Ashes to Ashes (17 page)

She looked up the dizzying height of the castle, to the platform where they’d stood looking like the lurid cover of a paperback romance. She laughed at the absurdity of it all, and went back inside laughing, to the warm kitchen where the teakettle was whistling merrily.

Michael was slicing cheese onto pieces of bread arranged on a cookie sheet. Rebecca’s laughter withered into a rueful grimace. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt: that comment to Eric didn’t come out like you intended.”

He slipped the cookie sheet under the broiler, poured boiling water into the teapot, and didn’t look at her. “After all the American books and films I’ve seen you’d think I’d remember just what the four-letter words are. And there he was apologizin’, too. Made me look a proper twit.”

“Freudian slip?” she inquired dryly.

“Oh aye.” His voice was strangled by amusement or contrition or both, she couldn’t tell. “Mind you, that comment about things gone missin’ from the inventories was very instructive.”

“Michael Campbell, you are incorrigible.”

“It’s a national trait,” he assured her. “Sit down.”

Rebecca took off her coat and sat down. He plunked sandwiches and tea onto the table. The slice of tomato sunk into the hot cheese of her sandwich looked like a red smiley face. She smiled. “It’s a shame we can’t work in here all the time. It’s the warmest room in the house.”

“The house is no so bad,” replied Michael, joining her at the table.

“You’re used to a cold climate. A good thing Dun Iain isn’t in Texas. 110 degrees in August— you’d shrivel up and die.”

He rolled his eyes in horror and gulped scalding tea. “You’re from there?”

“I’m not from anywhere, really. My dad’s a machinist, and was always chasing the pot of gold at the end of the lathe. Never found it, though. He and my mother are in Florida now.”

“Florida. Disney World. When I first got here, I told Dorothy I’d be drivin’ down to Disney World for the afternoon. She laughed at me. Then she told me how far it was.”

Rebecca grinned. “To an American a hundred years is a long time. To a Britisher a hundred miles is a long way.”

“Just that,” Michael replied with his own dazzling grin.

When the dishes were empty, Rebecca began clearing them away. “I’m not so sure anymore,” she said, thinking aloud, “that there isn’t something in those rumors of treasure.”

Michael, caught halfway between seated and standing positions, finished straightening as if his joints had suddenly rusted. “You’re gettin’ carried away by that again?”

Rebecca stood balancing the plates, suppressing an impulse to hurl one at his head. Every time she was ready to take him at face value, he turned another version of that patronizing face. And she had defended him to Eric. “Even if there isn’t a treasure, someone— Phil, Dorothy, someone— believes there is.”

“No necessarily.” Michael started running water into the sink, accompanied by a robust squeeze of the detergent bottle. Suds billowed. “Whoever’s been creepin’ about probably doesn’t have such a nice, tidy motive. And there’s no law sayin’ it has to be someone we’ve met, either!”

Damn him, he had a point there. “All right, Dun Iain’s really an ancient cult center and everyone within a hundred mile radius is a Satanist and Darnley is their familiar.”

“Maybe it’s an alien invasion,” Michael countered, “and the place is filled with bug-eyed monsters in invisible space suits.”

No ploy she had ever learned for dealing with a man worked with this one. And they called women unpredictable! Rebecca tramped upstairs, collected the sticky cider cups, carried them back down and slipped them into the sink. “I’m going to work in the study,” she announced.

“I’ve one more cabinet in the Hall. What time is your friend expectin’ us?” Michael slopped dishes in and out of the sink so briskly soap bubbles swirled around him.

The man could cook
and
wash dishes. Truly mind-boggling. “Be ready at five-thirty,” Rebecca told him, and left.

She opened the front door. Sure enough, Darnley was waiting on the doorstep. He yawned, showing every indication he was doing her a favor by coming inside. “I’m beginning to understand,” Rebecca said to Queen Mary’s marble face, “why James named the cat after one of your husbands. Men!”

Forget about Michael. Forget about Eric, tempting as it was to indulge in a daydream or two. She hadn’t yet written Ray. Not that there’d be any point in writing a letter today, it wouldn’t go out until Monday. And there was work to do.

Rebecca collected a notebook from the Hall and saluted the suit of armor in the study. It was supposedly Charles I’s Dutch-made jousting attire, but without provenance Michael had had to leave it to the state. The first thing she saw on the secretary was the huge, ornate mausoleum key. She took it into the prophet’s chamber, opened the desk, chose a diary at random, and thrust the key inside. It caught on something.

