Ashes to Ashes (33 page)

Her stomach was cold. She yanked her sweater down and rolled off the bed. The floor seemed to hiccup beneath her feet. “Michael?” His shoes lay beside the bed, pigeon-toed with perplexity.

He was leaning against the frame of his door, presenting her with the crumpled back of his sweatshirt. “Michael, it’s all right, talk to me.”

“Sod off,” he said.

She’d expected any remark but that. “What?”

“You’re needin’ a translation? Sod off— go away, let me be.” For once his back was eloquent, quivering with rage and bitterness.

Each word hit her like a brickbat. Her stomach cramped. “Michael!” She took a step toward him, whether to embrace him or hit him she didn’t know.

He slammed his door in her face. The crash reverberated through the house and was echoed by a sharp blow inside the room.

“Michael!” Fool, Rebecca told herself, to stand here childishly calling his name. I got carried away by one side of a two-faced inconsiderate slug. I am setting my standards pretty damn low. His name backed up in her throat and swelled painfully in her chest.

She blundered back into the large bedroom. The bottle of Scotch still sat on the bureau. She grasped it and raised it toward the stone windowsill— this is what happens when alcohol takes control of your senses… . Swearing viciously, she lowered the bottle and set it down. Wasteful, to break half a bottle of Laphroaig. It would make a terrible mess. Eric gave it to me. Remember Eric? I know where I stand with him.

Rebecca turned off the lights and the space heater and smoothed the bedcovers like she’d pat dirt around a land mine. She stalked down to her room to discover Darnley sleeping on her bed. He looked up with a smugly masculine expression. She considered throwing him, too, but it wasn’t his fault she was a certified idiot.

The house was no longer cozy but suffocating. The breath of air in the staircase was laughing derisively. The taste of Scotch was rancid in her mouth and her stomach gulped bubbles of nausea. She scowled at Elspeth’s portrait. “It’s all your fault, leaving your cheap lusts lying around like bear traps.”

But she and Michael had sensed no memory but that of shared experience. Those few moments hadn’t been cheap. Not cheap at all.

Rebecca’s body went as limp as if she’d been gutted and flayed. With a moan of pain she took out her contacts. She crawled onto the bed and stared toward the ceiling. But she heard no sound from the room upstairs.

Rebecca woke up knowing something wasn’t right. She was fully dressed, with a vile taste in her mouth that made her look suspiciously at Darnley as he slept at the foot of the bed, his tail curled over his nose.

Then her thoughts congealed. Remembering was like picking at a scab. With a groan she rose, dressed, and combed out the tangles in her hair. Outside her window thin clouds were shredded by a cold wind, revealing pennons of blue sky. Waves of sunshine raced across the lawn and hurdled the trees.

Michael’s eyes were blue. Michael’s eyes were closed, locked, and guarded by armed sentries.

Rebecca braced herself before going into the kitchen. Sure enough, there he was, brooding over a mug of tea, a rack of toast untouched on the table before him. “Good morning,” she said.

“Good mornin’,” Michael replied, equally flat. He didn’t look up.

Rebecca nestled a filter into the coffeepot, measured the coffee, added water. Steam rose and she inhaled the delectable odor. Caffeine was much more dependable than a man.

Michael was wearing a red sweatshirt emblazoned with the sentiment, “Renegade Time Lord”. His mouth was such a thin, tight line she couldn’t believe it had been so flexible the night before. His right hand, cupped around his mug, was red and swollen. That’s what that crash had been after he slammed his door in her face. He’d driven his fist into the stone wall. Rebecca’s face crumpled into a grimace somewhere between a smile and wail. “Would you like me to fix some ice for your hand?”

“No,” he replied. And, a moment later, “Thank you.”

She poured coffee and drank. It wasn’t as good as she’d anticipated.

“I’m sorry,” Michael said to the toast. “I had no call tongue lashin’ you like that.”

She wanted to retort, What makes you think I care? But last night she had cared only too obviously. “No, you didn’t,” she said.

The silence stretched like a rubber band. Then Michael slammed back his chair and strode out of the room muttering something about work to do. He hadn’t once looked at her.

Rebecca watched her coffee slop back and forth in its cup. Typical. You might as well skin a man alive as expect him to verbalize his feelings. The circumstances were pathetically banal, after all; they’d been forced together in trying times, they were only human, they’d gone overboard. No harm done. Thanks more to a ghost than to her own good sense.

