The Witch's Stone (11 page)

“No’ quite the same.”

“Actually, the situations are quite similar. A strange woman with few friends to defend her, your father was in a position of power and authority in comparison. He used her reputation as eccentric and strange and mostly just old to take advantage of her few resources and have her removed from her home and community.”

Pity welled in Hillary at the thought. After all, she knew first hand what it felt like to be the victim of a witch-hunt. No, she hadn’t been burned or hanged. She’d simply lost everything that mattered to her, leaving her standing alone in the smoldering ruin of her life.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re here aren’t you? Free?

She’d only spent two days in a jail cell before her lawyer arranged her bail, but it was long enough. Long enough to bargain her life away in tearful prayers if she could just get out of that mess.

“But he failed.” Caid’s voice brought her back to the present. “I wonder if my father knew she was selling things from the house. He would have been angry. As far as he’s concerned, this place is his.”

“He had no idea you could inherit instead of him?”

“Not until the solicitor insisted I be here when he read the will.” Caid’s straight brows drew together in a frown. “I hadnae seen her in more than twenty years. I doubt the possibility even entered his mind. She must have hated him.”

Hillary thought of what Joan had said about Agnes complaining of the way Caid’s parents treated him. Maybe Agnes had had a soft spot for him. “She read your books. Or at least she had copies of them.”

A semi-smile touched his lips. “Did
you
finish reading my book?”

“Almost. I hesitate to tell you this for fear of feeding what is clearly a monstrous ego, but I pocketed Agnes’s copy of your second book.”

He leaned forward, grinning. “My number one fan.”

“You forget I know you personally. I could never be your number one fan.”

He laughed, unperturbed by the insult.

“Besides,” she added, “I think that title goes to Joan.”

“No’ since I kissed you. She was well pissed at me that night.”

Hillary’s cheeks burned with the memory of his lips on hers, the heat that had surged through her body, and the way she had eagerly responded. She turned her attention to the stone floor. Caid cleared his throat and when she looked up again, he stared down at the table, tracing a thin crack in the wood with his fingertip.

When he lifted his gaze to hers, all humor was gone. “When you found Agnes, did it look like an accident? Did it look like she’d fallen down the stairs?”

“I…um…I,” she stuttered, trying to push back the picture of the bloated, twisted body in her head. And the smell. The rancid odor of rotting flesh that had stayed with her even days later. “I couldn’t tell. I’ve never seen someone dead from a fall down the stairs.”

“But when you first saw her is that what you thought? That she must have fallen down the stairs?”

She searched for the right words, trying to skip over her less-than-stalwart reaction. “I didn’t really look at her for long.”
Ah, the hell with it.
“The truth is I opened the door, saw her--smelled her--and then I went right back outside and threw up.”

“Sorry, I didnae mean to push.”

“It doesn’t matter, just not my finest hour. Why do you want to know?”

“I started thinking about what you said about my father trying to have her put in a home and I wondered just how far he would have gone to get her out. Especially if he knew she was selling things from the house.”

“You don’t really believe he would have killed her?”

“No,” he said with a sigh. “No. He’s far too civilized for that. I just…” He trailed off and shrugged.

“Bristol said everything about her death was consistent with a fall down the stairs. The time of death even lined up with a storm that had made the power go out for a few hours.”

He nodded, but his eyes narrowed the longer they stayed fixed on her. “Ye’re no’ telling me something.”

Had she given something away in her expression?

“Out with it,” he demanded. “What havenae you told me?”

“It’s nothing, really. What do I know about dead bodies?” More than she wanted to, unfortunately.

“Tell me.”

Hillary sighed. “She was so broken. And the amount of blood. I wouldn’t have thought that a fall down the stairs could make someone bleed so much.”

“What are you saying?”

“I was surprised when Bristol told me that Agnes’s death had been accidental. You asked me what I thought when I first walked in and found her? I thought she’d been murdered.”

