Chapter Twenty

 

 

Rebecca woke up knowing something wasn’t right. She was fully dressed, with a vile taste in her mouth that made her look suspiciously at Darnley as he slept at the foot of the bed, his tail curled over his nose.

Then her thoughts congealed. Remembering was like picking at a scab. With a groan she rose, dressed, and combed out the tangles in her hair. Outside her window thin clouds were shredded by a cold wind, revealing pennons of blue sky. Waves of sunshine raced across the lawn and hurdled the trees.

Michael’s eyes were blue. Michael’s eyes were closed, locked, and guarded by armed sentries.

Rebecca braced herself before going into the kitchen. Sure enough, there he was, brooding over a mug of tea, a rack of toast untouched on the table before him. “Good morning,” she said.

“Good mornin’,” Michael replied, equally flat. He didn’t look up.

Rebecca nestled a filter into the coffeepot, measured the coffee, added water. Steam rose and she inhaled the delectable odor. Caffeine was much more dependable than a man.

Michael was wearing a red sweatshirt emblazoned with the sentiment, “Renegade Time Lord”. His mouth was such a thin, tight line she couldn’t believe it had been so flexible the night before. His right hand, cupped around his mug, was red and swollen.

That’s what that crash had been after he slammed his door in her face. He’d driven his fist into the stone wall. Rebecca’s face crumpled into a grimace somewhere between a smile and wail. “Would you like me to fix some ice for your hand?”

“No,” he replied. And, a moment later, “Thank you.”

She poured coffee and drank. It wasn’t as good as she’d anticipated.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said to the toast. “I had no call tongue lashin’ you like that.”

She wanted to retort, What makes you think I care? But last night she had cared only too obviously. “No, you didn’t,” she said.

The silence stretched like a rubber band. Then Michael slammed back his chair and strode out of the room muttering something about work to do. He hadn’t once looked at her.

Rebecca watched her coffee slop back and forth in its cup. Typical. You might as well skin a man alive as expect him to verbalize his feelings. The circumstances were pathetically banal, after all; they’d been forced together in trying times, they were only human, they’d gone overboard. No harm done. Thanks more to a ghost than to her own good sense.

But God, how good it had been to hold him! Not just felt good, was good, body, mind, and soul, right down to those purring kittens of her wits.

She slammed her mug into the sink so hard it cracked. She stared, appalled. Damaging estate property. Things were going downhill fast.

Rebecca picked up the fifth-floor inventory from the Hall. Michael could finish the fourth floor by himself, she wasn’t going anywhere near that demon-possessed bed. James’s steps had stopped in the doorway. Maybe as a child he’d seen his mother and Rudolph in that bed. The sight might have been enough to shock him into celibacy for the rest of his life. There was a good case to be made for celibacy.

Rebecca started in one of the smaller rooms on the fifth floor. She cataloged the collection of Victorian paper theaters, the cut-out dolls dressed as shepherds, kings, and clowns carefully bundled into envelopes. She checked off the scrapbooks filled with old stamps—have to get them appraised. She opened the jeweler’s boxes containing seventeenth century objets de vertu, a cup carved from carnelian, a turquoise pomander, a tiny jeweled casket that smelled faintly of roses.

But more objects were listed on the inventory than were here. Either they were in another room or had been de-accessioned. She tapped her pencil on the notebook, sympathetic to James’s reluctance to part with his possessions but wishing he’d realized what a headache it would mean to the innocent historian. In the gaps in the inventories was space for plenty of mischief.

Maybe Michael was pleased she hadn’t made it with Eric because he wanted her himself. And yet, men didn’t seem to have much of an impulse toward exclusivity. Masculine games of power being what they were, he might have taken what he could get just to score off Eric. But he hadn’t. He’d buried his face in her stomach and clung to her as if he were being dragged away by some outside force.

It was all just fun and games. She played with Eric, Michael played with her. He’d said he wouldn’t play Sheila’s games. Hypocrite. She laid down her pencil and rubbed her throbbing temples. Just shrug it all off, that’s what the rules say, that’s what he’s done.

Rebecca looked up to meet the painted eyes of young Queen Victoria gazing steadily from a Winterhalter portrait. “I’m not particularly amused either,” she said.

Footsteps. Rebecca turned sharply, only to see Dorothy and her basket of cleaners and scrubbers stepping into the hallway. The housekeeper held a cigarette clenched in her lips, her face screwed around it like a prune around its pit. “Mrs Garst,” Rebecca called, “would you mind not smoking indoors, please? Some of Mr Forbes’s things might be damaged by smoke.”

