Ashes to Ashes (21 page)

“I intend to. Nae more nights in the recliner in the sittin’ room.” Rebecca laughed. Now she could laugh. That night four weeks ago when they’d found the ghost, the apparition, the cold lavender-scented entity, neither of them could’ve laughed any more than they could have brought themselves to go upstairs— or to retreat into Putnam. They’d passed the bottle of Scotch back and forth, waiting for the lights to go out again and something horrible to leap out of the darkness. Only when dawn had thinned the threatening night had they staggered upstairs to find that not one single object had even been moved, let alone stolen. Their only visitors had been supernatural. Darnley must have gotten into the house through the tiny pantry window— assuming it had been left unlatched.

Michael gazed reflectively into his mug. “I suppose there’s room in the hoose for Elspeth and James.”

“The scent of lavender is Elspeth,” said Rebecca. “So is the print on the bed, and probably the moving bottles. The footsteps and that shape in the window is James. I’d sure like to know why they’re still here, instead of— well, disappearing onto another plane or whatever you do when you die.” She arranged her dress on a hanger dangling from a cabinet doorknob.

“James might be guardin’ the artifacts. Makin’ sure they get tae go back, like they wish. And do they ever wish!”

Rebecca glanced at him. “What got you this time? That curl of hair in the prophet’s chamber?”

“Oh aye. For a moment there I was ready tae pick up that claymore and kill the nearest Englishman. Last time I felt like that I was pipin’ ‘Scotland the Brave’ at Bannockburn.”

“Swept up by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s charisma after all,” she teased.

Michael snorted. “Can objects have charisma?”

“The ones here certainly do. Kind of like music, as you say— gut reaction. Like the background static you get on the radio. Always there, just louder at some times than others.” She poured herself some tea, sat down, and accepted her cookie. Darnley settled on another chair and began grooming himself with little slurping licks.

“Aye, that’s a good simile.” Michael opened one of the diaries. He extracted the massive mausoleum key, laid it on the table, and inspected the photograph of the young woman labeled “Gemmell”. “We finished the study and the prophet’s chamber last week, and there wisna anything on your floor. The museum’ll no be wantin’ these— why are you lookin’ at them?”

“For the Ohio State Historical Society. Remember— I wrote them last week. Actually got to use my typewriter.”

“I was sure the Erskine letter would be in the study.” He leafed through another volume. “Will you be far behind on your dissertation?”

“I don’t have a schedule. And my dissertation director is the patient sort.” A good thing, too; she’d started imagining her typewriter was looking at her in silent reproof. Frustrating to have laid so many plans around that letter and then not be able to find it. “Maybe when I get back to Dover, I’ll write a best-seller about a haunted castle in Ohio. That was always one of Ray’s get rich quick schemes, except his best-seller was going to be a hot and heavy romance about the affair between Jean-Paul Sartre and Francoise Sagan.”

Michael looked up skeptically. “Aye?”

“Probably with the hot and heavy parts copied from
The Joy of Sex
,” she added, and bit her tongue. That was a cheap shot at Ray. Eric didn’t need a reference book to make her purr like Darnley. When he kissed the back of her neck she wanted to roll belly up, just like the cat. Not that she had— yet.

Michael struggled and failed to quell a grin, part amused, part exasperated, which escaped as a lopsided parody of itself. “Well then, when you’re makin’ a fortune, remember I get ten percent tae put my chin back together and tae repair the claw marks in my anorak.”

“That bruise on your chin is all healed, and your coat isn’t damaged in the least,” Rebecca retorted.

Michael didn’t hear. He was staring at a loose sheet in the back of a diary. “Here you go— the Gemmells.”

“Oh?” It was, she saw, a page out of a ledger book, dated 1912.

Michael pointed. “Expense sheet, see? John’s handwritin’. Servant’s pay packets. There’s Louise— she was still Ryan then. And there’s Rudolph Gemmell, butler, and Athena Gemmell, cook. Could this picture be Athena?”

“How old would you say this girl is— early twenties?” Rebecca took the photo. The dark eyes gazed impassively, almost resentfully, out at her. “Unless Athena was a child prodigy cook, she would’ve had to be at least in her thirties when this picture was taken. 1920’s, isn’t it?”

“Aye, that’s flapper era, a’ right. Not that she looks as if she has much o’ a taste for flappin’. Do you suppose she’s the Gemmells’ daughter?”

