Magic (21 page)

Bryan smiled as he bid his friend good-bye. Shane seemed perfectly at ease at Keepsake Inn, working on his music and his poetry. He was a wonderful father and a dutiful, doting husband to Faith, but Bryan sensed Faith hadn’t domesticated the agent completely.

Stuffing his notes back into the pockets of his khaki chinos, Bryan set off in search of Rachel, his mind mulling over what little information Shane had been able to give him. He pictured Miles Porchind in an ill-fitting tweed jacket, spraying the students in the front row of his stuffy classroom with spittle as he read aloud from Chaucer. He imagined Felix Rasmussen creeping around the musty stacks of books in a dark little store on some dingy side street.

Literature. Books. Porchind had come to the tag sale for books. Their late-night visitor had snatched an armload of books on his way out. Was it possible they weren’t after Drake House at all, but something in it?

“Bryan, they’re driving me insane,” Rachel said, coming out of the kitchen, wringing her hands in a dishtowel.

“Who?”

Rachel stared at him as if he had completely lost his head. “Who? Who do you think? Tweedledee and Tweedledum. My mother and your aunt.”

He waved a hand to dismiss the subject. “They’ll be fine once they get to know each other.”

“How can they get to know each other? My mother is perpetually confused, and your aunt never calls anyone by the same name twice. They’re like squirrels chasing each other’s tails!” She did a wickedly accurate imitation of Roberta, substituting a ballpoint pen for the ever-present cigarette. “ ‘My word, Rochelle, you make good eggs!’ Then my mother says, who’s Rochelle? ‘Your daughter, for heaven’s sake, Amelia! Your daughter, Roxanne!’ Then they start the whole thing over again! It’s worse than having breakfast with Abbott and Costello!”

“Honey, relax,” Bryan said with a cheerful smile. He pulled a quarter out of her ear, handed it to her, and patted her cheek. “Buy yourself a cup of coffee. They’ll be all right. It’ll all work out. You’ll see.”

Rachel stared at him in exasperated disbelief as he turned and headed for the front door. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“To get a haircut!” he called, waving at her over his shoulder.

Rachel ground her teeth, Wasn’t that just like him to blithely wander off on some silly errand, leaving her to deal with the problem.

No, she corrected herself as she slumped back against the wall, that was like Terence. Her stomach churned at the thought. Bryan was sweeter than Terence had ever been, and less self-absorbed, but when it came to accepting responsibility, it was looking more and more as if they were peas in a pod, smoothing the rough spots over with platitudes, leaving her to deal with reality while they chased rainbows.

When Bryan returned to Drake House several hours later, he was brimming with barely contained excitement. Unfortunately, Rachel was in neither the mood nor the position to hear his latest theories and the history behind them.

Bryan unfolded himself from behind the wheel of Rachel’s Chevette, staring in stunned disbelief at the scene that greeted him. Addie was hanging out her bedroom window, flinging Rachel’s clothes out onto the lawn one article at a time. Rachel stormed around the yard, gathering up undergarments, pulling her bras off bushes, digging her shoes out of the shrubbery.

“What’s going on?” Bryan asked with a quality of innocence that earned him a scathing glare from Rachel.

“Mother is upset with me because I let a realtor into the house this morning.”

“Traitor!” Addie shouted, and let fly a pair of loafers.

“She’s taken all my things and locked herself in her room.”

“Oh, dear.” Bryan frowned. “Where’s Aunt Roberta?”

“She went scuba-diving with someone named Brutus, an old friend of one of your brothers,” Rachel said, retrieving one of her shoes from the hood of her car. “If you want my frank opinion, the man did not appear to be mentally balanced, but who am I to judge?” She gave a brittle laugh that managed to combine fury and hysteria.

Bryan’s brows shot up in surprise at the news.

“This is all your fault.” Rachel glared at him and shook a loafer under his nose. “You told Mother we wouldn’t have to move. Naturally, she has no trouble remembering that little gem of information. Thanks a lot, Bryan,” she said, smacking him on the arm with the shoe. “You’ve made my job
so
much easier.”

Bryan winced and rubbed his arm. “But Rachel—”

“You keep saying you want to help me,” she ranted, running under a pair of jeans as they floated to earth. “Then you turn around and undermine my efforts to get Mother to accept the inevitable.”

