Ashes to Ashes (11 page)

Rebecca was mellowing fast. The rest of the restaurant seemed as hazy as a scene photographed through a gauzed lens; the conversations of the other diners and the clink of cutlery reached her ears in slow, indistinct eddies. Only the banquette was completely tangible. The candlelit plates and glasses and Eric’s face with the intensity of stained-glass windows lit from behind. Rebecca grimaced at her descent into unashamed sensuality and cut another morsel of veal. She was eating olives, she realized, and enjoying them.

“So you’ve been handling Dun Iain’s legal matters for several years,” she said. “Does that take up a lot of your time?”

“Not really. I’m the one-man Putnam branch of the firm, so I have to be here at least once a week anyway. There’s usually something to attend to over at Golden Age Village, for example— wills, trusts, various financial and legal matters to sort out.”

“Dorothy was saying that James resisted going into the Village.”

“He certainly did. Dun Iain was his home and that was where he was going to stay. A shame he had to fall down those stairs, but, well, he had had a long life. Not like his mother when she died.” This time it wasn’t Eric’s jaw that tightened but his mouth, its deep curve thinning into a narrow line.

“That must have been a real tragedy for James, losing his mother like that… ” Rebecca bit her tongue. She didn’t know how Eric had lost his own mother. Or his father, for that matter. No wonder the thought of Elspeth’s death distressed him.

But his voice was smooth as always. “I’m not saying James wasn’t a little crazy. He was. And yet in many ways he was perfectly sane. He loved his books, and his writing, and all those artifacts were his babies. Even though he felt guilty over them.”

“Guilty?”

“He said they shouldn’t have been brought here. He said they wanted to go home.” Eric gazed off over the restaurant as if seeing the old man pottering among the portraits, the letters, and the cut-glass bottles.

“Not that he wanted to send them home, but that they wanted to go?”

He turned to her with an apologetic smile. “I said he was a little crazy. But he’s getting his wish now. They’re going back.”

“I suppose, then, that James resisted selling off the more historically interesting objects?”

“There’s not much of a market for that kind of thing. He sold some decorative items to support the place, yes. ‘Deaccessioning’, I guess you’d call it. But they didn’t lose their entire fortune in the Crash of ‘29.”

“Deaccessioning,” Rebecca chuckled. “That’s good museum-speak. You’re learning fast.” Eric grinned and bowed over his wineglass. “I assume,” she continued, “that the readily salable pieces are in the bank.”

“Some bonds, a certificate of deposit or two. That’s about all. James sold his mother’s jewels, if that’s what you’re wondering. You’ll notice the erasures in the inventories.”

“Rats,” she said. “I was hoping to find Elspeth’s diamond choker, the one in the Sargent portrait.”

“Already gone. A shame; you’d look lovely in it.”

“I’ll ignore that,” Rebecca chided him, without really meaning it. “How do you suppose the rumor of treasure got started?”

Eric threw his head back and laughed. “Good Lord, Dorothy didn’t waste any time filling you in on the local gossip, did she? Treasure?” He leaned conspiratorially toward Rebecca and lowered his voice. “I think part of it is the normal human love for a mystery— the recluse in his castle— and part of it was fostered by James himself. He would carry things around and hide them and then forget where. I found his father’s signet rings in an old coffee can one time. Rescued them just before Dorothy threw them out.”

“The ones in the prophet’s chamber?”

“You’ve already seen them? Yes, those. I had my own ring modeled on them. Not that I had any intention of flattering him, you understand.”

“I should hope not,” sighed Rebecca. Again her glass was empty. There was a wonderful taste of garlic, basil, and red wine in her mouth. Eric was still leaning close to her. The candlelight made his eyes look like polished smoky quartz— cairngorm, in Scotland… . All right, she ordered herself. “Poor John, and Elspeth, and James,” she said. “They just never found how to buy happiness, did they?”

To her surprise Eric straightened. “Money can buy happiness,” he said quietly. “What it can’t buy is justice.”

For a long minute she looked at the somber line of his profile. A lawyer with a conscience. Maybe he’d rather be in criminal law but doesn’t have the stomach for it, and feels guilty… . Her head was swimming. So James had thought the artifacts wanted to go back. Did he, too, imagine Rizzio’s murder and the terrible battle at Culloden?