But God, how good it had been to hold him! Not just felt good, was good, body, mind, and soul, right down to those purring kittens of her wits.

She slammed her mug into the sink so hard it cracked. She stared, appalled. Damaging estate property. Things were going downhill fast.

Rebecca picked up the fifth-floor inventory from the Hall. Michael could finish the fourth floor by himself, she wasn’t going anywhere near that demon-possessed bed. James’s steps had stopped in the doorway. Maybe as a child he’d seen his mother and Rudolph in that bed. The sight might have been enough to shock him into celibacy for the rest of his life. There was a good case to be made for celibacy.

Rebecca started in one of the smaller rooms on the fifth floor. She cataloged the collection of Victorian paper theaters, the cut-out dolls dressed as shepherds, kings, and clowns carefully bundled into envelopes. She checked off the scrapbooks filled with old stamps— have to get them appraised. She opened the jeweler’s boxes containing 17th century objets de vertu, a cup carved from carnelian, a turquoise pomander, a tiny jeweled casket that smelled faintly of roses.

But more objects were listed on the inventory than were here. Either they were in another room or had been de-accessioned. She tapped her pencil on the notebook, sympathetic to James’s reluctance to part with his possessions but wishing he’d realized what a headache it would mean to the innocent historian. In the gaps in the inventories was space for plenty of mischief.

Maybe Michael was pleased she hadn’t made it with Eric because he wanted her himself. And yet, men didn’t seem to have much of an impulse toward exclusivity. Masculine games of power being what they were, he might have taken what he could get just to score off Eric. But he hadn’t. He’d buried his face in her stomach and clung to her as if he were being dragged away by some outside force.

It was all just fun and games. She played with Eric, Michael played with her. He’d said he wouldn’t play Sheila’s games. Hypocrite. She laid down her pencil and rubbed her throbbing temples. Just shrug it all off, that’s what the rules say, that’s what he’s done.

Rebecca looked up to meet the painted eyes of young Queen Victoria gazing steadily from a Winterhalter portrait. “I’m not particularly amused either,” she said.

Footsteps. Rebecca turned sharply, only to see Dorothy and her basket of cleaners and scrubbers stepping into the hallway. The housekeeper held a cigarette clenched in her lips, her face screwed around it like a prune around its pit. “Mrs Garst,” Rebecca called, “would you mind not smoking indoors, please? Some of Mr Forbes’s things might be damaged by smoke.”

Dorothy dumped her supplies and trudged back down like
Winnie-the-Pooh’s
Eeyore told he couldn’t play. The woman grew more bloated every day. Overeating, perhaps. Or too much medication. If stuck with a pin Dorothy would deflate into a puddle of flesh and double-knit.

But for the grace of education and opportunity, Rebecca thought, that could be me in thirty years. A menial scorned by smart-alec college girls as something less than human, embittered by the sour dregs of custom and ignorance. For a few months in her youth Dorothy had been young and free. Now she had nothing except her son and his family to look on with pride or hope.

Rebecca laid down the inventory. Dammit, she was making no progress at all with the vertical hold of her mind tuned to rapid scan.

She looked into the large bedroom; at least the ghosts there were not her own. There was the portrait of Mary Stuart. There was Elspeth’s furrow in the bedclothes. There was the portrait of John Forbes and his self-righteously male scowl. Five cut glass bottles stood on the dresser. Rebecca frowned. Five, not seven. Maybe they’d gone up this time, instead of down.

She went up. The ballroom was washed in air and light, blocks of quicksilver sunlight making a tartan pattern with the planks of the floor. No bottles. But Phil’s battery-operated screwdriver and a box of screws lay on a tabouret by a Queen Anne wing chair.

Rebecca picked up the tools, walked down all the flights to the entry, picked the key to the shed off the hook by the door and stepped out into the sunshine. It was cold, but a nice day for a walk. She should ask Michael— no, better go alone. It would be so much easier if she hated him.

The shed still reeked of gasoline. Rebecca put the tools on a bench next to a broken lamp and glanced at the grimy milk jugs. They were empty. She checked the gas can. It was full, the lid on securely. Oh well, give the place time to air out.

She returned to the house to find Dorothy leaving yet another foil-wrapped bundle in the kitchen. “Heavenly hash,” she announced.

