Ashes to Ashes (46 page)

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.

The kitchen was as dark as the tunnel. At least the walls and the ceiling didn’t seem like a throat threatening to swallow her. The clock gyrated in the beam of Rebecca’s flashlight as her hand shook to the pounding of her heart. It was seven-thirty. She could’ve sworn it was midnight.

She shut the secret door and the door to the pantry itself. She stood breathing deeply and rhythmically of the still, warm air of the kitchen with its undercurrents of dust and toast, forcing her heart to steady.

“Whatever happens,” Michael had said, “I want you to know… ” What? Had he still been planning to steal the treasure as late as yesterday?

And yet, no matter what his intentions had been, she couldn’t believe he’d ever actually stolen so much as a paper clip. He’d lied, yes. But his expression in the mausoleum had been that of a man who’d struggled through the hell of his own worse nature and emerged bloodied but unbowed.

Rebecca pulled her gloves off with her teeth and threw them in the direction of the counter. As if she didn’t have some rather more important things to worry about. Dorothy had intended for them to be deep in pharmaceutical dreamland when she and her minions came to take what they could and run. Circle the wagons, batten down the hatches, raise the drawbridge… . None of which would make any difference to people who no doubt had a key to the house and burglar’s tools to open the dead bolt.

She’d done enough already, naively assuming they’d choose the honorable way out. With a snort of disgust Rebecca pushed the table against the pantry door, blocking it. She took another flashlight from the drawer, put it in the pocket of her jeans, and walked into the entry.

Heather’s outer garments still lay across the sarcophagus. Rebecca scooped them up and focussed her light on the cold white face of the effigy. Yes, even in half-scale it was the same as the mask, the fullness of the face emphasized by middle age, the slightly aquiline nose emphasized by death. Rebecca shuddered in awe and horror mingled.

Forcing herself away from that face, she opened the bolt on the door. In spite of everything Michael was still the only friend she had tonight.

She plodded to her room. No electricity, no space heater. She couldn’t carry Heather upstairs to the fireplace. She pulled her hat onto the girl’s lolling head and arranged the collection of coats across her body. Running away was no option, especially when it would mean leaving Heather, a discarded pawn, behind.

Rebecca turned off her flashlight and leaned against the window embrasure, arms crossed tightly. The wind sobbed, blowing the snow horizontally across the glass. Maybe she could play possum, pretending to be asleep while the predators helped themselves; she could always testify against them later. But if Steve had been sent to scout, not to get Heather, they’d know she hadn’t eaten the tainted food.

Maybe they wouldn’t come tonight, discouraged by the weather… . Not bloody likely. Not after all the time and effort they’d already expended.

Rebecca moaned between her teeth. She was hideously vulnerable in the dark, in the cold, in the labyrinth of the old house. So were the artifacts, their haunting memories destined to be sold like boxes of cornflakes. Her mind tested the razor’s edge of hysteria and recoiled. Stop it! She doubled over, grinding her fists into her ribs. How dare they scare me like this! How dare they make me feel so helpless!

There was a flashlight, a shivering firefly almost obscured by snow. She tracked its path toward the house. A moment after it disappeared below her the door slammed and the dead bolt snicked. That was Michael, wasn’t it?

Scowling with rage rather than whimpering with fear, Rebecca crept to the stairs and felt her way down far enough to see Michael’s lanky form following the gleam of his flashlight into the Hall. In the backspill of light his mouth was pinched shut, his jaw outthrust. Before long he’d remember the fire he’d laid upstairs. Maybe by then she could face him.

Gingerly Rebecca climbed upward, turning on her flashlight only when she was past the third floor. Coffins lurched through the darkness in the corners of her eyes. Mary’s serene white face floated behind her, the open eyes fixed in mild surprise on the back of her neck. Every black doorway like a gaping mouth made her skin crawl as though it wanted to escape her body and hide. The profound silence of the house blanked out even the wail of the wind. No matter how carefully she climbed, her footsteps tolled on the stone.

