The Fate of Mercy Alban (14 page)

“I tried to contact you,” he told me. “Your housekeeper wouldn’t put me through. I came in person; your police guards did their job. Talk about a stone wall. But I kept trying because, after all, I had your aunt and I needed to bring her here, whether you were going to talk to me or not.”

I had heard enough. “Well, you’ve done that. Now it’s time for you to leave.” I shot a look at the officers, who were at his side in an instant.

“But we still have so much to say to each other,” he said.

I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “I don’t think so.”

As the police escorted him to the door, he turned. “You need to know that this book is going to come out whether you talk to me or not. I had my tape recorder turned on during the entire flight and your aunt talked of nothing but the past. I don’t have to write the book so much as transcribe it. And I promise you, Grace, much of what she said is going to rock the literary world. Scholars have been speculating for fifty years about the night Coleville killed himself. Now they’ll have a firsthand account.”

“And I promise
you
, Harris, if you slander my family in any way, you will know what it feels like to be on the wrong side of one of the most powerful families in this country.”

“I’d think twice about making threats in public if I were you, Grace.” He smiled.

“Think about this, Harris: You set one foot back on this property or try to contact me and I’ll be delighted to have you arrested.”

“Arrested?” He laughed. “On what charge?”

“I’m an Alban.” I walked up to him, locked my eyes with his, and lowered my voice to a hiss, feeling the presence of my mother, father, and brothers behind me and invoking the spirits of that very house as I spoke. “If you know anything about my family, you know there doesn’t need to be a charge.”

I turned to the officers. “Gentlemen, please escort Mr. Peters from this property. Far from it.”

As they led Harris Peters out of Alban House, I hurried to the window to see them put him into the back of their squad car. He saw me and waved, the cocky bastard. I watched as they pulled out of the drive, satisfied that he was really gone.

I turned around to find Matthew and Amity staring at me, openmouthed. “Anyone else thirsty?” I asked, making my way over to the sideboard and pouring myself a large glass of wine.

“I’ll have one,” Matthew said, grinning at me. “Whoa. I knew you were a strong lady, Grace. But I didn’t know how strong.”

I handed Matthew a glass and we stood in silence for a moment, my heart pounding so hard that I was sure the others could hear it. And then Amity said something that made it nearly stop. “Mom,” she began. “Do you think he was the one in the false basement?”

This hadn’t occurred to me, but it made perfect sense. “Aunt Fate could’ve told him all about the secret passageways when they were on the airplane coming from Switzerland! What a great way for him to dig up information from a family that he knew wouldn’t talk to him.”

“Unbelievable,” Matthew murmured, staring down into his glass. Then he looked up at me, his brows furrowed. “You know, you threatened to have him arrested, but I wonder—do you think you could file kidnapping charges against him? He did walk out of a hospital with a patient.”

That hadn’t occurred to me, either, but it, too, made perfect sense. “I’ll check into it. And I’m going to have the police put a trace on him, to make sure he doesn’t worm his way back into the tunnels.”

I crossed the room and sank into one of the armchairs by the fireplace, weighed down by what I had just learned. Fate Alban, suddenly alive, and sleeping on the chaise in the library.

My aunt had been, apparently, institutionalized since the night of David Coleville’s suicide. I didn’t want to admit it, to myself or to anyone else in the room, but a deep sense of dread was wrapping around me. I knew Harris Peters was right, that my grandfather, most likely, had put Fate away and covered it up, not even telling the family where she was. But why? Was whatever happened here that night horrible enough to drive her insane?

“Grace,” Matthew began, his words pulling me back into the room. “How, do you think, did Peters get your aunt out of the hospital? I mean, you can’t just waltz out of a locked ward with a longtime patient. If she suddenly turned up missing, why wouldn’t the doctors there have called you?”

“They did.” It was Jane, leaning against the doorframe.

Nobody said anything as Jane slowly entered the room, exhaled, and sank into a chair. She fished a tissue out of her sleeve and dabbed at her brow.

“You knew about this?” I asked her finally.

She shook her head. “No. But I did take a call. The day before your mother died.”

I exchanged glances with Matthew and then rose from my own seat and pulled up a chair next to her. “Go on, Jane. What did they say?”

“There was a call from a hospital in Switzerland,” she confirmed. “I couldn’t make heads nor tails of what they were saying at first, but finally it became clear that they were talking about a Miss Alban, that she had gone missing from their facility. I nearly had a heart attack myself when I realized what it all meant.”

“Did you know she had been living there all this time?” I asked. “What I’d always been told—”

“No!” Jane shook her head violently. “You were told the truth, as we all knew it. Miss Fate disappeared from Alban House that night. We in the household were asked never to speak of it again, that Mr. Alban’s grief at losing his daughter was too great. We did as we were told!”

By this time, Mr. Jameson had crept into the room and was standing at his wife’s side, patting her shoulder and cooing comforting words, his voice nearly a whisper.

Her expression, the look in her eyes, was wrapped in guilt and shame. I got the impression that she was feeling somehow responsible for this situation, that she had let the household and, worse, my mother down. For Jane, there could be no greater failing.

“Of course, Jane,” I said, smiling slightly and patting her hand. “Of course you’d do what my grandfather asked. You didn’t do anything wrong. Let’s just back up for a second. What did they say on the phone, the people from the hospital?”

She cleared her throat. “They were calling to report that Miss Alban had gone missing from their facility,” she repeated, her face ashen.

“And that’s all?” I asked. “Nothing about how long she had been there or why she was there in the first place or how—”

Jane let out another long sigh and twisted the apron in her lap. “I know I should’ve asked all those questions, Miss Grace, but I was so stunned—struck down, almost—when I realized what they were saying. Miss Fate, alive! I didn’t think to ask anything else.”

