Kisses and Lies (12 page)

Lucy says in a worried voice, “Cal, sweetie  .  .  .”

She disappears from view underneath me. They must all be standing at the foot of the stairs.

“I wish she’d never come here,” Callum says viciously. “I wish she’d hit her head when she fainted and—”

“Callum!” booms a man’s voice, so deep it resounds even in this gigantic space, as does his heavy tread on the wooden floor. “That’s enough!”

I turn on my heel. The last thing I want to do is walk into a fight between Callum and what I presume is his dad. A memory of Jase grappling with his father snaps into my mind, and though I can’t imagine that Callum and his dad are going to come to blows, that memory is so awful that it makes me want to run away till any conflict is over. I see Jase, so clearly that it brings a lump to my throat. I remember him struggling with his father on the grassy verge of the lake. I remember him wading through the shallow water, his face set and angry, to check if I was all right. I remember his soft lips on mine.

And then I push those memories down, stamping them away. I have to keep my focus on Dan right now. Thoughts of Jase will distract and weaken me—boys seem to have that effect, I’ve noticed before. One thing at a time. First I have to deal with the McAndrews and solve Dan’s murder. Then I can set my attention to working out why Jase’s dad is so hostile to me, and seeing if I can win Jase back.

Callum and his dad are shouting at each other, and, as the subject of their argument, I definitely don’t want to go downstairs to face that. I decide to sneak upstairs again till it’s over: I’m sure I can make it back up the carpeted stairs without anyone in the hall below noticing me. But, as I look up, I see movement in the gallery above me.

Someone’s there. And they’ll see if I run away.

I’m trapped.

So I take a deep breath and walk down the rest of the flight of steps, to the point where it takes a ninety-degree turn, merges with the other wing of the staircase, and becomes a double-wide, imposingly dramatic final descent into the hall.

There they all are, at the base of the staircase. Mrs. McAndrew, thin and pale, with that flaming head of red hair: her long white hands are twisted together as if she were wringing them. Mr. McAndrew—I know it’s him, because I recognize him from the inquest. Older and graying at the temples though he is, now I see him again I realize how much he looks like Dan and Callum. And there’s Lucy, reaching up to touch Callum on the arm, so pretty and innocent-looking, with her porcelain skin and wide-set blue eyes, that it’s hard to believe Dan’s EpiPen might have been in her handbag when he was killed.

Finally, I summon up my courage and look at Callum, Dan’s twin. Glowering with anger, his strong dark brows pulled together, his green-gray eyes gleaming, his arms folded across his chest. Strangely, though his resemblance to Dan is uncanny, I can see the difference between them now. Dan was so happy-go-lucky, concerned to charm everyone, always cracking a smile. Callum looks like he’s never cared in his whole life what anyone thought of him and isn’t going to start now.

My trainers creak on a particularly worn-down stair, which groans and squeaks. Everyone immediately looks up at me in shock.

Talk about making a dramatic entrance.

Callum recovers first.

“You shouldn’t be here!” he yells, stabbing one finger at me in a gesture that leaves me in no doubt about who he means. I’m standing a few steps up, so he has to tilt his head back to look at me, but I still feel very intimidated by his aggression.

I don’t answer him. Partly because I can’t think of the right thing to say, but partly because it’s such an intense experience to be so close to the spitting image of Dan, who was the first boy I ever kissed. His lips, like Dan’s, are full and pink, his lashes long and thick. But his aura is so different. Dan was easy and approachable; his brother is bristling like a hedgehog.

“You should pack up and leave right now,” he continues, his tone raging.

“Callum, the lassie’s our guest!” his father shouts angrily at him, but Callum’s already spinning round, striding furiously away across the hall. Lucy shoots one nervous glance at me and then runs off in his wake.

I manage the last few steps down to floor level, though my legs are wobbling with nerves. Mr. and Mrs. McAndrew just look at me. Despite Callum’s father’s reminder to him about his manners to a guest in the house, I can tell from their faces that neither of them is exactly happy that I’m here.

Then I hear footsteps above me, running lightly down the stairs. I actually tremble in anticipation of someone else who might order me out of the house. It can’t get worse, can it?

