Chapter Twenty-Seven

 

 

Rebecca twitched and moaned. A man stood in the door of her room. Michael? She saw then it was an old man, so shriveled that decay seemed to have set in before death. “No,” he rasped, “don’t push me, help.”

Except for that quick glimpse when she’d first arrived, she’d never actually seen James before. She started up and found herself alone except for Darnley, who sat on her bed eyeing the doorway with feline equanimity. “I’m trying to help,” she whispered, but there was no answer.

Rebecca looked out the window into the diffused light of the morning. Snow had smoothed lawn and drive into one white expanse. The trees stood like dark candles in a cake, and the mound of the dovecote and tomb was softly lapped by white. The clouds were a low and gauzy gray, of that matte texture betraying cargos of yet more snow. The wind moaned and the castle hushed its own creaks and settlings to listen.

Shivering, Rebecca clambered into half the garments she owned and went downstairs. The teapot was warm and dirty dishes lay in the sink. She fixed herself eggs and toast and ate two leftover pieces of bacon.

She and Michael had spent last evening impassively sorting artifacts. Only his expression had reacted to her early arrival home, not so much with a query as with a kind of satisfied relief. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to ask him about his early suspicions of Eric; that would’ve required altogether too many explanations from them both.

Rebecca cradled her cup between her hands, but it had already cooled. Eric would either go to the police and brazen it out or he would run for it. He was more likely to brazen it out. His story sounded good. His stories always sounded good. He could wiggle out of the charges of theft, harassment and embezzlement even if he had to throw his own mother to the wolves. And what could the wolves do to her? She’d end up in a hospital, not in a jail.

Probably the first thing he’d done after leaving the restaurant was to tell Dorothy that Rebecca was threatening to blow the whistle on them. James had died because he’d threatened the same thing.

Rebecca leaped up and tidied the kitchen, her abrupt movements making the cutlery clatter and the dishes jangle. It was too late now to take back those accusing words. She would have to hedge her bets.

She went upstairs, got her typewriter and her notebook, put together sandwiches of plain and carbon papers and typed three letters outlining her suspicions. When she’d addressed the envelopes she put the letters in her purse. They wouldn’t be mailed to Sheriff Lansdale, Chief Velasco, and Benjamin Birkenhead until Monday. She’d give Eric and Dorothy a chance. If they didn’t take it. . . Well, she’d told each recipient of her letter the other two had a copy; each man would have to act just to save face. They couldn’t all be involved.

Rebecca went upstairs feeling slightly sick to her stomach. Michael was layering paper, kindling, and pieces of wood from a crate in the sixth floor fireplace. “Does the chimney work?” she asked.

“I’ve laid muckle fires in mountain bothys wi’ poor excuses for lums. Look.” He took a match from the box on the mantelpiece, lit a spill of newspaper and held it in the maw of the fireplace. A chill draft whisked the smoke cleanly away. The wind whimpered in the chimney. Michael looked up at her with a slim, distracted smile.

“Okay,” she said, returning the smile in kind.

Rebecca selected an inventory and sat down. She checked off a stack of Minton tiles, each carefully nestled in tissue paper. A bell-shaped pot, a Bronze Age funeral beaker. Brass Victorian kitchen ware from Neidpath Castle. A coin of King James V. When a faint swish-crunch of wheels penetrated the moan of the wind she rose and hurriedly clutched the back of the chair. Her limbs were petrified with cold, her feet numb. She hobbled to the window and saw a Datsun creeping through flakes of snow the size of saucers. What was Heather doing out here on a Saturday morning? Afternoon, she corrected, noting with surprise the angle of the hands on her watch.

Michael was sitting by the wooden box containing the haunted artifacts of Mary Stuart. But he was staring beyond the box at Elspeth’s window, abstractedly, not as if he saw something there.

Rebecca went off flapping her arms and stamping her feet, trying to get her blood circulating again. By the time she arrived in the entry it was reverberating with dull thunks. She pulled back the bolt and opened the door. A small bundled figure was kicking at it, arms filled with a knapsack and a wicker picnic basket. Rebecca had to look twice at the circle of face peeking out between stocking cap and muffler to make sure it was Heather. My goodness, the girl had quite attractive hazel eyes. Rebecca had never seen them before, impacted as they’d always been in black liner, mascara, and shadow.