With an angry sigh, Caid threw back the covers, climbed out of bed and started pacing the length of the room. Cold, damp air dotted his bare skin with goose bumps, but he barely registered the chill.

Last night, his overactive brain had kept him up making lists of what needed to be done and the cost of each project until he could literally see years of his life being sucked into the same void as his dwindling bank account. The sound of Hillary’s soft cries had almost been a relief.

Tonight, though, he was tired. He’d worked himself physically in the morning, painting the study, then wrote most of the afternoon. With his brain like mush and a good solid ache in his muscles, he should have been asleep in no time.

Oh, he just had to wonder about his father having a role in Agnes’s death. What the hell did he care for, anyway? He hadn’t seen either of them years. It wasn’t his problem. The police thought the whole thing was an accident and if that was good enough for them, it would just have to be good enough for him, too.

He grabbed the battered paperback he’d been reading from the bureau and crawled back into bed, settling in with a caper about a bunch of bumbling would-be criminals who couldn’t get anything right.

At last his eyes grew heavy and he started to doze.

A loud creak followed by a heavy thud yanked him awake. Caid sat up a little. The book, still open on his chest, fell onto the mattress next to him. He reached for his watch on the bedside table. Good Christ, he hadn’t been out for more than two hours.

Cursing, and with an unfortunate sense of déjà vu, he rolled out of the bed, then dragged on his jeans. What was that noise? A door? Maybe he’d dreamt the whole thing. But if it was another break in…

As he stepped into the hallway, Hillary’s door, slightly ajar, caught his eye. He pushed it open the rest of the way. The lamp next to her bed burned softly, but she was nowhere to be seen.

Where was she? His heart rate picked up, beating hard against his chest. Maybe she’d gone downstairs for something. She’d probably been the one to wake him.

He wrapped his arms around his bare chest and rubbed his upper arms as he started down the hall. With only the pale light spilling out from both bedrooms to guide him, he made his way to the top of the stairs, but hesitated before descending into the pitch black of the lower floor.

If she were down there, wouldn’t she have turned on a light? What if she sleepwalked? As he reached out for the switch to the ugly chandelier dangling over the foyer, he hesitated. A door at the opposite end of the hall was open and a weak light glowed just beyond the threshold.

Inexplicable anger shimmered just below his skin. Annoyance mixed with something a little deeper, a little frightening, an emotion he couldn’t name and definitely didn’t want to examine.

He marched down the hall through the open door, coming to a narrow stone staircase. Dirty wall sconces glowed dimly, and combined with the thick cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, cast strange fluttering shadows up the wall.

Good God, what had she been thinking, coming up here? He rested his hand on the wood banister and something scurried under his palm. He snatched his arm back and rubbed his hand on his jeans.

Despite the shudder running along his spine, he continued up the stairs. At the top, Hillary sat with a book open in her lap in the middle of a long, rectangular room made smaller by the clutter of furniture hidden beneath ancient dust covers.

“Hillary, it’s one a.m.”

She looked up, her dark eyes unusually bright. “Sorry. Did I wake you?”

“Aye, you did. What are you doing up here in the middle of the night?”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she told him.

“And the obvious solution was to wander a dank, cobweb-filled staircase?”

“Something like that. I kept thinking about the key and how it was too big for any of the doors in the house. How all the other doors had the same size lock. Then I remembered that the door at the end of the hall had a different lock. I remembered because at the time I thought that was kind of strange and I wondered where the door led. If the lock was different, chances were it wasn’t just another bedroom. Then I thought the reason it was different was because the lock was bigger, big enough to fit the key we found. So I tried it and found the stairs to the attic.”

He couldn’t help but gape. She had managed to say it all in a single breath. “And a room full of junk.”

“That’s just it. This isn’t junk, none of it. This room is like a pharaoh’s treasure room. This is where Agnes kept anything of value. She thought someone was stealing from her, right? She must have locked these things here with the idea of protecting her valuables. This,” she held up the book on her lap for him to see, “is Roderick’s journal. I’ve found it, Caid.”

