Ashes to Ashes (49 page)

Eric aimed his gun, teeth set, eyes narrowed. Rebecca dropped the poker, swept up the cat, shouted, “I’m sorry,” and threw him.

With an ear-splitting squall Darnley sailed through the air. Eric’s shot went wild. He raised his arm protectively, his angry face gaping into panic. The cat struck and clung, teeth and claws tearing like scythes. Eric screamed, staggering backward, and scraped the cat off his chest onto the floor. But his feet had already carried him to the top of the staircase. They skidded, groping for more floor. He fell. His scream was cut suddenly short, but the sickening thuds and crashes of his plummeting body continued on and on.

Rebecca was draped bonelessly over the corner of the love seat. Her mind gasped for air, for coherence, for anything other than the numb, dumb sludge that clogged it. Get up, run— no, no need… .

Michael, still clasping the claymore, crept to the staircase. Darnley crouched on the top step, a bristling blob of fur seething like a tea kettle. No sound came from the lower floor. Michael started down, using the sword as a cane. Rebecca forced herself to stand, working through each step of the process like a child learning to walk. Right leg. Left. Twinge from the knee— ignore it. Flex ankle. Step.

She found her flashlight, turned it on, shone it down the throat of the stairwell. Eric lay face down, head twisted at an impossible angle to his shoulders, beneath the portrait of John Forbes. The painted black eyes and desiccated face focussed beyond him, beyond satisfaction or sorrow, beyond even caring. Elspeth’s rages, John’s anger, Rudolph’s opportunism and Athena’s resentment; none of it mattered, not any more.

The gun lay against the far wall. The claymore lay on the carpet, gleaming in the light of Michael’s flashlight. Michael knelt by Eric’s head, staring appalled at the red smearing his fingertips.

“Michael?” Rebecca took each step one at a time, the stone treads and their dusting of ceramic shards skewing beneath her feet. “Michael!”

Lavender surged through the corridor. Something glinted in the black open door of the large bedroom and shot into the hallway. Glass shattered against the wall just beside Rebeccca’s head, raining splinters on her hair and shoulders. She jumped the last two steps. Michael leaped up to catch her. They went sprawling on the floor together, limbs enlaced, heads covered. Another whiz, crash and sprinkle of glass. Another.

Rebecca counted seven. Seven crystal bottles hurled by the frustrated hand of a woman dead eighty-seven years. As the last sliver fell tinkling onto the staircase the air was ripped by a shriek, a banshee’s wail shrilling until the very stones of the castle cringed, then dying slowly into nothingness. Like a bubble popping the scent of lavender disappeared.

Warily Rebecca looked up. Michael was staring over her shoulder. She turned. A shape moved in the darkness at the top of the stairs.

The tall, thin shape of the man was just a form in the darkness, a hint of humanity. For a long, breathless moment it stood as though watching. Then it faded into the shadows. Solemn footsteps rang down that flight of steps, and the next, and the next, until they died away in the depths of the house, and their vibration was absorbed into cold silence.

It was over. It was all over. Rebecca forced herself to look at Eric’s body. She could see only the dark hair tousled on the back of his head, not, thank goodness, his face. One of his hands was outstretched, reaching futilely for the unattainable, perfectly still. If it weren’t for his glove she’d see the gold and diamond ring, its initials gleaming in icy mockery.

Michael looked at the blood on his hand, his face contorted with horror. “His forehead, against the floor— it’s smashed right in— his neck’s broken… . “His voice leaped into another register. “He’s dead.”

Eric was dead. Dead, like Elspeth, like James. Eric was dead.

We killed him. Rebecca turned away from the crumpled body, from the handsome intelligent face destroyed forever by love, by hate, by justice.

No. It hadn’t happened. It wasn’t true. She curled double over her knees. Tears oozed from her eyes and down her cheeks, draining her fear, draining her anger into a soft, dark nothingness. She was the shell of Dun Iain gutted by fire, ravaged and hollow, snow sifting down to smooth the harsh edges— ashes drifting in the empty corners, gathering on the hard rim of reality— ashes ashes all fall down.

Michael wasn’t there. In the distance water ran and stopped. The beam of his light came through the darkness. His hands, cool, damp, smelling of soap, drew Rebecca to her feet and down the staircase. They found Heather still asleep, her features smooth and innocent.

