Holy Terror in the Hebrides (22 page)

I knew, as a kind of academic abstraction, that the dazed apathy I was feeling now would wear off soon. Facts, horrid, ugly facts would batter again at the now-closed door of my mind, clamoring for admission, for action. Meanwhile, what I felt (I decided as I sat and sipped coffee and coolly considered the question) was, astonishingly, a kind of peace.

For I had finally admitted, and accepted, what I had at some level known for some time. That, my detached mind informed me, was what I had been running away from for the past several days. Not from a group of people who were no worse than any other people anywhere, but from the certain, if unconscious, conviction that Bob had been murdered. Coldly, deliberately, with malice aforethought—and, I was now dreadfully afraid, by someone I liked a lot.

The coffee tasted awful. The pain was coming closer. It was lurking, just around the corner. It was—here.

“No!” I wailed aloud. “Not Jake—no!”

My anguished cry seemed to echo. It took me a moment to recognize the sound that persisted, and when I did I bounded up from the table to open the back door.

“Stan! Of all the wonderful—come in! Come here!”

Stan was a patient, good-natured cat. He allowed himself to be scooped up, and lay quietly purring in my arms while I sat and wept into his soft, stripy gray fur. Only when I began to sniffle and reach for a tissue did he wriggle his eagerness to be put down.

“Yes, all right. You want some ham, don’t you? Or at least that’s all I have to offer you. And you can have as much as you want, as a reward for turning up when I needed you.”

He had restored my balance. I chopped ham for him, and poured him a little cream for dessert, and thought, with infinite sorrow, about what to do.

I wanted sleep quite desperately, but I knew it wouldn’t come. The peace of a deduction reached, a dreadful idea accepted, had been a transient illusion. There was no real peace for me with so many questions left unanswered. I was sure I was right, but I hadn’t the slightest iota of proof. I wanted to know what had happened between Bob and Jake to bring matters to their appalling conclusion. I wanted to know if the others had any suspicions. Especially, I wanted to know about Jake and Teresa.

She had been in his care, with everyone else asleep or at least elsewhere, when she’d taken a turn for the worse. And she had kept talking about water. That must have terrified Jake. Would he—could he—I didn’t want to think so, but then I didn’t want to think he had killed Bob, either.

He was such a decent man, such a warm human being! I pressed my head between my hands, hard. Was I making this whole thing up?

No. I wished I were, but no, it was real enough, and horrible enough. And what, to get back to where I started, was I to do about it?

I couldn’t call the police with no telephone. Or at least, I realized suddenly, I could, if I were willing to broadcast my whole story over David MacPherson’s radio. Not the most private of communications, was it? It was my legal duty to communicate with the police, but I could be jeopardizing myself or others if Jake somehow got wind of it.

Furthermore, the police had shown me what they thought of my ideas. With no clear evidence, they would do nothing.

“So there’s no point, is there?” I addressed Stan, who blinked and continued to lick cream from his whiskers.

If only I could talk to Alan! He’d listen to me, and act. But he was hundreds of miles away. Not that it would have made any difference if he had been home in Sherebury; I still couldn’t have talked to him with no phone. But a part of me felt obscurely hurt, resentful that he was out of the country—in
Belgium
, of all ridiculous places!—when I needed him so badly.

“The fact remains, cat, that I’m in this all by myself, and will be until the phones are repaired. So there’s really nothing I can do, is there?”

Stan considered the matter before strolling to the door and looking up at me.

“You want to go home, do you?” I got up to open the door, and then had a sudden thought. Yesterday, before I had climbed aboard my morbid train of thought, I had decided to go back to the hotel and help with their cleanup. What was to prevent my doing just that? I’d have to be careful what I said to Jake, but I could manage to avoid him, I thought, with all the work there was to be done. What’s more, if I kept my eyes and ears open, or could think of some clever questions to ask, I might just learn something.

It sure beat sitting around brooding.

“Wait till I get my jacket on, cat. I’m coming with you.”

I didn’t, of course, exactly “go with” Stan. A human is obliged to keep to the paths. But we ended up, more or less at the same time, at the hotel, which was alive with activity.

