The Old Wine Shades (15 page)

‘Is this going to be one of those places that have people gibbering over evil forces?’

‘I don’t think it has anything to do with good and evil. Come on.’ Jury walked toward the next room.

Melrose had his arms clamped over his chest. ‘I’m cold.’

Jury stood, his head tipped to one side like an older brother trying to hurry his younger one along. And another memory blanketed him. On the sand stood an older boy, arms crossed, impatient and annoyed and not really wanting to bother with him, Richard, and who opened his mouth and called. But there was no sound. Not from the boy or the waves, even though they were tall and crashing on the shore.

‘You don’t look so hot yourself, anyway.’

Jury frowned. ‘I don’t know, I seem to be remembering scenes from my childhood.’ He gestured for Melrose to follow him as he walked into the last room, the furnished one, the one where someone had served tea to someone else. He turned. Melrose was still fastened to the spot, arms crossed. ‘It’s warmer in here.’

Strangely enough, it was. The logs in the fireplace gave the impression they had just gone out, which of course they hadn’t; they were rotted, crumbled ashes. There should be something in there, he thought, taking the poker from the stand—should be a note, a photograph, a letter, a notebook . . .

‘What are you doing?’

‘Looking around, obviously. Are you still cold?’ Jury watched him trying to warm up his hands.

‘Not as, certainly. I’m just blowing my frostbitten fingers back to life.’

‘You exaggerate everything.’

‘It’s one of my talents. At least in here there’s something to look at.’ Melrose’s eyes traveled around the room—its wall of books, Adam fireplace, marble mantel. There was an elaborate bureau with silver inlays, a cream-colored Sheraton sofa faced two armchairs, also of Sheraton design, the three pieces sitting on a carpet that Melrose identified from his antique-appraiser-impersonator days up in Lincolnshire, as Kerman, somewhere in the ten-thousand-pound bracket. Against another wall sat a Regency commode, ivory and marquetry inlaid, above which hung a carved giltwood mirror, cousin to the larger mirror above the fireplace.

There were several paintings, oils and watercolor. Snow, winter light, windmills in this one with small figures skating and heavily dressed. Chill. This one was of a horse—only one—in snow up to his hocks and nothing but a few naked roots. Freezing. In this one, fog-covered ships, barely discernible and a winter sun setting behind. Not a shred of warmth in any of them.

The tea service sat on a silver tray on a handsome table. Melrose picked up one of the teacups, raised it to see its origin, noticed there was a trace of tea in the cup. How strange. He replaced it and picked up the teapot. He couldn’t make out the stamp of the silversmith. ‘Someone’s been having a tea party.’ He said this, he thought, to Jury, but Jury wasn’t there.

‘Hey!’ Melrose felt absurdly anxious. ‘
Richard
!’ Then he saw Jury coming through from the hall.

‘I was upstairs. Totally empty, not a stick of furniture, not a bibelot.’

‘Well, this stuffs’—Melrose swept his arm to take in the room—’pretty valuable. That carpet alone would go for maybe ten grand. And that elaborate walnut bureau over there, God knows. That’s from what I recall having been hastily schooled by Trueblood in my antique-valuer-days.’ He held up the cup. ‘The china is Minton and someone’s been drinking out of it.’ He showed Jury the cup with the dregs of tea at the bottom.

Jury remembered what Harry Johnson had said. He looked down into the cup as if he meant to tell a fortune, his own or Melrose’s. ‘I wonder who? Marjorie Bathous? You know, it would be fairly easy to get into-this house. Some of the windows aren’t secured.’ He replaced the cup on the tray.

‘Is all of this for anyone who chanced to be stopping? Prospective tenants, perhaps?’ said Jury.

‘Glynnis Gault?’

‘And Robbie?’

‘Don’t forget Mango.’

‘Mun-go.’

The French doors to the dining room stood slightly open. Jury had gone outside to stand on the narrow stone patio while Melrose looked again at the painting of the lone horse. Then he walked out to the patio.

‘There’s a child down there,’ Jury said.

‘Where?’

‘Off there.’ Jury pointed toward a little structure that must have been the Wendy house Harry Johnson had mentioned. ‘A little girl, by the Wendy house. Come on.’ Jury stepped onto a weed- choked stone walk and went down a grassy verge where there had probably once been flowerbeds.

Melrose followed. ‘We’ll scare her.’

Over his shoulder Jury threw back, ‘She scared me, didn’t she?’

Melrose sighed and followed him.

The Wendy house was some distance from the main house, so she didn’t see them coming; she was too engrossed in whatever she was playing at. When Melrose called out and waved, she stood up, but without haste as she pressed something to her chest, doll or stuffed animal, as if to protect herself, and yet she didn’t seem anxious. Melrose was the anxious one. All he wanted to do was get back to Boring’s and settle in with a Laphroaig whiskey. He could taste it.

This little girl was perhaps eight or nine and was probably too smart for her own good, or Melrose’s, if the kids he had met up with were any example.

‘Hello,’ said Jury. ‘My name’s Richard. We were looking over the house.’

Her brown-eyed squint was probably for Melrose, as if there were more—or better—to see. For Jury, the full-eyed treatment. ‘Are you going to live here?’

‘I’m really looking it over for a friend.’

‘Oh. Is he the friend?’ More squint-eyed appraisal.

Jury turned to look at Melrose with what was (Melrose could swear) the same expression as the one on the little girl’s face. ‘No. The friend didn’t come with me today.’

Melrose was beginning to think they really were here to view the property.