Dorothy dumped her supplies and trudged back down like Winnie-the-Pooh’s Eeyore told he couldn’t play. The woman grew more bloated every day. Overeating, perhaps. Or too much medication. If stuck with a pin Dorothy would deflate into a puddle of flesh and double-knit.

But for the grace of education and opportunity, Rebecca thought, that could be me in thirty years. A menial scorned by smart-alec college girls as something less than human, embittered by the sour dregs of custom and ignorance. For a few months in her youth Dorothy had been young and free. Now she had nothing except her son and his family to look on with pride or hope.

Rebecca laid down the inventory. Dammit, she was making no progress at all with the vertical hold of her mind tuned to rapid scan.

She looked into the large bedroom; at least the ghosts there were not her own. There was the portrait of Mary Stuart. There was Elspeth’s furrow in the bedclothes. There was the portrait of John Forbes and his self-righteously male scowl. Five cut glass bottles stood on the dresser. Rebecca frowned. Five, not seven. Maybe they’d gone up this time, instead of down.

She went up. The ballroom was washed in air and light, blocks of quicksilver sunlight making a tartan pattern with the planks of the floor. No bottles. But Phil’s battery-operated screwdriver and a box of screws lay on a tabouret by a Queen Anne wing chair.

Rebecca picked up the tools, walked down all the flights to the entry, picked the key to the shed off the hook by the door and stepped out into the sunshine. It was cold, but a nice day for a walk. She should ask Michael—no, better go alone. It would be so much easier if she hated him.

The shed still reeked of gasoline. Rebecca put the tools on a bench next to a broken lamp and glanced at the grimy milk jugs. They were empty. She checked the gas can. It was full, the lid on securely. Oh well, give the place time to air out.

She returned to the house to find Dorothy leaving yet another foil-wrapped bundle in the kitchen. “Heavenly hash,” she announced.

“Thank you,” Rebecca said. She left the front door open for Phil and went back upstairs. Michael was sitting at the bureau in the fourth floor room, leaning on his elbow, just as he’d been when she’d gone down.

As she went up the next flight of stairs she heard footsteps ringing on the treads above her head. Hello James, she thought, and quickened her pace to the room where she’d been working. She stopped dead in the doorway.

The pile of old paperbacks that had been on top of a wardrobe now lay stacked neatly on the floor. If they’d fallen, they’d have spewed paper shrapnel all over the room. They’d been lifted down. Michael? He apparently hadn’t moved while she’d been gone. James, maybe. Why?

Rebecca sifted through the books. Among the yellowed pages was a sheet of rag paper covered with James’s handwriting, one end torn roughly off. The back of her neck shriveled. She’d seen that paper before.

She trotted down the stairs, pausing on the fourth floor to ask Michael perfunctorily if he’d been upstairs. “No,” he replied without looking around.

Rebecca brushed past Dorothy on the landing and hurried into the Hall. The boxes holding James’s diaries and scrapbooks were lined up beside the table. Not in this one, not in that one. . . There! Rebecca opened the one with the photograph and the torn scrap of paper. The scrap fit the bottom of the letter as perfectly as one puzzle piece dovetailing into another.

Rebecca smiled with satisfaction, feeling like Miss Marple. She read, “June 3, 1952. My dear Mrs. Brown. Yes, your parents were valued servants to my father, and it is for their sake and that of your childhood here at Dun Iain that I am troubling myself to answer your last letter. You must realize, Mrs Brown, that your demands are growing more unreasonable all the time. What makes you think that any newspaper today would be at all interested in a scandal that happened in 1901?”

Rebecca glanced at the photo of Katherine Gemmell. She must be Mrs. Brown. Most people got married, despite the testimony against it.

The letter went on, “However, for the sake of your parents I will offer D., their grandchild, work at Dun Iain. Mrs. O’Donnell will be with me for a few years yet, but I will try to work something out. I repeat, though, that sympathetic as I am to your financial and marital difficulties, whatever problem you are having you have brought upon yourself. I cannot help you any more than I already have. Your threats are an embarrassment to the memory not only of your parents but mine.”

