Ashes to Ashes (3 page)

He’d responded with loving pats on the head. She’d been considering dynamite in his coffee when she heard about the position at Dun Iain.

Rebecca unpacked her tape player, found a plug, and snapped in a Mozart tape. The music was tinny and shallow, absorbed by rather than dispelling the silence. The walls seemed to lean disapprovingly inward. She turned off the player. On the mantelpiece she laid her dog-eared copy of
John Forbes: Man of Iron
; the thirty-year-old biography had cost her quite a trek through the secondhand bookstores in Kansas City.

She’d left her typewriter in the car. No great loss if it disappeared; it was a manual her parents had given her as a high school graduation present almost ten years ago. Oh, for a computer.

A programmer’s job, Ray frequently pointed out, would pay much better than her teaching job. And grad school was such a financial drain. If she wrote off her quest for a Ph.D., she could get that new car, that computer, a larger apartment. She already knew word processing, after all. Like a human Cuisinart she processed the musings with which Ray fertilized assorted philosophy journals: “Aristotle’s Poetics Revealed in ‘Saturday Night Live’”, or “Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’: the Paradigm of the Eighties.”

“Publish or perish,” he’d say cheerfully. “You’re such a big help, Kitten. I’m all thumbs when it comes to a keyboard.”

The armoire reeked of lavender. Rebecca searched for a plastic air freshener but found nothing. She hung up her blouses and dresses and left the doors open, threw her satin stocking bag into a drawer and checked the level of fluid in her contact lens case. A picture of Ray, looking professorial against a row of fake photographer’s books, went on the bedside table beside the case holding her glasses. Last Friday she’d had a headache; Ray, the
Joy of Sex
page all picked out, had been miffed. This was a man so set in his ways he’d ordered bourbon in Edinburgh.

Rebecca leaned on the embrasure of the windowsill. Publish or perish. Even if she— when she— published the Erskine letter and joined Ray in the rarefied atmosphere of a doctorate, nothing would change. On that hypothetical future date she could marry him, and nothing would change.

Her jaw ached, a sure sign of words left unsaid and emotions unexpressed. Elspeth Forbes gazed down from the paneled wall, not completely unsympathetic. Jan, amid the riot at the Burger King, had opined that distance fanned a large flame and extinguished a small one. Only 24 hours distant, Rebecca told herself, and she already had a damn good idea just which one she’d singed her fingers on.

The sunlight ebbed from the world outside. The maple trees faded to gray. She was inside those multiple eyes looking out. In the twilight the lawns and trees lost all depth, as though they’d been painted on the panes of glass. If she raised the window, she might raise the landscape itself, seeing behind it nothing, the castle the only reality.

Rebecca shook herself, turning back into the room. It was almost dark, illuminated only by the feeble light from the corridor. She clicked the switch by the door but the bulb in the midst of the ornate plaster ceiling didn’t respond. She tried the bedside lamp with the same result. All right then, time to make Dr. Campbell disgorge a couple of light bulbs as well as that cup of tea. And a sandwich would be good. A little food and a stress vitamin would steady her nerves.

Rebecca closed the door into the piper’s gallery and peered up into the darkness blotting the upper staircase. She would explore the rest of the house tomorrow, in the daylight. If it contained enough of what Ray called junk, working even with His Grace Michael the Grouch Campbell would be worthwhile. After all, she was here to do two jobs, her own and the state’s.

Starting down the staircase, she visualized Michael, festooned in the great kilt of the 17th century, lifting a lamp on the landing. In his informal 20th century clothes, longish hair and defensive posture he appeared barely twenty. He was probably closer to thirty, one of those aggravating men who look like boys until they’re forty, at which time they become distinguished.

Something bumped on the staircase over her head— the cat, no doubt. The breath of the castle wafted coldly down the back of her sweater. Not sure if she was joking, Rebecca repeated under her breath the old Scots prayer: “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us.”

She skimmed by the black yawning apertures of Hall and study. The bright light from the kitchen made the model tomb look like a child’s plaster of paris school project. Michael was singing something to the effect that it’s good to be young and daring. His bravado scraped her mind like chalk skreeking across a blackboard. No one could really be daring, given the constraints of culture and sex and economics.

