Houses of Stone (8 page)

The house would have made a better impression than its owner. It was one of the old Victorians, lovingly restored. The glow of a nearby streetlight showed neatly trimmed boxwood behind an ornate wrought-iron fence and gate. The lawn was as smooth as a green carpet; flower beds
were mulched and weedless. Peggy must employ a gardener, she couldn't keep the place in such impeccable condition by herself, and the house, with its ornate gingerbread trim and spreading porches, must cost its owner a fortune in yearly maintenance. Karen wondered why she hadn't realized before that Peggy had money. Well, the answer was obvious. It hadn't mattered to her before.

The interior, furnished with fine antiques, was as spotless as the exterior. Peggy must also employ a cleaning team. She had no live-in servants. It was an interesting contrast—Peggy's careless personal appearance and her impeccable house.

Peggy tossed her coat onto a chair. "Want a drink?"

Standing in the open doorway, Karen shook her head. "I really can't stay, Peggy. You know how those cats of yours affect me. My nose is already starting to itch."

"Oh, come on. I'll keep them away from you."

"You said that the last time. It's impossible; cats always head straight for me. Anyhow, it's the dander that sets off my allergy, and your house is full of it. Damn, there they come—"

Peggy scooped up the half-grown tabby that had plunged down the stairs and was indeed making a beeline for Karen. "Oh, all right, we'll sit on the porch." She tossed the tabby onto the stairs, fended off another admirer with a well-placed foot, and followed Karen out the door.

The night air was cool but not uncomfortably so. They settled into a pair of wicker chairs, and Peggy said, "Well?"

"I asked you first."

"So you did. Okay. The simplest and most obvious explanation for his behavior is that he wants to sell you something."

"What? He's already sold the manuscript."

"And regretting it. Not that he had much choice; as he candidly admitted, he had no idea that mess of papers was worth money. But behind his rueful, charming admission of fallibility, I sensed a certain smugness. He's got something else he wants to sell. Family documents? Maybe even the house itself. And now he knows it's worth money, at least to you. I'll bet used-car dealers love you."

"I'm not that gullible," Karen protested.

"Your appearance is against you," Peggy said, studying her critically. "Leaving off the makeup and wearing tailored suits doesn't help. Instead
of an older, professional woman, you look like a kid trying to look like an older professional woman."

Karen scowled. "For your information, I handle used-car dealers just fine. I knew what he was doing. But when I started thinking about what he might have, I ... so, okay, I lost it." She leaned forward, her eyes shining. "More poems. A diary. Letters. Even the missing pages of the manuscript!"

"The house has been cleared out," Peggy reminded her. "Simon already told you that."

"Yes, but the sale hasn't been held yet. They're waiting till May—the height of the auction season."

Peggy shook her head. "That sounds fishy to me."

"You're just determined to throw cold water on everything," Karen said sulkily.

"Somebody has to. You're flying high, honey. If you fall, the crash is going to hurt like hell. You have no proof that Ismene ever lived in that house. The manuscript could have been acquired at a sale."

"There's only one way to find out."

"That's not true. There are a lot of ways. But," Peggy admitted, "we'll have a look at the place. Weekend after this, maybe. Or the following week."

Smiling, and outwardly calm, Karen nodded agreeably. It took all her willpower to keep that fixed smile in place, and to conquer the anger that knotted her stomach. She was sick and tired of being ordered around, treated like a child. Everybody did it. Simon, Peggy, her parents, her friends, her ex-husband.

Especially her ex-husband. Her decision to leave Norman had stunned her acquaintances. "But he adores you," one of them had said in obvious bewilderment. "He takes such good care of you."

His Baby.

Karen left town at ten o'clock Friday evening, after meeting all her classes, keeping several student appointments, attending a faculty meeting, and turning down Joe Cropsey's invitation to have a drink with him. Shortly after midnight she checked into a motel outside Frederick. It would have been irresponsible to drive straight through. Unproductive, as well; she
could hardly go prowling around the grounds of a strange house in the small hours of the morning.

