to England, leaving Joshua without an heir, so after Joshua passed away in 1803, a cousin named Daniel Collins inherited the house."

During a pause, Barnabas heard Sally's stomach grumble. "What have you had to eat today?"

"Other than that glass of water? Ummm, an English muffin for breakfast before I left Collinwood."

"I'll go into the kitchen and see if I can find something for you to eat."

"No, Barnabas, it's OK, really. . . ." He didn't hear her, because he was already halfway down the hall to the kitchen.

A few minutes later, he returned empty-handed. "Unfortunately, it appears that Julia has gone to the grocery store. All we have on hand is a few soda crackers."

Sally picked up her purse. "Well, I'll just run out to McDonald's or something and pick up something and bring it back."

"Nonsense. We'll go out together and get a real meal."

* * * * *

Carolyn looked up as the bell rang. "Lana Thorne!" She went to hug her friend. "How are the wedding plans going?"

Lana sighed, "they'd be better if I could find someone to take over as Zoe's governess."

"Still no luck?"

"Nope. It's bad enough that Mr. Chance is so picky about the new governess, but I'm probably just as bad. The agency must have sent 20 women last week, and between the two of us, we rejected all of them."

Carolyn goggled, "he interviewed them?"

"Of course not. He watched me interviewing them, and found things to reject about each of them."

Carolyn leaned in close to Lana and whispered, "you can tell me the truth. Have you ever seen Colin Chance?"

Lana shook her head, "nope. Only Zoe ever sees him."

"What do you think it is? Is he scarred, do you think?"

"Three years ago, when I first started, Zoe said, 'Miss Thorne, I know that everyone thinks that Daddy is ugly, but he really isn't.'"

Just then, a handsome young man opened the door of the antique shop and called out, "Lana! You told me that you'd just be a minute!"

"All right, Harold!" Then, in a voice pitched for Carolyn's ears only, "poor thing! We're going to meet the bridesmaids for lunch and then go to Simone's for the final fittings of their dresses." With that, the two women exchanged air kisses and Lana left the shop.

Carolyn watched Lana and Harold leave, arm-in-arm, and wished that she and Jeb had had a big church wedding, but Jeb had been in too much of a hurry to wait so long. As it turned out, it was for the best, because if they had waited, she and Jeb would probably never have gotten married. At the best, their few short weeks together before Sky Rumson pushed Jeb from Widows' Hill would have been even shorter.

Knowing that Lana and Harold were postponing their own wedding until they'd secured a replacement for her as Zoe Chance's governess, Carolyn decided to see if she could help. She took a ten by twelve inch piece of posterboard, wrote {Governess Wanted -- Inquire Within} on it in thick red marker, and propped it up in the window of the antique shop.

Before anything came between us,
You were like my best friend,
The one I used to talk to,
When me and my girl were having problems,
You'd say it'd be okay, suggest little nice things I should do,
But when I go home at night and lay my head down,
All I could think about was you.

Usher, {You Make Me Wanna. . .}*

Barnabas drove to a medium-priced chain restaurant, where they were escorted to a booth for two in the non-smoking section. "It's really amazing," Barnabas said to her as they sat down, "it wasn't all that long ago that nearly everyone smoked, and I never noticed. But in the last few years, I have become quite intolerant of cigarette smoke."

They pondered the menu and made their choices. When the waitress returned with their beverages, a Dr. Pepper for Sally and an iced tea for Barnabas, he resumed the tale of the Collins family.

"In 1818, the parents of Daniel's wife, Harriet, were left without a home, and in order to preserve the peace with his wife, Daniel had to allow them to move in with his family. Daniel Collins was nothing if not a shrewd man, and to avoid having his in-laws underfoot, he built the west wing of the house for them. After the west wing was completed, Daniel felt that it made the house look uneven, so he added the east wing the next year.

"After nearly losing the house to an interloper named Gerard Stiles, Daniel's elder son, Quentin, inherited Collinwood. Quentin's elder son, Thaddeus, whom they called Tad, had no interest in such things, though, so Quentin left the house to his wife, Daphne.

"Quentin and Daphne had a son, Geoffrey, who had four children, Edward, Judith, Carl and Quentin. I've always had the theory that Geoffrey wasn't Quentin and Daphne's biological son, although I've never found any substantiation for it. I think that Geoffrey was Tad's son, whom Quentin and Daphne adopted."

"Why do you think that?"

"Now I'm going to lose all credibility in your eyes," Barnabas said with a smile. "But then, after your encounter with Roger's spirit, maybe you will believe me.

"You see, I've lived through two different timelines that were remarkably similar."

"You're losing me," Sally said, a perplexed expression on her face.

"Let me try again. Carolyn is Elizabeth's daughter, Elizabeth is the daughter of Jamison Collins. Jamison was the son of Edward Collins, and Edward was the son of Geoffrey."

"OK. I can follow you so far. . ."

"In the timeline that I was originally born in, Geoffrey was the son of Gabriel Collins."

"But didn't you just say that Geoffrey was Quentin's son?"

"Exactly."

"You've lost me again."

"Well, wouldn't you think that the sons of two different men would be different people?"

"Of course."

"But Geoffrey was the same, no matter who his father was."

"So? Maybe Quentin was his father and he was adopted by Gabriel, or vice versa."

Barnabas shook his head. "That doesn't work. You see, when Geoffrey was Gabriel's son, he was born two years after Quentin died, and when he was Quentin's son, he was born two years after Gabriel died."

"Oh! So you think that someone other than Quentin or Gabriel was Geoffrey's father!"

"Right. And the only Collins male old enough to have a child in either timeline was Tad, who was 16 at the time."