“Catriona,” says Mrs. McAndrew, looking up, “your brother’s just made a terrible scene.”

A girl a few years older than me reaches the bottom of the stairs and holds out her hand to me. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Catriona McAndrew. You must be Scarlett. Sorry about Callum, he’s always been a bit of a drama addict.”

If Callum and Dan take after their father (or took, in Dan’s case), Catriona McAndrew is spookily like her mother: slender, almost frail-looking, though her grip on my hand is strong enough. She has the same flaming red hair, pulled back into a tight ponytail, and a sprinkling of freckles over the bridge of her nose, surprisingly pretty against her pale white skin. But she seems much more confident than her mother, and she’s actually smiling at me.

“It’s okay,” I manage to say. “I mean, I understand.”

“I’ll show you round a bit, shall I?” she says. “This place is a real maze.”

“Thank you, Catriona,” her mother says gratefully.

“Good girl,” her father adds.

“Come on,” Catriona says, pulling gently at my hand. “This way. You could probably do with a bit of fresh air. Let’s start by going outside and looking at the moat.”

I nod and follow her.

I just hope she isn’t planning on pushing me in.

SEEING DAN EVERYWHERE

“And here’s the sea,” Catriona says, gesturing grandly.

Though I heard the roar of the waves as soon as we crossed the drawbridge, I had no idea that Castle Airlie was built practically on the side of a cliff, with a sheer drop to the Irish Sea below. The drawbridge is on the far side of the castle, which is built in a triangle—two long sides, one short—with a central courtyard. I walked round the entire three sides while looking for a staircase. No wonder it seemed to go on forever. My bedroom is on the side that doesn’t face the sea. I wish it did. I can’t imagine a more stunning view than this.

I gasp at the dramatic sight. The Irish Sea is pounding the rocks far below angrily, gray waves breaking into white foam, a constant, relentless pressure that makes me realize how powerful the sea can be. Eventually, it will eat away at the rugged cliff we’re standing on, sending it tumbling down to the edge of the water.

I take a step back. Catriona has been really nice to me, but that might have been just lulling me into a false sense of security before she pushes me off the edge. My fears about the moat were quieted when I saw how shallow the water was—Catriona says it’s just a “decorative feature” now. But push me over the cliff and there’s no way I would survive a fall onto those jagged rocks.

She laughs.

“Don’t worry, you’re safe enough with me,” she says. “But maybe you shouldn’t walk out here with Callum quite yet.”

“He really hates me,” I say sadly. “I can’t blame him, I suppose.”

“Oh, come on! We all know it wasn’t your fault Dan died.” I look at her.

“Do you mean that?” I ask, my eyes widening. I wasn’t expecting anyone to say that, or at least, not so directly.

She looks straight back at me, red hair whipped across her face by the wind. Raising one hand to push it back, she says:

“Of course. It was just an awful accident.”

I bite my tongue, because I know the truth. Peanut oil on the crisps at the party, enough to send Dan into life-threatening anaphylactic shock. And his EpiPen somehow removed, so that he couldn’t save his own life.

But I can’t tell her any of that. Yet.

Catriona sighs, turning to look over the sea again. She’s wearing a sweater and a pair of faded old corduroy trousers that should be dowdy, but hang off her narrow bones in a way that actually manages to make corduroy look quite elegant.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she says. “I think it’s the most beautiful view in the world.”

“It’s stunning,” I agree, though secretly I find it more cruel than beautiful. The silvery sea pounding the rugged gray cliffs, the bare marshland around us: it’s a stark and dramatic landscape, softened only by the sodden green grass underfoot. The castle behind us is equally stark, made of gray stone, with towers at each corner of the triangle studded with slit windows through which archers would have shot arrows at anyone trying to besiege the fortress.

“The moat was much wider then,” Catriona says, reading my thoughts with unnerving accuracy. “It would have been really hard to prop up ladders against the walls. And there are hidden openings up above for pouring boiling oil over the heads of anyone who did manage to get a ladder up. This castle was never taken by anyone. It was impregnable.”

