Devil May Care (10 page)

"Ted thought of that already," Ellie said, watching him prod the stair carpeting. "No wires, no nothing."

"So I see." Donald straightened. "Just a thought."

He refused her offer of refreshment, saying that he had to get up at dawn to prepare his father's breakfast.

"Otherwise he goes till noon on one cup of coffee.

Lock the front door, Ellie; I'll wait outside till I hear the bolts and bars bang into their sockets."

"Thanks, Donald. Good night."

Ellie offered her hand.

Donald contemplated it soberly for a few seconds, cocking his head on one side. Then he took her by the shoulders and kissed her.

Never in her life, not even at the unsophisticated age of twelve, had Ellie wanted to slap a boy for kissing her. She had no idea why she did it this time.

Even more surprising was the fact that Donald didn't duck. They stood staring at one another stupidly for a moment, while the echoes of the slap died, ghostily, in the high-beamed ceiling. Saint Thomas, the black-and-white Manx, bit Donald on the ankle. He jumped and swore and--it must be admitted-- kicked. Saint Thomas, who was not a stupid cat, had already departed. Donald grinned.

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"There you go. All sorts of brave defenders on hand. See you tomorrow."

Gallantly he closed the door for her, while Ellie still stared. She had rarely felt such a fool. Then she heard Donald's voice, through the door:

"Lock it, stupid."

Ellie obeyed, and then fled upstairs. She reached the window of her room in time to see Donald's tall figure moving quickly across the lawn. At the edge of the woods he turned; although Eilie knew he could not possibly see her, he raised one arm in a jaunty salute. He had known she would watch for him ... "I hope," she said aloud, "that something with long sharp teeth drops down out of a tree and sucks your blood."

But of course nothing did. There was not even a ghastly, wavering scream after he vanished into the woods.

Ellie got into bed and started Anne of Green Gables.

She was well into the second chapter when she heard the familiar scraping scuttle in the hall. The bed was thick with cats, as usual, and Franklin was sound asleep in his usual place on the chest. Ellie looked up from her book.

"Hello, Roger," she said--and then gasped, in mingled surprise and delight as the rat squeaked affably at her, its white whiskers twitching. Now she knew whom Roger Mcgrath had reminded her of. Kate must have named the rat after him.

CHAPTER FIVE.

Ellie sat up with a start. The bed was cat-free, but Roger the rat was standing on the chest at the foot of the bed. Since the top of the chest was about six inches below the surface of the mattress, Ellie could see only Roger's long, pointed nose resting on the coverlet between his neat white paws. He looked like one of the weird little drawings of Kilroy that were popular during the Second World War.

Ellie was accustomed to the migrations of the animal population; she had not been awakened by Roger's arrival or the cats' departure. For a moment she blinked sleepily, trying to think what had wakened her. Then she remembered. She had been worried about the Beaseleys. Presumably they had keys to the house (and that was not entirely a comfortable thought), but she had bolted and barred and chained every door the night before. The Beaseleys wouldn't be able to get in, and their touchy pride might interpret the barricading of the house as a personal insult.

Ellie tore downstairs, without waiting to put on a robe or slippers. She was too late. Marian Beaseley was already in the kitchen.

She glanced up from scouring the sink as Ellie came to a rocking stop.

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"I made coffee," she said.

"I need it." Ellie went to fetch a cup. She was still too dazed to be tactful. "How did you get in?" she blurted. "I was hoping I could get down here before you arrived, but ... " Any other woman would have asked a leading question. Marian didn't even look at Ellie; she had turned back to the sink, which she was scrubbing to a state of whiteness that dazzled the eye. Ellie knew there was no choice. She had to tell Marian the truth.

The Beaseleys might walk out if they thought the house was haunted, but that was preferable to having them quit because they felt they had been insulted.

There was no danger of them spreading the story around town. They kept to themselves.

"Something funny has been going on," Ellie said, filling her cup and sitting down at the table. "That's why I locked the door last night, Marian. Night before last I saw three ... people outside on the lawn.

