Memory and Desire (31 page)

There was the missing page of music. There were the scripts. There were last year's playbills. Again Claire picked one up and as though prodding a bruise opened it. Inside was written in Melinda's firm, black handwriting, “Alec. Saturday. Midnight. Garden."

Claire started to gasp and found herself hyperventilating. She clutched at the table until her head cleared.
No!
But Richard had said Melinda broke her date with him to see someone else. And that Alec was irritable. Because he'd thought they were going to have a cozy evening and then she'd teased him?
Alec, no!

Kate. Blake. Even Pakenham. They were at the front of the house. She had to get there and—and what? Turn Alec in? Torpedo any last hope for a relationship with Richard? Do what she came to Somerstowe to do?

There was an explanation. There had to be. And the sooner she found out what it was the better. Clutching the program, she hurried as quickly out the back door of the kitchen as she could and still breathe. The mutter of the crowd sounded like distant waves on a shore, a rising and falling hum almost absorbed by the stone-silence of the house. The corridor was dark, and she didn't know where the light switches were.

She stopped, hearing footsteps and a rustle of fabric. Behind her? In front of her? It was never easy to tell where Elizabeth's steps came from, other than from another dimension. Her skin crawled.

There, in the shadows just inside the door at the far end of the corridor, silhouetted against the light leaking from the entrance hall ... No, that was a perfectly substantial human being. Trillian, judging by the costume. How'd she get away from her family?

A tall man stepped through the door into the corridor. Alec. He swept the woman into his arms. Literally off her feet, she was so small. She wrapped her arms around his chest and lifted her face to his. They kissed, so passionately that by comparison Claire and Richard's kiss looked like a formal handshake.

Claire dodged into an alcove filled with deep shadow. Alec? Trillian? He wasn't a murderer. He wasn't a child molester either. And yet...

Wait a minute. Janet had seen Alec and Melinda embracing exactly the same way. What if it wasn't Trillian at all? If Susan had seen Melinda and thought she was Elizabeth, maybe Janet had seen Elizabeth and thought she was Melinda.

Down the corridor echoed a woman's sigh, caught between delight and despair. Claire dared another glance. In the dim light she couldn't make out their faces—they might both be ghosts—but yes, the woman in Alec's arms was blond. It wasn't Trillian at all. And since it wasn't Melinda, it had to be Elizabeth. She was saying something to him, her hand set on his cheek as though trying to keep him from looking away. He answered. Yeah, Claire thought, ducking back into the darkness, the ghost can see you back again.

So much for her assumption that Alec was worshipping Elizabeth from afar. That he had a hopeless crush on a tragic historical figure. Claire remembered the secret room in the attics and the long bench, polished clean. Long enough to be a love seat, wasn't it?

Melinda was going to write a novel about Elizabeth. Alec wanted her to get it right. Alec was going to—what had Alec intended, meeting Melinda secretly in the middle of the night?

More footsteps, coming from the kitchen. A shape moved in the corner of Claire's eye, a shadow denser than the surrounding darkness. She spun around. A motion, a breath of air, skimmed her face. Her nostrils filled with the scent of makeup and sweat. Something closed around her throat and tightened. Her mind chirped faintly, that's not Elizabeth...

She heard her own voice expelled in a wordless cry. She groped upward. Her fingertips closed on cloth, taut cloth, implacably squeezing her neck. Her lungs writhed inside the cage of her chest. Her head exploded so that the blackness around her flashed with stars. The world heaved and threw her down.

Somewhere in the distance a female voice called, “Claire! Where are you?”
Melinda, it was Melinda....
The stars rained down on her face like cold kisses, and she fell into nothingness.

Ring down the curtain,
Claire told herself.
Fade to black. Roll the credits.

It wasn't so much that death was frightening as that it was sad. She was leaving so many landscapes unappreciated and so many books unread. She'd never know whether her and Richard's bud of romance would have blossomed ... Wait a minute. If she was moaning soppily about dying she probably wasn't dead.

Dank darkness surrounded her. She could hardly tell whether her eyes were open or not. The floor beneath her was cold and gritty. Her head was splitting, her chest was crushed in a vise, and her throat felt as though she'd tried to swallow a Brillo pad. If a band of angels was coming for her, they were taking their own sweet time about it.

