The Haunting of Maddy Clare (29 page)

“You have other attributes,” he said.

“Like what?” I kept my tone teasing.

“Long legs,” he said with deadly seriousness. “Big, dark eyes. An interesting mouth. Nice breasts.”

If I was blushing before, now I felt I was truly on fire. I turned and found him regarding me steadily as he walked, from those amazing eyes of his. There was a glint of humor there, but he was not making fun. “Well,” I said unsteadily. “That is…certainly…an interesting list. But I don’t think Alistair hired me for that. I’m not much next to Mrs. Barry.”

“Evangeline?” Now he sounded surprised. “She’s pretty enough, I suppose. I don’t really know why Alistair is so hung up on her.”

“Are you blind?” I said. “She looks like Norma Shearer.”

“Hmm.” He seemed to ponder this. We crested the hill and entered the beginnings of Waringstoke. “Perhaps.”

“Trust me—she does.” I had seen all of Norma Shearer’s films, so I should certainly know.

“Well. It could be.” Matthew put his hands in his pockets. “I’ll tell you something, though. Even when I was in the trenches with the army, when we hadn’t seen a woman in what felt like years—not one of us fantasized about undressing Norma Shearer.”

At my look, he laughed, the sound coming rusty from his throat. I tried to look stern, but the smile came to my lips anyway. After all, I had never heard him laugh before.

R
oderick Nesbit’s house was still run-down and silent. It sat on a large, weedy clearing on the edge of town, backing onto the woods. The windows were grimy and the house stared at us from behind its peeling paint with blind eyes. There was a damp woodpile in the back, and next to it a small rotting shed with its roof caving in.

Matthew knocked on the door and waited. Though the house was quiet, there was a feeling of presence, as if someone was home. Matthew knocked again.

To our surprise, the door opened and a tall, thin man stood there, wearing a well-worn tweed coat and old leather slippers. He had a beard of brown hair and appeared about forty-five.

“Yes?” His eyes took us in from beneath an impressive ridge of forehead.

“Roderick Nesbit?” Matthew asked.

Something entered the man’s eyes that looked, for a moment, like abject fear. “Who is asking?”

As Matthew introduced us, his features changed again, the fear replaced with a rigid jaw of annoyance. “I have nothing to say to you.”

“Please,” I said. “We want to ask you about Maddy Clare.”

He turned to me and his expressive gaze took me in, from my everyday hat to my flowered sundress and my summer shoes. His voice was arch and dismissive. “I’m sure I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“You should,” I said boldly. “You attended her funeral.”

He paused for a long moment, his gaze still on me. Then: “Come in, then.”

His was a bachelor’s house, like Jarvis’. But if Jarvis had lived in an obvious bit of masculine mess, Roderick Nesbit lived in near squalor. The wallpaper in his front hall was peeling, the baseboards thick with old grime. He led us to a small sitting room, furnished with a filthy stuffed chair next to an unlit fireplace and a dusty, opaque mirror in a gaudy gilt frame.

“You’re wasting your time,” said Mr. Nesbit. “I hardly knew the girl.”

“Then why did you attend her funeral?” Matthew asked.

Mr. Nesbit sat in the stuffed chair. He did not offer us a seat; indeed he could not, as he occupied the only chair in the room. He plucked absently at the chair’s grimy arms and looked away.

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, more details came to me. Mr. Nesbit was not only thin; he was gaunt—his clothes hung loosely, and under his beard his cheeks were hollow. He also had the bloodshot eyes and ruddy veins of a perpetual drinker.

“I just felt sorry for her, that’s all,” he said, and his defensive posture seemed to fall away, as if it tired him too much to maintain it. “I heard she killed herself. She was just a maid. But servants are people, too, don’t you think?”

“How did you hear about it?” said Matthew quietly.

One thin shoulder rose in an affected, careless shrug. “Everyone in town heard about it. I’m an odd-job man, so I’m at people’s houses, hearing lots of things. That constable, Moores, he wanted it kept quiet. But nothing is ever quiet in a town like Waringstoke.”

“Had you met Maddy while she was alive?”

Nesbit blinked his bloodshot eyes. He looked miserable. “No. Of course not. She was a maid, wasn’t she, and doesn’t everyone say she was mad and kept to the house?”

“But you’re an odd-job man,” said Matthew, and his voice was gentle and unrelenting. “Did you ever do any odd jobs at the Clare house?”

It was clear Nesbit was weighing the odds of lying against the easy possibility that Matthew could ask Mrs. Clare for the answer. “Maybe here and there,” he decided. “I don’t exactly recall.”

“Think about it,” said Matthew. “We can wait.”

Again, the expressions on Nesbit’s face told everything. If this man ever thought to enter a poker game, he would lose every penny he had. “Now, see here,” he said, shifting in his chair and manufacturing anger. “You’re not police. I don’t need to answer you. So what if I worked for Mrs. Clare once or twice? I never met that maid of hers. I just felt sorry for her. That’s—that’s the end of it.”

Matthew stood silent for a long moment, watching the man squirm in his seat. “All right,” he said at last. “We’ll go, then. I have one more question for you.”

The man’s misery was acute; likely he was thinking of his bottle, wherever it was, and how quickly he could get to it the minute we left. “Just say it,” he snapped.

Matthew nodded toward the fireplace, over which hung a long, dusty rifle. “You like to hunt?” he asked.

Nesbit followed his gaze and again the fear crossed his face, but this time he tamped it under control. “I’ve hunted from time to time, yes.”

“But not lately,” said Matthew. “That gun hasn’t been cleaned.”

“I’ve been busy,” said Mr. Nesbit. “Trying to get some work here and there. It hasn’t been easy since the war. Some of us don’t have endless time all day to go hunting and whatever else. Some of us don’t live a life of leisure.”