The bottles were no longer on the steps. Rebecca peeked into Elspeth’s bedroom. Crystal flashed from the dresser. The furrow in the bedclothes moved, as if the sleeper woke and turned to rise. She shut the door and scampered up the next flight of stairs. Yes, the fatal window was open a crack, snow sifted onto the sill. No point in closing it, too.

Rebecca lit the fire, her hands so cold they fumbled three matches before one caught. She poked the burning kindling and leaned the poker against the brick. When the fire was throwing out bright yellow light she turned off her flashlight. She had the extra one, but it would be a long night.

The light of the flames danced on the walls, making the shadows writhe. The wood snapped and sighed. Rebecca set a cushion behind a couch to one side of the hearth, where her back was against warm, solid brick. The claymore leaned in its corner beside her, gleaming with fiery reflections. She saw herself standing at the top of the stairway like Joan of Arc… . Yeah, remember what had happened to her.

Something brushed by her, a palpable fall of fabric. Rebecca leaped to her feet. Beneath the odor of woodsmoke that of lavender swirled in the air. Rebecca heard a giggle, quickly muffled. “What do you know I don’t?” she asked under her breath, but there was no answer. She swept both flashlights around the room. The light glinted on the brittle blackness of the windows. Nothing and no one was there, just lavender, shadow and chill.

Rebecca turned off the lights, pocketed them, sat back down behind the couch, and pressed against the brick. Shutting her eyes against the wierd patterns of the light, she counted out several slow breaths. Too many plots, she thought. Too many malefactors, living and dead. She could try a little creative problem-solving, that was better than mindlessly waiting for… . Well, whatever.

She focused. Here Phil had found Louise’s necklace, a bribe to forget Katie Gemmell’s mysterious birth. It was Athena who’d remembered. She’d convinced Katie she deserved part of the Estate. But Katie had been conspicuous by her absence for thirty-six years now.

James’s last will, the unsigned one, hadn’t mentioned relatives. But that one wasn’t the legal one. The Estate was going to be an unexpected inheritance for the Morris’s… . Aha! That was when she’d made that comment about an unexpected inheritance— the first time she and Eric had gone to Gaetano’s. That night she’d still been innocent, not yet savaged by plot and time. The food and conversation had sparkled like Eric’s gold ring. A diamond, and his engraved initials “EFA”. His middle name was Frederick.

Her eyes opened, seeing nothing but the gleaming image of that ring. Frederick. Where else had she heard that name? Frederick. Fred.

Louise had said that Katherine Gemmell Brown left her husband for someone named Ed, Ted, or Fred. Who was a bad influence on her son.

Rebecca banged her forehead against her fists, trying to knock perception into her mind. What if Katie’s paramour had been named Fred— Fred Adler? Then Ronald would have been… . But no. James’s letter had said something about their grandchild “D”. Unless “D” was the daughter.

Again something moved. Rebecca started up. A man stood watching her. She squinted, and saw nothing but a chair and a bookcase illuminated fitfully by the ebb and flow of the firelight. She had to look more carefully, she told herself. She had to clear her mind of preconceived assumptions.

Grandchild “D”. Deborah, Diane, Doris. Darnley. David, Dennis, Daniel, Donald. Donald? Rebecca saw the smeared letters on the screen in the Records office. She hadn’t interpreted the one word as “Horton” because she’d already known Dorothy’s name was “Norton”. But the man, Eric’s father— his name she hadn’t known in advance. Maybe it wasn’t Ronald but Donald. Maybe Donald was Katie’s son, who’d taken the name of his stepfather, Fred Adler.

Fireworks exploded in her head. That was it! The link between Katherine and Dorothy and Eric! Rebecca leaped to her feet, did a quick jitterbug on the hearth and plumped back down onto her pillow.

Where was Donald Adler? Where was Fred, for that matter? Why had Dorothy returned to Putnam but Katherine hadn’t? Because Katherine had taken the child to California and filled his head with her mother’s stories of cats smothering babies and property hoarded by the undeserving! Katherine might still be sitting out in California, an old spider weaving her web over Dun Iain and everyone who belonged to it.

