Blackthorn Winter (17 page)

"
Mmm,
" mumbled Mom, her mouth full. "Not sure yet. Maybe Ivy and Edmund, throwing stones down at the beach. Interesting light over the water at this time of year. And I love the way all those beach stones are different colors. Have you noticed? They appear to be all gray at first, but when you look closely, they're full of colors. Layers of pinks and greens and purples." She looked thoughtfully out the window.

"Like in Nora's big rock," I said, nodding. "With those bright white quartz veins running all through it. Sort of like a spider's web."

Mom looked at me. "Which rock is this, honey?"

"You know, the one in the found-art collection." I looked around the room. "It was on the window ledge."

"I haven't seen it."

"Really? It was right there in the collection with the other stuff," I said.

"Maybe Ivy or Edmund took it for their game as well," she said, frowning. "Really, I shall have a little talk with them when they get home."

I stood up and went to look through the things Nora had displayed on the ledge: the conch shell, the gourd of feathers. The pinecones. The basket of small boxes ... but no stone. Probably it had fallen. I knelt to move the stacked boxes out of the way, grunting as I managed to slide the first box. Mom was right; the boxes
were
heavy. "Ivy and Edmund must be a lot stronger than they look," I said to Mom.

"Ah, but the two of them together have the power of ten. You know, strength in numbers?" Mom laughed. "Half of those boxes are full of my art books—"

"Mom, look!" I cut her off. I was staring down at the floor under the box I'd just shifted. "What's this?" Was I aware right then that my pulse quickened? Was I aware that my breath came faster?

A dark stain marred the old floorboards. I tugged the next box away from the window wall, then blinked. "Mom?" Quickly now I started shoving the other boxes out of their lineup. I rubbed my fingers over the large, dark stain they had hidden. Had the stain been here the first time I saw this room? Surely I would have noticed it!

Probably it was just paint leaking out of Mom's boxes.

It could so easily, so logically, be exactly that.

Then why ... why was I so certain that the dark stain was not paint at all? How could I know—as if I'd seen it before—that that faded smear was
blood?

"Good heavens!" said Mom, standing next to me. "What have those kids done now?"

Yes,
I thought.
Let it be the Goops who made this stain somehow. A nosebleed.

Mom knelt at my side. "They must have put the boxes over here to cover up their mess. Little devils!" She touched her fingers to the stain as I had. Sniffed. "Wait—I don't think this is paint. Could it be—red wine?"

Yes,
I thought again, fervently.
Wine!
Maybe the Goops had been playing around in here—little drunks—sneaking sips from a bottle of wine stolen from the kitchen....

"Hey, who left the door open?" called Edmund's voice from downstairs, and Ivy's shrill tones joined his: "Hey! The rain's coming in! Why is it always raining in this country? That's what I want to know." It was the Goops, home early on their half day off from school, trooping into the cottage with wet boots. "Hey, Mom, I drew a really great picture of a pirate ship! It's for Dad! Want to see it?"

And Ivy shouted, "I wrote Dad a letter in a secret code!"

Mom ran down and told them to take off their boots and close the door and not track mud onto the rug. I came down right behind her and demanded that they come upstairs and account for the big mess in the sunroom.

"What big mess?" Ivy demanded, and I noted uneasily how innocent she looked. She could be wild and loud, but she wasn't a liar. Nor was Edmund. Mom led them into the sunroom and asked them not to play in there anymore, and not to touch her things. "Same rules we had at home, kiddos," she reminded them.

"But we didn't touch your things," objected Edmund.

"At least I didn't!"

Mom asked them if they had piled her boxes of books over by the windows, and they said no, they hadn't. They inspected the stain and said they'd never seen it before, but
they thought it sort of looked like grape Kool-Aid, only thicker.

"We don't have Kool-Aid in England," Mom said. "Grape or otherwise. But maybe it could be some sort of black currant juice. Children often drink black currant juice here—"

"It looks like blood," I interrupted.

Edmund looked at me with interest. "Hey, yeah!" That was a much more intriguing possibility than mere Kool-Aid or black currant juice, or whatever.

