Chapter Sixteen

 

 

The whirr of the can opener filled the kitchen. “Have you seen the moggie?” Michael asked. He plopped a couple of spoonfuls of brown goo into Darnley’s dish. “This one’s liver. Right muck, if you ask me, but he probably thinks that about shortbread.”

Balancing her mug of tea, Rebecca peered through the pantry door. No cat. “Last time I saw him was in the ballroom when Phil was mortaring that brick. He was sitting on a windowsill surveying his territory.”

“I’ll leave it for him, then.” Michael put the dish in the pantry, looking at the piles of dishes at his shoulder as doubtfully as a soldier on a bomb-disposal squad.

“You heard them go again this morning?” asked Rebecca. “Six AM, wasn’t it?”

“Oh aye. I decided they’d had me on once too often. If they’d really broken this time there was naething I could do. I went back to sleep.”

“Nerves of steel.” Rebecca gathered up her sandwich plate and mug.

“Did you come doon?”

“Good heavens, no. It’s cold enough in the mornings without chasing ghosts. But I didn’t go back to sleep, either.” She’d lain there weighing the possibilities of her date with Eric tonight, but she wasn’t about to admit to that. Briskly she rinsed off her lunch plate. Five times now they’d heard the dishes crash to the floor, only to rush in and discover them sitting innocently on their shelves. Like everything else around here, the Royal Doulton was innocuous and unnerving at once.

“I’d better get back to work,” she announced. “I have to leave at five.” She took a moment to leave the front door ajar—Dorothy was expected momentarily—and fell into step beside Michael on the main staircase.

“Who’s playin’ at the concert tonight?” he asked.

“Cleveland Symphony.”

“That was one compensation for livin’ in London, the concerts at the Royal Albert and St. Martin’s in the Fields.”

I’ll bet, Rebecca thought, the Royal Albert didn’t have pipers wringing the heart out of your chest. She’d never again hear “Ferry Me Over” without thinking of Michael. Typical, to ruin a perfectly good song for her. Not that he’d volunteered over his bowl of soup last night that he’d played it. And she hadn’t volunteered that she’d heard him, let alone how she’d reacted. He’d think she was a real sob sister—one of her brothers’ favorite epithets.

They hadn’t discussed anything else, either. Not Brian’s apparent conversation with James, not the odd second will, not the supposedly non-existent Forbes treasure. They’d debated what to get for Christmas for their respective nieces and nephews—Michael’s three, Rebecca’s seven. “Populatin’ the world wi’ Reids?” he’d asked.

“My brothers are very traditional,” she’d replied. “Marry young and make sure you get your money’s worth out of your school taxes.”

Rebecca switched on the chandelier in the large fourth floor bedroom. Michael considered the objects strewn across the carpet and the bed. The doors of the George II bureau gaped open, revealing a variety of tiny drawers and shelves all crammed with artifacts, intriguing and otherwise. So were the shallow drawers of the apothecary’s chest. So were the cheap plywood bookshelves. It had taken all morning just to sort out the scrapbooks, decide they should go to the Ohio Historical Society along with James’s diaries, lug them all down to the Hall and arrange them in the cardboard boxes Eric had brought.

Michael picked up the inventory. “Have you seen the Pratt ware coo?”

“The what?”

“The creamer shaped like a wee Guernsey. Hard to believe what people collect. Although John would buy a thing just because someone else had it.”

“Oh! The gaudy nineteenth century Staffordshire cow, right? It was here yesterday. The Pratt Toby jugs are upstairs.”

His finger on the page in the book, Michael said, “I need the coo.”

The front door slammed. Dorothy advanced up the staircase with her basket, intent, apparently, on Michael’s bedroom. He headed her off. “Mrs. Garst, there were some things on the floor in yon room. . .”

“Yes, there were. Shameful way to treat Mr. Forbes’s nice things. That little cow pitcher, now—cute, isn’t it? But a silly thing to have in a bedroom. I took it down to the kitchen and put it away.”