Well! thought Rebecca. Katherine Gemmell Brown must’ve been desperate to resort to blackmail. And James was right: who’d care about Elspeth’s death now? Katie’s dark eyes gazed out at her from their paper, frustratingly silent. A failing marriage, and financial difficulties, and children. 1952. She would’ve been fifty-one. Her kids would have been grown, or almost so. James offered “D”, Athena and Rudolph’s grandchild, work at Dun Iain.

James might’ve torn the letter pulling it out of the desk in the prophet’s chamber, written another to Katie, and used the torn original as a bookmark. Now he came back from the grave to make sure it was found.

A shadow fell across letter and photo. Rebecca looked up. Dorothy stood just behind her, staring at the picture. Something slid from one side of Rebecca’s mind to the other, clicking as solidly as a key in a lock.

D for Dorothy. Dorothy was Katie Gemmell’s daughter. She’d replaced Louise as housekeeper here because of her mother’s pleas. Maybe Katie had looked dubiously at the wild teenager Dorothy had been and so had planned for her future. 1952—it had been several more years before Dorothy had actually come to work here. And despite Katherine’s bullying, Dorothy had gotten along with James well enough. James had trusted her.

But even in Dorothy’s fits of possessiveness she’d never pointed out her long relationship with the house. “Do you know who this is?” Rebecca asked, indicating the photo.

The housekeeper’s sallow eyes snapped and then dulled. “I’m going to clean your room,” she said. “At least you bother to make your bed and keep your clothes tidy.” She turned on her heel and walked stiffly out of the Hall and up the stairs.

My goodness, Rebecca thought. Either Dorothy was embarrassed at the way she’d gotten her job, or else she was afraid that Rebecca or Michael or Eric would realize what a strong motive she had for embezzling the collections. She could well believe that her grandparents, the Gemmells, deserved more than they’d received in helping to prevent a scandal over Elspeth.

I’ll ask Louise about it, Rebecca promised herself. It’s only a string of circumstantial evidence. Although I suppose Eric would tell me that people have been convicted on less.

The phone was ringing downstairs. Bundling the photo and the letter into the diary and the diary into its box, Rebecca hurried down to the kitchen.

It was Warren. “Here’s the lab report on your fire. Just greasy rags and scrap paper. No gasoline or other flammables. And no fingerprints.”

“Someone was either very clever,” Rebecca told him, “or very lucky.”

“Judging by those singed curtains, it’s you and Dr Campbell who are the lucky ones. I doubt if the perpetrator meant more than to frighten you, but a fire can easily get out of control.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Call me immediately if you think something else is going on,” Warren concluded, and Rebecca assured him she would. Not that it would necessarily do any good, she added to herself as she hung up.

Rebecca plopped down at the table and absently crunched a piece of Michael’s dried toast. Her headache, if not dissipating, was at least less insistent than her rumbling train of thought.

No fingerprints. Damn. Warren must have Steve’s and Heather’s prints on file. Did he have Dorothy’s? Hard to believe she would deliberately damage the house. Easier to believe Steve would be reckless—Heather had been angry with him about something. And yet Dorothy could have the stronger motivation. And there was Phil, too hangdog honest to be genuine.

On cue, Phil Pruitt’s voice sounded from the entry counterpointed by Steve’s whine. They were haggling over whether transplanting a rosebush or repairing a tread in the back stairs was first on the agenda. Both sets of footsteps went upstairs.

Darnley sauntered in the door and made for the pantry, turning his skeptical gaze on Rebecca. “All right then,” she said. She stood up, brushed the crumbs off her hands, and picked up the phone. It took her a moment to cajole Brian into fetching his mother, but soon Jan said brightly, “Sorenson’s fun house—nervous breakdowns our specialty.”

“Then I’ve come to the right place,” Rebecca told her.

“Hey, are you all right? Margie Garst said you had a fire out there.”

“Someone decided to get funny with the kitchen trash can, that’s all. No big deal.” Sure, Rebecca said to herself.

Jan wasn’t convinced either. “Why don’t you come and stay with me? Michael, too, if he’d like.”

“Run away? A fine thrawn lass like myself?”

“Say what?”

Rebecca grimaced at the flotsam her memory would spit out. “Never mind. I called to ask if you know what Dorothy’s maiden name is?”

“I assume there’s some reason you don’t just ask her. I mean, I’m a trusting soul. I trust you’re going to explain all this to me someday.”

“If I ever find any explanation I’d be glad to. Now, what was Dorothy’s maiden name?”

“Gosh,” said Jan. “Something like, like—Barton?”