The waiter was hovering. Eric was smiling and nodding as if he’d never made a serious statement in his life. “I’m stuffed,” Rebecca protested laughingly. “I can’t eat another bite. You’ll have to roll me out of here. Except I’ll be so huge you won’t be able to lift me.”

“You’re barely even a handful as it is,” Eric replied in mock reproof, and ordered chocolate mousse and espresso.

Odd, Rebecca thought, how everyone seemed to suddenly think she was too thin. And she thought, a handful, huh? What part of her anatomy was he considering handling? She giggled helplessly, and Eric regarded her with indulgence that was far from platonic.

The dessert and coffee were as delicious as the rest of the meal, and the jolt of caffeine helped to keep Rebecca from falling comatose in her plate. All too soon the day of reckoning came; the waiter appeared with the bill. Eric produced a pen and began to refigure it.

She seized the opportunity to pull out her compact and renew her lipstick. Circumscribed in the mirror’s tiny circle, her face glowed and her eyes shone in the candle light. Tendrils of hair softened the often too-crisp lines of her features. If Ray could only see her now… . It was because Ray couldn’t see her now that she was so splendidly flushed and tipsy. Yes, the engagement was over, all but the shouting. Not that there’d be any shouting, not with Ray. Rebecca made a face at herself and returned her compact to her purse, where it clinked against the huge door key.

Eric summoned the waiter and consulted over the new, improved version of the bill. The waiter bowed and scraped. The ceremony moved to its conclusion, the ritual presentation of the American Express card.

When all was completed to his satisfaction, Eric tucked the receipt into his wallet and turned to Rebecca with an engagingly self-deprecating smile. “Sorry to take so long. But it’s the principle of the thing, isn’t it?” He captured her hand from her lap and this time really did hold it briefly to his lips. Amazing how the man could get away with gestures that would be ludicrous in another. The kiss tingled all the way to her toes.

When she stood up, her knees were hardly steadier than her linguini. The rush of cold air and the chilly seat of the car cleared her head somewhat. Eric checked the gauges on the dashboard with the careful scrutiny of an astronaut preparing for launch.

When they returned down franchise row, the neon lights of the pizza place shone innocuously over a few parked cars, but no living figures were in sight. Rebecca asked Eric to stop at the convenience store on the next block; she wasn’t going to spend one more day in that house without coffee. Eric not only stopped, he bought a can for her and assured her there was a coffeemaker in the pantry. “I brought it out there myself,” he told her. “James preferred tea for his elevenses, but I don’t think anything beats a good cup of coffee.”

“Amen,” agreed Rebecca, and crinkled the bag happily in her lap between similarly happy if speculative glances at Eric.

He was, she thought, orchestrating an old-fashioned seduction. Slowly, one day at a time, none of this “Hi, pleased to meet you, your place or mine” business. An affair might be just the ticket. No more commitments, not now. There was nothing wrong with simple mutual pleasure.

Not that she was an expert on seduction. Ray was the only man she’d ever slept with. And he’d been the professor next door, a trusted friend, well before he ever became her lover. Once that placid quasi-domestic Friday night arrangement had been established, engagement had been the logical next step.

Every now and then Ray would hint about how repressed she’d been before he came along. She supposed she had to allow him that brief glint of machismo. So it had taken her a while to discover the opposite sex. Once her caution would have been commended, not condemned.

In the darkness she bit her lip and then smiled ruefully, wondering what had happened to that caution; she was considering this stranger as a potential lover. Her singed fingertips must be extraordinarily sensitive.

All too soon the car turned into the driveway. There was Dun Iain, lit up like a Christmas tree. You can tell he’s not paying for the electricity, Rebecca said to herself. He’s left every light in the place blazing. The windows were squares of brilliance against the black invisibility of walls, ground, and cloudy sky. They looked even more like eyes than they had in the daylight. Considering all that she had seen from them, they
were
eyes.

Pellets of rain struck the windshield in a brisk fusillade as Eric stopped the car and turned off the engine. He peered rather quizzically up at the house, then released both his and her seat belts and gently but firmly pulled her across the seat into his embrace.