Gingerly, Claire sat up. Yes, her eyes were open. Her glasses were still on her head, not that they were doing much good in this nothingness. Except for a distant drip of water the silence was absolute. The floor beneath her hands was dressed stone covered with dirt. The cloth billowing around her was her dress—she was still wearing the infernal Barbie-gown. With a hoarse curse she reached around, yanked open the buttons and loosened the corset. So what if the lights suddenly went up and she found herself in front of an audience, she was going to be able to breathe.

Wherever she was remained dark. Its cold chill seeped through her open dress and along her ribs. She tried a deep breath and winced with pain. Her entire body was sore. Surely she'd have noticed being beaten....

Suddenly Claire remembered the dark hallway, the steps, Alec and Elizabeth, and strong hands tightening the garrote around her neck. Someone, Kate, probably, had been calling her name—maybe that had scared the killer away before he finished the job.

But this wasn't the back corridor of the Hall. If it were, Kate would've found her by now. Claire would be propped up on the couch at the Lodge, Richard handing her another glass of whiskey, his brow furrowed with concern and exasperation ... Forget that, she told herself.

Groaning, she stood up. Maybe the blackness around her had thinned just a little, maybe her pupils had opened all the way, but the gloom seemed a bit thicker to her left than to her right. She turned toward the hint of light, slid her foot tentatively forward, and found her shoe hanging in mid-air.

With a gulp of vertigo and terror mingled, Claire sat down again. After a moment or two remembering Edgar Allan Poe's stories of concealed pits and walled-up crypts, she lay down on her stomach and groped. She found stone steps hollowed with age extending downward as far as she could reach. At her left was a wall, at her right, where the gloom was a bit lighter, an apparently sheer drop.

She fumbled around and found a bit of metal, a hinge or something—Richard would identify it instantly. Over the side it went. Claire held her breath, listening. The metal piece thudded somewhere below, a long way below. In the silence her heart pounded more loudly than a rain of scrap metal.

That was it. The killer had dragged her into the cellars of the Hall. Or at least to the top of the steps leading to the cellars. Richard had never said whether this part of the house was wired for electricity. He'd only warned the volunteers not to go into it.

Claire rose to her knees and felt along the wall behind her. Sure enough, there was a wooden door, but no light switch anywhere near it. The rusty doorknob turned only a fraction. The door was locked. She tried to peer through the keyhole. Either the corridor on the other side was dark, too, or the hole was blocked by the key. Richard had a key. Richard would let her out.

Richard didn't know where she was. It was Alec who ... Claire tried to swallow. Her mouth was filled with slime rather than saliva. The program. Melinda's handwriting. Her appointment with Alec after the cast party. And yet Claire had been watching Alec with Elizabeth when she'd been attacked. He couldn't have attacked her. He couldn't have killed Melinda. Right?

Those huge hands of his had been holding Elizabeth's fragile body—very fragile body—as tenderly as though she was spun glass. He'd been listening to her voice. Claire probably hadn't made much noise, just a gasp or a wheeze. He'd never realized she was in trouble.

Claire wondered just what Elizabeth's three-hundred year old voice sounded like, and what she'd told Alec about those everyday things historians would kill to know, and whether she remembered dying ...
Enough of that.

Claire knocked on the door, tentatively at first, then loudly. The door was thick and solid and from the other side her knocking probably sounded like a pillow fight.

They had to be looking for her. Surely no one would think she'd just run off somewhere like they thought Melinda had run off somewhere. But the killer could have misdirected the search, saying he'd last seen Claire outside.

Did he think Claire was dead? Or was he hoping she'd revive and fall off the landing? Maybe he wasn't taking any chances and intended to come back to the cellars to finish what he'd begun. Claire had no idea how long she'd been unconscious. It seemed like she'd spent days just taking inventory of herself and her surroundings.