Then a knocking on the front door sent me running back downstairs to let Duncan in, and Kate Glendenning, also just home from school. I had forgotten Duncan and I had plans to pump Kate for information about her mother's friendship with Oliver Pethering. I had forgotten everything but the stain.

The Goops called for our visitors to come upstairs and see it. "Juliana thinks it's blood," Ivy announced with relish.

"Whose blood?" asked Kate reasonably. "Anybody hurt around here?"

"How can you tell if it's blood?" Duncan asked, kneeling to look closely at the darkened floorboards.

The answer was on my lips before I could hold it back. "Because I remember," I blurted out. "I remember!"

Mom stared at me. Everyone did. "Tell us, honey," she said softly. "What do you remember?"

"I—I don't know," I whispered, and that was the truth. Whatever flash I'd had was gone already. "I just thought—I mean, for a minute I thought ... I thought I remembered something about blood on the floor. That I had seen it somehow before. Oh—I don't know."

"Nightmaaaaare city," moaned Edmund in a fake, evil voice. "That's where you saw it!"

"Maybe," I said doubtfully. The flash
had
had the quality of a nightmare.

"Or maybe you saw something like it in a film?" asked Duncan. "Some horror show?"

"Maybe you read something like it in a scary book," suggested Kate.

"I had a bad dream once," Ivy said, practically shouting for attention. "And there was, like, this
river
of blood. No, like, a whole
ocean
of blood!"

I didn't have anything more to say, but I kept looking at that stain. Mom suggested that we all go downstairs and have—what else?—a cup of tea. We all went to the kitchen and everybody was still talking about what the stain might be while I just sat there, the only silent one. Mom filled the electric kettle with water, and opened a packet of cookies (
biscuits,
she called them) for Ivy to arrange on a plate. Then Mom motioned for me to come back upstairs with her. I could feel Duncan's eyes on me as I went up.

"What?" I asked.

"Come back to the sunroom for a minute, honey. I want you to think if there's anything else—anything not quite right. Anything else that's different from what you remember being here."

"Well, I haven't really been up here much, Mom," I said, following her down the hall to the sunroom. "Just that first afternoon, really, when we arrived. I came in here and was just standing around when Liza said—" I broke off.

"Liza was in the sunroom?" prompted Mom. She ushered me ahead of her into the room.

I averted my eyes from the stain. "Yes, Liza was here," I said. "She was showing us the house. I hadn't even chosen my bedroom yet. She came in while I was looking at stuff on the window ledge, and she told me it was Nora's found art. Nora liked to collect things like that, Liza said. Thought they brought good luck or something."

"Yes," mused Mom. "I remember Nora that way—always looking for magic. Magic in nature. Magic in people ... magic in feathers and rocks."

I crossed the sunroom and stood by the windows, running my hands over the objects on the deep window ledge. Outside, the garden shimmered green in the drizzle. Through the rain I could see the big Old Mill House, its lights shining warmly out into the already darkening afternoon.

I stared at the light, then sat back on my heels, my heart beating hard—as if I had been running.

"The night we came home from the party," I said slowly, remembering perfectly how we'd crossed the wet garden, "the cottage was completely dark. But—" I took a deep breath. "But earlier, when I was with Duncan, and he was giving me a house tour, we were in one of the rooms and I looked out and could see our cottage." I took another deep breath. "And the light was on, Mom. The light was on
in this room.
"

"But when we came home the house was dark," Mom remembered. She turned wide, frightened eyes on me, and I knew she was picturing it. "And the door was unlocked."

That detail had slipped my mind. "You thought you had just forgotten."

"You're
sure
you saw a light on, honey?"

"I'm totally sure."

This time it was Mom who took a deep breath. "Okay, then. Okay. We need to make a phone call, Juliana. We need to call the police—and ask them to test that stain."

"I know," I murmured faintly. "But still—" A prickle at the back of my neck made me move closer to Mom. "There's still a chance, isn't there? That it—it
might
just be paint? Or wine. Or black currant juice, like you said—"

"Or tea?" she suggested wryly, wrapping her arms around me in a hug meant to comfort us both. "Dream on."

