Ashes to Ashes (25 page)

At least she wasn’t pretending she hadn’t eavesdropped. “This will is different from the one that was probated,” Rebecca told her.

Dorothy pulled her shapeless sweater more closely about her shapeless body. “Those taxes were eating him alive. He’d had to sell some things, and that hurt him terribly, you could tell. He loved his things so much. They were his children.”

Michael banged the spoon on the edge of the pot and laid it down. Phil loomed in the doorway behind Dorothy. “I’m leaving the sheet over the furniture in the little room,” he said.

“Thank you,” Rebecca called.

“I don’t know,” said Phil, with a sidelong glance at Dorothy, “about that lawyer fella being such a big help. James was kind of down on him there at the end.”

Dorothy bristled. “Just because he was old and confused and got it in his head Eric was to blame for the high taxes. In spite of that Eric helped him work out the compromise in the will. He’s always the perfect gentleman. Right?” She fixed Rebecca with her dreadful simper. Apparently, as far as Dorothy was concerned, whatever Eric wanted Eric could have.

Rebecca said to Michael, “The barley’s in the pantry. I’ll get it for you.” The door was open a crack; inside Darnley sat licking his whiskers.

“I’ll be back tomorrow to finish the ceiling,” called Phil.

“Thank you,” Michael said. “Much obliged.”

“I’ll be leaving as soon as I get my things.” Dorothy followed Phil into the entry. Rebecca emerged from the pantry in time to overhear her say to him, “I hope you’re going home by way of Ed’s Clip Joint. Steve needs a haircut. He doesn’t have to look like a foreigner; we have standards here.”

Phil didn’t reply. The front door slammed. Dorothy’s loafer-clad feet slogged up the main staircase. Michael stood, one arm braced against the counter, his other akimbo at his hip. “Was she talkin’ aboot me?”

“People of her generation tend to exaggerate the sociopolitical connotations of hair,” Rebecca told him, handing over the barley. “Yours is long, therefore you’re some kind of revolutionary.”

Michael tossed his head defiantly, setting the brown strands dancing onto his forehead. While Steve, Rebecca thought, needed his hair not only cut but washed, Michael’s was always scrupulously clean. Just went to show you couldn’t predict a person’s personal habits from the tidiness of his bedroom.

Michael turned to the soup. Rebecca dialed Eric’s office, only to have a polite conversation with his secretary. “No,” she said, hanging up, “he’s not there. He does have more than Dun Iain to worry about, after all. I’ll tell him about the other will tomorrow. It’s curious, but no big deal. We’d have our funding even if this were the legal one.”

“True enough,” Michael said. He strolled into the sitting room.

Rebecca gathered the box with the negligee, the letter from her sister-in-law, the missive from Bright Corporation, the will. And there was her notebook, abandoned on the table. She hauled everything upstairs to her room. From the window she saw the Pruitts’ pickup, the huge labrador hunkered in the back, departing up the driveway. A distant screech and wail must be the vacuum cleaner protesting its trip downstairs.

Rebecca sat at the dressing table. Maybe she was the one who should get her hair cut, or color it red instead of plain-Jane brown, or something. She looked twitchy, as Jan would say. Something about the wary lines at the corners of her eyes, or the smoke coming out of her ears. Too much input, she thought. Brain error.

A scream echoed up the staircase. Maybe Darnley had caught a mouse. Maybe Slash had caught Darnley… . Rebecca was already out the door before she remembered she’d seen the Pruitts leave with the dog.

She shot into the Hall from the landing just as Dorothy, carrying her basket, thumped in from the back staircase. There, backlit by the gold-tinted luminescence of a window, stood Michael playing the old pipes. Except they weren’t old pipes anymore. Now the chanter emitted a high clear note underlain by the bass hum of the drones like silver underlies the glass of a mirror. The sound filled the room and overflowed. A hush fell on Dun Iain, as if the stones themselves were trembling in some subtle harmonic of the music.

Rebecca recognized the melody and her mind sang the words. “I was forced to wander, because that I was poor, and to leave the hills of Caledonia seemed more than I could endure. And when that I was travellin’, oh a thought came to my mind, that I had never seen her beauty ‘til she was far behind.”

The music was piercingly sweet, piercingly sad. Rebecca’s nerves shivered with a delight so profound it hurt.

Dorothy clamped her available hand over her ear, hurried across the Hall and brushed by Rebecca, exclaiming, “What an awful noise! Sounds like he’s skinning that poor little cat!” Her steps rushed down the staircase. The front door slammed.

