Devil May Care (27 page)

"Well, of all the busybodies," Kate exclaimed indignantly, forgetting that she was supposed to be hard of hearing. It was not immediately clear whether she was referring to Grant or to Henry, or perhaps both.

No one else spoke. Donald was no longer laughing.

He and the others exchanged glances, appalled at this new development. They had not even had time to figure out a way of dealing with the consequences of Donald's cockeyed scheme. The advent of Henry was a complication they could ill afford. Somehow, without a word being spoken, it was tacitly agreed among them that Henry was not to be told of the crisis building up that night. How much of the rest of the story they would be forced to tell, how much Grant had already told, had yet to be ascertained.

As has often been said, Henry was not particularly sensitive; but the prolongation of the damp, uncomfortable silence would have been hard to ignore.

"If I am in the way, I shall, of course, return to town," he said stiffly. "I dislike driving at night; perhaps I can find a room at the inn." "Oh, boy," Kate said. "That would really do it.

Uh--Henry--the inn is always filled up this time of year, you couldn't find an unoccupied closet there.

Why don't you go on up--take the room you had last time--you'll want to shower and change before dinner --"

Her voice increased in warmth and amiability as she went on. Henry relaxed, taking this as a demonstration of Kate's goodwill, but Ellie, who had good reason to be suspicious of her aunt's enthusiasms, felt a wave of apprehension pass through her.

There was nothing she could do about it, so she remained silent. Before he went upstairs, Henry gave her the long, cool stare that was part of his

"I am bitterly hurt but I remain calm" treatment.

DEVIL-MAY-CARE 223

As soon as Henry was out of sight, Kate turned to Donald.

"Go get Angela and bring her into the house."

Angela was the mastiff who had taken such a fancy to Henry on his first visit. She was a sucker for new faces.

"You can't do that," Ellie said.

"Do what? Can I help it if Angela sits outside Henry's door? We've got to have some time to talk. What are we going to do with him?"

Donald had already departed on the errand. Angela was delighted to be allowed in; after snuffling around the hall for a while she gave a low whine of pleasure and bounded up the stairs.

"That should hold him for a while," Kate said.

"You'll have to wait till tomorrow to break your engagement, Ellie. If you tell him tonight--"

"What makes you think I am going to--"

"If you tell him tonight," Kate went on, raising her voice, "he'll find a room in town, and God knows what he'll hear there. I sure don't know what we are going to do with him, though. I don't suppose I can leave Angela by his door all night."

"Certainly not," the doctor exclaimed. "I don't know what's the matter with you, Kate. He's another able-bodied man, and heaven knows we're short on those. Can't we tell him--perhaps not the whole story, but enough of it to--"

"No, no, no." Kate waved an impatient hand. "The man's hopeless, Frank. You don't know him. He won't be of any use ... "

Her face took on an expression Ellie knew and dreaded. Kate turned to Donald and measured him with her eyes, like a casting director inspecting a prospect.

"No, yourself," Ellie said firmly. "You cannot send Henry out as a decoy. Even if he'd go, he doesn't look a bit like Donald."

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"Nobody else is going to do my dirty work," Donald said. "Forget it, Kate."

"Really, Kate, that seems--" the doctor began.

"All right! If you're all going to be so uncooperative ... " Kate stood in deep thought for a while. Then she heaved a sigh. "Oh, heil. Much as I hate to admit it, this is no time for fun. There is only one sane thing to do and we're going to do it. We'll lock this place up like a fort and stay in, all of us. You, too, Frank; if someone is hanging around out there, he might think you were taking the parchment away.

Luckily Ellie and I have already fed and watered the livestock. Tomorrow, when it's light, we'll all go to Charlottesville. Danny Wilkes will be able to locate the experts we need, even if it is Sunday."

"I suppose Danny Wilkes is the president of the University," Ellie said.

"Much more important fellow." The doctor smiled.

"He gave the University the new stadium. How do you meet these people, Kate?"

"I can't help it." Kate looked as embarrassed as if she had been accustomed to cohabiting with drug pushers. "It's my damn money. You run into all kinds of people in business ... Anyhow, they do come in handy sometimes," she added, looking a little more cheerful. "What do you think of my plan?"