Michael assumed his martyr expression and headed back down the stairs. Dorothy stood in the doorway of his bedroom like a scuba diver getting her last breath of real air. She was looking even paler and more tightly-wound than she had yesterday, as if she had a permanent stomachache.

Rebecca got a tumbler of water for the scraps of ivy growing in an assortment of Keiller’s marmalade jars on the windowsills. Phil and Steve were sitting on the granite step of the toolshed, eating their sandwiches and chips from Phil’s rusty lunch box. Above them clouds gathered; yesterday’s warm sunshine had become today’s chill wind.

Michael returned with the cow and sat down at the bureau. Dorothy ran a Niagara Falls of water into the bathtub next door. The phone rang. “I’ll get it,” Rebecca called, as Michael didn’t look up and the water kept running.

It was Eric. She settled into a comfortable slump against the wall, cradling the receiver to her face. “My secretary’s off today,” he said. “I just now found the memo saying you called late yesterday. I’m sorry—I was playing racquetball.”

“Nothing important,” Rebecca assured him. “Just wanted to ask you, out of rank curiosity, when was James’s will written and who were the witnesses?”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he said with a laugh. “It was written August 20 and witnessed by Phil and Dorothy. What on earth brought that up?”

August 20. The will Peter had found yesterday was the newer one. She hadn’t expected that. “Eric, Peter found another will when he moved the desk in the prophet’s chamber. It’s dated the 24th, and doesn’t have the provision about relatives. Warren’s the only witness.”

“Oh, that!” Eric exclaimed. “I’d wondered where that one had gone. Beneath the desk? I guess James left it there waiting for another witness and it got knocked off. I’ll have to tell Warren it turned up.”

The water stopped running. Michael was humming something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like, “Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you.” Rebecca grimaced; throwing something at him would only acknowledge that she heard him. She straightened and paced down the hall. There was one of the crystal bottles in the cradle in James’s room—Elspeth, remembering her infant daughter?

“So James resigned himself to leaving Dun Iain to the state after all?”

“Poor old James,” Eric answered. “You know how some people think if they don’t make a will they’ll never die? With James it was if he made lots of wills he’d never die.”

“I’m sure he had no idea the end was so near.” Rebecca stood at the top of the stairs and looked down. No. Don’t push me. Help.

“No one does,” said Eric. “A mercy, that.”

Rebecca shivered. She turned to see Dorothy right at her elbow, dusting the frame of Michael’s door.

Eric went on, “I talked to Warren this morning. He didn’t take the mausoleum key and doesn’t know who did. Frankly I can’t imagine why anyone would want it, but it does belong to the property. If nothing else we’ll have that lock changed, too.”

“I’ll let you worry about that,” Rebecca said. “I’m worried if we’re going to get through all these little treasures before January first.”

“You can do it if anyone can.” Rebecca laughed; she felt like Tarzan swooping through the jungle on those facile lines. “Bring that copy of the will with you tonight, please,” Eric continued, “and I’ll put it with the other ones. A different Forbes collection, a memorial to indecisiveness.”

Poor old James. “All right then. See you at five.”

“See you at five, Rebecca.”

She hung up with a smile and a pat to the receiver. Michael was singing, “Some day my prince will come.” Dorothy was smirking at her. Damn it, she wasn’t staging a show for their entertainment! Rebecca stamped into James’s bedroom, rescued the perfume bottle, and took it upstairs. The fifth floor bedroom, John and Elspeth’s room, was thick with the odor of lavender. The depression in the pillow on the bed was deeper than ever. Rebecca hurried away without looking behind her.

Back on the fourth floor Michael had shut up and was absorbed in a book. Rebecca sat on the bed, opening the first box she came to. Inside was a mound of intricate hand-stitched lace. “Wow!” she gasped.

Michael looked up. “What?”

“Irish lace. And. . .” Carefully she unfolded the top layer, revealing a latticework basket made of porcelain so fine it shone like pearl in the light of the chandelier. “An Irish Belleek basket.”

“Here we go.” He flipped through the inventory. “John bought them from the Perth Moncrieffes in 1921. Limerick lace, is it?”