“That’s it! James was sweet on her, but since she was the servant’s girl, John didn’t allow them to marry, and so she married someone else and he kept this picture all his life and never married himself!”

Michael pried her fingers from the photo and put it and the account sheet back in the diary. “Save it for your book,” he told her.

Rebecca laughed. The hedge clippers stopped abruptly and a thunderous hammering reverberated through the house. Michael and Rebecca started for the front door, only to encounter Dorothy already there. They exchanged a quick look— how long had she been in the entry listening to them talk? Not that they had anything to hide. But her insistence on having a finger in every conversational pie was more than a little irritating.

And the housekeeper was holding one of the extra keys that had been dangling from the hook beside the door ever since the lock had been changed. Rebecca grimaced; they’d already been over that.

Dorothy threw open the door to reveal the stocky form of Warren Lansdale outlined against the sunshine outside. Over his shoulder Rebecca caught a glimpse of Steve Pruitt warily eyeing the squad car. Not surprising that he hadn’t enjoyed his ride to the Putnam Police Department, Heather beside him and his earring tucked away in Lansdale’s pocket.

“Good morning,” said the sheriff, his affable smile breaking through the underbrush covering his mouth. “Sorry to interrupt your work.”

“They were taking a coffee break,” Dorothy said. Her glasses glinted with reflected sunlight, and Rebecca couldn’t see her expression.

“Mrs Garst,” she said, “you won’t be needing a key. Someone will always be here to let you in.”

“I’ve worked here for thirty years,” replied Dorothy, as much to the air as to Rebecca. “A lot longer than some people have. I’ve always had a key. Just like the world today, the experienced workers get no respect.”

Rebecca looked appealingly at Michael. It would take someone with a lot more brass than she to remind Dorothy that since no one but Michael and Rebecca herself had had keys, no one had broken in. But Michael, his brass suddenly tarnished, turned and clicked shut the door of the lumber room as if its being open a crack were of earthshaking importance.

“It’s not that, Dorothy,” Lansdale said, stepping into the breach. “It has to do with the division of the property, and the insurance, and James’s will. Just legal red tape. You know, Eric explained it to you.”

How clever! Rebecca thought. At the magic name, Dorothy’s sour expression grew sugary, like oversweetened lemonade. She handed Rebecca the key. “Oh, of course. Not for us mere mortals, is it, to understand the law? Here, honey, you make sure Mr. Adler knows the key is safe.”

Michael had been practicing his response-to-Eric poker face for some time now. He didn’t turn a hair at that statement.

“Thank you,” Rebecca told the older woman, and slipped the key into the pocket of her jeans. This time she would hide it.

Dorothy exuded an aroma of hair spray, stale cigarette smoke and alcohol. “I already gave the other key to Phil,” she continued. “You’d better go up and get it. If I can’t have one, neither can he.”

“I’ll take care of it,” said Rebecca.

“I don’t need to be standing around here passing the time of day.” Dorothy started up the staircase, carrying herself as though she were a porcelain vase that might break. Rebecca glanced after her curiously.

Warren hung his hat on Queen Mary’s toes. Leaving the door open, Rebecca and Michael escorted him into the kitchen, seated him at the table, and offered him a soft drink. Michael opened a can of Coke, tossed an ice cube into a glass, poured. Rebecca took can and glass out of his hands, filled the glass with ice, handed them with a napkin to Warren. Michael put on his “Americans are crazy” expression and perched on the end of the cabinet. Warren eyed Michael’s “Disarm Today” T-shirt, assumed his “Europeans are nuts” face, moved aside the mausoleum key, and nodded his thanks to Rebecca.

“I take it,” said Michael, “that if you’d had any news about the mazer you’d have said so by now.”

“That’s right. Afraid it’s still missing. The Putnam police took out a warrant and searched both the Pruitts’ and Heather Hines’s houses. Sandra, her stepmother, had hysterics. But the mazer wasn’t there. Neither was any dope.”

Rebecca almost wished she hadn’t told the sheriff about smelling marijuana on Steve, but she’d figured if she was coming clean, she might as well come spotless. “They haven’t broken up the mazer, have they?” she asked, sitting down beside him.

