The fact that Dad had texted back almost immediately wasn’t a good sign. He’d probably been hunched over his phone waiting to hear from me. Which meant his obsession with the idea of reenacting the jewel robbery was pretty intense.
I sighed, texted back, “OK,” and started the car.
“I’m at Trinity,” he added.
When I got to the church I found Mother and several other ladies from the Altar Guild getting the sanctuary ready for the next morning’s services. They seemed delighted to see me arrive to collect Dad, which probably meant he’d been trying too hard to make himself useful.
“I only wish we knew for sure the supply priest will actually show up,” Mother fretted, as she frowned at a vase of lilies that seemed determined to droop more than she considered suitable.
“Why wouldn’t he?” I asked. Was Dr. Womble apt to lead Father Shakespeare astray, taking him fishing on Sunday morning?
“Mr. Hagley was the one arranging the supply priests this quarter,” she said. “And we can’t exactly ask him if he booked one before getting himself knocked off, can we? I think the diocese frowns on séances.”
She sounded positively testy.
“If it will make you feel any better, a Father Shakespeare arrived at the Wombles while I was there,” I said. “And Mrs. Womble said he was tomorrow’s supply priest.”
“Thank you, dear,” Mother said. “That puts my mind at ease.”
“It doesn’t entirely put mine at ease,” one of the other ladies said. “That name sounds familiar—haven’t we had him before?”
“I think you’re right,” Mother said. “I wonder if he’s the cheerful one with the lovely Australian accent.”
“If Junius Hagley booked him, it’s probably the one who always sounds as if he has a bad head cold,” the other lady said. “The officious one.”
“He’s a friend of Dr. Womble’s,” I said. “So my money’s on the cheerful Aussie. Come on, Dad. Let’s go see Ragnar.”
Ragnar’s farm—an estate, really, though Ragnar always referred to it as “the farm”—was a few miles out of town. I started off the journey telling Dad about Dr. Womble’s newfound fascination with the Bounty, in hopes of distracting him from the reenactment project, but it didn’t work. He sat on the edge of his seat, peering ahead, until Ragnar’s front gates came in sight.
“Here we are,” Dad exclaimed. “Start visualizing. It’s New Year’s Eve, and we’re going to a masked ball.”
He sat up straight and half closed his eyes, the better to superimpose 1987 over the present day.
I kept my eyes wide open, which tended to improve my driving.
Two large brick pillars flanked the asphalt driveway leading into what was now Ragnar’s house. I had no idea if the pillars had even existed in 1987, but in Mrs. Winkleson’s day, they’d been painted white. One of Ragnar’s first improvements—to his mind, at least—had been to paint them an inky matte black. He’d also replaced the round white concrete balls that had previously topped the pillars with large, menacing gray gargoyles. The black wrought-iron gate was a holdover from Mrs. Winkleson’s reign, allowed to stay because it was, after all, black and made of wrought iron, one of Ragnar’s favorite things in the universe. But unbeknownst to the gate, its days were numbered. Ragnar wanted it replaced with a larger and much more elaborate gate. With dragons. So far I’d done forty-seven trial designs for the dragon gates, and Ragnar had pronounced my latest effort almost perfect. I was guardedly optimistic about achieving perfection with sketch forty-eight or forty-nine, but lately helping Robyn had taken up most the time I’d have usually spent either at my anvil or with my sketch pad.
The gates stood wide open—another change from Mrs. Winkleson’s day. She’d have made us wait at the gate until one of her overworked staff finally noticed the buzzer. According to the newspaper reports, Mrs. Van der Lynden had stationed James Washington here for security on the night of the New Year’s ball. So did that mean the wrought-iron gates had been here at the time of the robbery? Even if they had, they wouldn’t have been much of a barrier. A moderately active jewel thief could have climbed them easily. And that was assuming it was dark and he failed to notice that to the right and left of the pillars only an ordinary barbed wire fence barred the way. I suspected Dad probably had a romantic vision of our local jewel robbers scuttling over the red tile roofs of a Mediterranean villa, like Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. So far I couldn’t see that the crime would have challenged the physical abilities of the most sedentary crook.
I paused in the gateway and contemplated the gates for a moment.
“What’s wrong?” Dad asked.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “I’m just studying the gates.”
“We can get out if you like, so you can get a closer look.”
“I don’t need a closer look,” I said. “I’ve repaired them several times. For what it’s worth, I think they’re old enough to have been here in Mrs. Van der Lynden’s time.”
“Progress!” Dad beamed at the gates as if they’d done something useful and important.