Rebecca’s fingertips smoothed the almost microscopic stitching. “No way. See the applique, and the layers of tulle and organza? Carrickmacross.”

“Aye, then. Carrickmacross it is.”

At least he was man enough to admit he was wrong. Rebecca said, “John didn’t restrict himself to specifically Scottish goods, did he? A lot of these things are just typical collectibles of the period—the Meissen clock upstairs, for example. The Pratt ware. This.”

“But he nicked them from someone in Scotland. That was what mattered. It was all a game to him.”

“Like James writing wills,” Rebecca said.

Michael swung around. “What did Adler say about the other will?”

“He said he’d been wondering where that one got to. It’s only one of several, I gather.”

“He wasn’t surprised?”

“No.” Rebecca smoothed the lace back around the basket and labeled the lid of the box. “The legal will, by the way, was dated August twentieth. If the one Peter found had been signed by two witnesses, it would be the legal one.”

“Takin’ away Adler’s tidy fee for findin’ relatives, eh? How nice that it was never signed properly. Mark my words, Rebecca, he’s up to something.” With this pronouncement Michael turned back to his stack of books.

His back was, as usual, uncommunicative. Why the two men had to be so suspicious of each other Rebecca couldn’t fathom. It must be some kind of territorial imperative. If Eric hadn’t known about the August twenty-fourth will she’d wonder why James hadn’t told him. But he had known.

The next box she opened contained yellowed rolls of paper. Gingerly she pried one open. “Maps! Copies of General Wade’s eighteenth century surveys. When the English were building roads and bridges so they could get at the natives to ‘pacify’ them.”

“And the first effective ground transportation in the Highlands,” Michael said to the bureau. “An economic blessin’ to those same natives. The museum’ll want those maps, right enough. You can set them aside.”

Not one flicker of patriotic indignation. Rebecca stuck out her tongue at his back, said “Yes, my lord,” under her breath, and set them aside.

Dorothy vacuumed the corridor. Phil slapped plaster downstairs. Darnley padded in, sniffed, padded out again. Michael’s chair creaked gently. Before long the little Tompion clock beside the bed said four o’clock. Rebecca slipped away, leaving Michael with inventory, spiral notebook, and a pile of papers that looked like letters and receipts. So much to do, and here she was leaving. Of course she’d worked every evening this week. And Michael was a full Ph.D., they were probably paying him more.

Her bedroom, despite its white walls, was already dusky. Before she plunged into the ritual of shampoo, hair curlers, pink dress, she stuffed Ray’s negligee into the bottom of her wardrobe. At least the odor of lavender had never returned. Steve and Heather must’ve frightened Elspeth away.

In the dim light the garnet, jet, and diamond of Elspeth’s pictured necklace seemed to sparkle, while the woman’s face was obviously only paint, sad, sensitive expression and all. But the woman in the photos had been a vivacious flirt.

Shaking her head, Rebecca touched her throat with the Chanel No 5 Eric had given her and plugged in her earrings. She packed her toothbrush in her purse, took it out, packed it and took it out again. Any man as well organized as Eric had to have an extra toothbrush. It just seemed, well, so calculating to actually plan to spend the night. Rebecca put her contact lens case in her purse, popped out the day’s birth control pill and swallowed it, even though her throat was dry.

She emerged from her room to encounter Michael strolling by, and waited for him to say something about her being “tarted up.” He said, with his appraising look, “That’s the frock you made, is it? Awful posh.”

“Why, thank you,” she replied.

They passed the study in time to see Phil bringing out the white-stained plaster bucket, and the entry in time to see Dorothy open the door and go out. “What culinary time bomb did Dottie bring today?” Rebecca asked, following Michael into the kitchen.

He unrolled one end of a foil bundle. “Looks like a petrified haggis.”

“Oh, no.” She could’ve cried. That gray brick had once been a lovely little rump roast. “Maybe I can shred it and serve it with a sauce.”

“At least she didna bring those sausages filled wi’ yellow glue.”