She took the basket. Heather laid down the knapsack and emerged from her polyester chrysalis. “Hi!” she said, with the brittle, and probably equally false, cheer of a department store Santa.

“Hello,” returned Rebecca quizzically.

Heather threw her garments over the recumbent form of Queen Mary. Rebecca blinked; the marble face seemed to wince at such lese majeste. “I was over at the Pruitts,” Heather said, “and Mrs Garst came by with some food for them, and she said she was going to bring you some, and since I was coming out here anyway I said I’d bring it for her.”

So Dorothy’s cuisine tracked them through the storm. “Thank you. Would you like some cocoa?”

“Yes, please.”

Rebecca put on a pan of milk and peered into the basket. A congealed salad peered back at her, queasy orange Jell-O clotted with carrot strips and crushed pineapple. Another dish held gray hunks of hamburger meat laced with green peas and instant rice like bits of Styrofoam.

Exhaling through pursed lips, Rebecca closed the basket, fixed Heather’s cocoa, and made a fresh pot of tea. The girl’s hair, she decided, must be dyed that dismal black; it contrasted shockingly with a rosy complexion that owed its beauty to youth, not to artifice. But her expression was middle-aged, abused by gravity into a tragic mask.

Heather realized she was under surveillance. “I’m sorry, I rushed out of the house without my make-up.”

“You look just fine,” replied Rebecca, understating the issue.

“I’ve run away from home.”

Rebecca stood, teapot aloft, as if the squashed remnants of the girl’s spiky hairdo had been the snaky coiffure of Medusa. “What?”

“I’ve run away from home.”

Yes, that was what she’d thought she said. Rebecca laid down the pot, pulled out a chair and sat. “Your parents must be terribly worried,” she said, although what she wanted to say was, Why descend on me?

“My dad’s away on business. He’s always away on business. My real mother lives in Indonesia. Sandra went to her garden club. They’re making wreaths for the mall or something. I decided I just wasn’t going to take it any more.” With a quick smug smile Heather drank some of her cocoa.

“Take what?” Rebecca asked.

The child uttered a word she had no business knowing. “Sandra lost her cool because I came in late last night. She just doesn’t understand.”

“You know mothers,” said Rebecca with a wan smile, “their ears just fold up on you.”

“Stepmothers at least. I couldn’t have told her anyway. I thought maybe you could help.”

Rebecca frowned; she’d missed a conversational connector somewhere. “Help with what?”

“I mean, when I was in your room that time—sorry about that and everything, but we’ve been over that. . .” The girl waved her hand airily, dismissing past mischief. “I saw your birth control pills, so I figured you were, well, experienced.”

Rebecca wasn’t sure what to reply to that. She doubted the girl wanted a lecture on the sharp pecks of the birds and the harsh stings of the bees.

Heather said, “I think I’m pregnant.”

“Good God!” Rebecca took a gulp of tea and it stuck like a thistle in her throat. She sputtered, “And you’re afraid to tell your parents?”

“You know what they’d say?”

“I can make pretty good guess.” Someone moved in the entry. Michael and his British sixth sense had scented a cuppa and arrived in the doorway just in time for the shocking news. Heather turned, saw his stunned expression, and ducked into a defensive huddle.

Rebecca fixed a mug of tea, took it to the door, and pressed it into Michael’s hands. “Christ,” he hissed under his breath, “don’t you people have all night chemist’s shops? All the lad had to do was buy. . .”

“And I suppose you’ve always been a paragon of self-restraint,” interrupted Rebecca, turning him around and applying a firm push to his shoulders. “Go away. The last thing she needs now is a man!”

“Well, excuse me!” he said, and went back up the stairs.

Heather emerged from her crouch. “Is he gone?”

“Have you told Steve?” Rebecca asked.

Heather’s face wavered into the most peculiar expression, part exasperation, part amusement. “No, I haven’t. What could he do?”

“I’m not sure marriage is an option.” Foolish little Heather—she had her life ahead of her—look at Dorothy, her past sins returned to haunt her. Rebecca sat wearily down at the table. Her job description hadn’t included being Putnam’s Dear Abby. “How much overdue are you?”

“A couple of weeks. More or less. I’m never that regular.”