Rebecca twisted the phone cord. “How about Brown?”

“I don’t know. She was born in Columbus, I remember Margie telling me that. I think they’re all gone; Chuck said something about never having grandparents on that side.”

“Good as far as it goes. Do you know anything else about her?”

“Well, Margie was griping about how absentminded Dorothy’s getting—she promised one of the kids a toy and then didn’t bring it when she came, and the poor little tyke was beside himself. Early senility?”

“Maybe she’s been under a lot of pressure lately.” Darnley jumped onto a chair and Rebecca stroked him. He looked up, amber eyes inscrutable.

“Maybe you’d like this one,” said Jan, with the air of a salesperson offering different pairs of shoes. “Margie and I were talking about the Tuchman girl—married on Monday, divorced on Wednesday, hadn’t even written her thank-you notes—and Margie says Dorothy went through a quickie marriage to a boy in Columbus back in her flaming youth days, before Chuck Garst.”

“Not too much of a scandal even then, I guess. But right now I’m more interested in her parents. Can you ask Margie what her maiden name is?”

“Sure. It may not be Barton, it may be. . .”

Darnley leaped down and fled into the pantry. Rebecca spun around and saw the figure standing in the kitchen door. Her mind fell into her stomach with a crash that rattled her teeth. She gasped, “Jesus H. Christ!”

“No,” mused Jan, “that’s not it. . .” Her brain caught up with her mouth. “Rebecca, what is it?”

“Ray just walked in the door.”

Ray stood smiling at her, glasses gleaming in anticipation. The blond wave across his forehead was still marked by the teeth of a comb. He wore a checked shirt, the pocket stained by ink, and his favorite corduroy jacket with the patches on the elbows. He was trying valiantly to hold in his stomach.

“Good grief,” said Jan. “You want me to call the exterminators?”

“I’ll call you back.” Rebecca hung up the phone and forced a breath into lungs that seemed to have petrified.

“Kitten!” Ray exclaimed. He set down his suitcase and came toward her, arms outstretched, face bifurcated by a grin. “I’ve missed you!”

He had her trapped where the cabinet met the wall. Paralyzed, she let herself be swept into his embrace. He smelled of pipe tobacco and Old Spice. She’d forgotten that; her mind had been filed through like the bars on a jail cell. He kissed one corner of her mouth and patted the back pocket of her jeans. “Getting a little hefty in the starboard beam, huh?”

“I’m not a coed any more,” Rebecca returned. She pointedly glanced up and down Ray’s slightly beefy body, broad shoulders that kept on going right down to his knees. “You haven’t lost any weight yourself.”

“I’ve had to live on fast food and TV dinners. Your cooking is so much better than mine.”

She realized she was clinging to his lapels, more to push him away than to draw him near. She released them and struggled out of the corner into which he’d backed her. “Ray, where on earth did you come from?”

“I started driving yesterday and spent the night in Indianapolis. It’s a long way out here, you know.”

They’d had too many conversations just like this, not quite in the same language. “I mean, why are you here?”

“You asked me to come, Kitten,” he explained patiently. “The message you left with Nancy in the departmental office—send me a pretty nightie and we’ll spend Thanksgiving together giving thanks.” He had the decency to try and suppress his smirk. “That got around the department pretty fast, let me tell you. Everyone was teasing me.”

Rebecca gaped at him. She’d thought that headache was getting better. It had merely turned a corner, gathered steam, and come back to hit her again.

“I had to get Gene to take my classes, and you know how he always expects a bottle or two of wine in return. But I figured a reunion with you was worth it.”

The negligee. A reunion. Oh God let me wake up this is a bad dream!

Ray remained substantial. Rebecca forced another breath and said, “I didn’t leave a message for you. I would’ve called you at home with something that personal. It was the same person who sent you those postcards. It had to have been. They called the department because they knew you’d recognize my voice.” A woman, she thought. It was a woman.

“Well I didn’t know. I never can figure you out. I thought you wanted to make up, maybe you’d been reading The Total Woman or something.” He pulled her close to his chest. Once she’d lived to cuddle against the breadth of his chest. It had been so safe, so comforting. Now it was like hugging a couch-sized marshmallow. “I’ve been worried about you, Kitten, so far from home and among all these strange people.”

Now she was going to have to hurt him again. Damn and double damn whoever was harassing her, making innocent Ray his—her—victim too. But no and no again, she wasn’t going to let some nut drive her away.