Not that she had any idea of resisting. The kiss sent static hissing down her nerve fibers. She wondered abstractedly if she’d frizzle up like a cartoon character caught in the throes of G-rated passion. But this was not G-rated. She melted against him.

The can of coffee fell off her lap and cracked against his ankle. “Ow!” he exclaimed. “You could’ve just said no.”

“I’m so sorry— I didn’t mean… . “They both scrabbled after the can, cracked their foreheads together, and subsided laughing against the seat.

Eric escorted her to the door, took the key, and unlocked it. “If I were you, I’d get a locksmith out here to put in a new lock.”

“This contraption lends it character, though, don’t you think?”

He smiled and said, “I’ll be appearing on your doorstep again soon. I’d like to look over James’s papers one more time for news of Rachel Forbes’s descendants. If you don’t mind sharing the space.”

“Of course I don’t mind.”

“And we’ll have to do another dinner, or maybe a concert, soon.”

“Yes. Definitely.” They kissed again, quickly but not superficially, and Eric ushered her inside. But not before her damp lips turned abruptly cold in the chill of the night.

Just as the lights of the car flashed on, the rain came down in sheets. Rebecca slammed the door, locked it behind her, and stood with her back against the wood waiting for her red corpuscles to stop pirouetting like bubbles in champagne. Slowly her idiotic grin ebbed to an introspective smile.

Eric was certainly a class act. How long had it taken him to smooth the sharp edges of his background— ten, fifteen years? But his manner wasn’t a seamless whole. His occasional somber abstraction suggested depths beneath the surface gloss. He held something back, kept something in reserve.

Rebecca asked the marble features of Queen Mary, “Were any of your husbands like that? Francis, the gallant? Darnley, the dandy? Or Bothwell, the warrior? As if he were waiting, like a cat at a mouse hole?”

The serene face of the queen, all passion spent, did not reply.

Rebecca was tempted to creep up the stairs and leap into the Hall screaming “Boo!”. But that would be a cheap trick. She shouted “Hello!” toward the light gleaming on the landing and walked into the kitchen.

Even the light in the hood over the stove blazed away. The casserole dish sat on the counter, almost full of noodles and what looked like the flour paste children use in kindergarten. Dishes and cutlery were propped in the drainer, clean, and an empty can of beans lay in the trash can.

So Michael had given up on Dorothy’s cooking. While she stuffed herself with enough Italian food for three: herself, Michael and… . Rebecca put the coffee in the cabinet, folded the sack, and wondered if Ray had ever gotten any spaghetti. She visualized him leaning against the kitchen counter in his apartment, spooning food off a paper plate, all alone.

Dammit, she wasn’t his keeper. She’d heard that breaking off a serious relationship entailed a certain amount of guilt. All right, if that was the price, she’d pay it. Tomorrow she’d write him and get it over with. The misty glow cast by her senses dissipated, revealing the hard edges of reality. A shame that glow had barely lasted past the front door.

When she put the sack in the pantry, she found Darnley’s dish filled with noodles; Michael had made every effort to get rid of the evidence. But Darnley had probably gone mousing. In fact, there was a mouse now. Rebecca bent and peered into the darkness beneath the wobbly shelves. No, she’d thought for a moment she’d seen tiny glittering eyes, but none were there now.

Turning off lights as she went, she returned to the entry and again shouted “Hello!”

“In here,” called a voice behind her, and she jumped.

Michael was in the sitting room, stretching and yawning. That was it, he’d dozed off and hadn’t heard her come in. He looked comfortable enough, lying back in a recliner, the whiskey and a glass on the table beside him. The bottle wasn’t too badly depleted. The television wasn’t on, but the cassette player was. “Turn that off, please,” he asked.

She turned it off. The cassette was one of the Scottish folk-rock bands she herself enjoyed, pipes, tin whistle, accordion and electric guitar.

Michael’s lap overflowed with a pile of cloth and wooden tubes that looked like— that was an eviscerated set of bagpipes. “If you canna beat them,” he said, “you can always join them.” With a tiny brush he began to ream what Rebecca recognized as the chanter.

“Where’d you get the brush?” she asked.

“It’s amazin’ what you can find if you take a turn tae yoursel’.”

And in ransacking the place he’d turned on all the lights. She shrugged off her coat and yawned.

“I see your evenin’ was a success.”