And the day Kate left there was--I thought there was a man here in the house."

"Who?"

"It couldn't have been Donald," Ellie said, half to herself. "I must have been hallucinating. It's the only explanation. Sometime, somewhere, I must have seen a picture of him ... "

"Hmph," said Marian, her back still turned.

"It must have been imagination, Marian. The man was--uh--I could see through him. He sort of faded away ... "

"Francis Morrison. Young Donald's the spitting image of him."

"Who was Francis Morrison?"

"Killed at Saratoga," Marian said briefly. "Second son. Nice young fella." There were several things Ellie might have said.

She did not say any of them. As she sat staring at Marian's uncompromising back, straight as an arrow in its faded print dress, a shiver ran through DEVIL-MAY-CARE 79

her. The Battle of Saratoga ... She didn't remember the precise date, but it had been during the Revolutionary War. Two hundred years ago ... yet something in Marian's voice implied that she had known the said Francis personally. It wasn't what Marian said, it was the way she said it ... Of course she might have seen a picture ... Or she might be inventing the resemblance between Donald and his remote ancestor. There was no sense in questioning Marian. She hardly ever answered questions.

She had not answered the question as to how she had entered the house, through chained and bolted doors.

"The people outside," Ellie began.

"Must of been Mrs. Mcgrath and that young man of hers. And the old squire, after '. The bodies was buried in Kate's woods."

Again Ellie gaped, speechless. Marian filled a pail with water and began mopping the floor. As the mop came closer and closer to Ellie's feet she took the hint.

Once she was out of Marian's presence she was tempted to go back and ask the obvious questions.

But she knew it would be useless. Marian's flat, expressionless black eyes were as effective as those of a rattlesnake in paralyzing its victim. You couldn't really call an exchange with Marian conversation.

Her comments were as unanswerable as stones dropped into a well.

Anyway, Ellie thought, Marian didn't seem to be perturbed by the idea of ghosts. Why should she, when she spoke of them as old acquaintances?

Ellie lingered in her room, reading Anne of Green Gables, until she thought she had given Marian time to finish her work. When she went downstairs, taking the book with her, the kitchen was shining and deserted. Ellie got her breakfast and sat down. She continued to sit, drinking coffee, until she had fin80 Elizabeth Peters ished the book. After all, what else did she have to do? This was supposed to be a vacation. The house was unusually quiet, the animals having been fed and let out by one Beaseley or another. Eliie didn't need to look at the glaring sunlight to know it was hot outside. July in Virginia was always hot.

She was a fast reader and she had risen early; it was only a little after ten by the time she closed the book and stretched luxuriously. Anne's adventures were very soothing. What an innocent world it had been, that remote Canadian province in the last years of the nineteenth century. A cynic might claim that such innocence existed only in fiction; that the real world had had just as much misery, poverty, and sin as this present decade. Fictitious or not, it was a nice world to escape into from time to time.

A sharp snapping sound announced the appearance of a pair of cats through the swinging panel Kate had had cut into the outer kitchen door. One of them was Abu Simbel, the Abyssinian, a handsome, ruddy aristocrat; the other was his inseparable companion, George. George was a scrubby white mongrel with one black spot under his nose, like a Hitlerian moustache. No amount of grooming or cream-rich diet could make George look anything but lower class; but he had been Simbel's protege ever since the night Simbel had carried him in by the scruff of the neck, a skinny, half-drowned kitten.

Kate never turned anything away from her door, animal or human, two-legged or four-legged, feathered or furred or bare, but George's adoption had been foreordained. He was several pounds heavier than Simbel now, but the Abyssinian still treated him like a spoiled baby, washing him several times a day and standing back from the food until George had finished.

The two of them sat down on very solid bottoms by the empty food dishes and stared compellingly at Ellie.

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"You already ate," she told them. "You're both too fat anyway. You can't have any more until ... "

She filled the food dishes with dry food. Then she picked up the piece of paper that had drifted to the floor on the current of air from the animals' passage into the kitchen. Marian had left a shopping list.