“Then it might be a false alarm. But for heaven’s sakes, Heather if it is. . .” She wanted to say, don’t do it any more, but the girl’s trusting gaze made every one of her own past indiscretions float wraith-like before her. “Get some information on birth control, okay?”

“Okay. But if it’s not a false alarm?”

“Tell your parents. And Steve. You can’t run away from it.”

“Oh.” Heather considered that, her face set with the artless adolescent self-absorption that drives adults mad. “Can I stay here tonight?”

Rebecca caved in. “If you call Sandra and ask. Tell her the snow’s too heavy for you to drive safely. That usually works.”

Heather jabbed truculently at the phone. Rebecca sipped her tea and listened to the girl’s half of the conversation. Although she could also hear most of Sandra’s; the woman was shrieking so loudly Heather held the receiver a foot from her ear. Finally Rebecca, suppressing a groan, interceded. “Mrs. Hines, this is Rebecca Reid. Yes, Heather is here with me. You know she helps with the cleaning. Yes, the roads are pretty bad, she should stay. Yes, I’ll make sure she earns her keep.” What Sandra said about ungrateful stuck up stupid Heather made Rebecca wince.

She hung up and turned to the girl. “You’re all right for tonight. I suggest you use the time to do some serious thinking. About Steve, for one. I’m sure he’s a nice kid, but. . .”

“Love is worth everything,” Heather said.

“No, it isn’t,” retorted Rebecca. “But that particular romantic fancy is one you simply have to outgrow.” The girl shrugged, unconvinced. Rebecca sighed—people who lived in emotional glass houses shouldn’t throw advice. “Are you hungry? Get some food and then come on up to the top floor.”

“Thank you!” Heather dived on the picnic hamper. “I’ll wash the dishes, too, okay?”

“Okay,” Rebecca said, smiling at the girl in spite of herself. Had she ever been that young? These days she felt as if she’d been born forty.

She found Michael in the ballroom, holding his cup and staring out a window. She walked up beside him and looked down on the tire tracks in the driveway, on the trees and dovecote half concealed in swirling white confetti. The wind sang, its words just beyond hearing, only the eerie melody audible. “There’s some food downstairs if you want it. Dorothy’s, I’m afraid. The Jell-O doesn’t look too bad.”

He turned to her, but his eyes were focused about two feet beyond her back. The angle of his brows indicated deep thought. “Right. Thank you kindly.” He wandered off across the room, still holding the cup she’d seen was empty, and sat down by a pile of boxes.

So she’d insulted his masculinity. Tough. Rebecca sat down, shifted, cataloged a few items, shifted again. She forced herself to concentrate. More ephemera, letters and documents. A Chinese vase from Fyvie Castle. A collection of 1950’s advertisements for refrigerators, including one for the model downstairs. It was some time later that she stood and stretched, pleased at the boxes standing properly labeled. Almost four o’clock.

Michael was gone. When had he left? Shaking her head, Rebecca started downstairs. The stairwell was dim, evening seeping in already. No one was on the fifth floor, or the fourth. Michael’s room was its usual defiant mess. Her own room was inhabited; Heather lay on the bed. She stirred as Rebecca looked in and muttered, “Thought I’d take a nap.”

“Go right ahead. Be my guest.” Rebecca tucked the girl under the blankets and flicked on the heater. Usually cold gloom made her sleepy, too, but not today. Today her nerves wriggled like insects stuck on pins.

The second floor was deserted. Drifts of shadow filled the corners of the Hall. On the gallery Elspeth’s portrait was turned so that her face peeked through the railings. In the empty kitchen the tea pot was cold. No Michael.

Rebecca looked into the store room. The dark mass of the boxes seemed to shift and grumble, inching forward in the corner of her eye. She shut the door on them. Of course. Michael was in one of the little rooms on the sixth floor. She started back upstairs not sure just why she was looking for him. On a stretch of staircase that five minutes before had been empty lay all seven crystal bottles in a neat row like a roadblock.

Rebecca stood staring. The chill lavender-scented draft in the stairwell raised the hair on the back of her neck. And then the hush was broken by the grotesque crash and clatter of the dishes in the pantry.

