“Huh. That was interesting.”
Addie clutched the hand railing. Rupert was lounging on the landing as though he were sunbathing at the Côte d’Azur. If she hadn’t been minding her steps, she might have pitched forward over his long legs and met her own untimely fate.
“Stop doing this, turning up without warning! If you were a cat, I’d bell you. I could have fallen down the back stairs and broken my neck.”
“Someone would have found you eventually, although the maids do give Miss Barlow a wide berth. I wonder why she’s not popular.”
“Been eavesdropping?” It was one of Rupert’s singular accomplishments.
“Singular? Come now. I’m more useful than that. Look at what I’ve accomplished in the past.”
He was reading her mind once more, loud and clear. “Are you going to physically materialize again?” Rupert had turned up more or less in the flesh in the nick of time on their last adventure, frightening a murderer out of his wits.
“I’m not sure. That was an emergency and took a lot out of me—supposedly you’re the only one I’m assigned to grace my presence with.”
Addie snorted. She could do without being graced with Rupert’s presence for the rest of her life.
Rupert ignored her. “Generally we ghosts focus on moving objects about, and believe me, that’s arduous enough. You’d never believe how much air can resist an ordinary object. There’s a formula.”
Addie was not science-minded and didn’t really care about formulas. Formulae? See, she didn’t even know the correct plural word. She sat down on a carpeted stair tread. “So, who is guilty?”
“For which death?”
“Don’t be tiresome. I’m not choosy—either one. I know you know more than you’re telling me. I bet you’ve been lurking about all morning and afternoon gleaning lots of fascinating facts with your devilish mind-reading.”
Rupert put a finger to his lips. “Shh. No summoning the D-fellow, if you please. So far, I’ve avoided him and his minions, and I want to keep it that way. One would so hate to incinerate.”
She gave him a very weak punch, chilling her knuckles. “What have you found out?”
“Ungrateful girl. What’s in it for me? I know you’ll run right off to earn points with your precious inspector.”
“Now that you’ve turned over your new leaf, aren’t you obliged to do the right thing just because it is the right thing? And as I said, he’s not my inspector! There’s no reason for you to be so jealous.”
Unfortunately.
“As if I could be. I left all that sort of silliness behind.” Rupert didn’t meet her eyes, and that gave her a perverse sense of satisfaction. She knew he cared about her, which was rather ironic after all he put her through. “All right. I did pick up a valuable nugget.”
“Out with it!”
Rupert smirked. “It’s rather enjoyable keeping you in suspense. My pleasures are so limited lately.”
“Good! You had enough pleasures to last several lifetimes before you crashed the Hispano Suiza.”
With his French mistress.
The latest one. There had been another Frenchwoman in his past, as well as several ladies from the United Kingdom and beyond, a veritable female League of Nations. Most of them had shown up at his funeral. Rupert had been an international ambassador of adultery.
He nodded in guilt. “All right, all right. We’ve established I’m a dog.”
“That is an insult to dogs. Tell me what you know.”
“When Michael Ainsley went missing, Bradbury and Clifford were also present, lieutenants all. They somehow wangled leave together and came to cheer Hugh up in his bed of pain. Even your buddy Lucas dropped in for a drink a time or two.”
“Who’s Michael Ainsley?”
Rupert waggled his usual finger. “Come now. Use that beautiful head of yours.”
Light dawned. “Oh! You mean the soldier who deserted. Except he didn’t! He was buried on the grounds.”
“Well done. So, one of them might know something. The two or three of them might know something. And I suppose you could throw Hugh into the mix, although I gather he was pretty badly off when they visited. Half out of his head sometimes. Pamela had her hands full, plying him with leaves and twigs and what-not, beyond what the sawbones prescribed to keep the pain at bay.” Rupert tapped his square chin. “She was quite a witch, you know.”
“Rupert! Don’t be so misogynistic!” While she and Pamela were not best friends, she was always pleasant and thoughtful. All the flowers she sent a year ago after Rupert died brightened up the dregs of Addie’s winter.
“I’m not referring to her personality, you goose. I mean she was very knowledgeable about the old ways. Herbal remedies. You saw her bottles and jars the other day. Tinctures and salves and so forth.”
Addie had, shelves lined alphabetically, the labels in Pamela’s neat handwriting. “You don’t mean she dabbled in poisons, do you?”
“Might have.”
“Did she poison herself?” The idea seemed absurd. Pamela was a perfectly perfect hostess all weekend. There were no signs of depression or agitation that Addie noticed.