“Thank you,” Rebecca said. She left the front door open for Phil and went back upstairs. Michael was sitting at the bureau in the fourth floor room, leaning on his elbow, just as he’d been when she’d gone down.

As she went up the next flight of stairs she heard footsteps ringing on the treads above her head. Hello James, she thought, and quickened her pace to the room where she’d been working. She stopped dead in the doorway.

The pile of old paperbacks that had been on top of a wardrobe now lay stacked neatly on the floor. If they’d fallen, they’d have spewed paper shrapnel all over the room. They’d been lifted down. Michael? He apparently hadn’t moved while she’d been gone. James, maybe. Why?

Rebecca sifted through the books. Among the yellowed pages was a sheet of rag paper covered with James’s handwriting, one end torn roughly off. The back of her neck shriveled. She’d seen that paper before.

She trotted down the stairs, pausing on the fourth floor to ask Michael perfunctorily if he’d been upstairs. “No,” he replied without looking around.

Rebecca brushed past Dorothy on the landing and hurried into the Hall. The boxes holding James’s diaries and scrapbooks were lined up beside the table. Not in this one, not in that one… . There! Rebecca opened the one with the photograph and the torn scrap of paper. The scrap fit the bottom of the letter as perfectly as one puzzle piece dovetailing into another.

Rebecca smiled with satisfaction, feeling like Miss Marple. She read, “June 3, 1952. My dear Mrs Brown. Yes, your parents were valued servants to my father, and it is for their sake and that of your childhood here at Dun Iain that I am troubling myself to answer your last letter. You must realize, Mrs Brown, that your demands are growing more unreasonable all the time. What makes you think that any newspaper today would be at all interested in a scandal that happened in 1901?”

Rebecca glanced at the photo of Katherine Gemmell. She must be Mrs. Brown. Most people got married, despite the testimony against it.

The letter went on, “However, for the sake of your parents I will offer D., their grandchild, work at Dun Iain. Mrs O’Donnell will be with me for a few years yet, but I will try to work something out. I repeat, though, that sympathetic as I am to your financial and marital difficulties, whatever problem you are having you have brought upon yourself. I cannot help you any more than I already have. Your threats are an embarrassment to the memory not only of your parents but mine.”

Well! thought Rebecca. Katherine Gemmell Brown must’ve been desperate to resort to blackmail. And James was right: who’d care about Elspeth’s death now? Katie’s dark eyes gazed out at her from their paper, frustratingly silent. A failing marriage, and financial difficulties, and children. 1952. She would’ve been fifty-one. Her kids would have been grown, or almost so. James offered “D”, Athena and Rudolph’s grandchild, work at Dun Iain.

James might’ve torn the letter pulling it out of the desk in the prophet’s chamber, written another to Katie, and used the torn original as a bookmark. Now he came back from the grave to make sure it was found.

A shadow fell across letter and photo. Rebecca looked up. Dorothy stood just behind her, staring at the picture. Something slid from one side of Rebecca’s mind to the other, clicking as solidly as a key in a lock.

D for Dorothy. Dorothy was Katie Gemmell’s daughter. She’d replaced Louise as housekeeper here because of her mother’s pleas. Maybe Katie had looked dubiously at the wild teenager Dorothy had been and so had planned for her future. 1952— it had been several more years before Dorothy had actually come to work here. And despite Katherine’s bullying, Dorothy had gotten along with James well enough. James had trusted her.

But even in Dorothy’s fits of possessiveness she’d never pointed out her long relationship with the house. “Do you know who this is?” Rebecca asked, indicating the photo.

The housekeeper’s sallow eyes snapped and then dulled. “I’m going to clean your room,” she said. “At least you bother to make your bed and keep your clothes tidy.” She turned on her heel and walked stiffly out of the Hall and up the stairs.

My goodness, Rebecca thought. Either Dorothy was embarrassed at the way she’d gotten her job, or else she was afraid that Rebecca or Michael or Eric would realize what a strong motive she had for embezzling the collections. She could well believe that her grandparents, the Gemmells, deserved more than they’d received in helping to prevent a scandal over Elspeth.

I’ll ask Louise about it, Rebecca promised herself. It’s only a string of circumstantial evidence. Although I suppose Eric would tell me that people have been convicted on less.