“We wondered if they meant to sell it for scrap. But Chief Velasco in Putnam agrees with me— it’s not that Steve and Heather are too dumb to know what to do with it, but too smart to take it to begin with. Especially Heather. You wouldn’t know to look at her, but she’s got more than air between her ears. She’s still in school, and on the honor roll.”

Lansdale stroked his moustache. “I’ve known these kids since they were babies. Pretty wild, yes. But they have no records. And Heather’s only sixteen, a minor. Without finding the mazer actually on them, all we could do was slap them on the hands for tearing up your room, Miss Reid. Even if they’ve never really come up with much reason for picking on you. Maybe they had no reason— your room was there, like Mount Everest. My advice is to stop worrying about Steve and Heather and start looking for someone else.”

Rebecca nodded. “Yeah, I know. There were two sets of malefactors in the house that night. That story is just unlikely enough to be likely.”

“And there I was takin’ a snooze in the sittin’ room,” Michael moaned.

Warren glanced speculatively at him. So it had occurred to him, too, that Michael might have taken the mazer himself. Just likely enough to be unlikely. “Surely you’ve decided to let Ray off the hook,” said Rebecca.

“Well,” Lansdale said apologetically, “you never can tell what someone will do when their emotions get in a tangle.” He peered into his glass. Michael eyed the ceiling.

Rebecca hid her frown by getting up and pouring more hot water into the teapot. God, she hated airing her if not dirty at least slightly smudged linen in public. She hated having smudged linen to air. Michael and Warren had to be exchanging one of those knowing masculine looks behind her back. She wouldn’t be surprised if even Darnley was smirking. She turned. Darnley was gone. Michael was swinging his feet back and forth like a child. Warren was inspecting the mausoleum key.

“I’m just an innocent bystander,” Rebecca said, more testily than either man deserved. “Someone wants to get their hands on the artifacts, that’s all. Money’s a better motive than… ” She almost said “sex”, but swallowed the word in the nick of time. “… coming in from left field with all these theories about Ray,” she concluded awkwardly.

Michael looked at her with his favorite analytical expression, as though she were a bacterium on a slide and he were peering at her through a microscope, safely removed from return inspection. “Left field?” he queried.

She explained the baseball analogy.

“I’m a Glasgow Rangers fan myself,” he said. “Football— er— soccer.”

Lansdale laughed. “Yes, I think we are going to have to eliminate Dr. Kocurek as a suspect. Have you heard from him recently?”

Despite her following up their conversation at Jan’s house with a letter, Ray still fondly believed he could win her back. Rebecca felt as if she’d stepped on bubble gum in July. “Another sentimental greeting card last weekend. The most recent batch of flowers I gave Jan to take to Golden Age. I haven’t talked to him, no.”

“Has he gotten any more postcards?”

“Not that he told me. Just the three ‘Visit Ohio’ cards last month, typewritten, signed with a fair approximation of my signature. He did send them on to you.”

“Oh yes. He was very helpful, putting them in a cardboard-lined photograph mailer and everything.”

“The package was postmarked Dover, was it?” Michael asked. Rebecca shot him an indignant glare, which he turned with a shrug.

“Yes,” said Warren, “it was. And all of the cards were postmarked Putnam. I think we’ve pretty well proved he was never here, ever since we found that drifter Mrs. Sorenson saw outside the mall. He did look a lot like Dr. Kocurek, I’ll admit.”

Rebecca nodded. Giving Ray’s picture to the police had been the low water mark of her month. When she’d gotten it back she’d burned it, full of remorse for ever suspecting him.

“The first card did predict the vandalism and the theft,” the sheriff went on, “but the other two were frankly imaginary. One said there’d been a fire, the other something about more thefts.”

“Who around here would have your signature to copy?” Michael asked.

“I wrote to Eric about coming here. I’ve been writing to Jan and Peter for years. I even wrote James Forbes after I first learned about Dun Iain, asking for information. Even though he never answered, my letter could still be here somewhere.”

Warren made water rings across the table with the bottom of his glass.

“And someone could have found one of your letters to the Sorensons in the trash, for example.”

“Dorothy said something about Slash tearing open garbage bags. But to take a letter from the trash argues an awful lot of premeditation, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to think,” said Michael darkly. “You thought some things had really been stolen, Sheriff. What about Dorothy?”

Lansdale made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t worry about Dorothy. Her bark’s a lot worse than her bite.”