“Wow,” I say, staring up at the sheer stone walls. “It’s—intimidating.”

I’m not sure if that was the right word to use, but when I glance at Catriona I see that she’s flushed with pride.

“It is, isn’t it?” she says excitedly. “Lots of people think Castle Airlie is a bit—well, bare, I suppose. But it’s one of the few castles no one ever managed to besiege successfully, and I’m weirdly proud of that.”

“Did your family build it?” I ask, imagining McAndrew ancestors looking like Dan and Callum wearing kilts and fighting off would-be intruders with broadswords, like something out of Highlander.

Catriona doesn’t read my mind this time. Instead, she wraps her arms around herself as if she’s feeling the cold wind off the sea, and starts walking back toward the castle.

“A distant branch of the family did,” she says. “In the thirteenth century. But eventually they only had daughters, and the castle’s entailed.”

I have to skip to keep up with her: she’s walking fast now.

“That means it can only pass down to a male heir,” she explains. “So it came down through one branch, and then another, and eventually to my grandfather.”

“That’s crap,” I say. “The entail, I mean. My dad was a baronet but because he only had a girl, the title’s died out. Not that I’d want a title, but it doesn’t seem fair, does it?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Catriona says, giving me a sympathetic smile. “Are you interested in history, Scarlett?”

“Um, yes,” I say, though it’s a very general question. Still, she’s being nice to me, much nicer than Callum, and I basically would agree to anything she said just to have an ally at Castle Airlie.

“Would you like to see the family portrait gallery?” she says, so enthusiastically that there’s clearly only one acceptable answer.

“I’d love to,” I say.

I can’t help feeling that Catriona is incredibly poised for someone whose brother died six months ago. She’s acting more like a tour guide than a bereaved sister. But, considering the drama going on with the rest of her family, maybe it’s just a coping mechanism: and maybe, too, she’s trying to overcompensate by balancing out the overheated emotions of some of the other McAndrews.

And, I reflect, I’d much rather have Catriona behaving as if I’m just another guest at Castle Airlie who needs the grand tour, than Callum stabbing his finger at me and yelling that I shouldn’t be here.  .  .  .

“Are you okay?” Catriona asks. “You’ve gone really quiet.”

She’s right: I haven’t said a word in ages. Catriona has been doing all the talking as we’ve walked along the gallery, giving narration on portraits of McAndrew ancestors from Tudor ones in ruffs and doublets, to satin jackets, to ruffles and lace, to dark Victorian suits. But what’s been keeping me so silent is the eerie resemblance that many of the men share. It’s like seeing Dan everywhere—Dan, whose face I knew so well from afar, but only saw up close for such a short period of time. Now I can look at him as closely as I want, for as long as I want. I just have to visit this gallery, with its echoing mahogany floor and bottle-green walls hung with images of Dan in every conceivable historical costume that I can imagine.

“It’s just  .  .  .” I back up and sit down on a padded window seat in one of the bays built into the thick stone walls, probably to provide views over the Irish Sea. I can imagine it being really relaxing to curl up by the heavy old glass panes and watch the sea pounding at the rocks below the cliff.

“It’s just that so many of these paintings look like Dan,” I say.

“Oh, Scarlett. I’m so sorry.” Catriona sits down next to me. Everything in Castle Airlie is on a large scale—there’s plenty of room for both of us in the window bay. Catriona takes my hand. “I wasn’t thinking.  .  .  .” She looks up and down the gallery. “I’m so used to the McAndrew face, you see. To me, it isn’t just Dan. It’s Dad and Callum as well, and it was Granddad, when he was alive.” She smiles at me. “Did you know Dan well? How long had you been going out?”

Oh, this is embarrassing.

“Um, we weren’t going out or anything,” I admit, curling up into a ball and hugging my knees. “We’d only just met, really.”

“Was it sort of a whirlwind thing?” Catriona asks.

“I don’t know what it was,” I confess. “We just—we were talking and then we started kissing, and then he collapsed.”

“It must have been terrible,” Catriona says sympathetically.