Every link sounded true, right down to Eric’s cat phobia. Motive, opportunity, ambition. Rebecca visualized the portrait of John Forbes. His eyes were onyx marbles. Eric’s eyes were dark, too. But then, so were Rudolph’s. And Elspeth’s. Donald Adler might have had Rudolph’s and Eric’s devastating good looks. No wonder Dorothy had been swept off her feet.

A shame, Rebecca thought, she had at last come up with a viable theory too late to do her or the house any good… . She stiffened, her muscles keening with tension. Footsteps were coming upstairs. James? Michael? If it was Michael he’d be calling to her.

The floorboards squeaked. A light flickered. Darnley’s little head appeared above her, looking at her quizzically over the back of the couch, his tail waving like a semaphore. Rebecca made shooing gestures. Darnley said in conversational tones, “Meow.”

Two quick steps and hands seized her, one around her chest, the other pressed over her mouth. Her scream was only a choked gurgle. Eric’s hands were sturdy, Warren’s were large, Phil had picked her up bodily from the broken chair… . The strong arm across her chest was deceptively slender. The fingers that crushed her right breast were long and flexible. “Hush,” said Michael’s rounded vowels in her ear. “You’d think I was Jack the Ripper.”

“Then stop acting like him!” she mumbled, and bit him.

“Ow!” Both hands vanished. She swung around. He was shaking the hand she’d bitten and inspecting the other, just realizing what it was he’d been holding. “Sorry. But I didna want you tae go screamin’ on me. I heard something movin’ aboot that wisna the cat nor one o’ the bogles. Someone’s in the hoose.”

“Already?” Rebecca sat hard on the wooden floor but didn’t feel a thing. “How’d they get in? If it’d been when you were outside, there’d have been four sets of footprints. And I closed off the tunnel.”

“Tunnel?” Michael peered over the back of the couch like a soldier looking from his trench into no man’s land. Darnley sniffed at him, made a face, trotted away. Michael settled back down beside Rebecca, so close she could smell his breath. So he’d had a swig of the whisky while he was in the Hall. He could’ve brought her some.

“Of course there’s a tunnel.” Even as Rebecca explained about Heather and the drugged casserole, about Steve and his ambiguous promise to bring help, she remembered that scrape of stone, that quick draft in the tomb. That was when the predators had come inside. They’d been inside all this time.

Michael laid his hand on her arm. The fingers pressing her skin through blouse and sweater were wonderfully firm. In the glow of the fire his features were stark, ravaged by self-knowledge, tired and yet stubbornly denying the tiredness. He could tell her it was a balmy summer day outside, she thought ruefully, and she’d believe him. “You look terrible,” she said.

“Seein’ that face in the tomb was damn close tae a religious experience,” he replied. And added, “You’re no sae lovely yoursel’. Half-Hangit Maggie looked fitter when they pulled her oot o’ the coffin.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” And he said, low and urgent, his accent so thickened by his agitation she could hardly understand him, “Aye, I’d been thinkin’ o’ theivin’ something. I’m sick tae death o’ cheese-parin’. But what made me think I could steal when I never had the gumption tae park illegally I dinna ken. I came here tae work, no tae steal. That was lunacy.”

Odd how she’d once thought Eric’s eyes were compelling. They were blank slate compared to Michael’s hot, demanding blue gaze. “You don’t owe me any explanations.”

“Oh aye?” he replied. “If I dinna owe you, lass, I dinna owe a soul.”

Rebecca looked up at the plaster ceiling and down at the planks of the floor, trying to evade those immeasurably deep eyes. But they followed her. She said, “You told me several days ago your scheme didn’t concern me.”

“I didna ken what was goin’ on here, did I? The only thing I was sure I wanted was for you to get away free and clear. No right you’re bein’ mucked aboot because I was gey daft.”

“It was too late for that even then! Besides, how do you know I haven’t been in on the plot all along?”