Ashes to Ashes (18 page)

“My mum made it for me,” he said, recoiling.

“Let me see.” Warily he extended an arm. Rebecca traced the intricate pattern with her forefinger. “I learned how to knit when we lived in Denver, but then we moved to Houston and we didn’t wear sweaters any more. My mother does crewel embroidery, beautifully, but she moans all the time about how it’s not anything worthwhile. Keeps her sane, though.”

His eyes crinkled with that peculiar cynical gleam. “Aye?”

“Nothing. Just yammering.” Rebecca handed him one of the keys. “I’ll drive.”

“No, no. I need practice drivin’ on the wrong side of the road.”

“Do you have insurance?” she teased.

He sniffed, pretending offense. “I’ve been drivin’ here for a week.”

“All right then— it’s all yours.” She turned on the light in the kitchen, made sure there was food in Darnley’s dish, and helped Michael find the quilted coat he’d left in the sitting room.

Darnley was chasing a moth on the lawn. Rebecca, at first alone and then with Michael’s help, tried to herd him inside— with predictable results. “He’ll freeze out here,” she said at last.

“He has a nice little fur coat,” Michael told her, locking the front door. “He can bide in the doocot till we get back. Don’t worry about him.”

“Hey, he deserves his fair share of my worrying time,” Rebecca protested. Michael laughed.

After a moment’s confusion as to which side the steering wheel was on, they sorted themselves into the Nova. Rebecca snugged the seat belt across her lap and winced as Michael slammed his left hand into the door, reaching for a nonexistent stick shift. “Real men dinna drive automatics,” he proclaimed, resignedly attending to the lever on the steering column.

“Right,” said Rebecca. In the thin gleam of dusk the few lighted windows of Dun Iain shone innocently. The castle was like a child dressed in pristine pinafore and sailor hat, waiting until the parents’ backs are turned to go make mud pies. Already a few stars pricked the depths of the cobalt sky, and the damp grass and leaves sparkled frostily. The tang of woodsmoke hung on the wind. They were in for a hard freeze.

Rebecca laid her head against the seat and snuggled into her coat, turning the collar up around her cheeks. The cloth smelled faintly of Eric. Bemused, she allowed herself a few moments of reverie as the car glided slowly through the darkness.

Waving her hands, Rebecca directed Michael past the Burger King, past the sleazy pizza restaurant, and through a complicated intersection where he stopped briefly to debate his right and his left. Just beyond was the narrow tree-lined street where the Sorensons lived. “Very good,” said Rebecca as they stopped. “In the dark, too.”

“It helps that the steerin’ wheel’s on the other side.”

The porch light of the tall clapboard house shone with welcome. “Don’t expect anything fancy. Jan and Peter are on a strict budget.”

“I’ve been cheese-parin’ for years,” Michael assured her. They emerged from the car, he opening his door, she opening hers.

There was Jan herself. She said goodbye to a dim shape who retreated into the house next door and rushed forward to meet her guests. “Rebecca! Come on in. And you must be Dr. Campbell.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Sorenson,” he said, shaking her hand as politely as Rebecca even at her most punctilious could have wished. Peter stood silhouetted in the screen door, his burly form looking like the colossus of Rhodes with the two children clinging to his legs.

The porch light caught the rich gleam of Michael’s hair and the brightness of his eyes, the long, expressive mouth, and the wiry body. Jan glanced at Rebecca, saying, “Ooh,” under her breath.

“Not necessarily,” returned Rebecca.

Peter and Michael introduced themselves. Brian inspected from his three-year-old’s vantage point Michael’s Reeboks and jeans. Mandy, the five-year-old, said, “Mommy, he isn’t either wearing a dress.”

“Uh-oh.” Jan explained, “We looked up Scotland in the encyclopedia. I think they expected you to look like the picture of the Gordon Highlander.”

Michael smiled at Mandy. “It’s called a kilt. When I played the pipes for a band, I wore one. And to my sister’s weddin’. But few people wear one every day the now. We save it for best, you see.”

Mandy continued to stare. Brian decided the stranger was incoherent but harmless and set off on a search-and-destroy mission. Peter sat Michael down on the couch and handed him a can of Budweiser. Jan said, with a nod toward the house next door, “Sue says there was a drug bust at the Pizza Shed.”

Rebecca’s ears pricked. “When?”

“Last night. Everyone kept saying it couldn’t happen here.”

“It’s everywhere,” Peter said gloomily. He took a swig from his beer.