Bleach, paper towels, cat food, dog food, goat food, birdseed ... Ellie winced as she thought what Kate's monthly bills for animal food must come to. A number of people had challenged Kate on that subject-- once; they never challenged Kate more than once.

"How can you spend so much on animals when there are babies starving to death in India?" was one objection; the other end of the ethical spectrum was represented by comments along the line of

"Dumb critters oughta feed themselves, they don't need all that fancy food." Kate's reply usually expressed her preference for animals over people; animals, she said, might occasionally bite the hand that fed them, but they never stabbed it in the back. Kate never worried about mixed metaphors so long as she got the point across.

George slobbered noisily over his food. Ellie left him to it. She got her purse and went out the front door.

Ow. It was hot.

Ellie opened all the car windows and then went back into the shade to let it cool off. As she stood there, fanning herself ineffectually with the shopping list, her ears were assailed by a mounting roar.

A bright-red rider mower came ponderously into view around the corner of the house; it looked and sounded like a mythical monster. Donald was driving it.

As soon as he caught sight of her he began veering in eccentric circles and swaths, cutting insane patterns across the lawn. Ellie glowered at him. Donald steered the mower up to the porch steps and shut it off. Silence, exquisite and calm, descended.

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"Hi," Donald said.

"Hi."

"Where are you off to?"

"Town. Shopping."

"You've been talking to Marian," Donald said. "I recognize her rhetorical style. Or are you still mad at me?"

"Why on earth should I be mad at you?" Ellie inquired loftily. She got into the car. The steering wheel was still so hot she could hardly bear to touch it.

"Mind if I come along?" Without waiting for an answer, Donald got off the mower and into the car.

He instantly got up again. He was wearing shorts.

The agonized expression on his face broke down Ellie's reserve. She whooped with laughter.

"Oh, cruel," said Donald, his posterior two inches off the seat. "I may be permanently maimed. Get moving, will you? And turn on the air conditioning!" Ellie did as he suggested, not because of his discomfort, but because of her own. As the car rolled smoothly down the driveway she inquired, "What do you want to go to town for?" "You don't talk right," Donald said, sitting gingerly on the seat. "You should say, ' do you--' "

"What do you want to go to town--"

"Just to keep you company." Donald beamed at her. "I'll finish the lawn later."

"What about the animals? Should we leave them alone?"

"There are assorted Beaseleys all over the place.

Anyhow, animals are a lot more competent than people."

Ellie steered deliberately for the first pothole she saw and observed, with pleasure, that Donald's head contacted the roof of the car quite smartly.

"No disturbances last night?" he asked, rubbing his head ostentatiously.

"I said I'd call if anything happened."

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"I don't believe you. You might be more inclined to call Ted."

"I'm sorry I called him in the first place," Ellie admitted. "I adore him, but he is an awful gossip. I don't want that story spread all over town."

"He's probably spread it already."

"He didn't talk to the Beaseleys."

"Nobody talks to the Beaseleys. Hey--you mean the exquisite Marian communicated with you? How did you ascertain that she was unaware without giving the show away?"

"I didn't." Donald looked at her in surprise, and Ellie added defensively, "I had to tell her something.

I didn't want her to think I was locking the place up because I didn't trust her."

"I forgot about the Beaseleys when we locked up," Donald admitted. "You must have had to get up at dawn to let her in. No wonder you look so holloweyed and sickly."

Ellie ignored this gratuitous insult. Donald's comment reminded her only too clearly of the unanswered question.

"I didn't get up at dawn. But she was already inside."

"What? How?"

"She didn't say. You know how she is, I couldn't ... We must have forgotten to bolt one of the doors or windows."

Donald shook his head.

"No chance."

"Then how--"

"Either she is a witch, which wouldn't surprise me. Or there is some way of getting into the house we don't know about."

"I don't know which idea is worse."

"Forget about the Beaseleys. You don't really believe they're responsible for your ghosts, do you?"

"No."

84 Elizabeth Peters

"Neither do I. What's bugging you? Something Marian said?"