Ashes to Ashes (23 page)

Michael blew on the beads and rubbed them with the hem of his shirt. Flakes of red paint adhered to the fabric. “Cheap clay,” he pronounced. “For these you could’ve bought New York, back when prices were somewhat less.” He tossed the beads to Rebecca, turned on his heel, and walked away.

The necklace was cold and gritty. A toy, probably, stuffed behind the loose brick with the picture in some childish magic ritual. Louise was an adolescent when she first worked here, and had probably lived in the rooms just off the ballroom. “May I have the clipping?” Rebecca asked Dorothy.

Dorothy, her face curdled with something Rebecca suspected was disappointment, handed it over. She turned to inflict her dustcloth on the closest piece of furniture. Phil laid the brick on the hearth. “I’ll bring some mortar tomorrow and fix it,” he said tonelessly.

Rebecca nodded. Glancing sharply at Dorothy’s back, swathed in a shapeless pink sweater, she headed for the stairs. “What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” the housekeeper had said. Very helpful. What weren’t they supposed to know— about items listed but missing from the house?

Just as Rebecca walked past the fourth floor the phone rang. Michael reached out of his room to answer it. “Hello? Aye, she’s here. It’s your boyfriend,” he told her, holding out the receiver.

She said to him, “I thought you didn’t believe in the Forbes treasure. Your body language speaks better English than you do, you know.”

His eyes flashed, his lips thinned, his chin snapped up like a shield. She ducked toward the staircase, calling, “Hang up the phone in just a minute, please.” No Forbes treasure, huh? Not that it mattered whether he believed in it or not, but his inconsistency was unsettling.

Leaving the necklace and the clipping in her room, she picked up the phone in the kitchen. An emphatic click on the line assured her that Michael had not only hung up the extension, he’d probably slammed it through the table. “Hello!” she said.

“What was all that about?” said Eric’s velvet baritone.

“What was what about?”

“Something about the Forbes treasure speaking English.”

“No, no. Michael’s always been adamantly against there being any such thing as a treasure, and then when Phil finds a loose brick upstairs he practically tramples me to get there. All it was was a cheap necklace and an old ad. Louise’s, I bet.”

“We’ll ask her on Sunday, at her birthday party,” Eric said. “So Campbell is doing his dog in the manger routine? I tell you, he’s up to something.”

“Well he’s damned lousy at it, whatever it is.”

Eric laughed. The sound smoothed Rebecca’s feathers. The last time she’d seen Eric was last Saturday night when they’d returned to Dun Iain after visiting two other castle follies near West Liberty. They’d sat under this castle’s enigmatic facade, the lamp beside the door and the window of her room shining, the stars cold and still overhead, until the car windows were opaque with the steam of their breaths.

She’d gone inside glowing with pleasure and frustration. Fortunately Michael hadn’t stayed up, honing his armory of snide remarks and amused glances, to see her blouse misbuttoned. Well, it had been dark in the car, Eric’s sturdy hands had done their best— which was very good indeed. She was always embarrassed after such an encounter, not during. Like indulging in a sophisticated meal and then getting indigestion.

Eric was saying something about the mazer. “Oh,” Rebecca replied, grateful he couldn’t see how hot her cheeks were, “Warren’s already been here. Nothing this week at all about the mazer, about the cards, about anything. Except that now the mausoleum key is gone.”

“What?”

“I put the key into one of the diaries, and had that one in the kitchen when Warren was here, and now the key’s gone. I’m afraid it looks like Warren took it, although I guess Dorothy or Phil or Michael could’ve rushed down the stairs when my back was turned. Not that Dorothy or Phil knew the key was here.”

Eric said, “Great. Now what? I’ll call Warren about the key and tell you about it tomorrow night. Five o’clock?”

“Yes, with bells on. I even ironed my dress, I’ll have you know. I haven’t been to a real symphony concert in ages.”

“You’d look lovely in a gunnysack, Rebecca.” She smiled; that was a line, but she enjoyed swinging on it. He went on, “I thought we’d go to a special place to eat. My condo. I’m pretty good with a wok, if you don’t mind my cooking Chinese for you.”

Rebecca’s chest went fuzzy. She leaned against the cabinet, trying to keep herself from hyperventilating with trepidation or delight or both. They were going to his place. She’d have to wear the lacy teddy that had survived the night of the vandals… . God, she was acting as if going to bed with the man was as casual as ordering dessert; I’ll have one silver-tongued lawyer, please, with a dusting of habeas corpus. Giddily she asked, “You can cook?”