So Eric had been wrong; the local kids hadn’t been confining themselves to booze. Rebecca knew marijuana when she smelled it.

Jan headed for the kitchen. Peter leaped forward to extract a pencil from Brian’s mouth. Michael peered dubiously into his can of beer. “Like it?” Rebecca asked.

“I’ve had water wi’ more gumption to it,” he whispered. But when Peter sat down and began talking about his job, Michael not only managed a good pull at the can, he conveyed the impression that wiring prefab houses was the most interesting work he’d encountered in years. He was showing more consideration than Rebecca would have thought him capable of. But then, he wasn’t competing with the Sorensons.

She followed Jan into the kitchen and found her pouring glasses of wine out of a jug. Rebecca chuckled. Eric would be appalled. He probably only drank from bottles cobwebbed by genuine French-speaking spiders.

“He’s not as nice as he looks?” Jan asked.

Eric? Oh, no, Michael. “He’s all right. Moments of schizophrenia, though. Now I know why
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
was written by a Scot.”

“Oh?” Jan stirred a pot of stew redolent of onions and bay leaves. “Not like good old predictable Ray.”

Rebecca slumped. “Good old Ray,” she said sadly.

“So that’s the way it is. I thought I smelled a breakup on the horizon. Is that why he’s lurking around town?”

Rebecca stared at Jan as if she’d suddenly spoken Swahili. “What?”

Jan blinked. “Oh. Well, maybe that wasn’t him I saw outside the mall. Sure looked like him, though. Waiting for the green light to cross the street even though there wasn’t another car in sight.”

“That sounds like Ray.”

“Wearing an old flannel shirt and a knit cap.”

“That doesn’t sound like Ray.”

“Unless,” Jan suggested, “he disguised himself in order to follow you.”

“That isn’t Ray at all,” Rebecca groaned. “Don’t scare me like that, Jan— I get enough melodramatics at Dun Iain.”

Jan stood over the salad bowl, paring knife poised. “What did I say?”

Rebecca was so far gone she was being rude. “Sorry,” she told Jan, and between sips of wine told her of the mysterious happenings. “And the last person I thought to suspect was Ray.”

“Ghosts, burglars— everything but secret passages in the library. I thought you were looking a little twitchy.” Jan tossed the salad so vigorously bits of lettuce plopped out onto the counter. She scooped them back into the bowl. “And I hear you had a hot date with Eric Adler last night.”

“Dorothy broadcasting on the grapevine network?” Rebecca asked. “I figured he’d already worked his way through the female population of Putnam and needed fresh prey.”

“I’ve only said hello to him up at Golden Age Village myself, but as far as I know, he keeps a pretty low profile. I guess a lawyer has to be discreet. Or is he?” Jan handed over the salad.

“Yes. No. I don’t know.” Rebecca carried the bowl into the dining room and placed it on the table. Peter was asking questions about Scotland. Michael’s brogue, unthickened by the beer, expounded on the tartan revival—”mostly laid on for the tourists”— and took a slap at absentee landlords.

“I read somewhere about Scottish nationalists,” said Peter. “I thought they were like the Irish IRA, you know, bombs and guns.”

“Most of our wounds are self-inflicted to begin with. Why make more?”

A remarkably live-and-let-live statement from Mr. Thistle, thought Rebecca as she returned to the kitchen. But he had saved that clipping about the fire-bombing in the Highlands. It must be an issue that interested him.

“Yes?” teased Jan. “You don’t know whether Eric is discreet?”

The pit of Rebecca’s stomach tingled delectably at the memory of their mutual indiscretion on the roof of the house. “He’s human. He brought me a bottle of hideously expensive whiskey, but he didn’t bring any to Michael. Out of spite, I guess, although to look at him you’d think he didn’t know the meaning of the word. But he and Michael don’t get along too well.”

“Michael must be the only one. James just loved Eric, I hear. At least until right before he died, when he went kind of soft in the head. And Dorothy treats Eric as if she’d thought of him herself.”

Rebecca laughed. “She does seem rather at a loss for criticism.”

“Maybe she’s got a crush on him. Don’t laugh— when she was young and wild she had boys all the way from Columbus on her string.”

“Dorothy? Wild?”

“Oh, yes. Back in the early fifties, Margie tells me, she was the town scandal. Boys and cigarettes, drinking and dancing. Funny, isn’t it, how she goes on at poor Steve Pruitt about his clothes and his beer when she’s puffing Virginia Slims and popping Valiums as if they were candy.”