“I didn’t say that. I agree—it seems unlikely. She was made of stern stuff. Had to be, with Hugh’s situation.” He paused. “I knew Pam rather well, you know.”
Addie covered her spectacles with her hands. “Oh, God. Not another one.”
Rupert shrugged. “She was lonely. It didn’t last very long. She felt a bit remorseful, and maybe I did too. Pam was fond of you, you know.”
Addie didn’t want to hear the details and tried to control her urge to push Rupert down the stairs. It wouldn’t do any good. Or any harm, for that matter—he was already dead, damn him.
That explained the masses of hothouse flowers, didn’t it? Gladioli of guilt.
Another betrayal, but she was accustomed by now. There was no point in being upset—it wouldn’t help solve the case. “Does Michael Whosis have anything to do with Pamela’s death?”
“I feel strongly that he does. Call it sixth sense, if you will. Your inspector has a touch of that, you know.”
“He is not my inspector,” Addie repeated. “I suppose intuition is handy when you deal with the worst of humanity.”
“Indeed. It’s also very useful in wartime. One gets used to trusting those odd feelings. I can’t tell you how many times I knew when Jerry was about to make himself a bother and took action accordingly.”
Rupert sounded as if he’d like to relive those awful days. Men. Really, they were incomprehensible, dead or alive.
“So, getting back to the present, you suspect Owen Bradbury and Dennis Clifford?” She didn’t bother to include Lucas—Rupert was always negative about her old friend.
“I didn’t say that either. I did catch them in a heated confab on the terrace after lunch, though. Perhaps you can exert your feminine wiles and discover something.”
Another person giving her wiles too much credit. She’d never been an accomplished flirt to begin with, and most of the young men she’d unartfully practiced on were in graves across France.
“Captain Clifford called Pamela’s death a cock-up. I thought that was strange.”
“Well, there you go. Find out what he meant by that.” Rupert checked his third-best watch, the one the undertaker had tried to discourage her from burying with him. Rupert had collected watches as he had cars, so half a dozen were still in a leather case in the safe at Compton Chase. She really should send them to his parents in their seaside manor house in Cornwall.
“I’ve got something I must do,” Rupert said with a mysterious air. “Good luck, my dear.” He vanished from the landing.
Addie wondered how far Inspector Hunter was in the interview process. There were the houseguests. Evelyn Fernald. Hugh’s Aunt Iris. He probably wanted to talk to John and Juliet Barlow too. Pamela’s maid. Jim Musgrave. Beckett. Sergeant Wells would talk with the rest of the staff, if this case was anything like the one that had occurred at Compton Chase.
If Rupert was right and the two deaths were connected, that would eliminate those who weren’t here nine years ago. That surely meant Margie and Mandy Jordan—they were still in pigtails and pinafores in 1916, their pigtails probably brown. Presumably, Patrick Cassidy was in Ireland or in uniform somewhere in Europe. Addie crossed Lucas off her mental list because he was Lucas, even if he’d come over to Fernald Hall for dinner or drinks that fall. She hardly thought he’d commit a postprandial murder. As for the rest, she’d be discreet in her inquiries and make sure Mr. Hunter was unaware of her assistance.
Of course, if the discovery of the soldier’s body had nothing to do with Pamela, then all bets were off. They could be dealing with two killers, possibly even more if the murderers were working in teams.
She couldn’t help but shiver, although it was a perfectly warm June afternoon.
Making her way down the back stairs, she encountered the maid, Mary, going up, the same girl Addie had asked to keep people from the conservatory. Mary nearly tripped and set the box she was carrying on a step to regain her footing.
“Pardon, Lady Adelaide, I didn’t expect to see anyone. These old books are heavier than I thought. Mrs. Lewis should have sent a footman up.”
A good thing Mary hadn’t tripped over Rupert—or was that impossible? Did one walk through Rupert? Addie picked up a volume and opened it. A School History of England. Oddly enough, it was written by a teacher in the New York City Public Schools and had been printed over twenty years ago. She flipped through the illustrations and colored maps of countries that didn’t exist anymore.
So no Great War within, which made the book almost a fantasy. A fairy tale.
The war had changed everything.
“Poor John. He’s got a lot of reading ahead, doesn’t he?”
“Mr. Stewart had the books sent over. I don’t know how they expect the poor boy to concentrate—he’s just lost his mother.” Mary bit her lower lip. “I know it’s not my place. But I think it’s wicked he’s to be sent away, I don’t care what anybody says.”
“I think I agree with you.” Unless his father somehow killed his mother.
Addie needed to speak with Hugh.