"Excellent," the doctor said promptly. "I knew your basic good sense would triumph in the end, Kate. I'll just telephone Jackson Phelps and ask him to take care of our animals tonight. He's done it before."

Donald said nothing. His lower lip protruded like that of an angry baby. Kate patted him lightly on the shoulder.

"This hurts me as much as it does you, Donald. I would absolutely love to unrnask a villain singlehanded and drag him off to the police. But not even to make one of my favorite daydreams come true DEVIL-MAY-CARE 225

will I see any of you run the slightest risk of being hurt."

Donald appeared to be convinced by the argument and by the unusual sobriety of Kate's voice. He nodded and gave her a sheepish smile; whereupon Kate's face relaxed into a more characteristic expression of malicious speculation, and she said thoughtfully, "Of course if there were any chance of persuading Henry to leave, around midnight or thereabouts ... "

"You don't mean that," the doctor said affectionately.

"Oh, yes, she does," Ellie muttered.

Kate heard her and flashed her an impudent smile.

The doctor appeared not to hear; a startling idea had occurred to him.

"Good Lord, Kate, you're right, you know. If the fellow is as desperate as you and Donald believe, he might attack anyone who left here tonight. Unless we all went, in a body--he would hardly take on the lot of us--"

"But it's dark," Kate said. "Quite dark now. He might lay some trap on the road. That stretch between here and the highway is very lonesome. I'm not even sure I would trust the cars now. He's had time to work on them."

"Aren't you being a little melodramatic?" the doctor asked.

"I'm not talking about probabilities, Frank, I'm talking about one-in-a-thousand chances; but why risk even those odds? This character is unpredictable, and we've already seen that he can be dangerous."

"Makes sense," the doctor admitted.

"Then that's settled," Kate said briskly. "We'll have a nice quiet evening at home. Ellie, you haven't seen my latest toy; I was saving it as a surprise. You haven't been in the basement, have you?" "No," Ellie said. She was distracted by a mounting uproar from above. The barking of a large dog min226 Elizabeth Peters gled with thuds and muffled shouts. It was not possible to distinguish whether the thuds were made by Henry or by the dog hurling itself against his door.

"I'd better let him out," Ellie said. "What new toy, Kate?"

"I've installed a little movie theater," Kate said.

"Just a little tiny theater. I got so tired of sitting up all night to watch Leslie Howard and the Marx Brothers; they always show the good old movies after midnight, and there are so many commercials--"

"So naturally you installed your own theater," Ellie said. "Kate, darling, don't look so guilty; it's your money, you can spend it any way you like. But do you really think this is an appropriate moment for the Marx Brothers?"

The doctor's eyes gleamed.

"You don't happen to have A Night at the Opera, do you?"

"Certainly. I'll show it to you another evening, Frank. I have some new films, picked them up when I came through D.C. It's taken me the longest time to get prints; I had to blackmail a dozen people."

Eilie looked apprehensively at the ceiling. The noise was getting louder. The others appeared not to hear it.

"You got them?" the doctor asked eagerly. "I didn't think you could. Which ones? The Dallas game, of course--"

Kate nodded. Her expression could only be described as a smug smirk.

"And the Philadelphia game. The 1966 Giants' game, that Sonny won seventy-two to forty-one ... "

"I must let Henry out," Ellie said.

"Yes, do." Kate nodded. "I'm sure he'll enjoy the films. I'll explain the game strategy and the finer points to him as we go along."

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When Ellie was with her aunt she spent a good deal of the time trying to figure out Kate's real motives for a proposed course of action. This evening was no exception. Ellie came to the conclusion that, as usual, Kate had several reasons for proposing her plan. There were alternatives they might have considered; once the immediate impact of Kate's forceful personality was removed, Ellie thought of one or two herself.

Not that the plan was a bad one, and she felt sure that Kate's reasons for wanting them to stay in the house had been valid. There was no need for them to take even the slightest chance of being attacked.

However, Ellie suspected that a subsidiary motive had been Kate's anxiety to see her new football films.

She was like a child when she had a new toy, and she was probably looking forward to heckling Henry.