“You shouldn’t be comforting me,” I say. “I hardly knew Dan, and he was your brother—it’s so much harder for you.”

“But you actually had to see him—you know—”

“Well, don’t you two look really cozy,” a girl’s voice breaks in.

I jerk my head up, stunned that neither Catriona nor I have heard her approach. We must have been really absorbed in our conversation.

“Lucy!” says Catriona, looking as surprised as I am.

“Let me guess,” Lucy says. “You’re having a lovefest about how fantastic Dan was, right?”

I’ve seen her photos, and I saw her briefly earlier, crossing the hall. But close up, Lucy Raleigh is even prettier than I thought. Her skin is smooth as satin, and with her upturned nose and little pink mouth, she looks like a girl in one of those natural-ingredient shampoo ads, her long blond hair poker-straight and shiny as the diamond studs in her ears. She exudes the kind of confidence that Princess Plum and her cohorts have, the confidence of knowing that she’s rich, beautiful, and privileged. And she’s the girlfriend of Callum McAndrew, who, though incredibly hostile to me, is undeniably a very good-looking boy from a well-off family.

So why, when she has all these advantages, is she glaring at me like I’m dog poo on her expensive shoes?

“I didn’t know Dan that well,” I answer, choosing my words carefully, because I don’t want to get caught out in a lie, “but I really liked him. Everyone seemed to like him, actually—”

Beside me, Catriona is nodding. But Lucy interrupts me, her hands on her hips.

“Everyone liked him?” she snorts. “God, if they only knew! They only liked him because he was so two-faced he’d tell people exactly what they wanted to hear. Dan would do anything, say anything, to get what he wanted.”

“Lucy, please,” Catriona starts.

But Lucy overrides her.

“You didn’t even know Dan,” she snaps at me. “You talked to him for five minutes and then you followed him outside to that terrace so he could feed you a load of compliments and snog you. Just like he did with every single girl he ever met. You didn’t exactly make it difficult for him, did you?”

“Lucy, stop it,” Catriona warns again.

But now I can speak for myself. Anger has loosened my tongue.

“Why are you being so nasty to me?” I demand. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because you ought to know that Dan was really a slag,” Lucy insists, her blue eyes flashing. “You’ve probably built up this whole romantic fantasy about him, told yourself that if he were still alive, you’d be together. Ha!”

Catriona jumps up. “Lucy, you’re going much too far.”

But, awful though it is to hear that I was just one of many, many girls for Dan, I don’t want Lucy to stop. If you’re investigating a murder, you have to be prepared to hear a lot of things you may not want to find out. I knew that from the beginning. And if what Lucy’s saying is true, it’s a really interesting perspective on Dan—one that might help me discover who killed him.

“So what’s this got to do with you? Why is it your job to go around setting the record straight?” I challenge her, hoping to provoke her into saying even more.

She takes the bait and bites down on it hard.

“Someone has to do it,” she insists. “Even now that Dan’s dead, nothing’s changed. Everyone just keeps going on about Dan this and Dan that, but Callum’s worth a hundred of him—”

“Lucy!” booms a voice from the far end of the corridor. Loud footsteps stride down the gallery, heavy thuds on the polished wooden floors. Callum McAndrew comes into view.

I catch my breath. If I thought he was glowering before, I hadn’t seen anything yet. His gray-green eyes are so bright with anger they’re positively flashing sparks at us. Lucy’s right: Callum is the complete opposite of Dan. I never saw Dan as anything but the happy, smiling charmer Lucy’s describing, whereas his brother seems to have a perpetual scowl. He’s like a thundercloud storming down the hall.

I wish fervently that Taylor were here for backup. She would square her shoulders and scowl right back at him, and seeing her do that would make me feel a thousand times better.

Or Jase. Having Jase standing next to me would make me feel totally safe.

I tell myself firmly not to be so weak and woolly. I chose to come into the enemy’s lair all alone—I’ll have to take the consequences. I can stand up for myself—I’ve done it before, in worse circumstances than these.

Brave words. But watching Callum’s approach, I swallow hard and brace myself for what’s about to happen. One thing’s crystal clear: there’s going to be a lot of shouting.