She spun around. The crash of the dishes was a natural phenomenon, nothing alarming. . . She went back down anyway, leaving the bottles, turning on lights as she went. The pantry door was closed. She opened it.

China shards lay strewn across the stone floor amid the crumpled shapes of the covering cloths, their bright colors like blood on a wound. One entire shelf of dishes had been swept clean, only shapes in the dust marking where they’d been stacked. Rebecca’s jaw dropped, her brain stammered.

No lavender. Not one whiff did she smell in the pantry. Michael? Why would he throw down the dishes? She looked into the sitting room. Darnley was curled up on the couch grooming his tail. He looked at her. She looked at him. No, he was too surefooted to have knocked the dishes down.

Rebecca turned. A dark faceless figure stood just behind her. She leaped back. Her heart exploded in her chest, pushing a gasp from her throat.

“Miss Reid, it’s me.” The nasal voice was trimmed of its adolescent whine. Furtive lashless eyes peered through the holes of a ski mask. Black coat, jeans, gloves and an eye-searing Cincinnati Reds scarf—it was Steve Pruitt.

Rebecca collapsed against the sitting room door as oxygen percolated painfully into her brain. “Where did you come from?”

“I—er—I had a key,” Steve said. “I came to get Heather. She said she was coming out here. I don’t want her out here.”

A little late to be assuming responsibility, Rebecca thought. “She’s here. Come on.” Rebecca hauled herself up the staircase, Steve’s boots clomping behind her. On the one hand she was grateful for the noise, on the other she wanted to tell him to be quiet, he was disturbing the tense silence of the house. “Did you walk in from the road?”

“Yeah. Snowplow’s been there already.”

In the bedroom Steve called Heather’s name and shook her. No response. Rebecca, frowning, got a wet cloth and slapped her face. Heather moaned and fell inert again. “What’s the matter with her?” Steve lifted one of her hands and dropped it. It fell limply, with a small thud.

Rebecca tried to remember what her sister-in-law the vocational nurse had once told her. She gently pried open one of Heather’s eyes. Her pupil was a grain of black in a dull iris.

“She’s on something?” Steve asked.

Rebecca shot a sharp glance at him. No, Heather hadn’t been despondent. It must be. . . Oh, come on now. She led Steve back downstairs and swept Darnley from his perch on the couch. In the kitchen she offered him a piece of meat from Dorothy’s casserole. He sniffed at it, hissed, contorted his body and with a snag of claws in Rebecca’s sweater leaped and ran.

Rebecca threw the casserole, dish and all, into the trash and washed her hands. With all those pill bottles clanking in her purse Dorothy hadn’t had to go far for inspiration. But she’d intended the drugged food for Rebecca and Michael, not Heather. Rebecca didn’t have to guess why. She’d forced Dorothy’s hand by telling Eric the game was up.

She threw down the dish towel and turned to Steve, hovering like a giant mosquito behind her. “Tranquilizers, I imagine.”

“Is she going to be all right?”

“If it’s Valium or something like that she can just sleep it off. Hardly any of the casserole is gone.” But Heather was small. What if she was pregnant? “It wouldn’t hurt to call the paramedics,” Rebecca concluded.

First an ambulance, then—no, not Warren, the Putnam police. Even if she couldn’t convince them Dun Iain was in danger maybe the activity would scare Dorothy and her minions away. Rebecca picked up the telephone receiver. Silence. She jiggled the buttons. Nothing. She clunked it down and sagged against the cabinet, her face in her hands. Calm down, she ordered herself. Heather wasn’t having trouble breathing. “A branch must’ve fallen across the line. Come on. Let’s do what we can, then you’ll have to go back into town and get help.”

“Yeah.” Surrounded by the dark blue ski mask Steve’s pale eyes made his head look like a skull in negative image. Rebecca didn’t need to see his disfigured face to sense his fear. Having your employer try to burn you to death didn’t generate loyalty. He glanced over his shoulder more than once during their trip up the stairs, but no more often than Rebecca.

The next half-hour was the most unpleasant Rebecca had ever spent. But by the time they walked Heather out of the bathroom and up and down the corridor her eyes had cleared and she was muttering curses at them. Steve, with surprising tenderness, tucked her back into bed. “I’ll bring help, I promise,” he said. His eyes glinted with terror, but his voice was firm.