“I refuse to live on fast food and TV dinners. I thought something out of the ordinary would be in order since I have to leave town for a few days next week. I’ve finally turned up something about Rachel Forbes.”

Grateful he’d changed the topic— chicken, she said to herself— she asked, “Have you contacted Rachel’s children?”

“No,” he answered, “I don’t do seances. John was born in 1847, remember? And since Rachel was the older of the two, I’ll be lucky if I find her grandchildren still alive.”

“I should’ve figured that out.” Rebecca sternly ordered her corpuscles to stop doing backflips through her brain. “Where are you going?”

“Nebraska. A Rachel Forbes Dennison is listed in the census for 1890. I’ll have to hit several county seats, checking property records and that type of thing. Every other courthouse has had at least one major fire that’s wiped out the relevant information.”

A horn honked outside. “Oh! Eric, the Sorensons are here. Peter’s going to do some work for Phil and they brought the kids along. I have to run.”

“And I’m doing lunch with the district attorney. Keep me posted if anything comes up. I’ll check with Warren about the key. See you tomorrow.”

“I can hardly wait.” She hung up, wondering whether she could wait or not. Anticipatory fantasy was so enjoyable it might be difficult for reality to compete. Reality did have its hard edges.

One of reality’s harder edges, Michael Campbell, strolled into the kitchen. “The Sorensons are here. Steve’s puttin’ the Hound of the Baskervilles into the shed. Wi’ no good grace, but I doot he has his orders.”

Rebecca nodded abstractedly. She leaned against the counter, smoothing the tousled edges of her libido with little strokes of self-discipline. Michael began cutting vegetables into the pot of broth. A good thing he hadn’t heard her exclaiming over Eric’s ability to cook when he’d been capably shouldering his share of the cooking duties all this time. Even though she did have to dump pepper into everything but the raspberry trifle.

A tap-tap-tapping sounded from the entry. Poe’s raven, no doubt… . Rebecca wrenched herself into coherence. That’s right, she’d left the door locked, fending off vandals in U-Haul trailers. She hurried into the entry, absurdly grateful for Jan, someone she’d known for ten whole years.

The Sorensons looked refreshingly like Beaver Cleaver’s next door neighbors. Jan had a firm hand on the back of each miniature T-shirt; Mandy’s sported a unicorn, Brian’s read “Here Comes Trouble.” The children’s scrubbed faces peered upward at the height of the castle.

“Thank you for coming out on a weekday,” said Phil, clomping down the staircase. “I want to fix the stain on the ceiling tomorrow so the plaster can dry over the weekend.”

“No problem,” Peter returned, hoisting his toolbox. “I had some comp time.” The men went off talking about wiring and water damage.

Rebecca left the door gaping and settled with Jan on the stone wall where she had first seen Darnley. The children chased a ball across the lawn. Steve crept around the side of the building, rake held like a halberd over his shoulder. Slash whined, his feelings hurt, in the toolshed. Dorothy shook her dust rag out of a fifth floor window.

And there was Darnley himself, ejected through the front door. “Get on wi’ you,” Michael said to him. “You’ll no be gettin’ the soup bone quite yet.” Then, going back inside, “Aye, I’ll take it down.”

“How are you getting along with yon braw lad?” Jan asked.

“Been listening to the tapes he lent you?” returned Rebecca.

Jan grinned, producing a couple of Battlefield Band cassettes from her duffle bag of a purse. “It’s contagious. You should hear me when we’re at Peter’s grandparents in Minnesota. Ya, it’s a fine lutefisk, huff da,” she said, perfectly mimicking a Norwegian accent.

Rebecca laughed, and answered Jan’s question. “Amazing— if I’d said to my brothers some of the things I say to Michael, I’d have been mincemeat. That wee tartan chip on his shoulder can take it as well as dish it out.”

“Sounds as if you can be honest with him.”

“I guess so. The question is whether or not he’s being honest with me.”

Jan tilted her head curiously. “At least his chip isn’t a giant four-leafed green one. Louise got a letter the other day from a group in Belfast wanting money from Americans with Irish ancestry. For Irish orphans, they said, but I told her to forget it, they were probably buying guns to create more orphans.”

Brian and Mandy linked hands and sang, “Ring around a rosy, pockets full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” They collapsed giggling onto the lawn.

“Didn’t I hear once,” said Jan, “that that song is really a grim little ditty about people dying of the pox or something equally nasty? You know, the rosy ring is the rash, and you leave flowers on a grave, and it’s really ‘achoo, achoo, we all fall down dead.’”