“Like Tom Barry,” said Matthew.

Nesbit stilled. He raised his gaze to Matthew and said nothing.

“I hear you don’t hunt anymore,” said Matthew.

“I do.” Mr. Nesbit’s voice was hoarse and his words were automatic. “I do. Just not lately, that’s all.”

“That’s a shame,” said Matthew. “It’s a nice pastime.”

“You have to leave,” said Roderick Nesbit. “Now. Or I might dust off my rifle right now.”

“All right,” said Matthew.

“Now,” said Nesbit. “Now.”

As we left, I heard sounds. Perhaps I dreamed it. It sounded like wings, like scrabbling birds’ feet on the roof. But when I looked behind me, there was nothing there.

We walked to the pub for lunch, but we had hardly taken a seat at a small table in the corner when a large shadow came over us. It was Constable Moores.

“Oh God,” Matthew muttered. “Now what?”

“I’m glad to find you here,” said the constable, helping himself to a seat. “I’ve just been to the inn, looking for you. The innkeeper said you’d gone to town.” He lowered his heavy gaze at us. “I took
a little time to visit your friend Mr. Gellis before I came. He’s not doing so well, or didn’t you notice?”

The barmaid arrived and served us a beer; there was a short silence until she left, and then Matthew spoke, staring calmly at Constable Moores over the rim of his glass. “What are you implying?”

“Nothing much,” said Moores. “Just that you seem happy to let a man sit alone in a room, losing his mind. The innkeeper is none too pleased, by the way. He’s about to send your friend out into the cold, and you with him.”

Matthew sighed. “I’ve been making arrangements to take care of him.”

I stared at Matthew, surprised. I hadn’t known. What arrangements could he mean? Constable Moores was not impressed.

“Your friend needs to go to a hospital,” he said.

“Perhaps,” said Matthew. “Without his solicitors, I have no power to send him anywhere.”

“Damn it, boy, the man is sick!”

Matthew’s glass banged on the table. “And I said I would handle it.” His voice was low and cold. “Constable, if you think I’m going to send my colleague off to some asylum just because he makes the innkeeper uncomfortable, you need to think again. Alistair is going to be cared for. Properly. I do not need your advice, or anyone else’s.”

“Please,” I said to them both, trying to keep my voice soothing.

“You are pushing things, my boy,” said Constable Moores, his voice leveled at Matthew in a growl. “This is a small town, with good people. And there has been nothing but trouble since you and your friends arrived.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Matthew growled back.

“Please,” I said again. Something about the animosity in Constable Moores’ stare made the back of my neck prickle. “What did you want to see us about, Constable?”

He cut a glance at me. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “In fact, I’ll ask a question. Where were you last night?”

For a second I was so shocked I couldn’t speak. My face must have shown it, but luckily the constable had looked away and was glaring at Matthew again. How could he know about the woods? “What are you talking about?” I managed.

“It’s very simple,” said Moores. “Last night. Where were you?”

“At the inn,” I stumbled, a semblance of my composure returning. “In bed.” No one at the inn could have seen anything—there had been no servants about in the middle of the night. Had someone been out there? Or had someone seen me from a window?

“All night?” the constable shot at me. “Alone?” He glanced at Matthew. “Both of you?”

“Now, look here,” said Matthew. “What the hell kind of question is that?”

“An honest one that deserves an honest answer. Can anyone vouch for either of you all night?”

“But why?” I asked.

“Because Bill Jarvis didn’t show up for work this morning,” the constable snapped, “and now we find he’s gone missing. And then I hear you were at his house none other than yesterday, both of you. That’s why.”

There was a long silence. Finally Matthew spoke. “Missing?”

“Missing,” said Moores. “Sometime in the night, I think. His bed was rumpled. Hard to tell if any clothes were gone, but I don’t think so. His wallet and money are still sitting on his bedside table, and his front door is unlocked.” He looked back and forth
between Matthew and me. “What did you talk to him about, when you paid him that little visit yesterday?”

Matthew glowered into his beer, so I spoke. There seemed no reason not to tell the truth.

“We talked about Maddy Clare,” I said.

Constable Moores’ complexion darkened. “That ghost stuff of yours.”

“It’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” I said. I kept my voice light, but I raised my gaze and looked him in the eye. “You may not believe in any of it, Constable, but Maddy’s ghost is real. We had information that we wanted to ask Mr. Jarvis about.”

He let my statements pass. “What information?”

“We had heard—that perhaps Maddy was not in the grave Mr. Jarvis dug in the churchyard. That she may have been buried somewhere else.”

He seemed to pale. “That’s balderdash.”

I pressed my advantage. “I suppose we could have just asked you.”

“I don’t see why,” Moores grunted. “I’ll just bet Bill was happy to have a visit from you on a Sunday, accusing him of burying an empty coffin.”

“In fact,” said Matthew with tight calm, “he told us to ask you.”

The constable sighed in frustration and looked away.

“Is it true?” I asked softly. “Did you cut Maddy down the day she hanged herself?”

Constable Moores was quiet for a long moment. The fight seemed to seep slowly out of him. “We don’t get many suicides around here. It was a horrible day.”

“You didn’t mention it,” said Matthew.

“No.”

“Did you know her?”

Moores shook his head. “No, of course not. No one did, from what I hear.”

“But you know she’s buried in the churchyard, don’t you? You saw her in that coffin.”

“Yes. I suppose I did.” He turned back to us and glared at us again, though this time the glare was weary. “It was a sad case, and I don’t deny I don’t like to think about it. I don’t deny I wonder what happened and where that girl came from. But that doesn’t mean I think she came back from the dead, or that she haunted the Falmouth House barn. I don’t believe in ghosts, or devils, or whatever it is you’re looking for.”