Slowly, carefully, her skirts gathered in one hand and her other hand splayed on the wall, Claire felt her way down a staircase as long as that proverbial one into heaven—except this one was going the other way. When a sweep of her foot detected dirty flagstones rather than steps she took a deep breath and peered into the darkness. Somewhere the water dripped on. What she didn't hear was the sound of a key in the lock at the top of the stairs.

She visualized a human form coming down the stairs with a flashlight. Its beam would probe the dark, hiding whoever was holding it. Someone could hold out the hand of a savior and then kill her with it. No, she wasn't enthused about waiting around here. But where could she go?

The shadows seemed a little lighter on the far side of the room, assuming it was a room she was in. Taking one cautious sliding step at a time she moved toward the suggestion of light. The cellars were dangerous, Richard had said. He'd also said there was an exit to the outside.

The caves had been expanded from the dungeon of the original castle, made into grottos for Phillip's Brotherhood and their ersatz occult ceremonies. Claire didn't have much hope, though, of finding an elegant candlelit eighteenth-century drawing room just ahead.

Her outstretched hand met a wall. Rough-cut stone and a wooden lintel ... Yes! It was a doorway, the door itself hanging askew, the corridor beyond defined by a tenuous light. Strain her eyes as she might, though, she could see nothing but four walls diminishing into darkness.

She stepped through the door and stopped. Here she was, about to enter the labyrinth, without a ball of twine to her name. Muttering an apology to Sarita, she flipped up her skirt, felt along the hem of her petticoat until she found a seam, and ripped. The sound of tearing cloth made her flinch. Thank goodness nothing came charging out of the dimness at her.

Down one curving passage she went and up the next, paying out strips of petticoat behind her. In more than one place she stumbled over rocks fallen from the ceiling. Once she put her hand on a wall only to have the masonry collapse in a small dusty avalanche. Richard, of course, had been right to warn of the dangers here. He knew these cellars. Some knight errant he was, letting her struggle through them alone.

Whenever Claire encountered a doorway she went through it and groped along the walls and floor, shrinking from what she might, but never did, touch, until she either returned to her cotton lifeline or found another door. Someone, Richard probably, had cleaned Phillip's grottoes of whatever rubbish they'd accumulated over the years. She made a mental note to tell him about the lingering smell of sewage in the air and the constant dripping noise, like Chinese water torture.

Something scuttled away in the darkness. Mice? Rats? Kobolds? As long as whatever it was didn't get friendly, Claire was willing to co-exist.

Her mouth was filled with foul-tasting grit and her throat burned. Her eyes burned, too, from straining to see. Hours might be passing—she couldn't tell. Her own breath sounded like a threshing machine. Dully she fumbled on. She was probably going in circles, her cloth lifeline stitching a spider's web pattern through the catacombs.

Her limbs crawled with cold and a slow, leaden despair. The skin on her naked back was numb. Her senses were failing—she was seeing dancing glints of light in the darkness, and a faint breeze carried an almost subliminal sound of singing. Probably the cellars were haunted with memories of Phillip's occult games. What she most dreaded hearing, though, were footsteps behind her. Maybe she did, some sense other than her ears registering a subtle resonance in the stone beneath her feet...

Wait. That really was a breeze tickling her cheeks. There was a door somewhere ahead. And surely she was hallucinating, but the gloom seemed to be a little thinner. Solstice night in Britain was a very short night indeed. Dawn was rising outside. Heartened, Claire staggered on.

Something swooped above her head. She squeaked and crouched. Another shape swooped, fluttered, and came to rest high overhead. Slowly she straightened, barely making out the outlines of a domed room like an antechamber. Several tiny points of light shifted along the ceiling, the eyes of bats returning from their nightly foray outside.

Outside.
Claire looked carefully around. She didn't see Count Dracula ready to spring out at her. She was alone except for the cold breeze and the bats and that distant baritone voice. Come on, she urged herself, a few more steps. A few more minutes.

A few minutes later she saw real light gleaming through a doorway. Beyond it an arched stone passage ended in an ornate grille, curlicues black against what seemed like a spotlight-bright glow. She didn't know whether to rush forward and throw herself against the gate or to prostrate herself on the ground with gratitude. Since the ground was littered with bat droppings she chose the former, first ripping off her cotton umbilical.