“But honey, it’s not—”

They both broke off as a brown Ford Galaxy rattled up the drive. The car coughed to a halt and Porchind and Rasmussen emerged from the interior. A rock sailed down from above and richoceted off the grille of the car with a
ping!
All heads turned to see Addie wielding a bra-turned-slingshot.

“It’s Porky and the Rat!” she shouted, loading a bra cup and letting another stone fly. “Get away from my house!”

“Please excuse my mother, gentlemen,” Rachel said as they all took cover on the porch. “She’s been hallucinating a lot lately.”

“We’ve come to retrieve our books, Miss Lindquist,” Porchind said without preamble, tugging at his brown vest in a vain attempt to get the garment to cover his protruding girth.

“Books,” Rasmussen echoed. He cast a glance at Bryan, his sunken eyes gleaming with restrained temper. Bryan merely smiled at him inanely.

“Oh, yes,” Rachel said, giving Bryan her own fierce look. “I’m so sorry about the mixup. Bryan will get them for you.”

“They’re in the study,” he said, pleasantly unrepentant. Opening the door, he motioned everyone inside. Rachel stomped past him. Porchind and Rasmussen sidled by, reluctant to turn their backs on him. “Wasn’t that funny—those two stacks of books getting switched around that way?”

His only reply came in the form of three furious stares, which rolled harmlessly off his shield of innocuous enthusiasm.

“My, that old journal was certainly interesting reading,” he said brightly as they went into the study.

The two visitors turned abruptly to each other, their complexions paling from white to ashen.

“I couldn’t make head or tail out of it myself,” Bryan said with a grin. He fought the urge to chuckle as Porchind and Rasmussen relaxed visibly, letting out a collective breath.

They sank down on the leather love seat, apparently weak with relief as Bryan handed the little stack of books over to them. Porchind’s fingers, as stubby and round as breakfast sausages, curled greedily over the bindings as he pressed the books to his ample belly.

“I’ve spoken to a realtor about the house,” Rachel said abruptly, drawing startled glances all around. She leaned back against the desk, crossed her arms over her chest, and gave Bryan a mutinous look.

“We were hoping to save you the trouble, Miss Lindquist,” Porchind said with a nervous twitter.

“I had to get a fair idea of the market value,” Rachel explained.

“You’re certain you’re going to sell, then?”

“Yes,” she said, avoiding Bryan’s intense look.

“There’s still the little matter of Mrs. Lindquist,” he said pointedly. “It is, in fact, her house.”

Rachel reined in her temper and her own feelings of guilt. She hated to have it come down to a competency hearing. She had the ominous feeling that all hope of a reconciliation with Addie would be utterly destroyed by that. But the situation was getting desperate. Their funds were dwindling, and the IRS was breathing down their necks. She could see no way out other than her original plan of selling the house and going on to her new job in San Francisco. Her emotions were only complicated by Bryan’s unreasonable opposition. She felt as if he were betraying her.

“And there is the little matter of my contract with Mrs. Lindquist,” he continued. With a tremendous effort of will he ignored the fury rolling off Rachel in waves and resurrected his foolish grin. He turned to the gentlemen and began juggling a trio of red foam balls he had produced from thin air. “I’ve been hired to find the ghost.”

“There are no such things as ghosts, Mr. Hennessy,” Porchind said as if he were admonishing a ten-year-old.

Immediately both he and Rasmussen gave a little squeal of surprise and leapt forward a bit on the love seat. Their heads swiveled simultaneously, looking behind them as if they expected to see daggers protruding from the back of the chair. Everyone then glared accusingly at Bryan, who went on happily juggling, ignoring their unspoken accusation that he was somehow to blame.

“Sure there is,” he said enthusiastically. “This one’s name is Archibald Wimsey. He was staying here in 1931 as a guest of Arthur Drake. Mysteriously disappeared. I’m quite convinced that his spirit inhabits Drake House to this day.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Porchind said severely.

“Absurd,” Rasmussen reiterated.

Together they popped up from the love seat, their eyes and mouths round O’s of surprise, their hands going to their backsides.

Rachel sent Bryan a withering glare, then stepped forward to console her guests. “The springs must be going in that old thing. No wonder no one wanted to buy it yesterday.”