At least he sounded more cheerful now. She hadn’t crept up on him. He’d seen her from the window… . The cat, Darnley, wasn’t upstairs but sat licking his paws on Mary’s marble stomach much as his namesake must once have curled against Mary’s skin.

Rebecca stopped dead in the entry. From the kitchen Michael’s voice stuttered to a halt. One beat, two, and then he bellowed, “Blast you, woman, if I’d wanted my beer cold I’d have put it in the fridge myself!”

And then again, Rebecca thought with a frustrated stamp at the unforgiving stone of the floor, wasn’t there also a prayer about deliverance from the wrath of the Campbells?

Rebecca dreamed she was sitting in the upholstered seat of a tour bus, tied up like a Christmas package. Outside the window, green countryside lapped at the walls of a pink-beige castle. She had to have something inside that building. Urgently she banged her head on the glass. She wasn’t tied, she realized; Ray’s arms held her, his voice whispering soothing condescensions. The bus roared away in a cloud of exhaust. The castle— Dun Iain? Craigievar?— disappeared behind ribbons of asphalt and slipped forever from her grasp.

The roar of the bus grew louder. Rebecca swam suddenly from sleep, her mind clutching one thought: that prayer was not for deliverance from the wrath but from the greed of the Campbells.

The noise was a vacuum cleaner. The housekeeper was here. Rebecca fought off the smothering embrace of the blankets and sat up. So much for the romance of sleeping in a canopied bed. Claustrophobic, that’s what it was. After all, the original purpose of a canopy was to protect the sleeper against zoological paratroopers from a thatched roof.

She should never have drunk that tea. Michael had brewed it strong enough to dissolve a spoon, assuming she would dilute it with milk. She hadn’t, and had gulped cup after cup of the scalding stuff over sandwiches and banalities. When they’d adjourned next door, to the room which was fitted out with reclining chairs and a TV set, her eyelids had fallen to half-mast. She’d left Michael watching an old episode of
M*A*S*H
, replaced the two light bulbs, and gone to bed.

But then, perversely, her eyes had popped open. The house had creaked and sighed, the wind had moaned around the turrets, and Michael had clomped endlessly up and down the staircase and across the ceiling above her head, his footsteps as ponderous as her own heartbeat.

Ray smiled from his photo beside her bed, his bland, Slavic face bisected by stylish glasses. He’d paid more than his half of that tour of Great Britain; if it hadn’t been for him, she’d never have set foot there. Better to be shipped about like a package than never to have been there at all.

She threw back the covers and groped for her slippers and her glasses. The window overlooked a static vista of central Ohio, the sky smudged with cloud and the maples tossing in the wind. Under that pewter sky their leaves were less crimson than splotches of dried blood… . Rebecca laughed at herself. What an image. Get away from Ray’s dampening influence for a day and already her imagination had become overactive.

Nikes, jeans, and a Pringles of Scotland sweater made a suitably efficient outfit. She pulled her hair into a ponytail, embellished it with a scarf, and considered the effect. Without its framing waves her face seemed pinched; the cheeks that yesterday had been fashionably hollow looked this morning as though they’d been sucked dry by a vampire. Her brown eyes were as disproportionately large and dark as those of Elspeth Forbes gazing from her portrait just over Rebecca’s shoulder.

The woman’s necklace was gaudy but gorgeous, garnets and jet centering on a fiery gem that looked like the Hope diamond. The Hope was rumored to have brought bad luck to its wearer, and Elspeth’s slightly dazed, slightly desperate expression looked as if she believed hers, too, to be cursed. The biography didn’t say why she died so young. Of homesickness for her native Dundee, possibly, or from a broken heart. Rumor had it she’d been married off to the much older John Forbes after an unhappy love affair with a fellow Scot.

Rebecca inserted contacts into her eyes and gold studs into her earlobes. She applied light touches of blush, eye shadow, mascara, lipstick. There, she looked healthier. Cosmetics were expensive, but it was self-respect to look as nice as possible.

She headed for the staircase. A middle-aged woman was halfway up, lugging a vacuum cleaner and a basket of cleaning paraphernalia. “Let me help,” called Rebecca.

The woman jumped and clutched at the breast of her flowered blouse. “Sweet Jesus, girl, don’t sneak up on a body like that!”

With a distinct sense of deja vu— this hadn’t been funny the first time— Rebecca bared her teeth in an innocent smile and said, “I’m sorry. I was just on my way downstairs. I’m Rebecca Reid.”