He bent toward her. She dodged, steaming his glasses. “Ray, listen to me. I didn’t call Nancy and ask you to come. I don’t know a thing about it. It was the prankster. I’m sorry—it’s not fair, none of it.”

His glasses cleared. Behind them his gray eyes flickered, understanding, not wanting to understand. She looked around for some alley down which she could duck, but no, hiding wouldn’t help.

A tattoo of footsteps and Michael bounded into the doorway, held out an ancient leather-bound book, and said, “Rebecca, look at this!”

She shook off Ray’s grasp. Ah, hell—Michael had been ready to resume normal diplomatic relations. But now his eyes were slightly crossed, his brows arched, as if someone had just hit his forehead with a hammer. His mouth was tucked in at the corner, with surprise, with humor—she couldn’t tell.

Ray looked Michael up and down. He was broader, but Michael was taller. Rebecca croaked, “Dr. Kocurek, Dr. Campbell.”

“How do you do,” said Michael, his lips loosening into a fair approximation of a smile. He stepped forward, hand outstretched.

“Hello,” Ray said. Warily he shook Michael’s hand. “You’ve been living here with Rebecca?”

“Aye,” said Michael. His smile took on death’s head proportions, his eyes went glassy.

Ray glanced from Michael to Rebecca as though he were considering dusting her for fingerprints. Realization swept his face. No, no, no, Rebecca wanted to wail, that’s not it at all. The silence in the room was like quicksand.

“So you like Dr. Who?” Ray said gamely, gesturing toward Michael’s shirt.

“Aye.”

“Rebecca likes that, too. It’s pretty amusing. Pitiful production values, though. Might as well be filmed in the BBC coffee shop. The special effects in Star Wars are much better done. . .” His voice trailed away. He looked down at the toes of his shoes.

Michael looked dubiously at Rebecca. He makes eye contact for the first time today, she thought, and it’s because of Ray. “Nice to meet you,” he muttered, and vanished out the door, clutching the book like a shield.

Rebecca’s jaw hurt. Oh, she was grinding her teeth.

“So,” Ray said, trying but not attaining a jovial tone. “That’s the Englishman. Seems nice enough. I’d always heard they didn’t talk much.”

“I wouldn’t let him hear you call him English.” She inhaled, keeping her anger from leaking into her voice. It wasn’t his fault. “Ray, I’m sorry you came all this way for nothing. It was a dirty trick.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he returned. “I had to come out this way anyway. I mean—well, I was saving the news for a surprise.”

“Oh?” For one dizzy moment she thought he was going to admit vandalizing the castle. But no, he hadn’t done that.

“I’ve been offered a position as the head of the philosophy department at Ohio Wesleyan. They liked my magazine articles. But a department head needs a wife—parties and stuff, you know. I’m a bachelor, I might not get the job. . .” Even Ray realized that wasn’t coming out right. He sighed and shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

“So am I,” she managed to say calmly. “But it’s not just that I don’t want to marry you, I don’t want to marry anyone. I have work to do, research, teaching. I don’t think I’ll ever marry.” She sounded like Peter Pan asserting he’d never grow up.

“I see.” Ray picked up his suitcase.

“The negligee’s very pretty,” Rebecca said. “Would you like it back?”

“Keep it, Kitten.”

“Thank you.” She kissed his cheek. “You’ll get the job, you’ll see.”

“Good bye.” He gazed at her a long moment, as if imprinting her image on his retina. Then with an anemic smile he turned and walked out the door, back straight, gut tight, cloaked in dignity.

Rebecca followed, glancing around. No Michael. No Dorothy, no Phil, no Steve. They were probably ranged in the windows of the castle like Romans in the Colosseum, eating popcorn while innocents were savaged below.

Ray put the suitcase into his Escort. He climbed in, shut the door, and slapped the steering wheel with as much hurt and anger as Rebecca had ever seen in him. He drove away with a spatter of gravel and not one backward look.

He hadn’t deserved this. Rebecca swore and kicked at the door.

Car horns shrilled from the end of the driveway. She waited, but the sound was not followed by rending metal and crashing glass. Rebecca sagged against the cold stone coping of the door. I will never commit myself to a man again. It hurts too much. It hurts.

The sky arched blue, clear, and indifferent overhead. The house was silent. The draft through the door and into the entry was chill on the back of Rebecca’s neck.

 

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