“The hot dogs stuffed with American cheese? Pretty bad, I agree. The meat loaf was okay, though, even with the catsup smeared on top.”

“My mum makes the best shepherd’s pie you ever ate,” Michael said wistfully. He opened the box of shortbread. “And her black bun. . .”

“Oh, Becky!” warbled Dorothy from the entry. “Eric’s here.”

Michael extracted a cookie without so much as rustling the paper wrapper. Rebecca went to the door. “In here!”

Eric was wearing the charcoal three-piece suit that made his eyes look like onyx. All he needed was a pocket watch and chain with fobs dangling across his vest. He greeted Rebecca with a wink and shook hands with Michael. “How’s it going? Making any progress?”

“Just about,” Michael replied, butter not melting in his mouth. “Do you know anything about an English book cover inset with rubies and diamonds, circa 1630? Or a decorated English agate perfume bottle, circa 1540? From Hopetoun House and Drumlanrig, respectively. The list doesn’t say if there was a book in the cover—I assume there was no Shakespeare folio.”

Eric smiled. “I asked James about those same pieces. He de-accessioned them about ten years ago, I think, before my time. Showy things like that sold quickly when he needed cash.”

“They’re still listed in the inventories.” Now Michael smiled. Rebecca watched, fascinated. They were just like dogs—a border collie and a Doberman, possibly—sniffing each other out.

“I warned you that James didn’t always record a sale,” Eric said. “Somehow he thought if he didn’t mark an item sold, he’d still have it.”

Michael said lightly, his smile becoming a lazy grin, “Convenient, then, that you know the inventories so well. I thought cheap lawyers didn’t bother with things like that.”

“Oh,” said Eric, voice perfectly moderated between a laugh and a polite protest, “but I’m a very expensive lawyer.”

“Touché,” said Michael, and ate his cookie with an emphatic crunch.

Eric turned to Rebecca. “Shall we go?”

“Let’s,” she said. Really—men were absurd.

“Have a good time, children,” called Michael. “Don’t forget to write.”

The toad. She’d been worried about leaving him with more than his fair share of the work and he was glad to get rid of her.

Phil was waiting in the parking area, his Cincinnati Reds cap shading his hangdog face. “Mr. Adler, here’s an expense sheet. I hope it’s made out all right.”

“I’m sure it’s fine, Phil. Let’s see—nails, plaster, glass panes, caulking.”

Steve, Slash at his heels, slouched across the gravel. “I’ll put the leftover gas in the pickup.”

“No you won’t,” said Phil. “That gas belongs to the estate. We’ll save it until we start the lawn mowers up again in the spring. But,” he added apologetically to Eric, “I will have to get a new gasoline can.”

Assuming Phil and Steve had jobs here in the spring, Rebecca said to herself. She looked at Slash. He looked at her, nostrils flaring.

Eric said, “Get a good one. You don’t want gasoline to be stored improperly.” He pulled out a pen, jotted “Gas can” on the list, put both paper and pen in his pocket and shook Phil’s dirty hand with his clean one. “Thank you. I’ll see that you’re reimbursed quickly.”

Eric turned to Steve and Steve spun away, one corner of his mouth twitching in a barely suppressed sneer. Swells like Eric, he seemed to be thinking, didn’t have to know gasoline from Perrier. A shape moved in a fourth floor window. Rebecca shot a sharp, wary glance upward. It was Dorothy, her bulbous form outlined by the ceiling light. She stood, arms crossed before her, impersonating a waxwork figure.

Michael’s voice echoed through the door, singing lustily, “There’s many a wean wi’ the red locks of the Campbells who’s ne’er seen the coast of Argyll.” If he grew a beard, Rebecca thought, it’d be red. Wasn’t the Campbell who was murdered in Kidnapped called “The Red Fox”?

“Earth to Rebecca,” said Eric.

She started. “Sorry. I haven’t been quite with it all day.”

“Then it’s time for an evening out.” He opened the door of the Volvo and Rebecca climbed out of the chill wind.