"What's going on?" demanded Quent Carrington in a worried voice just moments after the police van arrived. My mom had shown the two forensics experts as well as Detective Inspector Link up the stairs and into the sunroom, but I had stayed down with Duncan and Kate and the Goops. "Is something wrong? Is someone hurt?" Quent stood at the door, peering anxiously past me.

"No ... no, not hurt." I opened the door wider so he could come in. "It's just—upstairs." I hesitated; the news was so strange, so odd. "Mom and I found a big mark on the sunroom floor that looked like blood. We don't think it was there when we moved in. So we called the police to come test it."

"Blood!" Quent paled. "Is Hedda all right?" He pushed past me and took the steps two at a time without even asking me if he could go up.

"I'm Mrs. Martin-Drake's landlord," I could hear him saying upstairs. "Show me this blood!"

Down in the sitting room, we all just looked at each other. "It's probably really
old
blood," Kate ventured reasonably. "After all, think how old this cottage is. Somebody in medieval times may have cut himself with his sword or—his dagger—I don't know. Why did your mum call the police about it?"

I shrugged. "She's a high-strung artist. But you're right. Probably we just didn't notice the stain when we first moved in. It's probably
ancient
blood." I didn't mention how the light had been on in our cottage the night of the party but off again when we arrived home. Somehow, I just didn't want to talk about it then—how someone could have come here that night while we were at the Old Mill House. The night Liza had died.

Had Simon Jukes—the official suspect—climbed over the stone wall and broken into our cottage while we were gone? But there had been no sign of forced entry, and Liza had been at the party, not keeping company with Simon. I had been moved by Henry's insistence at the wake that his brother was innocent; there had been something in his eyes that made me believe him. Now I kept picturing how Kate's mother had quarreled with Liza Pethering at the party that night. And then Liza died. Could Celia Glendenning somehow have lured Liza away from the party, here to our cottage, and then attacked her—made her bleed on the floor? Celia was a large, strong-looking woman; could she have dragged Liza's unconscious body out to the Shreen to drown? I remembered how Duncan and I had discovered Celia in Liza's gallery with Oliver. With Liza out of the way, Celia Glendenning could marry Oliver Pethering.... I remembered how nervous Oliver had seemed when Duncan and I came to the gallery. Did he know what Celia might have done? Were they in it together?

Obviously I couldn't talk to Kate about any of these questions, so I just kept quiet. Soon the team of police finished gathering evidence and came downstairs, with Mom and Quent following. They would get back to us, they said vaguely. But it was quite likely this stain had nothing at all
to do with Liza Pethering's death. That case was going to be irritatingly difficult to take to court. It was full of dead ends, and this stain would most likely be another. It was all very frustrating; they didn't even know yet what the murder weapon had been, and Simon Jukes wasn't talking.

Quent requested that the police keep him informed as well. They replied that of course they would; they said as our landlord he had every right to know what was happening. Quent walked the police out to the road, but then came back to us.

"I'm so sorry, Hedda," he said.

She looked surprised. "None of this is your fault, Quent."

His lips lifted at the corners. "No, of course not. But I'm still sorry you have to deal with any of this. You've been here less than two weeks, and it's been pure chaos rather than the new start to your career that you'd hoped for."

Mom wrapped her arms around herself. "Let's not talk about it. Let's just wait till we know what the forensics team finds before we start worrying. I mean—there might be a perfectly innocent reason for that stain. In the meantime, what can we do?"

We all just looked at each other and everybody knew that an innocent reason for the stain was pretty unlikely. But any other reason was so awful, we couldn't stand thinking about it.

"We can go back to the Old Ship for another meal," Quent said in his hearty way. "That's what we can do. Get our minds off it. My treat! No—I insist. Or we can go somewhere else if you'd rather ... There's a nice Indian place in Lower Dillingham that does a very tasty curry. We'll
all
go." His genial smile included Kate. "Call it a late lunch or early supper."

"Oh, I don't know," began Mom. But Ivy and Edmund overruled her.

"Curry, Mom!" Edmund wheedled. "You love curry."

"I love curry, too," Ivy stated. "And that yummy Indian bread—
nan,
I think it's called. Let's get some of that. Okay, Quent?"