As she locked the door of the motel room and tossed her overnight bag onto the bed, a heady sense of escape filled her. No one knew where she was. No one could find her. There would be no knock at the door, no ringing of the telephone. This was the ultimate freedom—with no Grand Inquisitor lying in wait to drag her back to her cell.

Her slippered feet sank deep into mud that squelched and clung. The wet, matted weeds in the center of the rutted track were slick as ice. Interlaced branches formed a canopy overhead, a dark, twisted fabric through which the rain forced passage, now in trickles, now in heavier streams. Her wet hair writhed like a living thing, coiling around her throat. She reached up to pull it away, and saw the house ahead, looming dark against a storm-gray sky.

Karen stopped and rubbed her eyes. Her lashes were heavy with wet, but an overactive imagination, not impaired vision, must have produced those fleeting impressions. Her hair wasn't long; it was cut short, and plastered to her head by the rain that had soaked through her scarf. Her shoes were sensible brogues, not thin slippers. The skies were cloudy, but not menacingly dark; it was just past noontime.

The house still looked forbidding. It was no typical Tidewater mansion, beautifully proportioned and painstakingly hand-crafted (by slave labor, Karen reminded herself), but a graceless square block with narrow windows that gave it the appearance of a fort rather than a home. Chimneys on either end, disproportionately tall and slender, pointed skyward. Even the signs of long neglect and the weedy, untended grounds did not wholly account for its unprepossessing appearance. Hayes had been right; of architectural distinction there was none.

There were signs of recent attempts at renovation. The lawn had been mowed, though its green owed more to clover and variegated weeds than to grass. Some of the shutters had been painted. Others hung, gray and dispirited, from rusty hinges. Two of the windowpanes on the lower level were boarded up. Another set of panes had been recently replaced; the small paper stickers still adorned them.

So that was why Cameron Hayes's hands looked as if they had been
chewed by a bear. He must be doing some of the work himself. The place certainly needed attention, it must have been neglected for decades. If the inside was as bad as the outside, Hayes's hope of finding a buyer were slim.

The house was for sale; she had seen the sign. The driveway gates were chained and padlocked, so she had been forced to leave her car outside. The small side gate, hung with "No Trespassing" signs, was padlocked too. She had climbed over it.

Karen gave herself a little shake. She couldn't stand here dripping and dreaming all day. Workmen wouldn't show up on a Saturday, especially in such weather, but Cameron Hayes might. She didn't particularly want him to find her here, but if he did, she would stand her ground—no sense trying to sneak away unseen, the presence of her car would tell him someone was inside—and make her excuses. "I just happened to be in the neighborhood ..." She smiled wryly. Excuses be damned; she was hooked, and he probably knew it. Peggy had been right about that, at any rate; her eager questions had given her away.

Of course she ought to have called to tell him she was coming. She hadn't, though. It could be argued (she argued) that his willingness to answer her questions implied permission to visit the house, but that excuse was decidedly feeble. She hadn't called because she wanted to be alone on this first, secret visit.

Yet as she went on more slowly, slipping on the wet grass, uneasiness prickled along her spine. It wasn't a Gothic tingle, but rational, if belated, apprehension. Perhaps she ought to have approached Hayes directly, or at least told someone where she was going. She had not realized the place was so isolated. She had not seen another house or even another vehicle after she left the highway and turned onto the narrow back road, overhung with trees and studded with potholes. The only sounds that broke the silence were those made by wind and falling rain. She was over a mile from the highway, too far to hear traffic noises. Some such noise, some indication of life, would have been welcome just then. A bird chirping, a dog barking. . . Well, maybe not a dog. In her present mood a howling in the woods would conjure up images of wolves—or worse. More prosaically, this was the sort of place that would attract trespassers with less noble motives than hers—vagrants, poachers, hunters . . .

"Serial killers," she jeered at herself, and started at the sound of her
own voice echoing in the silence. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. Wisps of fog drifted across the grass.