Jury asked her, ‘Do you live near here?’

She pointed off in the direction of what might have been a crossroad. The direction she gave seemed to be through the woods.

‘How do you get over here, then? Do you come through the

woods?’

She nodded. ‘There’s a kind of path.’

Jury was sitting now beside her on the playhouse’s single step. ‘Do you come here often?’

Clothing the bear she’d been holding in a yellow raincoat, she chewed her lip, but didn’t answer.

‘I won’t tell anyone, promise.’

‘Okay, but you better not.’ She looked up at Melrose, who was still standing, and aimed that warning at him. ‘I come here nearly every day. Aunt Brenda doesn’t want me to.’

Melrose found a stump to sit on, presently occupied by a round-faced doll in a heavy-hooded coat. He picked it up.

She regarded him. ‘That’s mine but you can sit there awhile.’ Jury, Melrose noted, hadn’t needed permission to sit on the step of the little house. He frowned at the doll.

‘That’s Oogli. She’s an Eskimo.’

Melrose looked more closely. ‘Inuit, not Eskimo.’ He was about to ask if she owned all the stumps around, but she turned back to Jury. ‘Aunt Brenda says this isn’t our property and it’s trespassing. I would have to ask before I came. But there’s nobody to ask.’

‘So if there’s no one to ask, what can you do?’

Her smile was a little thin—

(Stingy, Melrose would have said.)

—but it was more smile than they’d gotten so far.

Melrose couldn’t resist saying, ‘But if you’re gone that long and that often, doesn’t this aunt ask where you’ve been?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you tell her? That you’re taking a walk with that bear and Ugly?’ He held up the doll.

‘Oogli, not Ugly. No, I say I’ve gone to my friend Alice’s.’ She tied the two strings hanging from the hood together under what chin the bear had. She adjusted the hood then.

‘But doesn’t your aunt ever call up Alice’s mother to see if you’re at her house?’

She shook her head. ‘Alice doesn’t have a mother.’

‘What? Well, who does the poor child live with?’

‘Nobody.’

‘But she has to sleep
somewhere.
She has to eat, for heaven’s sake.’

Jury stretched his legs out and said to Melrose, ‘Will you be through here anytime soon? Will you have Alice sorted?’

Melrose managed to look hurt. ‘I’m only trying to fill in the picture.’

‘No, you aren’t; you’re trying to show how smart you are,’ said Jury.

‘He’s not very.’ She said this with equanimity. She hummed a little in a self-satisfied way as she removed the bear’s raincoat and went rooting for another outfit in her stack of little clothes.

Jury asked, ‘Have you been coming here a lot while the house stands empty?’

She nodded as she pulled a sweater over the bear’s head.

‘Have you ever seen people come here to look at the house? Like we’re doing? Do you remember seeing anyone else last year?’

She looked off, thoughtfully. ‘Like who?’

‘A woman and her little boy.’

‘Oh. Yes, I remember him; he was nice. He didn’t talk, though. And he had a dog!’

This information was conveyed with more enthusiasm than she’d displayed toward Melrose certainly.

‘He liked to bound around; he ran like the dickens, he did. Well, there’s lots of space for running around here.’ She spread her arms wide. ‘We played and he gave me some of his candy. I mean the boy did. His name was—Robert? Bobby, I think. He didn’t tell me; I only knew his name because his mum was calling for him. He gave me lemon sherbets.’

‘His mum, did you meet her?’

‘No; I only saw her. She was at the bottom of the little walk calling for him. He didn’t answer, and I told him he really should answer so his mum wouldn’t worry about him. He just went off, back to the house.’

‘Did he say anything about the house? Whether his mum liked it or not?’

She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. I told him there were ghosts.’ Melrose snorted. ‘Ghosts!’

She nodded, not bothered by the scoffing.

Jury leveled a look at Melrose, then asked her, ‘Do you go up to the house, then, sometimes?’

She shook her head so vigorously, the very force of it said she was lying.

‘Then,’ said Melrose, challenging her, ‘how do you see the ghosts?’

She gave him a look that was not unlike Jury’s look. ‘In the woods.’ She had pulled a garment from the pile, a shirt covered with red hearts. She pulled off the sweater and held the shirt up to the bear.

‘Have you seen anybody else here?’

She grew thoughtful. ‘There’s a woman who I think takes care of things.’

‘The estate agent, maybe?’

She nodded. ‘Then a long time ago, last year I saw a man up there—’ She pointed to the terrace. ‘But only for a minute.’

‘What did he look like?’ asked Jury.

‘I didn’t see him good. He was tall. I guess he looked’—she glanced at Melrose—’like . . . you.’ She nodded toward Melrose.

She was making it up, for lord’s sakes, thought Melrose. How could Jury listen to this drivel?

‘Like Mr. Plant here?’

‘Yes.’ She had Melrose in her sights and wouldn’t give up, if she could help it. She was working the shirt over the bear’s head. ‘When was this? I mean, when last year?’

‘Oh, I don’t exactly remember. It was before my birthday—’

A Star Is Born.
Melrose snapped a twig with his fingers.

‘—and that’s in July,’ she added. ‘I’m nine now.’ Her tone was a little puzzled, as though she mistrusted nine.

‘About nine months ago.’

‘I guess.’

‘Are you afraid these people maybe would think like your aunt Brenda does that you’re trespassing?’

‘Yes. But there’s nothing I can do about it.’

Melrose’s tone was sarcastic when he said, ‘You could not play here, that’s one thing you could do.’