Smoke in Mirrors (9 page)

“Ah, yes. The tenure thing.”

“Indeed.” Roberta winked. “And you must admit this place does have character.”

Leonora privately thought that
character
was a polite architectural euphemism in this instance. Prior to her arrival in Wing Cove she had assumed that she’d had some idea of what to expect, but her first close-up view of the mansion this morning had sent a fluttery chill of genuine dread down her spine. She’d seen enough horror films over the years to recognize Mirror House for what it was: the sort of place where mad scientists engineered monsters in the basement.

Fortunately, she thought, she was an academic, a clear-headed librarian who did not go in for that sort of nonsense.

Nevertheless, there was no denying that Mirror House was a hulking, gray stone gargoyle of a mansion. Three stories tall and badly proportioned, it crouched amid the trees on the heavily wooded point that marked the southern entrance to Wing Cove. On a dreary day like today, with snaky tendrils of fog writhing and twisting ashore from the cold waters of the Sound, the mansion literally loomed in the mist. It could have served as inspiration for the artwork on the cover of a gothic novel.

The inside was worse than the outside, as far as she was concerned. The towering fir and cedar that hung over the mansion did an excellent job of cutting off what little natural daylight might have managed to seep through the narrow windows.

Roberta’s office here on the first floor was the most cheerful room she had encountered in the course of the tour. It even seemed warmer than the rest of the house. The walls were crowded with photographs and framed letters from important alumni. A large potted palm rose from a colorful pot near the window, offering a bright, if utterly incongruous, tropical element to the décor. The sides of Roberta’s computer were covered in sticky notes. Colored file folders and a truly impressive collection of pens were scattered across the surface of the desk.

The door of the office stood open, revealing a stretch of paneled hallway. From where she sat, Leonora could see some of the antique mirrors that lined the walls.

A young woman dressed in jeans and a sweater, her long honey-colored hair clamped in a ponytail, went past in the corridor.

“Excuse me, there’s my student assistant.” Roberta put down the pot. “I want you to meet her. She’s here several hours a week.”

Roberta hurried to the open door.

“Julie?” she called.

Julie came back to the doorway. She had a can of soda clutched in one long-nailed hand.

“Yes, Mrs. Brinks?”

“I want to introduce you to Leonora Hutton. She’ll be working upstairs in the library for the next couple of months. Leonora, this is Julie Bromley.”

Julie nodded politely. “Hi, Ms. Hutton.”

“Nice to meet you, Julie,” Leonora said.

Roberta turned back to Julie. “Don’t forget to call the janitorial people this afternoon. They still haven’t taken care of the carpets.”

“I won’t forget, Mrs. Brinks.”

“Fine. That will be all for now, dear.”

Julie disappeared. Roberta went back to pouring coffee.

“Sugar or cream?” she asked.

“Neither, thanks.” She did not like coffee, but she had refrained from saying so when she noticed that Roberta had no tea bags to offer. She could certainly manage a few swallows for the sake of politeness.

“How long have you been executive director here?” she asked when Roberta handed her the mug.

“Long enough.” Roberta went around behind her desk and sat down. “I’m retiring next month. Six weeks from today I’ll be on a cruise ship bound for the Greek Isles.”

“That sounds wonderful.”

“I’m really very excited. Bought a whole new wardrobe for the trip.” Roberta looked around the office. “But I must admit, it will feel strange to leave this place behind. When I stop and realize that this will be my last alumni weekend, I get a little teary-eyed.”

“I understand.” She tried a cautious sip of the coffee. It wasn’t bad, if you liked coffee. She didn’t. “Thanks again for the tour. I know how busy you must be.”

“Not at all. I’m delighted that the library is going to be put online. I’ve said for years that it was a shame that
those books were not widely accessible to scholars. There are some very rare and interesting volumes upstairs. I suspect some of them are worth a great deal of money. Nathanial Eubanks collected them in conjunction with the antique mirrors.”

“What was his fascination with old mirrors, anyway? He seems to have obsessed on them, from what I can see. Every surface in this house is covered with them.”