"So he got his girlfriend pregnant . . ."

"Or a servant," Barnabas interposed.

"Or a servant," she conceded, "and so whoever was head of the family at the time took the illegitimate child as his own. Makes sense to me."

Barnabas looked surprised at Sally's frank acceptance of a theory that even Julia, who had seen the same things that he had, had expressed doubts about. Then he continued the family tale, "Geoffrey's wife seemed to enjoy causing discord in the family. Her specialty was giving preferential treatment to her two younger sons, Quentin and Carl, over her elder children, Judith and Edward. After she passed away, Daphne moved back into Collinwood. However, no matter how hard she tried to bring some stability to their family life, the strife begun by Geoffrey's wife never quite ended.

"Geoffrey's daughter, Judith, inherited Collinwood, but she died childless, so she left the house to her nephew Jamison, who left it to his daughter, Elizabeth, who, when she was committed, left it to her daughter, Carolyn."

The restaurant had piped in contemporary music and Barnabas paused, listening to it momentarily, and when he asked Sally, in his crisply-accented English, "Is he singing about your baked beans?" she nearly choked on her Dr. Pepper.

"That wasn't meant to be humorous."

"I know," she replied, trying to restrain the giggles, "it's just that's the exact same thing I thought the first time I heard this song."

"Really?" he sounded amazed.

She nodded. "Eventually, I figured out the lyrics, though. It's actually a pretty good song."

"Really?" he sounded skeptical.

"It's about this guy who's involved with one woman who finds himself falling in love with another one. See, the chorus, goes {You make me wanna leave the one I'm with, start a new relationship with you, you make me think about a ring and all the things that go with it}. And then he sings {You make me, You make me}, which is the 'baked beans' part," she grinned at him, "and sings the same thing over again. He's having problems with his girlfriend, so he goes to a female friend for advice. He finds himself falling in love with the friend, and falling for her hard."

Suddenly, Barnabas found himself opening up to this unusual young woman, "sounds like my own life."

"How so?"

Barnabas prepared himself for a long story. He had needed to tell his tale to someone, and after Sally accepted his theory about Geoffrey, he suspected that she would be a perfect confessor.

"My father was a very old-fashioned man. He decided when I was very young that he wanted me to marry into the family of his best friend," {She's bound to come across mention of the DuPres family sooner or later, so I need to come up with names for them that she won't recognize}, "Andrew. And when Andrew's daughter, Etta," he cringed a little at the name, but knew that there was no way that Sally could connect Andrew and his daughter Etta from the mid-20th century with Andre and Josette from the late 18th, "was born, my father and Andrew arranged a match for us."

Sally was astonished. "They still do that?"

"I don't know anyone who has been in an arranged marriage in recent years, but this was over 40 years ago, and it was a little more common back then."

He resumed his tale, "when Etta turned 20, my father, whose name was also Barnabas, and I traveled to Andrew and Etta's home. I found Etta to be a very pleasant young lady, and I imagined that my life with her would be a good one.

"However, Etta had other ideas. She had been raised on a steady diet of romance novels and such, and she had imagined that her future husband would ride into her life on a white charger, sweep her off her feet, and carry her off into the sunset. Which was most certainly not the description of the son of her father's best friend, who wanted nothing more than a comfortable, happy home.

"So, I befriended her best friend, Angelique, to help me court Etta. She told me about the daydreams that she and Etta had of true love when they were girls together. However, the more Angelique told me about herself, the more attracted to her I became. One day, I realized that I didn't love Etta, I loved Angelique.

"So, unsure of how to break the news to my father that my interest lay elsewhere, I continued to openly court Etta, while seeing Angelique in secret."

"How did you get out of your father's plans for you to marry Etta?" Sally asked.

"That's where the story becomes a little more complicated. Knowing that I'd be disinherited when I married Angelique, I contacted my uncle to make arrangements to move there and work for him after Angelique and I married.

"Everything was in place, and then . . ."

"What?"

"I fell in love with Etta."

"Really?"

Barnabas nodded. "To this day, I don't know what hit me. The very day that my uncle's letter arrived, telling me that he'd be happy to have my new bride and me come to live with him, I proposed to Etta. I was obsessed with her. I dreamed about her all night, I thought about her all day. She consumed my every thought."

"So you married Etta?"

He laughed, ruefully, "No. See, she finally found the knight on the white charger. My uncle. They eloped together.

"My obsession with Etta became worse. I couldn't sleep for wanting her, and when Etta and my uncle returned to the family estate, I challenged him to a duel. And I killed him."

Sally gasped, "did you go to prison?"

"No. My family covered up for me. They told the constable that he had been killed while he was cleaning his gun.

"Then when I was still in shock over killing my uncle, Angelique persuaded me to marry her. When I realized that I wasn't in my right mind when I married her, I decided that I had never loved her at all. We got a divorce soon after that. Years passed, and eventually, I rediscovered the love that I had felt for Angelique all those years earlier. I proposed, this time of my own volition, and she accepted."

"And?" Sally asked, sensing there was more to the story.

"We got married at the wedding chapel on 10th and Seaview in Collinsport. Is that chapel still there?" When Sally nodded, he continued, "and then, the day after we returned from our honeymoon, she was killed."

The desolation in Barnabas' eyes made Sally's breath catch in her throat.

"Several months later, Julia told me that she had decided that she wanted to have a child, while she still could. Julia is the best friend I've ever had, and so when she asked me to father the child, I accepted.

"She had difficulty conceiving at first, and by the time she conceived, we'd been spending so many nights together, that we decided to make it legal.

"And that, my dear, is my life's story." {The abridged version, at any rate.}