Petals on the Pillow (20 page)

Kelly felt the color flood her cheeks as her skin practically burned. She wanted to sink into the floor with embarrassment. “Dr. McIntyre! I can assure you that I am not pregnant.”

“Just checking, Ms. Donovan.” McIntyre clicked his bag shut and gave her a nod as he let himself out of her room.

For a little while, Kelly simply sat and seethed. How dare everyone talk about her behind her back? How dare that man stand there and accuse her of having an affair? Of course, she hadn’t been behaving in a way that even Kelly herself would term normal and she was sleeping with Harrison, but that was beside the point!

Sick of staring at the wallpaper and too sore to consider climbing up and down the ladder to work on the mural in Betsy’s room, Kelly finally grabbed her sketchbook and headed out into the gardens around the Manor.

It was another uncharacteristically sunny day on the island. She found a concrete bench that the sun had baked warm by a bed of red and purple primroses.

As always, the feel of a piece of chalk between her fingers had a calming effect on her. She wanted to capture how the speckled sun through the leaves of a giant oak turned the petals of the primrose almost white in places and left the shadows a velvety blue-black. She lost herself quickly in the patterns of overlapping leaves and winding stems so by the time the noise behind her actually intruded on her consciousness she knew somehow that it had been going on for a few minutes.

The bushes rustled behind her and the sense of being watched became almost unbearably strong. The air seemed thick with tension. Once again, as she had so many times in her first few days at the Manor, Kelly felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up on end.

“I refuse to jump, shriek or scream, so you may as well come out of there, whoever you are,” she said without turning around, but she couldn’t completely hide her surprise when David Clark plopped down on the bench next to her. She definitely couldn’t hide her shock at how he looked. He had degenerated terribly in the past few days. His hair was limp and stringy. Under several days’ worth of beard, his skin seemed ashen and slack. Pieces of twigs and leaves clung all over his dusty, rumpled clothing. “You look terrible.”

Clark gently lifted back some of Kelly’s hair and peered at the bruising on the side of her face where she had connected with the stairs. “You don’t look like the picture of health your
self.”

Kelly shrugged his hand away. “I tripped and fell.”

“Hmmm,” was the only comment he made.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she went on. “If Harrison sees you on the grounds again he’s liable to blow a gasket.”

“So I gathered.” Clark rubbed at his eyebrow. Kelly could see a slight tic in the corner of his left eye. He rubbed that, too. “I just don’t quite know why.”

Kelly snorted. “Let’s just say he isn’t quite as dense as you may have thought.”

“What do you mean by that? I may have called Harrison a lot of things through the years, but I don’t think dense was ever one of them.”

If Kelly hadn’t seen the note herself, the disingenuous look on Clark’s face might have fooled her. She gathered up her pas
tels and began slotting them back into their trays. “Look, Mr. Clark—”

“David.”

She shrugged. “Fine. David. This is all between you and Harrison. I really have nothing to do with it.” She snapped the case shut and stood.

David grabbed her hand, keeping her from walking away. “I know that. Don’t you think I do? But he won’t talk to me. Won’t see me. Won’t take my calls. What the hell am I supposed to do?” His voice cracked with desperation.

Kelly turned toward him, softened for a moment by the emotion in David’s voice. Then she remembered the betrayal this man had perpetrated against someone who had called him friend, who had trusted him with an open heart. She remembered the damage that David Clark’s affair with Elizabeth had wrought on Harrison, the naked pain in his eyes and his doubt about everything he had believed in, even his own daughter. “That’s simply not my problem, Mr. Clark,” she said coolly.

“Dammit,” he exploded. “It’s got to be somebody’s.”

***

Harrison stood in the open door to Kelly’s room and grum
bled with irritation. If the woman would hold still for a minute or two it would make matters easier on him. He shifted his shoulders against the tension in them. He had come up here to apologize. He had been unfair this morning and felt bad about how he had treated her. Guilt was an uncommon emotion for Harrison and it didn’t sit well with him.

He hadn’t been able to help it. As Kelly had described what had happened to her, Harrison kept hearing Kendra’s voice in the back of his head. What had been her words?
Each individual incident could be explained, but when put together things didn’t add up.
Something like that, he was sure.
Little inconsistencies eventually emerged as a pattern.
There had been a heck of a lot of little inconsistencies in Kelly’s description of last night’s events and he couldn’t stop himself from noticing them.

First of all, why had
the noise Kelly had heard only woken her? Granted, the insomnia that had plagued Harrison for the past two years seemed to disappear when he slept with Kelly in his arms. There was something about the warmth of her next to him, the golden scent of her hair, the evenness of her breath that soothed him into a restfulness he hadn’t experienced in ages. It was possible he had simply been too deeply asleep to hear much of anything out in the hallway. That was one inconsistency explained.

Then what about the scrap of yellow chiffon Kelly claimed to have found lying in the doorway to the east wing? Harrison knew that Dora had her plate more than full since he had dis
missed a lot of the help from the village she had normally utilized. Even so he doubted the housekeeper would have allowed material to lie about on the floor for months on end and, if she had, why hadn’t anyone else seen it? He had to admit it was conceivable—not likely, but conceivable—that it had blown there during the night, that a breeze moving through the closed rooms had finally scuttled the scrap into sight. Another possible explanation for another inconsistency.

So what had happened to the material? That was one incon
sistency that Harrison’s logical brain couldn’t crack. Roughly the entire household had arrived at Kelly’s side at the same instant he had. He was nearly ready to swear that there had been no time for anyone to snatch a piece of material from Kelly’s hands and hide it anywhere.