I waited in the road until I had spotted Jake, leaning rather precariously on a ladder and dealing with a shutter that was hanging by one hinge. I faltered, then. There he was, helping out, acting like the decent person he was. How could I . . .

That is not a productive thought, old girl. Stick to the program. I went around to the back of the house, where Chris and Janet were on their hands and knees in the garden.

Chris hailed me. “Dorothy! Join us, won’t you? I can offer you potatoes, turnips, a few late carrots, or some particularly repellent parsnips.”

I walked over. “Goodness! What a muddy mess!”

“Isn’t it? That’s why we’re not trying to salvage any of the plants; they’re goners. We’re just gathering the roots for Hester and Andrew. We’re all one big happy family now, fellow survivors, you see.”

“You’re in good spirits, I must say.” I creaked to my knees, hitched up my jacket, and started sorting through lumps of mud for anything edible. Chris had helped me down with a considerate hand on my elbow; Janet had merely grunted, but at least she’d moved to make room for me.

Chris sobered. “Whistling in the dark, actually. We heard from Teresa’s doctor this morning. They operated to try to relieve the pressure on the brain, but she’s still not responding very well. We’re trying to keep from thinking about it too much.”

Well, I could understand that attitude only too well. There were a few thoughts I would rather avoid, myself. I shook my head and bent to the turnips.

I was glad when Janet finished up with what she considered to be her allocation of mud and went to another corner of the plot. It left Chris and me alone, nobody else within earshot, and as I dug I had worked out just what I wanted to ask him.

“Chris, you’re going to think this is an odd question, but—do you know if something happened Monday night? With Bob?” Of course I had to leave Jake’s name out of it, but I could reasonably ask about a murder victim, couldn’t I?

Chris turned so pale I thought he was going to be sick. “What do you mean?” he asked with an unconvincing attempt at a smile.

So something
had
happened. “I don’t know. I just—got the idea Bob was somehow involved in something peculiar. Can you tell me about it?”

“How did you know?”

It was almost a whisper, and I looked at him sharply.

“Chris, don’t ask me, please. I can’t tell You. And there’s no reason why you should tell me anything at all, except that—well, it would be a very great help to me.”

“It’s your policeman friend, I suppose.”

I sat back on my heels. “Now you’ve lost me. I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

His color began to come back. “Oh. I thought—well, I suppose there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. There wasn’t anything to it, really, except that it made me mad, and I wasn’t eager for it to get around.”

“I won’t tell anyone who—who doesn’t have to know.”

It was an ominous way to phrase it, and Chris went pale again, but he sighed.

“I guess it had to come out sooner or later. Bob made a pass at me, that’s all. And I told him what I thought of him, him and his little boys, threw him out of my room, and slammed the door in his face. We probably woke Jake; his room’s right across the hall. And that’s all there was to it, and you can think what you like!”

I think I would have fallen if I hadn’t been on my knees. “Little boys?” I managed to say, in what I hoped was an ordinary voice.

Chris was too upset to notice. “Yeah, those kids he had around all the time. If his interest was all fatherly, I’ll eat this parsnip, mud and all.”

“He was gay, then?”

Chris caught my tone, that time. He looked at me oddly.

“Not exactly. Or not exclusively, I should say. And he wouldn’t admit it. At least that was the word in the gay community. He’d never come on to me before; I couldn’t stand the guy. And that’s why . . .”

I got it, finally, and looked at him with pity. “Oh, Chris. You think I think—I mean, were you afraid I was going to accuse you of having something to do with Bob’s death?”

He looked relieved, and very, very young. “You mean you don’t think so? I—I’ve been worrying every since it happened. He’d been acting funny all day, moody, and I was scared—”

“You thought he killed himself because you turned him down.” It was time to get rid of innuendo and talk plainly. “You can take my word for it, he didn’t. Of that I am absolutely sure. However, I’m glad you decided to tell me about your little—encounter. Now I—I think I really must get up while I still can.”

He hauled me to my feet, surprised me by planting a rather gritty kiss on my cheek, and went back to his work while I escaped into the house with a large basket of vegetables, to wash my hands and try to settle my mind.