Rebecca stood enchanted, watching the dust motes dance in the sunlight. “The foreign winds cry Caledonia, it’s time you were goin’ home.”

Her presence didn’t matter any more than those motes of dust. Michael’s eyes were shut. His deceptively delicate fingers moved on the chanter as though he were making love to it. The drones lay trustingly against his shoulder and moaned in response.

Rebecca folded her arms. He was wearing the open face of the pictures, charged with intense emotion. She didn’t want to see that much feeling, that much vulnerability, in him. It was like opening a box of corn flakes and finding it filled with gold dust, startling and disturbing.

“And should some young man ask of me, is it brave or wise to roam, I’ll bid him range the wide world over the better to know his own home.”

The song squeezed Rebecca’s heart until it ached. She was desperately homesick for Scotland, for Alba, for Caledonia, even though she’d been there only five days. Now she understood why, after Culloden, the English had banned the pipes as instruments of war. Their song was gut feeling expressed in rational precision, right brain and left in a formidable, terrifying union.

“Ferry me over, ferry me there, to leave the hills of Caledonia’s more than my heart can bear.”

She wanted to go to Michael and tell him he wasn’t alone. But he was alone. If she interrupted him, she’d only embarrass them both.

Rebecca trudged to her room and shut the door. The portrait of Elspeth looked abstractedly down, as if the painted woman, too, were drinking in the song as potent as whiskey. Home. Home.

Abruptly the music stopped, leaving an odd hollow echo hanging in the air, emotion unfulfilled, love unrequited. Rebecca wanted to scream to fill the empty silence. She was alone, and she hurt. Tears filled her eyes and she dashed them away. Damn Michael. She hated a man who made her cry.

Slowly the light faded and the shadows of evening filled the room.

The whirr of the can opener filled the kitchen. “Have you seen the moggie?” Michael asked. He plopped a couple of spoonsful of brown goo into Darnley’s dish. “This one’s liver. Right muck, if you ask me, but he probably thinks that about shortbread.”

Balancing her mug of tea, Rebecca peered through the pantry door. No cat. “Last time I saw him was in the ballroom when Phil was mortaring that brick. He was sitting on a windowsill surveying his territory.”

“I’ll leave it for him, then.” Michael put the dish in the pantry, looking at the piles of dishes at his shoulder as doubtfully as a soldier on a bomb-disposal squad.

“You heard them go again this morning?” asked Rebecca. “Six AM, wasn’t it?”

“Oh aye. I decided they’d had me on once too often. If they’d really broken this time there was naething I could do. I went back to sleep.”

“Nerves of steel.” Rebecca gathered up her sandwich plate and mug.

“Did you come doon?”

“Good heavens, no. It’s cold enough in the mornings without chasing ghosts. But I didn’t go back to sleep, either.” She’d lain there weighing the possibilities of her date with Eric tonight, but she wasn’t about to admit to that. Briskly she rinsed off her lunch plate. Five times now they’d heard the dishes crash to the floor, only to rush in and discover them sitting innocently on their shelves. Like everything else around here, the Royal Doulton was innocuous and unnerving at once.

“I’d better get back to work,” she announced. “I have to leave at five.” She took a moment to leave the front door ajar— Dorothy was expected momentarily— and fell into step beside Michael on the main staircase.

“Who’s playin’ at the concert tonight?” he asked.

“Cleveland Symphony.”

“That was one compensation for livin’ in London, the concerts at the Royal Albert and St. Martin’s in the Fields.”

I’ll bet, Rebecca thought, the Royal Albert didn’t have pipers wringing the heart out of your chest. She’d never again hear “Ferry Me Over” without thinking of Michael. Typical, to ruin a perfectly good song for her. Not that he’d volunteered over his bowl of soup last night that he’d played it. And she hadn’t volunteered that she’d heard him, let alone how she’d reacted. He’d think she was a real sob sister— one of her brothers’ favorite epithets.

They hadn’t discussed anything else, either. Not Brian’s apparent conversation with James, not the odd second will, not the supposedly non-existent Forbes treasure. They’d debated what to get for Christmas for their respective nieces and nephews— Michael’s three, Rebecca’s seven. “Populatin’ the world wi’ Reids?” he’d asked.

“My brothers are very traditional,” she’d replied. “Marry young and make sure you get your money’s worth out of your school taxes.”