I hoped he wasn’t going to attempt anything truly annoying, like trying to talk Ragnar into painting the brick columns white and restoring the concrete balls.
“We should find out what Mrs. Van der Lynden called the place.” I pointed to the black-and-gray plaque that proclaimed RAGNARSHEIM. Mrs. Winkleson had had a small black-and-white sign calling it RAVEN HILL.
“I’m not sure she called it anything.” Dad frowned down at the pile of clippings in his lap. “All the newspapers just call it the stately mansion of the Van der Lynden family.”
“Doesn’t make for a very catchy sign. And the letters would be so small you’d have trouble reading them,” I added, remembering the tiny type they’d had to use to fit Beatrice Helen Falkenhausen van der Lynden on the plaque that had covered her niche.
“Archie van der Lynden would know,” Dad said. “You could ask him when you talk to him about his mother’s ashes.”
“If the chief is ever able to put us in touch, I will.”
We were following the asphalt driveway now as it curved gently to the left through lines of flowering cherry trees on either side. White cherry blossoms drifted down onto the windshield and eventually fell off as we made our slow way along the lane. Beyond the cherry trees I could see fields of white daffodils, white daisies, white flowers whose names escaped me—Mrs. Winkleson had imposed a rigid black-and-white color scheme on the whole estate, so all the flowers were white. Ragnar had largely left this aspect of the landscaping alone, initially because Mother Nature didn’t make many flowers in black and gray, his favorite colors. Nearer the house he’d added in a few blood-red roses and poppies, and he’d set aside one part of the formal gardens for experimentation with black flowers. But he’d become reconciled to the white flowers after noticing how eerie they looked by moonlight.
“All this would have been dark when the guests were arriving,” Dad announced. He was frowning, apparently at the landscape’s rebellious inability to conform to the picture in his mind’s eye. “Look! There’s Ragnar’s gardener. One of his gardeners, anyway. He must need several.” He pointed to a man standing on a ladder, pruning one of the cherry trees. “I don’t suppose there’s any real reason to interrogate Ragnar’s staff.” He looked wistful, as if he thought interrogating the gardener might be rather fun.
I took my eyes off the road long enough to glance over at the pruner.
“That’s not a gardener,” I said. “That’s Fred something-or-other. Former bandmate of Ragnar’s—I forget which band. Bass player. Ragnar takes in strays, as he puts it. Human strays.”
“He has a lot of needy friends, then?”
“Friends, friends of friends, random acquaintances he picks up at concerts or in the bookstore or the coffeehouse. I’m not even sure he knows where some of them came from. I’ve never been out here when Ragnar didn’t have at least a dozen people staying with him for however long it takes them to get back on their feet.”
“Back on their feet?” Dad twisted in his seat to keep his eyes on the pruner we’d just passed. “Not physically, I hope.”
“Sometimes. I remember one guest who’d broken his leg, and since he lived in a fifth-floor walkup in Brooklyn he stayed here until he was back in action. Quite a lot of them are down-on-their-luck musicians or actors between gigs. Artists who can’t afford studio space. Guys whose wives or girlfriends have thrown them out. The occasional drunk or addict trying to clean up his act—if Ragnar ever needed work, he’d make an awesome sober companion. And of course he usually does have employees, although their numbers vary greatly for no apparent reason, but it’s hard to tell them from the guests, which can be disconcerting.”
“Why?” Dad frowned. “It all sounds wonderful.”
“It is,” I said. “But all the same, if I’m asking someone to hold the ladder while I install a wrought-iron chandelier, I want to know if he’s on salary or in withdrawal.”
“Oh, dear,” Dad murmured. “I can understand.”
“Still, they’re mostly harmless. He doesn’t get many bad apples—just people who, as he puts it, need a little more time to find themselves.” Of course, some of his guests had been looking—not all that diligently, from what I could see—for years. But since Ragnar required them to perform at least a small amount of useful work, the complete deadbeats tended to depart rather quickly. And Ragnar, who was a sociable creature, could always be assured of finding someone—usually at least half-a-dozen someones—to keep him company whenever he wanted it, and help out with whatever new project had caught his fancy.
“He’s a good egg,” I said aloud.
Dad nodded, and returned to squinting at the scenery.
I wondered if I could manage to leave Dad here to plot his reenactment with Ragnar’s help. And immediately felt guilty. Dad got such a lot of pleasure out of things like this, and if I hadn’t been busy, I’d have really enjoyed helping him. But I was busy. And—
“Oh, look!”