“Very sad, really. Insanity ran in the family. Some say Eubanks had a crazy notion that as long as he could see his reflection in a mirror, he would not go mad like the others in his line. Others say he was convinced that he could see his past lives in some of the mirrors. All we really know is that the family’s bad genes caught up with him in the end. He committed suicide.”

“I see.”

It had been surprisingly easy to slip a librarian into Mirror House. Deke, as the head of the Bethany Walker Endowment Fund, had simply informed the Eubanks College administration that the fund was willing to pay to have a professional librarian put the Mirror House library online. In memory of Bethany Walker.

College administrators never said no to money, even if they privately thought it was going down a drain.

Leonora made it through half of the coffee before she excused herself.

“Mind if I finish this upstairs?” She held up the mug of coffee. “I really should get to work. I want to do a survey of the collection. Get my bearings, as it were. I’ll return the cup later.”

“Of course. Run along and don’t worry about the cup.” Roberta waved her off. “And please don’t hesitate to let me know if there’s anything I can do. My door is always open.”

“Thanks.”

Half-full mug in hand, Leonora went down the long hall toward the grand staircase. There were a handful of offices on this floor. Roberta and Julie occupied two of them. A third was dark. The sign on the door read
Eubanks College Alumni Fund Development
. It was the office that Meredith had used during her short stint as a fund-raiser. Roberta had mentioned her only briefly during the tour.

Miss Spooner left on very short notice. Something about being offered a position in California. Fund-raisers are in huge demand these days, you know. We haven’t been able to replace her yet.

There was a lot of activity here on the first floor. The mansion’s large public rooms were being readied for the major event of the upcoming alumni weekend, a formal reception. Leonora had to dodge members of the cleaning crew and a man on a tall ladder, who was replacing light-bulbs in a massive chandelier.

Mirror House was well-named. Nearly every wall was covered with mirrors and antique looking glasses. But strangely, the enormous quantity of reflective surfaces did little to brighten the place. The interior of the old mansion, decorated in the heavy Victorian style with a strong emphasis on red velvet and dark woods, seemed drenched in perpetual twilight.

It got worse at the top of the staircase. Leonora came to a halt and looked down the long, shadowed hall on the second floor. The library was four doors down on the left. The scrolled and gilded looking glasses on the walls glittered malevolently. Beckoning her into the gloom? Or warning her to stay out of the darkness?

An inexplicable and almost overwhelming urge to turn and run swept through her. She gripped the carved banister until the sensation eased.

After a few seconds, she made herself walk down the
corridor toward the library. She took refuge in the background research she had done before coming to Wing Cove. She knew there was a very logical reason why the mirrors and looking glasses that lined the walls were so dark and dim. They were all antiques, several of them dated from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.

Vintage looking glasses lacked the brilliant optical properties of modern, contemporary mirrors. Their reflective surfaces had not been very bright to begin with because of the limitations of the technology of the eras in which they had been crafted. The old mirrors had continued to darken with age due to impurities in the original glass and the tarnishing of the various metals used to back them.

Okay, the mirrors were old and dark. But why did she get the disturbing sensation that the antique looking glasses here in this hall seemed to literally suck up the light rather than reflect it?

Wrench looked up
from his water bowl when Thomas emerged from his workroom.

“Six o’clock.” Thomas went to the window and studied the view through the trees across the night-darkened cove. “Light’s on at her place. She’s home.”

Wrench did not appear to be impressed by that observation. He did, however, gaze hopefully in the direction of the front door.

“You’re right.” Thomas turned away from the window and crossed the front room to collect his jacket, a small flashlight and the leash. “We both need a little exercise. What do you say we go see how our new tenant is doing? Could be she needs a little maintenance work.”

Wrench needed no urging. He trotted happily out the front door and stood waiting patiently on the porch while Thomas locked up and attached the leash.

They went down the front steps and found the dark lane that led to the illuminated footpath.