They lay on the bed in the large fourth floor bedroom, wrapped in the green wool plaid, Darnley hunched and quivering beside them. The freezing cold of the night permeated Rebecca’s body and even in Michael’s arms she shivered. Only her tears were hot, burning creases in her face. Michael’s mouth touched her cheeks and eyes, not so much kissing the tears away as mingling his own with hers.

Somewhere between five minutes and an eternity later red lights pulsed in the windows and tires crunched in the driveway. Help had come. Too late. Much too late. Michael and Rebecca propped each other up and went to open the door to the outside world.

The happy shouts of the children rang through the Hall. Rebecca stood in the window, slitting her eyes against the glitter of the snow. Brian and Mandy, so bundled in snowsuits they could hardly walk, were urging Peter on as he maneuvered the head onto their snowman. The maple trees were black stitches basting together white lawn and brilliant blue sky. The mausoleum was an unobtrusive white mound by the churned ruts of the driveway.

Rebecca smiled. The movement cracked her face and sloughed several layers of anguished frown. She turned, limping, back into the room.

Michael sat at the table, his mug of tea in front of him, looking at his hands as if he were about to launch into Lady Macbeth’s “out damned spot.” Rebecca rubbed his shoulders and laid her cheek on the top of his head. “Don’t,” she whispered. “Remember how brave you were. Did you realize what it was you shouted? ‘Cruachan!’, the old Campbell war cry.”

“Racial memory.” He looked up at her with eyes drained into gray by weariness. “I wisna brave, I was scared spitless.”

“So was I.” Her mind was still buffeted by the sound of Eric falling down the stairs. It might have been poetic justice, but that didn’t make it any the less horrible. He had told her, “No one knows the end is near— a mercy, that”. But he wouldn’t have been merciful to them.

Darnley lay asleep on the carpet in a patch of afternoon sun, paws splayed, looking like a lady’s fur wrap tossed carelessly down. “The vet says he isn’t hurt,” said Rebecca. “Nice of the man to make a house call.”

“I doot he was as curious as everyone else.” The telephone rang for the fiftieth time. Jan’s voice answered and calmly interceded.

It had been a dark, cold midnight when police, paramedics, Warren Lansdale and both Pruitts descended upon Dun Iain. It had been an even darker four-thirty when they’d retreated, taking an already twitching Heather and Eric— what had been Eric— with them. Despite infusions of coffee from Phil’s thermos, Michael and Rebecca had been numbed beyond speech long before they were left to lapse into blessed oblivion.

Rebecca had regained consciousness at ten to find the morning bright with promises, not the least of which was Michael’s bleary, unshaven face on the pillow beside her. Next time, she thought with a wry smile, she’d notice she was sleeping with him. Complicating relationships were the only ones worth the effort of having.

There was another knock on the front door. She kissed Michael’s forehead and went to see who Jan was dealing with this time.

Alerted by the Putnam grapevine, Jan had arrived with breakfast just as Rebecca finished a cold water spit bath, flinching from her face in the mirror— it’d looked as squashed and slept in as her blouse.

The lights had flashed on within the hour. The telephone had taken a little longer. Not only were the lines down in the woods, they’d been neatly cut just where they entered the house. Rebecca had promised herself she wouldn’t think about that.

Phil had appeared next. He’d plodded upstairs in delightful silence to fix the broken windows, the one Michael had kicked out and the one shattered by Eric’s first shot. Elspeth’s window, the one Michael had climbed in. Rebecca wasn’t going to think about his precarious climb, either.

A reporter from the
Putnam Enquirer
had come about noon. Rebecca and Michael had agreed to talk to her; the dramatic events at Dun Iain were, after all, going to bump the breakdown of the traffic light at Elm and Main off the front page whether the actual participants had anything to say about it or not. When the reporters from Dayton and Columbus had arrived soon after, Jan sent them off to the
Enquirer
office to copy the prepared statement.

Now the voice echoing up the stairwell was Warren Lansdale’s. He stood holding his hat next to Queen Mary’s supine marble body, talking earnestly while Jan nodded understanding. “… I never realized— God rot me for a complete idiot— excuse me, ma’am… ” He saw Rebecca at the top of the flight of stairs and stopped. His moustache was looking distinctly moth-eaten.

Rebecca summoned a smile for him. “Come on up, Sheriff.” Poor complacent Warren had been severely shaken last night. He’d been just as much a victim of the plot as she had.