The limbs of the trees along the driveway were black brush strokes against an overcast sky that shimmered like sifted ashes, touched with mauve where the sun sank invisibly toward the horizon. “The days are creepin’ in, right enough,” she said.

Eric started the car. “You’ve been working with Campbell too long. You’re starting to talk like him.”

“Dialect is insidious,” admitted Rebecca. “Especially that one. I’ve been reading British all my life.”

“And whatever is a nice girl like you doing in a field like that?” But he touched her cheek as he spoke—just kidding, no criticism implied.

“My great-grandfather emigrated from Ayrshire a hundred years ago. My grandfather taught me the old songs his father had sung to him. ‘Loch Lomond’, for example.”

“The one with the high roads and the low roads?”

“Do you know the story behind that?”

“I have a feeling I’m going to hear it,” Eric said with exaggerated patience. He guided the car out of the driveway.

Rebecca batted affectionately at his shoulder. “There’re two Scottish soldiers—or drafted crofters, most likely—in prison in England. One’s going to be released, the other executed. Taking the low road means to go along the fairy route, underground, as a ghost. So he’ll be home, but he’ll be dead.” Like James, she added to herself. Like Elspeth. But maybe she had never considered Dun Iain home.

“I’d always thought,” said Eric, “it was a happy little tune.”

“Typical Scots, making lemonade out of lemons. Irrepressible.”

“I’ve noticed,” he said dryly.

Eric would never have believed the expression on Michael’s face when he played the pipes. His astringent manner had been peeled like a lemon, the raw pulp exposed. But she didn’t have to think of him tonight.

“I’m rather partial to ‘Music from the Hearts of Space’ myself.” Eric reached to the dashboard and inserted a tape. Synthesized New Age harmonies emanated from the speakers, soothing and non-demanding.

Rebecca relaxed into the upholstery. “So,” she continued, “when I was being carted around all over the countryside as a child, British history seemed exotic enough to be interesting but familiar enough to be safe. Make sense?”

“Perfectly. When I was a kid, I was partial to automobile engines—rationality, you see. When I wasn’t down at the beach. But you can’t make much of a career out of cars or surfboards.”

No, Rebecca thought, those meticulously clean fingernails hadn’t touched engine grease in years. The motherless child had found his rationality.

They turned onto the access road, gained the interstate, and accelerated smoothly toward Columbus. The music murmured, its subtle rhythms blending with that of the car wheels on the road. The lights of passing cars threw Eric’s face into sharp relief and then swept on, leaving him in twilight. Carefully controlled features, noted Rebecca, framed by an exact haircut. And yet, that afternoon on the roof of Dun Iain, she’d glimpsed the flame that burned within. His sophistication had probably been hard-won, layer after layer of shiny lacquer applied to both enhance and protect the fiery core. She admired him for that, even as she was amused by it. Well, Eric was in a profession that rewarded smooth edges.

“A penny for your thoughts,” he said.

She laughed. “Have you ever considered politics?”

“No. Much too demanding.”

“Have to keep your nose too clean?”

“My nose is clean, thank you. I take my lumps on the stock market like everyone else, and there’s not a single messy divorce clouding my record.”

“Divorce doesn’t matter these days like it did back in Mary Stuart’s,” said Rebecca. “Or in Elspeth’s.”

“Divorce wasn’t even an option for her.”

“Or John. Although I daresay she was the injured party, not him.”

“You’d better believe it,” Eric murmured, so quietly Rebecca wasn’t sure she’d heard him.

“So Warren says he didn’t take the mausoleum key,” she said.

“If he did take it, he can have it. In some ways Warren’s too soft to be a law officer, but he’d protect John, James, Elspeth and the baby.”

Rebecca regarded Eric’s profile thoughtfully. James must have told him about the baby. Or Louise. It was no secret. “He wouldn’t have had to lie about the key, though. That bothers me.”

“People sometimes lie for perfectly innocent reasons.”

“If they’re innocent they can be honest,” Rebecca persisted. “Did you know Warren was the only witness on that will?”