Caid turned slowly, really seeing just what made up the clutter in the room. Silver serving dishes and tea services, tarnished, but solid silver. He pulled back some of the dust cloths, revealing smooth dark wood pieces unlike the scarred and chipped furniture downstairs. Boxes of china so thin the plates were nearly translucent.

“I just can’t figure out how a frail, old woman like Agnes managed to get all of this up here,” Hillary said.

“She probably had the lad who managed the garden bring it up for her,” he replied absently. Could he sell some of this? Even if it brought him just a few thousand pounds, it would help with the house. Maybe it would even be enough to hire a builder to do some of the work. That would hurry things along. Get him out of this place sooner, and off to Spain.

“There’s all kinds of family photos in the box where I found the journals,” Hillary said, setting the books down next to her. “You look like your grandfather. It’s strange, when I saw your parents I thought you looked like your mother, but I guess you just have her coloring.”

“I guess,” he murmured. He would have liked to use the whole box for kindling.

“Do you remember him at all?”

Caid shook his head. “He died shortly after I was born.”

“Joan told me he and Agnes were quite close. Maybe that’s why she left you the house, because you reminded her of him.”

“More likely to spite my father.” He should invite an appraiser to the house and find out what this lot would be worth. “We should keep this door locked until we’re certain that our intruder is no longer getting in.”

She nodded, but he could tell she wasn’t really listening. She sifted through the photos until she came to his grandfather’s wedding picture. “This is your grandmother?”

“Aye. Perhaps we should go back down, it’s the middle of the night.”

“They look so happy together. When did she die?”

“I dinnae know. Long before I was born.” What was her preoccupation with his family? There he was in the blasted middle of the night, sitting in a cold attic while she analyzed photos of a family he cared nothing about. 

“Did he remarry?”

Caid sighed. “No.”

If she detected his impatience, which he made no effort to conceal, she didn’t show it.

“Look, he kept her wedding ring.” She held out a small wood box. Inside, a thick band with tiny grooves and swirls etched into the gold sat atop a few folded papers.

He plucked the ring from the box. “I wonder how much I’d get for this.”

“You can’t sell it!”

He stood rigid against her emphatic response. “Aye, I can.”

“He kept that ring all these years. He never remarried. He must have loved her a great deal.”

“You can tell that from a wedding ring and one photograph, can you? Maybe his marriage was such a horror show he vowed to never make the same mistake twice.”

“You’re a cynic.”

“And ye’re a romantic. I never would have expected that of you.”

She snorted. “I know, especially being divorced.”

“Ye’re divorced?” Why the idea that she would have a past surprised him so much he couldn’t say. But worse was the idea that she might have a present. Was there someone waiting for her at home?

“Yeah.” She shrugged and put the pictures back in the box.

“How long?”

“The divorce became final a couple of months before I left Canada, but we’d been separated for a while. We should probably go down.”

He knew evasion when he saw it. He excelled at it, after all. “What happened?”

“Are you trying to ask if one of us had a torrid affair?”

Perhaps she’d been trying for humor, but the hitch in her voice ruined any chance of that. How could she appear both vulnerable and strong at the same time? Perhaps it was that bizarre contradiction that fascinated him so much.

Bloody hell, fascinated? Not likely, she was merely the only woman at hand. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Is that what happened?”

“No.” She held out the small box that had contained the wedding band, but frowned when he took the box from her instead of dropping the ring back inside.

“You’re not really going to pawn that, are you?”

A tiny twinge of guilt tugged at his conscience. “This house is a tip. It’s falling down around my ears. I need to pay for the repairs somehow.”

Her lips thinned. Her obvious disapproval fanned the guilt already wriggling inside him as well as his annoyance. Bloody hell, why should he feel bad selling off heirlooms from a family he’d never felt a part of? 

“Do you want to leave the box of photos or bring them down?” she asked.

“I dinnae care what happens to them.”

A challenging grin lifted the corners of her lips and she crossed her arms over chest. “Why don’t you get along with anyone in your family?”