She walked the men to the front door, promising them she and her mother would come to a definite decision about the house very soon. When she returned to the study, she gave free rein to the fury that had been building inside her all day.

“Of all the childish, infantile tricks!” she shouted, standing toe to toe with Bryan. “Booby-trapping that chair with your magic gizmos. Isn’t that just like you!”

“Well, yes,” Bryan admitted grudgingly. “But I didn’t do it.”

“Oh, sure,” Rachel said with a sneer. She turned and began pacing back and forth in front of him in an effort to burn off some of her anger before she exploded. “What do I have to do to get through to you, Bryan? I have got to sell this house.”

“No, you don’t,” he said. Suddenly he was grinning again with almost boyish excitement. “I think I’ve found out why Porky and the Rat want it.”

“I don’t care why they want it. I don’t care if they want to set up a nudist colony for the terminally strange.”

Bryan grimaced. “There’s an ugly thought.”

Rachel’s eyes flashed. “It’s nothing compared to what I’m thinking about you at the moment.”

That was true. The signals he was intercepting were more than a little hostile. He cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and took the plunge.

“I think they’re after gold.”

Rachel halted her pacing and stared at him in disbelief. “What?”

“Porchind’s late relative, Pig Porchind, was a bigtime bootlegger back in the days of Prohibition,” he explained, visibly warming to his topic. “According to the gossip of the time, he had a fortune in gold stashed somewhere around Anastasia.”

“What has that got to do with Drake House?” she asked impatiently.

“At that same time in history there was a notorious cat burglar on the loose around here. His targets were the homes of wealthy lumber barons and shipping magnates. There were rumors about the theft of an enormous amount of gold from old Pig. It was apparently never found. Neither was Archibald Wimsey, an old British chum of Arthur Drake’s who was visiting during the summer of 1931. By coincidence, all concerned in this story were either dead or gone missing shortly after it all happened, and most everyone forgot about it.”

“That’s a very entertaining story, Bryan,” Rachel said. “Does it have a point?”

“Of course it has a point,” he said irritably. “Wimsey is your mother’s invisible friend, and Porky and the Rat think the stolen gold is stashed somewhere in Drake House.”

“That’s absurd,” Rachel said. “If there were a fortune in gold in this house, don’t you think someone would have found it by now? It’s been more than sixty years since Prohibition.”

“And almost that long since these rumors were in circulation. Why would anyone look for something they didn’t know was there?” he asked reasonably.

“Why would anyone look for something that doesn’t exist?” Rachel countered. “Did you find any mention of this legend in that journal?”

“Uh—no,” he admitted, “not precisely.”

Rachel rolled her eyes. “This whole tale is so farfetched, I can’t believe you’re telling it to me. Who gave you all this golden information anyway?”

“Lorraine Clement Carthage, who was a debutante at the time and is mentioned—er, fondly in the diary.”

“And who is now, no doubt, as senile as my mother.”

He couldn’t quite meet her eyes after that state ment. Lorraine hadn’t exactly been in step with the world around her, he had to admit, but to his way of thinking the evidence was all adding up very nicety. Lorraine had thought the dashing Wimsey was the thief. Apparently Pig Porchind had thought the same thing and had probably had Wimsey done away with, which explained the restless spirit. The fact that the gold had never been recovered meant it still had to be around someplace, and Drake House appeared the likely spot since attention was being focused on it by the late Pig’s relative.

“Bryan, don’t you see this is all a wild goose chase?” Rachel asked wearily. “All you’ve got are some moldy old rumors and half-baked speculation. It would be wonderful to find a fortune in lost gold. It would be the answer to my prayers. But life doesn’t work that way.”

“Not if you don’t let it,” he muttered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you have to believe a little.”

Rachel closed her eyes and counted to ten, but the anger was still there afterward, the anger and all the old bitterness. “You think problems can be solved by magic?” she asked. “You think all we have to do is believe in fairy tales and everything will end happily ever after? Magic is for fools and children.”

Bryan’s head snapped back as if she had slapped him. His jaw tightened ominously. “Well, it certainly isn’t for martyrs, is it?” he asked darkly.

Rachel stared at him, her eyes round with hurt.

In a saner moment he would have called himself a bastard, but he had some pent-up pain of his own to vent, and he was only human.