“Thank you,” Rebecca replied. “I couldn’t have taken care of her alone.” And she thought, Michael sure had found something interesting in one of the small storerooms. The turkey, they could’ve used his help.

When Rebecca opened the front door a blast of wind buffeted her and she clung to the handle. “Bon voyage,” she said as Steve plunged past her. For a moment he was a silhouette amid swirling white confetti. Then he was gone.

Rebecca stood squinting into the darkness. Steve’s steps were deep holes in the drifted snow, deeper than the set he’d made coming in. Heather’s steps were almost filled. Three sets of tracks. Rebecca’s teeth were chattering. She slammed the door, shot the bolt, trudged wearily into the kitchen and started clearing up the broken dishes.

She stopped suddenly in mid stoop, dustpan dangling. When she’d opened the door for Steve to leave, the dead bolt had been open. But she’d shut it when she’d admitted Heather. If the dead bolt had been closed when Steve came no key could possibly have let him into the house.

Rebecca dropped the broom and dustpan and raced upstairs, vaulting the barrier of crystal bottles. “Michael! Michael, where are you?” He wasn’t on the sixth floor. His coat and his wellies weren’t in his room. Neither was his flashlight. He was gone. Not in his car—it was still in the parking area under its shroud of snow.

Rebecca’s knees dumped her onto a stone step. Her mind shattered like the dishes, shards of thought tumbled in indiscriminate piles like a thousand-piece puzzle. She scrabbled among them; some had to fit together.

Three sets of footprints. Heather coming. Steve coming and going. Michael going. . . That wasn’t right. Somebody had levitated.

A movement. Rebecca spasmed to her feet. Darnley sat at the foot of the stairs, bristling, staring upward, not at her but through her. James’s steps plodded down the stairs behind her. She shrank against the wall. A shape brushed by her, too solid for air, too insubstantial for flesh. Her eyes burned, but she could see nothing.

The steps stopped. Darnley looked up, meowed, and arched his back as if petted by an invisible hand. Then the cat glanced at Rebecca as if to say, yes, something wrong with you?

Silence. Rebecca started to breathe again. With a tangible click her thoughts dropped into place. James had fallen down these stairs and been buried in the mausoleum. Steve had taken the mausoleum key without apparently coming in the house. Darnley went in and out of the dovecote. Michael had looked through her when he turned away from the window, lost in thought. Elspeth’s jewels made a reliquary.

“Why that sneaky underhanded two-timing rat!” Rebecca exclaimed. “What a muckle great idiot I am, and with all the evidence he had!” Her voice echoed mockingly up the stairs. She left it behind as she galloped to the study. The mausoleum key was gone. Not one puzzle piece, then, but two, fitting back to back like the dovecote and the mausoleum.

She grabbed her coat and hat, gloves and boots—not that she was cold, she was burning with rage. She ran to Michael’s bedroom, pulled two blankets from his bed and spread them over Heather. The girl’s forehead was cool, but not cold. Her breathing was nice and even.

Rebecca finished sweeping up the dishes, the shards rattling into the trash pail. There—that was the shelf that had Darnley’s hole beneath it. No coincidence that the one next to it was the one the dishes had fallen from. Steve, a klutz at the best of times, probably couldn’t see much through that ski mask.

She poked, prodded, and with a fierce oath kicked. The shelves moved. Subtlety, she told herself, not force. She pulled, and with the hiss of oiled hinges the entire section of shelves and the wall behind them swung open. Rebecca aimed her flashlight into darkness. John’s paranoia? An idle moment for the architects? A joke of James’s?

It didn’t matter. A short muddy stairway led to a tunnel that was so low she had to stoop. Stone walls traced with root tendrils leaned toward her. She was beneath the huge, heavy walls of the castle. Contracting her body into as little space as possible she shone the light ahead. The path was perfectly clear, the stone flags of the floor marked with foot and paw prints. Grand Central Station.

A small hole was Darnley’s detour to the moggie gate behind the rosebushes. The main track led on. The odor of mildew and dirt choked her. The skin between her shoulder blades prickled but she didn’t turn around. Ahead of her was a rounded three foot high opening like the door of a hobbit hole, outlined by the faint silvery glow of the night.