He shook hands and settled at the table, clasping the cup of coffee Jan brought him and staring up at the piper’s gallery. Rebecca turned to see what he was looking at. Elspeth’s portrait still peered out between the railings. But her face was just paint on canvas, her body a husk in the mausoleum; her awareness was gone. “You can’t blame it all on her,” Rebecca said quietly. “Everyone made wrong choices, including me.”

“And me,” said Michael as Jan wafted discreetly away.

“Well,” Warren said, “Let me begin by apologizing. I knew Eric had a gun, he’d reported it missing. I never dreamed… .”

“You did enough apologizing last night,” Rebecca told him.

“Oh, well… . I should’ve suspected something was going on right before James died, when he was so upset about the taxes. I bet Eric was telling him the taxes were a lot higher than they really were, not only so he could skim off the top but so James would agree to willing the Estate to those imaginary ‘relatives’.”

“What if,” Rebecca asked, “there really are some relatives of Rachel Forbes’s out there? Do they get the Estate after all?”

“I got hold of Benjamin Birkenhead this morning. Once I convinced him that Eric really was— gone— and that he’d been manipulating all of us out here… . “Warren cleared his throat. “Birkenhead says the State can sue to have that will thrown out and the one James made several years ago re-instated. That wouldn’t affect you. You’d still get the artifacts.”

Michael nodded. “So Eric began simply wi’ a campaign of harrassment, tryin’ to scare us out, or, failin’ that, to keep us from takin’ all the dearest things.”

“And then he had to cover up what he’d already done,” said Rebecca. “by making me suspect Dorothy or Phil or you, Sheriff, or even Michael.” Beside her Michael stared down into his cup. So he’d had a half-baked scheme of his own— that hadn’t helped. But that, too, was finished. “Dorothy’d been part of Eric’s plan all along, hadn’t she?”

“Chuck found Dorothy overdosed on tranquilizers and vodka last night. Suicide attempt. She’d left a note saying she never meant things to get away from her. Apparently she’d drugged your food as Eric told her, and then realized he meant to kill you. She’d already come around by the time I got to the hospital this morning, and she wanted to talk. Did she ever want to talk!”

Warren drank, fortifying himself. “The only prints on the jeweled box, besides yours, were hers. She’d been taking things all along, in spite of Eric warning her to wait for the pay-off. We even found that picture of Katherine Gemmell and James’s letter in her pantry, behind a flour canister.”

“Eric was going to share the inheritance with Dorothy?” asked Rebecca.

“He’d promised to pay off Chuck and Margie’s house and set up a college fund for their kids. She still believes that she was using Eric, not the other way around. But then, how can you tell who was using who?”

“You canna,” muttered Michael.

“She never suspected Eric killed James, not until the last few weeks,” Warren continued. “What could she have done if she had? She was in it too deep herself.”

“What happened to Eric’s father?” Rebecca asked.

“Dorothy says she was never married to Donald Adler. By the time she knew she was pregnant he was in jail on a burglary charge. Taking after Fred, his stepfather, who was a petty thief and hoodlum. I checked with Columbus, his record’s as long as your arm. But Donald was killed by another inmate before Eric was born. Katie and Fred took the baby to California, and then Fred walked out. Or so Eric told Dorothy.”

“Funny, it was Eric’s middle initial that tipped me off, and I was wrong about that. She’d named him ‘Forbes’” Rebecca shifted on the hard chair. Her head ached, her shoulders ached, her knee throbbed. Even her mind was tired, sprawled as limply as the cat in the confines of her skull. “Maybe Katie intended to start over. We’ll never know if she deliberately drove Eric into going after the inheritance, or whether he simply picked up so much of her resentment he decided it was something he should do. Eric said she always pushed him to make something of himself. Strange what love will make you do. And hate, and how thin the boundary is between them.” Beneath the table Michael took Rebecca’s hand and squeezed it against his thigh.

Warren puffed his moustache uneasily. “Dorothy didn’t know where Eric was until he appeared on her doorstep three years ago and started playing on her guilt about giving him up as an infant.”

“Would he have told her who he was if she wisna so cozily bidin’ here at Dun Iain?” Michael asked.

No one answered. The happy voices of the children rang through air sparkling like cold club soda. Darnley twitched, stretched, and yawned.