Rebecca pulled out the entire book. The serrations of the key were hung on a photograph of a young woman taken sometime in the 1920s, judging by her bobbed and waved hair. Although she had a pretty, if rather plain, face, there was a discontented curve to the painted mouth that reminded Rebecca of Dorothy. Although Dorothy, she calculated quickly, probably hadn’t even been born when this picture was taken. The eyes were different, anyway, large and dark and oddly furtive. Had the girl sneaked out to have her hair cut despite her parents’ wishes, the typical adolescent rebellion of the period?

She turned over the thick cardboard. On the back was the stamp of a Columbus photography studio and a faded pencil scrawl. “Gemmell”, she thought it said. A last name only. Some lady friend of James’s? A relative? She scanned the page in the diary where the picture had been. It was an account of Warren Harding’s election in 1920. No help there.

Rebecca tucked the picture and the key inside the book and returned them to the drawer. She added “Windows below platform” to the list of repairs she was making for Phil. Back in the study, she pulled a chair up to the secretary and went to work.

A portfolio of illuminated medieval manuscripts would repay preservation. Several Roman coins rattled in an old cigar box, neatly labeled “Ardoch Roman Fort”. A flint arrowhead might be prehistoric.

Darnley leaped into her lap and thrust his tail up her nose. She did a record-breaking sitting high jump and then, ashamed of herself, patted the enticingly purring creature until he settled down on her lap, snagging her jeans with his claws.

A Neolithic chert axe head. A copy of
The New Yorker
, wartime edition 1944. A rolled strip of Aubusson tapestry. “Okay,” said Rebecca, “where’s the rest of it?”

Her voice boomed in the afternoon silence. Darnley looked up at her disapprovingly. Despite herself, she glanced over her shoulder at the empty doorway. Nothing. She might as well be alone in the castle with the cat and the spattering sounds of her frying nerves.

There was a medieval “healing stone”, a ball of dark quartz mounted in tarnished silver. Rebecca held it up, watching the mysterious play of light and shadow in its depths. Superstition, she told herself. It couldn’t really heal a hangnail. Although strange things happened in your mind if you believed— whatever. She thrust the stone into the back of the desk and checked it off the inventory. The cat’s sleeping weight was putting her legs to sleep.

More books, more papers. No Erskine letter. She considered a Caithness Glass paperweight, a modern version of the translucent healing stone, but the museum could buy itself a hundred of those. The room was warm, and the cat was purring as he slept. Rebecca’s eyelids went down for the third time.

She was suddenly yanked into wakefulness by the sound of footsteps. Darnley leaped from her lap, his claws stabbing into her thigh. She gasped. She was awake, all right.

The steps plodded down the staircase just outside the door. For a moment she sat paralyzed, every follicle on her body distended, while the cat crouched bristling at her feet.

“Darn it,” she whispered, “if that’s you, Michael… ” Darnley sped between her legs. She threw herself toward the door, knowing if she hesitated one instant longer she’d barricade herself in the prophet’s chamber instead.

Watery sunshine illuminated the landing and the stairwell. Nothing was there, not even a shadow. But still the footsteps continued, one after another, ringing hollowly on the cold stone.

Perception shattered and its shards sliced bloody grooves in Rebecca’s mind. She had had nightmares like this. She tried to move, but her muscles wouldn’t work. Her lungs burst and her face empurpled itself with a shout that wouldn’t come. But this wasn’t a nightmare. It was real.

The steps stopped. “Rebecca?” said Michael’s slightly slurred voice from the Hall. “Is that you?”

Galvanized, she spun across the landing and into the room. He was sitting at the table, his head lying on his crossed arms, one of a stack of books open before him. She collapsed in the nearest chair and stared at him, feeling as if her eyes extended from their sockets on stalks.

He sat up. “I thought I was dreamin’ footsteps. I wisna, was I?”

Wordlessly she shook her head.

“You went to look? What did you see?”

She shook her head again and forced out, “Nothing. I heard the steps but nothing was there.”

“Ah, bugger it,” he exclaimed. “I you’d only had a video camera we could’ve sold tapes to the telly!”