The woman peered up at her through blue horn-rimmed glasses. A red slash of lipstick emphasized the downturned corners of her mouth. Judging from the creases in her cheeks, that disapproving frown was her usual expression. She released her blouse and with an elaborate sigh said, “Dorothy Garst. You’re the schoolteacher from Missouri?”

Rebecca stepped back as woman and machine arrived on the landing with a clash of metal against stone. “From Dover College.”

“Aren’t you the lucky one, getting to work with Dr. Campbell. Isn’t he a case? I’d always heard Englishmen weren’t very friendly. And that haircut!”

“I wouldn’t let him hear you call him English,” Rebecca replied, slightly dizzied. “Has he been here long?”

“A week. I keep hoping he’ll start talking to where I can understand him, but he hasn’t yet.”

Michael would probably have to be tortured to make him give up one rolled “r”. “He’s quite a change from Mr. Forbes, isn’t he?”

Dorothy leaned forward, nodding curtly. Her gray perm, set like cement on her head, didn’t budge. “Not much of a change, no. Neither one of them wants me to touch anything. How can I clean the place properly if I can’t move things? But no, it was ‘Leave that whatsit alone, Dottie’, when old James was alive, and now it’s “Leave that whatsit alone, Mrs. Garst’.”

“Some things that don’t look valuable are,” said Rebecca placatingly.

“Old books that attract mice and pictures of people in funny clothes?” Dorothy’s washed-out brown eyes narrowed into slits. “I bet you’re here to look for the Forbes treasure.”

“Treasure?”

“Mr. James kept going on about how his father had brought a treasure back from England… ”

“Scotland,” Rebecca murmured.

“And hid it somewhere in the house. But if you ask me… ”

Rebecca didn’t. She explained, “The obviously valuable pieces, like jewelry, are in the bank. There aren’t any pieces of eight, I’m afraid.”

“If you ask me,” continued Dorothy without taking breath, “he was just touched in the head. Senile, you know. He didn’t act like he was rich. He paid me, and Phil Pruitt, the caretaker, and Phil’s son Steve, who does some gardening, but he never went out and got himself anything nice from the new Wal-Mart. Kept living here with all this junk. If he’d had him a room over at Golden Age Village, he wouldn’t have fallen down these ridiculous stairs. Right here’s where Phil found him, end of August.” She seemed disappointed when Rebecca wasn’t startled.

“He was here alone at night?”

“Ah… . “Dorothy straightened and stepped back, her eyes sliding away. “He— er— he didn’t want anyone here with him.”

“He must’ve been in good health, then, and could do for himself.”

“Not really. He’d gotten pretty feeble and hadn’t been out of his room by himself in two months. A nurse came in every day to check him over and keep him tidy. Though how anyone could stay clean in this dusty old place… . “Dorothy adjusted her glasses and peered critically at a wonderful Landseer landscape hanging in the stairwell. “Well, I tried to help.”

Rebecca frowned. “If Mr. Forbes was that decrepit, what was he doing on the staircase?”

“He’d gone soft in the head,” insisted Dorothy. “No telling what he thought he was doing.” Grasping her vacuum and her basket she headed on up the stairs, presenting Rebecca with a vision of her rear end like a sausage encased in pink double-knit slacks. “I’d better get going— still got the rooms up above. I did yours yesterday. I have a system, a rotation pattern… ”

That voice had enough vinegar in it to etch tracks in the stone steps. Fortunately the vacuum roared into life and blanked it out. Rebecca shook her head, half amused, half appalled. So the local gossip was that there was a treasure here. Romantic fancies, no doubt. Forbes’s stocks and bonds weren’t nearly as interesting as some mythical trove.

The old man had fallen down these very stairs and died there, alone, in the darkness… . All right, Rebecca thought, she certainly wasn’t going to be intimidated by that macabre image. She turned and climbed up to the fourth floor. And it was the fourth, despite Michael’s calling it the third; when in Rome do as the Romans, or the Americans, do.

Through the door on her left she saw a bedroom littered with cast off T-shirts, papers, and books.
The History of Scottish Second Sight
lay open on the unmade bed, Michael’s idea of light bedtime reading. There was no corresponding picture of a woman on his bedside table. The lawyer, Adler, had mentioned to her that the young Scot was single.