I found Grace in the kitchen, surrounded by a huge pile of carrots and potatoes.

“Oh, good, more. Put them down there; I’ll deal with them.”

“Heavens, you’re
glad
to have them? I’d think you’d never want to see another muddy vegetable again.”

“They’re food. If you had seen as much hunger as I have, you might feel differently about anything edible.” She returned to her work, and I began to work at her side. Act normal.

I had all the pieces now. I knew about the conversation Jake had overheard, that had put the match to the fuse. I still didn’t know what to do about it, and I was no closer to an answer when Hester shooed us out of the kitchen so she could prepare lunch.

Grace and I, tired of standing, went to the lounge and sat. It was a sad room, with little furniture and no rugs. It would be days, perhaps weeks, before everything was dry and clean again. I more or less fell into a chair; Grace sat down more smoothly, but a little sigh of relief did escape her lips as she relaxed.

“I do believe you’re as tired as I am, Grace. It certainly looks better on you than on me.”

I was aware that my face was dirty, and that there was mud under my fingernails and on the knees of my slacks. My hair was uncombed. I was a mess.

Grace smoothed her skirt. Her hands, though wrinkled from being in water, were clean and well-kept, and every silver hair on her head was smoothly in place. “I haven’t been gardening. You look fine. It’s honest dirt.”

“Ah, but even when I’m clean, I can never achieve that effortless elegance you manage all the time. Your kind of beauty is in the bone; you’ll be beautiful till the day you die.”

She looked at me coolly, and then smiled a little. Perhaps it was because she was tired that she allowed her shell to crack a trifle. “I seldom receive such a delightful compliment. Thank you, Dorothy. It’s all the more valuable because it seems totally disinterested, unlike those of—most people.”

“Of whom?”

She gave me a long look, her smile wiped from her face.

“Please. I have a reason for asking. You had someone specific in mind, didn’t you?”

She frowned a little, and then shrugged.

“Oh, I suppose it doesn’t matter now. You’re right, of course, though it applies generally, too. I am involved in a great deal of charity work, and I must also serve, often, as hostess for my husband’s fund-raisers.”

She saw my puzzled look. “Oh, that’s right, you don’t live in America anymore. My husband is an Illinois state senator. At any rate, my point is that I operate in many capacities in which a compliment is usually a veiled request, or a bribe, to put it less charitably. I have come to view my beauty as a burden rather than a gift.”

I nodded. “I’ve often thought that really beautiful women must have rather a hard time of it, contrary to what most people would think. You’d never know when you were being appreciated for yourself.”

“Yes. But I haven’t really answered your question, have I? And you’re waiting for me to tell all.” She grimaced. “I dislike thinking about it, although it was a trivial business, really. It’s simply that Mr. Williams—I cannot bring myself to call him ‘Bob’—paid me a number of fulsome compliments Monday night, just before he attempted to—that is, he—”

She searched for a suitably delicate euphemism, while I vaguely remembered an odd little scene in the lounge that first night.

“He ‘put the moves on you,’ is, I believe, the way the young would put it.”

“Exactly. The phrase has a certain vulgarity that precisely matches the fact. Not to mention the ludicrous side of it; I must be at least twenty years older than he was. I was, of course, disgusted, and told him to go take a cold shower.”

That, I thought, made two pointed, personal rejections in one night. Bob was acceptable, apparently, to neither sex. I could understand why he had been moody the next day. Was it possible that I’d been wrong all along? Had he, in fact, committed suicide?

But again the tape replayed behind my eyes. And again I saw him falling, quite definitely not jumping.

“Not to interrupt, but they said I should tell you lunch was ready. And I could maybe escort two lovely ladies to the dining room?”

Jake stood, beaming, in the doorway.

I
F I NEVER
have to suffer through a meal like that again, I won’t be sorry. Hester, in gratitude for our help (and with her cooking pots returned to her), had produced an excellent lunch for us. The crab claws had probably come out of Iona Sound, and must have been sweet and tender. The bread was homemade and hot, the vegetables were perfectly cooked, and the dessert was some light, creamy concoction that looked like food for the gods.