Rebecca switched on the chandelier in the large fourth floor bedroom. Michael considered the objects strewn across the carpet and the bed. The doors of the George II bureau gaped open, revealing a variety of tiny drawers and shelves all crammed with artifacts, intriguing and otherwise. So were the shallow drawers of the apothecary’s chest. So were the cheap plywood bookshelves. It had taken all morning just to sort out the scrapbooks, decide they should go to the Ohio Historical Society along with James’s diaries, lug them all down to the Hall and arrange them in the cardboard boxes Eric had brought.

Michael picked up the inventory. “Have you seen the Pratt ware coo?”

“The what?”

“The creamer shaped like a wee Guernsey. Hard to believe what people collect. Although John would buy a thing just because someone else had it.”

“Oh! The gaudy 19th century Staffordshire cow, right? It was here yesterday. The Pratt Toby jugs are upstairs.”

His finger on the page in the book, Michael said, “I need the coo.”

The front door slammed. Dorothy advanced up the staircase with her basket, intent, apparently, on Michael’s bedroom. He headed her off. “Mrs. Garst, there were some things on the floor in yon room… .”

“Yes, there were. Shameful way to treat Mr. Forbes’s nice things. That little cow pitcher, now— cute, isn’t it? But a silly thing to have in a bedroom. I took it down to the kitchen and put it away.”

Michael assumed his martyr expression and headed back down the stairs. Dorothy stood in the doorway of his bedroom like a scuba diver getting her last breath of real air. She was looking even paler and more tightly-wound than she had yesterday, as if she had a permanent stomachache.

Rebecca got a tumbler of water for the scraps of ivy growing in an assortment of Keiller’s marmalade jars on the windowsills. Phil and Steve were sitting on the granite step of the toolshed, eating their sandwiches and chips from Phil’s rusty lunch box. Above them clouds gathered; yesterday’s warm sunshine had become today’s chill wind.

Michael returned with the cow and sat down at the bureau. Dorothy ran a Niagara Falls of water into the bathtub next door. The phone rang. “I’ll get it,” Rebecca called, as Michael didn’t look up and the water kept running.

It was Eric. She settled into a comfortable slump against the wall, cradling the receiver to her face. “My secretary’s off today,” he said. “I just now found the memo saying you called late yesterday. I’m sorry— I was playing raquetball.”

“Nothing important,” Rebecca assured him. “Just wanted to ask you, out of rank curiosity, when was James’s will written and who were the witnesses?”

“Curiosity killed the cat,” he said with a laugh. “It was written August 20 and witnessed by Phil and Dorothy. What on earth brought that up?”

August 20. The will Peter had found yesterday was the newer one. She hadn’t expected that. “Eric, Peter found another will when he moved the desk in the prophet’s chamber. It’s dated the 24th, and doesn’t have the provision about relatives. Warren’s the only witness.”

“Oh, that!” Eric exclaimed. “I’d wondered where that one had gone. Beneath the desk? I guess James left it there waiting for another witness and it got knocked off. I’ll have to tell Warren it turned up.”

The water stopped running. Michael was humming something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like, “Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found you.” Rebecca grimaced; throwing something at him would only acknowledge that she heard him. She straightened and paced down the hall. There was one of the crystal bottles in the cradle in James’s room— Elspeth, remembering her infant daughter?

“So James resigned himself to leaving Dun Iain to the state after all?”

“Poor old James,” Eric answered. “You know how some people think if they don’t make a will they’ll never die? With James it was if he made lots of wills he’d never die.”

“I’m sure he had no idea the end was so near.” Rebecca stood at the top of the stairs and looked down. No. Don’t push me. Help.

“No one does,” said Eric. “A mercy, that.”

Rebecca shivered. She turned to see Dorothy right at her elbow, dusting the frame of Michael’s door.

Eric went on, “I talked to Warren this morning. He didn’t take the mausoleum key and doesn’t know who did. Frankly I can’t imagine why anyone would want it, but it does belong to the property. If nothing else we’ll have that lock changed, too.”

“I’ll let you worry about that,” Rebecca said. “I’m worried if we’re going to get through all these little treasures before January first.”

“You can do it if anyone can.” Rebecca laughed; she felt like Tarzan swooping through the jungle on those facile lines. “Bring that copy of the will with you tonight, please,” Eric continued, “and I’ll put it with the other ones. A different Forbes collection, a memorial to indecisiveness.”