She emerged inside the dovecote, the wind whining through the frost-rimed interstices in the stone. Hinges gleamed murkily on the inside of a stone that was, on close inspection, only plastered wood. A handy dandy little entrance indeed.

Rebecca opened the door and stepped out. The snow around the side of the mausoleum and on the steps down to the entrance was pocked with footprints. The lock, glinting with bright bronze streaks, hung open. A dim yellow luminescence leaked between the door and its frame.

Here in the lee of the structure the wind was stilled. The laden tree branches creaked sadly. If Rebecca turned around she might see spectral faces among them. If she went inside the tomb she might see worse. She stood palpitating, listening, sensing. Malice, yes. A sad tired malice, gnawed almost to nothingness. A terrible patience worn so thin and fine it had at last snapped. Perhaps as the things in the house were sorted through John lost his last hold on existence. He’d defined himself through his possessions.

“Do you want it found, John?” Rebecca whispered. “Are you as tired as I am of this charade?”

Fortunately there was no answer. Taking a deep breath of ice and mold Rebecca threw her shoulder against the massive door. It gave. Her momentum carried her inside, and her feet stumbled down a short flight of steps.

She had a quick impression of shelves built into the stone walls, for the most part filled with nothing but dust, cobwebs, and darkness. A flat stone bench like a druid altar stood in the center of the building’s semi-circle. Michael sat there, his elbows resting on his knees, his head hanging, his flashlight lying beside him. He twitched but didn’t look up at Rebecca’s sudden entrance. His light seemed as bright as a strobe flash, illuminating one arc of the curving wall. Above it shadows clung like bats to the ceiling.

Rebecca tightened her teeth, filtering a stench of mildew and decay so thick she expected it to deflect the beam of her own flashlight. She ignored the slow crawl of her skin and swept her light around the tomb. To her left was a shelf holding a dusty coffin, its brass nameplate tarnished. But she knew what it said: “John Forbes, 1847-1931”. Just below it was another coffin, its wood still bravely gleaming beneath a thin patina of dust. That nameplate was quite legible: “James Ramsay Forbes, 1892-1988”.

Michael faced a third coffin, even grayer and more dismal than John’s. It had no nameplate, but Rebecca knew whose lovely mortal shell lay there broken but not quite abandoned. “Elspeth,” she whispered. Her breath was shockingly loud. Michael stirred but didn’t look up.

Below that shelf was a miniature coffin as sad and derelict as Elspeth’s. The baby might not have been hers. It probably wasn’t even a Forbes. But whether mother and daughter or murderer and victim, the woman and child were spending eternity side by side.

In the glare of light, trailing cobwebs back into the shelf beside the baby’s coffin, was a box. Its tilted lid was smeared with handprints revealing the rich sheen of mahogany. A screwdriver lay on the floor beside it.

Michael was sitting a good three feet away. As Rebecca stepped closer she saw tears like drops of ice glistening on his cheeks. Her rage died with the sudden flare of a magician’s flame paper. “The Forbes treasure? You’ve found it?”

He wiped his face with a gloved hand. “Oh aye, I’ve found it.”

Rebecca walked forward. The cold air seeping through the door made odd little whorls with the clammy air inside the tomb, stirring dead leaves across the stone floor and licking at her ankles. Malice, patience, pain. . . She ignored the bulk of Elspeth’s coffin just above her and focussed her light into the shadow-filled box.

A face looked up at her. Her breath escaped in a short cry. She jerked away and spun toward Michael aghast.

“Got me too,” he said. “Payin’ me back for a’ those jokes aboot her. But it’s no her head. Look again.”

With an audible swallow Rebecca looked again. The beam of her flashlight wobbled and steadied. The face was plaster; each eyelash of the closed eyes was defined, the cheeks were slightly sunken, the nose sharp. The mouth curved in a delicate, chillingly tranquil smile. It was the face of the effigy, of the Curle portrait—the face of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Rebecca went down on her knees in the dust and litter. “My God. It’s beautiful. It’s horrible.”

“You said yoursel’,” replied Michael, “the face o’ her effigy was modeled on her death mask, but the mask at Lennoxlove’s no like it. And that one’s too small. This is the real one.”

“Provenance?” Rebecca’s voice thinned to a wisp.