Something snapped in Rebecca’s chest. She inhaled raggedly, thought for one ghastly moment she was going to disgrace herself by crying, then burst into laughter that had more than a trace of hysteria in it.

Michael’s crazed smile crumpled. He looked around, as though considering making a break for it, then stood and patted her clumsily on the shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“Intellectually,” Rebecca gasped, “you can talk about ghosts and the supernatural all you want, but when it hits you emotionally— Christ!” She seized her wits, gulped, mopped at her eyes. “Yes, I’m all right.” This was ridiculous. She stood up so quickly her head cracked Michael’s solidly on the chin.

He staggered back, face contorted with pain, hand cradling his jaw.

“I’m sorry,” she moaned, rubbing the dent out of her skull.

Michael said between his teeth, “Is it time tae go yet?”

“It’s past four-thirty.”

“Good. I’d like tae be outwith Dun Iain for a time.”

“Even if it means going with me?”

He removed his hand from his chin and tried moving it from side to side. It still worked. “I never was brave enough tae go chase the footsteps,” he told her. “Even in broad daylight.”

“Darnley pushed me,” she said, ducking the question of whether he meant that as a compliment. “I’d better go get ready.”

Rebecca fled upstairs. The front door opened and shut. Michael bounded past her room. From her window she saw Darnley frisking across the lawn. She envied the cat’s simple life; this roller coaster of temperament she’d been riding made her feel as if she were possessed by a demon chameleon.

By the time she’d washed her hair and put on her makeup she was so limply drowsy she could barely keep from collapsing on the bed. She forced her eyes open far enough to examine her packet of birth-control pills. She really should keep taking them and forget her vague notions of giving her hormones a vacation. Which was a pretty cold-blooded calculation. But since those who equated romance with hot-blooded spontaneity ended up not with doctorates but with babies, she could live with it.

So having an affair will proclaim your independence of Ray, she said to herself. Are you sure it won’t cut your nose off to spite your face? What if Eric turns out to be the average mass murderer?

Eric couldn’t be a criminal. Any more than contradictory Michael, or laconic Phil, or garrulous Dorothy, or affable Warren. Michael was right. Whoever was responsible was someone they didn’t know, with motives they couldn’t fathom. With a frustrated snort she threw the packet back into the drawer and opened her jewelry case. Those hoops would go well with her tweeds. Or maybe those gold posts… .

She stared dumbly for a moment, the gears of her mind failing to mesh. Two gold posts lay in one compartment, one in another. The odd one was larger and heavier. She picked it up and held it to the light.

Steve had been wearing one like this when she’d met him beside the mausoleum. One like this had been caught in the bedspread last night, last week, whenever the room had been trashed. And today Steve had come back without Phil’s knowledge, wearing a different earring, and Heather had sneaked not to just anywhere in the house but to Rebecca’s room. Just as if she’d known where the room was. And what she was looking for.

Michael’s voice filtered down the stairs. He was singing something depressing about homesickness, defeat, and death. “Thanks a lot,” Rebecca said to the ceiling.

Steve and Heather had problems enough without her calling the law down on them. If it had just been her room, she might have let it go. Even though she wondered why they’d attacked only her room. Surely the smashing of priceless antiques would better have relieved whatever fit of resentment had come upon them than simply throwing around her ordinary things.

But they’d taken the mazer. They had to have taken the mazer. She had to tell Lansdale— she had no choice. Knowing that Michael was wrong, that it was someone they knew, brought no satisfaction at all. And as for their motive… . Pathetic kid, Eric had said.

Rebecca put the earring in a twist of tissue and tucked it into the bottom of her stocking bag. She looked back into the mirror to see Elspeth Forbes’s reflection gazing over her shoulder. The postcard was still tucked into the corner of her portrait, the rim of its shadow lying across her chin so that she seemed to be smiling knowingly at Rebecca.

“Yeah,” said Rebecca. “I’ll call Warren tomorrow. Tonight I’m going to get away, have fun, clear out the old gray matter.”

She left on the light beside her bed and the one in her bathroom as well, and was in the entry separating the new door keys from their ring when Michael came bounding down the stairs. His hair was meticulously combed and his faintly bruised jaw shaved. The off-white fisherman’s knit sweater he wore over a blue button-down shirt emphasized his rangy build, all sinew and synapses. Rebecca pounced. “What a gorgeous sweater!”