I could understand that. “You said the call came just before my mother passed away. Did you tell her about the call?”

Jane held my gaze for a long time, and in her reddened, pained eyes, I saw the answer. She shook her head just the slightest bit before confirming what I knew. “I did not,” she whispered, her voice breaking apart like shattered glass.

I wasn’t sure what to say to Jane—I didn’t know if telling my mother would have been the right thing to do or not—but I didn’t have to respond, because Jane went on.

“Your mother hadn’t been feeling well off and on for a couple of weeks,” she explained. “It was one of those spring colds she always used to get. The horrible coughing. She was on the mend and just starting to get her strength back when the call came in. I wasn’t quite sure what to do. I talked to Mr. Jameson about it and we decided to wait a few days to tell her, until she was feeling strong and well and more of herself.”

“Aye,” Jane’s husband piped up, nodding his head. “We didn’t want to give the lady too much of a start, not until she was up to it. We were”—his voice broke—“worried about her heart.”

“But the journalist,” I said. “When he called, didn’t you think—”

“That we did,” Jane confirmed. “He had been calling for weeks. When I took the call from the hospital, I put two and two together. I suspected he had been the one who had found Miss Fate. Too much of a coincidence, it was. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Jane dabbed at her nose with the tissue. “Because your mother agreed to talk to him—it surprised me, sure it did—I was planning to tell her about it before he got here. When she came in from her walk. I thought that, if she was feeling up to going outside, well, she could handle the news that Miss Fate was alive and that I suspected this journalist was the one who had found her. And maybe it would convince her not to talk to him. That’s what I was hoping. Never in the world did I think he would bring her here. Like this. Today of all days.”

I took Jane’s hands in mine. It was time to come clean, for both of us. High time. “I want to hear exactly what you know about that night, Jane. The night David Coleville killed himself here at Alban House. And I have something to tell you in return. I found some letters—”

But I didn’t get a chance to tell her about the letters, and she didn’t get the chance to tell me what she knew about that night, not just then. Before either of us could get any more words out, I heard my daughter’s voice, distant and small, hesitant at first. “Mom?” And then more urgent. “Mom!”

I turned in the direction of her voice, the grand staircase, and saw her on the second-floor landing. I hadn’t realized that she had slipped out of the room. “Mom, you need to come up here.”

“What is it, honey?” I asked, almost afraid to approach her.

“Somebody has been in our rooms,” she said, her voice a harsh whisper.

A chill fell around me, and in an instant I was flying up the stairs, grasping at Amity and running with her toward the master suite, Matthew, Jane, and Mr. Jameson following close behind. The door was ajar, and I pushed through it to find a scene of utter disarray—clothes and hats strewn everywhere, the desk overturned, its contents littered all over the floor. The computer was lying sadly on its side and half of the books on my mother’s bookshelf were thrown this way and that. I could see that the tapestry was drawn back, the hidden door wide open like a gaping maw.

My hands flew to my mouth. Amity was clutching me and I put an arm around her.

“Honey,” I began, “you said somebody had been in our rooms. Plural. Just this suite of rooms, or—?”

She shook her head tightly. “Yours, too.”

I flew back out the door and down the hallway. The door to my old room was open, my suitcase splayed out in the center of the floor, clothes from the closet tossed about, the dresser drawers open, their contents rifled through.

And then I saw them—the letters David Coleville had written to my mother, strewn about on the floor like so many fallen leaves. I gathered them up and held them close to my heart. My mother’s private letters, a love she had kept hidden for decades, so violated and exposed. On the day of her funeral, no less. This felt like an attack on her. My eyes stung with tears.

“How could this happen?” Amity’s voice wavered, vulnerability seeping through her words. “Guards were here the whole time. They’ve been here for days.”

“Not the whole time,” I said, glancing at the window. “They took Peters away in their squad car just now. No guards are here.”

Matthew shook his head. “There wouldn’t have been enough time for whoever did this to do so much damage,” he said. “The guards left just a few minutes ago. This scene took a while to create, I’m afraid.”

“They were standing by the stairs most of the afternoon,” Amity said. “There was another pair outside.”

“That’s right!” I said, remembering seeing the velvet rope across the staircase. “Whoever did this must’ve used the passageways. It very well could have been Harris Peters, before he made his grand entrance.”

By this time, Jane had made it to the second floor and was peering into the room. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she whispered.

I bent down to retrieve a jacket from the floor, but Matthew grasped my hand before it made contact with the fleece. “I think you should leave everything just as it is, for now,” he said, his eyes scanning the room. “The police are going to want to see this untouched. Maybe whoever did this left fingerprints.”

He was right. I put my arm around Amity and led her out of the room and into the hallway, shuddering to think that, had I not insisted she make an appearance at the reception, she might have been up here when the thief burst in.

Jane looked at me, and as if she could read my thoughts, she said: “I’ll make the call to police, miss.” And she hurried off toward the telephone in my mother’s study.

Matthew, Amity, and I walked the other way, down the hall toward the stairs, but before we descended, he stopped and turned back toward the master suite. “What I don’t get is, why?” he said, narrowing his eyes and shaking his head. “Why would anybody do this? What did they think they were going to find? Something valuable—jewelry, maybe?”

The realization washed down around me like a cold rain. Scenes flashed in my mind, me talking with Amity in my mother’s study the first day we arrived, me sitting alone on the floor of her closet reading the letters my mother had kept hidden all these years, me hurrying into my room and tucking the letters inside my own suitcase. Someone had been in the passageways watching us,
watching me
, all the while. It was the only way anyone would have known those letters were in my suitcase.