“Yeah, I heard something like that, too. Except I thought it was the Black Death, and it really was ashes, because they had too many bodies to bury so they burned them. And the Great Fire of London in 1666 finally wiped out the Plague— there, at least.”

Jan shrugged. “Whatever. The point is that nothing is really what it seems to be, nursery rhymes or anything else.”

“You can say that again,” replied Rebecca, with a sideways glance at the inscrutable face of the castle.

Michael appeared in the doorway, carrying the claymore from the prophet’s chamber. He struck a pose, declaiming, “Once more into the breach, for Charlie, Scotland, and Saint Andrew!”

The children goggled at him. Rebecca laughed. Jan applauded. Michael lowered the sword and rested its tip on the ground. “How’d they carry these things about? No wonder they adapted so quickly to firearms.”

Jan called, “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.”

“I’m no livin’ wi’ one,” Michael returned. “I’m takin’ it to the ballroom, so Peter’ll no drop the ceilin’ on it.” He vanished into the house.

“Honestly,” Rebecca said, “every time I’m ready to roast him over a slow fire he about faces and does something appealing. His bad moods blow over instantly. But then, so do his good ones.”

The children, scratching their heads dubiously at the weirdness of adults, swarmed forward demanding food and drink. “I got some Animal Crackers yesterday,” Rebecca told them. “Come on in the kitchen.”

Jan resumed her clutch of their T-shirts. Rebecca left the tapes in the sitting room and explained that the pile of cloth and polished wooden tubes on Michael’s chair was a set of great Highland pipes under renovation. “The reeds came in the mail last week,” she concluded.

Jan plunked the children at the kitchen table and started counting out the cookies. “What smells so good?”

“Michael’s making soup. With garlic and onions, even. He thought the mustard and catsup on the Whoppers we ate the other day was spicy but no bad.”

“Went to Burger King, huh? Dutch— or should I say Scotch— treat, I suppose. You’re really big spenders.”

“Neither one of us has money to heat up, let alone burn.”

“Speaking of money to burn,” Jan said, “Eric was telling me out at Golden Age that he took you to the Velvet Turtle last week. Wow! For the price of a meal there I could have that new living room suite.”

“Not quite,” replied Rebecca. “But I’ve never seen so much silverware. I kept waiting until Eric chose a piece and then I picked up the same one. I figure if he can rise above his humble origins, so can I.”

“And what do you two have planned for this weekend?”

Oh. Rebecca blushed, tried to duck, and turned positively scarlet. Either she was going to have to learn better self-control, she told herself in disgust, or wear a ski mask all the time.

Mandy and Brian began clamoring for the bathroom. Jan herded them up the stairs and past the study, where Phil’s and Peter’s earnest voices were interrupted by the patter of falling plaster. She deposited Brian in Rebecca’s bathroom just as Dorothy came down the stairs. The housekeeper had already lit a cigarette and trailed smoke like a crashing plane. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to keep this place tidy,” she said without preamble, “when things are piled on the floor. Mr. Forbes would never have approved of his things being left on the floor. He was very particular, believe me.”

“We won’t damage anything,” Rebecca assured her yet again.

“Thirty years I’ve worked here.” Dorothy went on down the next flight of stairs, her monologue trailing like the smoke behind her. Mandy coughed.

“Last month,” Rebecca said to Jan, “she was asking why James didn’t throw out all this junk and get some nice things from Wal-Mart.”

“She’s probably going to be out of a job soon. After thirty years you’d expect her to be a little possessive.”

“Oh yes,” stated Rebecca. “You’re sure Dorothy was a flaming youth back in the ‘50’s? She certainly flamed out.”

Jan laughed. “All right, explain that blush. What do you have planned with Eric? An intimate dinner at his condo?”

Rebecca made a throwaway gesture. “It seems like a good idea.”

“I’ll bet it does. He’s a charmer, isn’t he? I’ve been wondering about you two— I mean, you’ve always been so cautious about relationships. Ray must’ve worked on you for ages before… Oh, I’m sorry.”

Brian came out of the bathroom and Mandy went in. The little boy started up the stairs while the women played goalie at the bottom. “It’s nothing I haven’t thought about,” Rebecca assured Jan. “When you grow up hearing your brothers talk about women as if they were baseball diamonds you get a bit apprehensive. Ray never hounded me, he was just there. Eric’s not hounding me, either, even though he does come on a lot stronger.”