The steps leading to the front door were not gracefully curved, just slabs of stone mortared into place. They were a little too high, a little too narrow. She climbed them, treading carefully on the water-slicked surface. The door was a flat expanse of wood, with no window and no fanlight above. If ever a door had been designed to keep people out, this was it. Tentatively she raised her hands and pressed them against the panel. For a moment she had the unnerving impression that they had vanished. Everything was the same shade of pallid gray—her winter-whitened skin, the worn paint of the door, the surrounding air.

Karen stepped back, putting her hands in her pockets. They were ice-cold. Small wonder, she told herself. The air was cold—wet—chill. Even if the door were not locked, which it probably was, she had no business inside the house. Retreating a little too quickly, she followed a brick walk between low hedges of boxwood toward the west side of the house.

The windows on this side were lower than those in front, or the ground was higher; standing on tiptoe, she was able to look in. The view was discouraging—an empty room, swept clean of furniture and every other object. It might have been a library. The opposite wall, the only one she could see with any degree of clarity, had rows of shelves below a stretch of what appeared to be dark-paneled wood. The shelves were bare.

Her spirits plummeted. She reminded herself this was what she had expected.

The house was larger than it had appeared from the front. Instead of extending wings on either side of the main block, the owners had simply stuck another group of rooms onto the back when additional space was required. There was no attempt at architectural symmetry; the end product was a hideous hodgepodge of different materials and disparate shapes. There seemed to be no end to it, and the farther she went, the more apparent were the long years of neglect.

Finally the wings and extensions ended and she found herself in what might loosely be described as the backyard. The weeds there were not so high or so pervasive; they rose from what had been cultivated soil. She deduced that the area had once been a garden. A vegetable garden, no doubt; Great-Uncle Josiah wouldn't have bothered with flowers. Behind the plowed earth was a wall of tangled wilderness. The heavy stems of poison ivy and honeysuckle wound tight around tree trunks and hung in green curtains from dead boughs; fallen branches interlaced with prickly thorns lay in tumbled heaps.

There was a single narrow opening in the barricade. As Karen approached, she saw it was the entrance to a path of sorts, low-roofed by leaves. An animal trail? But surely deer wouldn't come so close to the house, not when they had acres of wilderness in which to roam.

She had not seen any outbuildings, barn or sheds or the like. Perhaps that was where the path led. Ducking under a low branch, she followed it. After the first few yards it began to descend, gently at first, then at a steeper angle before it ended, abruptly, in an open space, sunken and roughly oval in shape. Hickories and white pines enclosed it, and a jagged outcropping of rock formed a natural wall along one side. The ground underfoot was thick with fallen needles that muffled her footsteps.

Except for the drip of water from the leaves, the air was utterly still. "A savage place, as holy and enchanted ..." Not a comfortable verse to recall just then; but at least the moon wasn't waning and she was not tempted to wail for a demon lover. There was something uncanny about the place, though. Why should anyone beat a path to an empty clearing? And why wasn't it overgrown with weeds and brambles, like the rest of the woodland?

At first, when she heard the sound, she took it for the murmur of water—a stream tumbling over rocky rapids or the ripple of the river, which could not be far distant. Abruptly, shockingly, the murmur changed direction. It sounded as if it were coming straight toward her. It sounded as if it were just beyond the trees, closer, closer, under the ground at her feet, in the air itself, rising in pitch and volume until there was nothing else in the universe except that piercing undulating scream.

Karen ran blindly, arms across her face to shield it from the branches that stretched out as if to block her passage. By the time she broke out into the open, there was no sound except the drip of water and her own harsh breathing. As she stood struggling for control a shift in the direction of the wind carried a sweet scent to her nostrils. The bushes beside the enclosed back porch were lilacs. Though they needed pruning, the deadly vines had been stripped away and the branches were heavy with
bloom. They were a reminder of normalcy and of beauty. Her breathing slowed. Stupid of her to be panicked by some unusual acoustical phenomenon . . .