Michael knelt beside her and opened a small drawer in the base of the box. It was filled with yellowed papers. “Provenance a’ the way back tae the great hall at Fotheringhay. Queen Elizabeth ordered the mask made. She’d never actually seen Mary, mind you, and this was her last chance. That face is hers. It’s really hers. . .” He stopped to regain control of his voice. After a moment he said, “The Erskine Letter’s no here, either.”

A draft snaked along the floor and beneath the hem of Rebecca’s coat. Stone grated on stone. She glanced up and swung her light around the tomb. Nothing was there, just shade and sorrow and stench.

Michael indicated the cloth in which the mask was nestled. “John cut up an Aubusson tapestry for her. Cheap at the price. I dinna ken aboot this, though.” He flipped aside a fold of fabric next to the plaster chin.

Cold flame danced around the face. Elspeth’s garnet, jet, and diamond choker wrapped the severed neck of the dead queen. “John loved Mary,” Rebecca said. “She’d never lied to him. . .” She leaped to her feet, away from Elspeth’s coffin. But nothing happened. Elspeth’s spirit was in the house.

Michael heaved himself up beside her. “James never kent where the necklace was. He lied, Adler lied, it’s a’ been lies, a’ but that face.”

“Lies?” said Rebecca. The unwholesome air clogged her chest and made her slightly dizzy. “Lies?”

Michael flinched.

“Why did you come out here alone?” she went on, not in a shout but in a mild perplexed weariness. “Is that how you were able to look me in the eye and tell me you hadn’t stolen anything, because you hadn’t yet found what you were planning to steal?”

“No!” he protested, and then, on a long agonized sigh, “I dinna ken what the hell I was plannin’.”

“You might not be able to sell the mask,” said Rebecca remorselessly, sparing neither of them. “But the necklace would sure bring a tidy sum. No one need even know it was here.”

“You would,” he said under his breath.

“Don’t mind me. I’m the one who thought that line about ‘the greed of the Campbells’ was just propaganda. Well, you and Colin can get what you want now, guns or fancy cars or whatever you’ve been after all this time.”

“No guns. We never wanted guns.”

“No. I don’t think you did.” Her voice trembled but she was too tired to steady it. Maybe Michael’s shoulders were shaking. It was too dark to tell. Rebecca herself shook, the clamminess of the tomb permeating coat and sweater and oozing into her bones. The mask looked upward. She wasn’t so sure its lips weren’t moving in prayer.

Quickly she covered the cold, pale, compelling face with a piece of tapestry, set the cover back on the box and replaced the screws. “We might as well leave it here. Cold and damp—a museum couldn’t preserve it any better.”

With a heave and a startlingly loud scrape and crash Rebecca put the box back on the shelf. She stood, dusted herself off, and turned away from Elspeth and Mary and the link, a dead child, that bound them together throughout time. Holding the screwdriver toward Michael she said, “Here. If you decide you want the necklace you’ll need this.”

He didn’t take it. She could hear his ragged breath in the silence, edged with the distant wail of the wind. With a snort of exasperation that was close to a sob she thrust the screwdriver into his pocket. “Here, damn it!”

His flashlight rolled slightly on the bench and the shadows swirled and steadied. His ravaged face turned away from her toward the darkness.

Rebecca spurted into the cold but fresh air. Around the corner of the tomb the gale-driven snow slapped her face and ran like tears down her cheeks. The lights of the castle hung in the seething darkness before her as if they were strung in mid-air. She stood, snow drifting over the tops of her boots, and looked at them. Dun Iain’s impassive face made no response.

For once I had my priorities straight, she thought. Michael and I were friends before ever approaching love, physical or otherwise. For us there wouldn’t have been a boundary but a ford, a gate, a bridge. She spun and shouted toward the misshapen hump of the mausoleum, “But there’s no such thing as truth, is there?”

Her words were shredded by a gust of wind so strong she staggered against the icy side of the dovecote. From the woods came a rumbling thud and a wet hiss. Every light in Dun Iain went out. Rebecca stood blinking. Another branch, this time breaking the power line. She wasn’t surprised.

Beyond the snow-filled beam of her flashlight loomed the merest suggestion of blackness, of solidity in an insubstantial world. Rebecca opened the door in the doocot, trudged inside, and shut it behind her.

 

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