Henry was certainly very anxious to please. He didn't even complain about Angela, although he was perspiring and furious when Ellie dragged the dog away from his door, and, with Donald's help, shut her in the cellar.

Donald worried him, though. As they sat in the drawing room with their drinks (Henry was sipping abstemiously), he kept glancing at the other man, and finally, in a lull in the conversation, he said, "Can't help noticing, Don, that you look as if you've been in the wars. Did you fall off a horse?"

Donald's hand went automatically to the bandage on his forehead, which was the only visible reminder of his accident.

"It was a horse, all right," he said ambiguously.

"I'm still a little sore around the ribs."

"Thought so, from the way you walked." Henry looked shrewd. "Well, I'm glad to hear it was only an accident. I couldn't help wondering if it had anything to do with what Al was hinting at. Since

228 Elizabeth Peters

you seem to be so--uh--friendly with the family here--"

Ellie caught Donald's eye and turned hastily away.

Poor old Henry, she thought--and knew, as she thought it, that she had reached the final stage of disengagement, that of kindly pity. Lean and brown and nonchalant, romantically bandaged, Donald was everything poor old Henry secretly yearned to be himself.

"What precisely did that old busybody tell you?"

Kate asked sweetly. She offered Henry another drink. He refused.

"Nothing specific. You know how politicians are."

Henry winked at her. Kate looked at him as if he had lost his mind. "You know," Henry repeated. "Cautious people. Never say anything outright. Safer that way; my profession is the same. No, Al just said Ellie had been having some strange encounters ... " He tried not to look at Donald, and failed.

"I'm surprised you took such vague hints seriously enough to come," Kate said severely.

"Oh, it wasn't all that vague," Henry said; and Ellie, who recognized the tone in his voice, looked sharply at him. "He said someone had broken into the house."

He leaned back, smiling, pleased at the effect of his statement. The others looked blank. Consciously or unconsciously they had counted on that very professional caution Henry had mentioned to restrain Alan Grant from giving a detailed description of what had transpired. He knew the dangers of being misquoted, and he would never have mentioned ghosts or ghostly visitations. Since they tended to think of all the events as being connected, they had forgotten that one particular episode had been purely physical, criminal in nature, and was on record. And it was a sufficiently frightening episode to justify Grant's call.

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"Ah," Kate said. "Ah. Yes. I wasn't here at the time--"

"Then Ellie was alone? My poor girl--" "No, I wasn't," Ellie said; and then stopped, seeing the trap. Damn Henry and his lawyer's tricks ... Henry waited. He knew the effectiveness of silence.

He looked from Ellie to Donald, who was sitting stiffly upright--the only position in which his ribs didn't ache--and who gave him a look in return that should have made his ears turn red. No one spoke. Ellie was trying to think. She didn't care what Henry thought of her morals, but there were two considerations that made her want to avoid the issue for the present. In the first place she had no intention of ending her engagement and having a loud unpleasant argument in front of other people-- particularly Donald. In the second place she was afraid that Henry, provoked, might rush out into the night into--whatever awaited there. She couldn't imagine what she had ever seen in him, but she didn't want to be responsible for his being injured.

She looked at Kate, and got no help from that quarter; Kate was studying the ceiling and whistling softly through her teeth.

Then, suddenly, it was as if the last intangible thread had snapped. Ellie laughed aloud.

"Oh, really, this is ridiculous," she said cheerfully.

"Henry, you look so silly; like Cotton Mather judging adulterers or something. The truth is, I've been the victim of a series of practical jokes ever since you and Kate left. Someone has been playing ghost. At first they were only pranks, a little frightening, but not dangerous; then we had the burglary., and Ted, who had been keeping an eye on the house since the pranks began, tried to catch the burglar and had a heart attack. He's in the hospital now ... Kate, did you call about Ted today?" "I'm just about to," Kate said; she was smiling.

"Go on, Ellie."

23O Elizabeth Peters

"Donald moved in, to protect me," Ellie said.

"That's how he got hurt, trying to stop the person who has been playing the tricks. We still don't know who the person is, but we know he wants something that's hidden in the house. Tomorrow we're all going to take this thing--it would take too long to explain what it is, Henry, and you wouldn't understand anyway