Just a business conference, Thomas thought. He pulled up his collar against the damp night air. That’s all he was going for here. He just wanted to see how her first day at Mirror House had gone. Find out if she thought she might actually learn something useful. Compare notes. See if she had any plumbing issues. He hadn’t had much time to get the old cottage in shape for her. He had intended to start major remodeling work after the holidays.

There was only a light crowd on the footpath this evening. Thomas let Wrench forge a path for both of them through a flock of joggers. People tended to get out of Wrench’s way. For some reason, no one seemed to see him as a reincarnated miniature poodle.

They reached the footbridge and, as usual, had it to themselves. Serious fitness buffs rarely deigned to take the shortcut across the cove.

Thomas could not take his eyes off the warm glow that emanated from Leonora’s window. Images of bugs with very small brains drawn to hot lamps designed to fry them to a crisp danced in his head. He ignored them.

This was business.

It was a short walk, no more than fifteen minutes from his house to hers. Wrench gave him a curious look when they turned off the footpath to go along the lane that led to Leonora’s front porch, but he did not object.

They came to a halt at her front door. Wrench sat and did his tongue-lolling thing. Thomas knocked. He promised himself that no matter what happened he would not do the tongue-lolling thing.

The door opened almost immediately. Leonora stood in the opening. She wore a deep-purple corduroy shirt that skimmed her curves and a pair of black trousers. Her
night-dark hair was brushed straight back from her face and caught with a black cord at the nape of her neck.

“Hello,” she said. Wary but polite.

“Evening,” Thomas said. Damn. The woman looks good. Very good. No tongue-lolling, he reminded himself.

Wrench pushed his nose against Leonora’s hand. She looked down at him and patted him gingerly on top of his head. He grinned.

She raised her eyes to Thomas. He wondered if she intended to pat him, too.

“Just thought I’d make sure you got settled in okay,” he said when it became obvious that she was not going to scratch him behind the ears.

“Everything is fine.”

He glanced around her, trying to get a look at the living room. “Furniture working out?”

“Yes. Some of the pieces are a little oversized for the space, but they’ll do for my purposes.”

He remembered how he had stood in the showroom at the furniture store and made his selections from the three basic rental packages that had been offered. In the end he had gone with the Traditional Rustic Comfort set-up because it had the largest bed and he liked a big bed, himself. What the hell had he been thinking? Not like she would ever invite him to join her in it.

Contemplating that big bed in her small bedroom was not helpful. Time to change the subject.

“Had dinner yet?” he asked.

“No. I was just about to fix something.”

“Want to join me? There’s a café in town that serves some good fish. Very casual. We can have a couple of drinks. Talk about our, uh, investigation.”

She pondered that for a few seconds. Then she shrugged. “Okay, I guess that would be all right.”

“Hey, thanks,” he said. “I really appreciate the enthusiasm, you know? I was braced for outright rejection.”

“Really?” She arched one brow. “Do you get rejected a lot?”

“It’s a case of love me, love my dog. Not everyone takes to Wrench.”

She looked down at Wrench. “You blame your dog when you get rejected?”

“He doesn’t mind taking the heat and it saves a lot of wear and tear on my ego.”

“A win-win situation.”

“Yeah, that’s how I look at it. Why don’t you get your coat and we’ll be on our way?”

“What about Wrench?”

“We’ll go back across the bridge and leave him at my house.”

She nodded, turned, opened the hall closet and removed a long, black, down-filled coat.

He helped her into it. The small task gave him an opportunity to examine the curve of her neck and get a whiff of her scent. He liked the elegant line of the first and figured the latter for a mix of lemon-infused soap and warm woman. No heavy perfume. He appreciated that. He was not a fan of strong fragrances.

They walked across the footbridge and along the lane to his house. Wrench gave him a pitiful look when he realized that he was about to get left behind.

“You know they won’t let you in the café,” Thomas reminded him. “You’ve tried sneaking in before and it didn’t work.”

“Management probably finds it hard to overlook a wolf coming through the front door,” Leonora said dryly.

“I keep telling you not to judge by appearances.” Thomas unsnapped the leash.