Eric looked over at her. Passing headlights reflected in his eyes, making them glint like the gold ring on his hand. “Yes. James told me on the phone. Last time I talked to him before he died. Poor old guy. As far as he was concerned, state or relative, it’d still be some stranger who took over Dun Iain. Can you blame him for wanting to stay longer?”

He meant living, not as a ghost. But no, she couldn’t blame him. “What do you mean by Warren being too soft? Do you think he’s covering up for Dorothy? She’s been lurking around like Bela Lugosi.”

“Dorothy?” Eric’s features flickered with sardonic humor. “The uncertainty about her job is eating her. Not surprising. Phil, too, although with him it’s harder to tell. But we have no proof that either of them has done anything dishonest.”

Central Ohio slipped by on either side of the highway, clumps of trees, farmhouses, and stores all fading into the evening obscurity. The occasional lighted window or neon sign seemed like a hole cut in a gray backdrop. Rebecca sighed. Her suspicions sounded so melodramatic. And she wasn’t even talking about the ghosts. “It’s like trying to follow a railroad timetable in an Agatha Christie thriller. Who signed what will when? Where were Steve and Heather when? Who had what key when? You’ve solved the problem of the front door, but now the mausoleum key is lost. Return to ‘Go’, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

“Steve,” Eric snorted, “could use a stint in the Army.”

“And Heather?”

“Get her away from Steve, she’ll be fine. She just needs to do a little growing up.”

Don’t we all, Rebecca thought. “You didn’t answer my question. Do you think Warren is covering something up?”

“Inquisitive tonight, aren’t we?” he teased. “What’s to cover up? Surely you don’t think Warren, Dorothy, and Phil are planning a heist? If you ask me, it’s Campbell. . .”

“I didn’t ask that,” she said, and then bit her tongue. Michael, too, was an outsider. But if dishonesty meant guilt. . . No, he could be annoying enough when she was with him. Now she wasn’t.

Eric glanced narrowly at her but said nothing.

“What’s to cover up?” she repeated. “That’s what’s so irritating. Nothing I can put my finger on.” Of course there was Phil’s comment about “that lawyer fella”. Someone else had said that James had soured on Eric there at the end. Warren? Jan? She wriggled uncomfortably. She was starting to sound like Dorothy, an obnoxious voice in a loop. But she asked anyway, “Why would James blame you for the taxes?”

“What?” Eric asked incredulously. “Who said that?”

“Phil, I think.”

“Oh. Probably some comment James made about my filling out his tax returns for him. Bet you didn’t know I do accounting, too, did you?”

“And leap over tall buildings in a single bound?”

He laughed, crooked teeth flashing unashamedly.

Rebecca was beginning to appreciate just what it would be like opposing Eric in court. If he was being deliberately evasive, that would mean there was something to evade. Maybe he was simply confident that matters were under control. Or else. . . If anything infuriated her it was a man’s condescending “don’t worry your little head about it”.

“So you don’t want me to worry about anything?” she asked. “The whereabouts of the mazer, or the key, or whether someone—Jan’s kids, anyone—is planning a heist, or whether I’m going to find Steve’s and Heather’s fingerprints all over my room when I get back tonight?”

“I think you shouldn’t worry about anything, but if you want to, that’s up to you. Besides. . .” He tickled her ribs with that admonitory forefinger. “What if you don’t get back tonight?”

The look he gave her would have ignited tinder. With a nervous laugh she sank back against the seat, glad the darkness concealed her pink face.

She’d never believed men like him really existed; compared to him every other man she’d met was an irredeemable clod. Yes, he had to keep throwing that stardust in her eyes. That was part of the bargain.

The traffic grew heavier. They were swept along in the stream, past residential areas and businesses, below glaring yellow streetlights that made Rebecca’s pink dress look as sepia as the old photographs of Elspeth. Soon they eddied into the Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium parking lot and stopped. When she got out, Rebecca’s hair whipped in a gust of chill wind off the river.

She leaned appreciatively into Eric’s protective arm, and together they hurried into the building.

 

1