Rebecca drained her wineglass and rinsed it out in the sink. She hadn’t told Michael about the earring. Poor Steve, indeed. Poor Phil. The egg would hit his fan, too. Unless he knew all about it already.

Jan installed the children at a card table and gave them bologna sandwiches. The adults she seated around the dining table. Rebecca tasted a forkful of stew appreciatively; Jan could do amazing things with ground beef. “I take it you’re finding some valuable things out at Dun Iain,” said Peter. “That old furniture is much better quality than you can get today.”

“Except for desk chairs,” muttered Rebecca.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jan said. “I’m rather partial to early Sears Roebuck myself.” She waved her hand airily around her house.

Michael and Rebecca laughed. Peter looked pained. “Actually,” said Rebecca, “we’re more interested in historical artifacts.”

“Have you found your letter yet?” Jan asked.

Michael glanced up curiously. The children, losing interest in his dextrous manipulation of knife and fork, ran into the living room. The sound track of
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
blasted through the door. “Turn it down!” bellowed Peter.

Rebecca explained about the Erskine letter and the rumored exchange of babies, Queen Mary’s for the Countess of Mar’s. “Of course Ray,” she added, “thinks it’s politically incorrect to question the antecedents of the royal family. He was really put out when the committee accepted my proposal.” She looked across the table at Michael, expecting indignation at the least.

But he was wickedly amused. “I’ve seen footnotes about that letter. I never knew old John had made off with it. Wouldn’t it be grand to pin back a few English ears? I’ll help you. You could use some expert help.”

“Thanks.” If he heard her slightly acid tone, he ignored it.

Jan and Peter shared a speculative look at that exchange. Jan said, “You know, Michael, you have us to blame for Rebecca’s being at Dun Iain. When she was here a couple of years ago, we drove by the place, and we almost had to tie her up to keep her from marching up to the front door and demanding admittance. Then, after James died, Margie told me the state wanted a historian to balance the one the museum was sending— you, it turns out— and I tipped off Rebecca before the advertisement was published.”

Michael nodded. “You do what you can to get your work.”

A fine point Ray had never really understood. “I appreciate your help, Jan,” said Rebecca. “I think.” The dining room was a bubble of light and warmth filled with friendly voices. It was cramped and stuffy compared to the Hall at Dun Iain, where voices echoed in darkness and solitude. She blinked rapidly. What an odd feeling, to watch her own perceptions flapping in her mind like fish in the bottom of a boat.

Jan was saying something to Peter about the Dun Iain ghosts. Rebecca started to add, “I’m not imagining things. Not only Michael but the cat see them, too,” when she caught the impact of Michael’s savage glare. All right, admitting to ghosts threatened his manhood. She said instead, “Peter, you’ve been inside Dun Iain, haven’t you?”

“Sure. I’ve done some subcontracting for Phil. He’s good at carpentry, plumbing, that sort of thing, but he gets me to do the electrical work. Some of that antique wiring could curl your hair. No pun intended.”

He sat innocently deadpan while everyone groaned, then snapped his fingers. “By the way— Jan, where’s that key?”

Jan leaned back, lifted a huge iron key from the china hutch, and presented it to Rebecca. “Better late than never. Phil got this for Peter before James died, and we’ve been forgetting to give it back.”

The key was heavy and cold in Rebecca’s hand. She intercepted Michael’s keen glance toward Peter. No, she told him silently. Ray isn’t the last person I’d suspect, Peter Sorenson is. She said, “You might as well keep it as a souvenir; there’s a new lock on the door.”

Jan put the key back on the hutch. Peter never so much as blinked. Michael shrugged very briefly and asked, “Would bad wirin’ in the fuse box or wherever make all the lights come on by themselves?”

“No way. That box is the first thing I fixed.”

“Oh,” said Michael. He leaned his chin on his fist, winced, shifted his hand to the corner of his jaw, and contemplated his empty plate.

Sorry, Rebecca thought. I’d have liked a logical explanation. I have to go back to Dun Iain tonight, too.

“In fact,” Peter went on, “I’ve done so much work out there the last couple of years James left us a hundred bucks in his will. Touching, how he regarded half the community as family.”

“He even left a legacy to Louise O’Donnell, Phil’s grandmother, out at Golden Age,” chimed in Jan. “She worked at Dun Iain for years. She was a maidservant there when Elspeth died.”