F
inally, why on earth would anyone push Kelly down the stairs in the first place? There was no earthly reason for anyone to do so and Kelly’s somewhat unearthly reason ... well, that didn’t make much sense either. So what if she’d said something to someone that made them suspect her strange link with Elizabeth? What kind of motive was that? Kelly’s sudden idea that there was more to Elizabeth’s death than anyone knew was equally ridiculous. It was David Clark’s fault that Elizabeth had been out on the end of that dock in that storm, but that didn’t make him a murderer in the eyes of the law. In Harrison’s eyes? Maybe. But that wouldn’t give anyone in this house a reason to shove Kelly down that long flight of hard marble stairs.

So what was with the feeling of guilt, Harrison asked him
self. Inconsistent or not, he had to admit that Kelly had been hurt and frightened this morning and he had been less than sympathetic. He sighed as he glanced around her empty room.

Without her in it, the room seemed drabber, less colorful, and a little more chilly. Her lack of need for logical explanations was part of her vibrant hold on life. Harrison knew that as he knew, too, that the other things that Kendra had said about Kelly were true. A sweet girl and a heck of an artist. Without a doubt.

All of which led him to realize he probably knew exactly where Kelly was this minute. Her case of drawing supplies stood open and the ubiquitous sketchbook was gone. She had probably gone out to sit in the sun and draw. He turned on his heel and headed out to the gardens.

***

“Let go of my hand.” Kelly twisted against David Clark’s grip, but could not get free. Her ribs ached with each breath she took as she began to almost pant with fear that he would not let her go.

“Not until somebody explains to me what is going on around here.” Clark stood. He pressed his angry face up against hers, locking her wrist down against her side. Kelly could smell his stale breath and see the red lines that crisscrossed his eyes. “I want to know what Harrison thinks I did.”

Kelly stopped struggling for a moment to catch her breath. She squinted her eyes as she gazed deep into Clark’s crazed ones. “It’s not what he thinks. It’s what he knows. He has proof.”

“Proof? Proof of what? My God, how can I defend myself if no one will tell me what I’m charged with? I feel like I’ve stum
bled into some bizarre Kafka novel and can’t get out.”

“You don’t look much like a cockroach, but if the behavior fits....” Clark’s fingers now pinched into Kelly’s shoulders and she regretted her sarcasm. She groaned with pain as he shook her, but stood her ground.

“I’m not here to trade literary witticisms with you,” Clark hissed. “I’m here to get at the truth.”

“You’re not going to get anywhere by manhandling me,” Kelly spat back.

***

Harrison turned left at the bottom of the stairs, cutting across the rotunda to the drawing room. He’d use the French doors there to head out into the gardens and find Kelly. He doubted she’d gone too far, as beat up as she was from her fall this morning. When he came into the room, the velvet drapes were still drawn. He’d barely parted them when he caught sight of Kelly across the lawn and what he saw had him reeling back from the window like he’d been sucker-punched.

Kelly and David. Together. Standing so close their lips were nearly touching. Harrison gasped air into lungs that felt practically paralyzed.

He forced himself to part the curtains again, just enough to see out. He hadn’t imagined it.

They were there. David held Kelly close to him and she stood there gazing up into his eyes.

Harrison’s world whirled apart and then snapped back together in a rearrangement that had a clarity he hadn’t experi
enced in a long time. It all made perfect sense now.

Kelly and David. David and Kelly. All this turmoil, this rehashing of Elizabeth’s life and death, had started with Kelly’s arrival. David must have somehow gotten wind of what Harrison and Kendra were up to and must have gotten to Kelly before she ever arrived here. She was, obviously, the perfect dis
traction and probably the perfect little spy.

Harrison dropped the material as if it had suddenly gotten hot, but it was too late. The image of the two of them togeth
er had burned itself into his retinas, into his brain. The sour taste of betrayal, uncomfortably familiar after all these months, returned to the back of his throat.

It had never occurred to him to not trust Kelly. Even Kendra, who had had her doubts, had never suspected treach
ery on this scale. He wondered if they were lovers and then nearly laughed at his own naivete. Of course they were. Hadn’t that always been the way David operated? He’d laughed about it, said it hadn’t been his fault, that women had just thrown themselves at him. Had Kelly thrown herself at David? The thought sickened Harrison. He sat down hard in one of the stiff wingback chairs by the cold, empty fireplace.

***

Kelly felt Clark’s grip begin to weaken on her arms. “Look. If you don’t let me go in the next couple seconds, I’m going to scream. I’m not sure if you’ve heard me scream before, but trust me when I tell you that I’ve never smoked and I have a fairly decent set of lungs. Once I start screaming it will only be a few more seconds before people will start tumbling out of those doors just behind us. Including Harrison. So if you don’t want to get slapped with some kind of restraining order or trespassing complaint I think you ought to let me go.”

She watched as any number of emotions crossed Clark’s haggard yet still handsome face. Confusion. Anger. Fear. They all were reflected in his eyes, but eventually yielded to resigna
tion. He slackened his grip still further and Kelly shook herself free from his grip.

He put his face in his hands and something perilously close to a sob shook his shoulders. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. I just don’t know what else to do.”

Once again, compassion warred with the anger Kelly felt for this man for what he’d done to Harrison. Confused herself and more than a little afraid, she backed quickly away from him. “In that case, I’ve got a newsflash for you, buddy. You’re not welcome here. Harrison doesn’t want you here and I sure as hell don’t ever want to lay eyes on you again.”

She turned and ran back to the Manor. She banged through the front doors and into the rotunda, but raced through it so fast that she never noticed that the drawing room doors were ajar.

Chapter Fourteen

Harrison hadn’t come to Kelly’s room during the night.

He hadn’t been at dinner either. Dora had made some excuse for him that no one had really believed. Kelly, Kendra and Betsy had eaten together in uneasy silence. Kendra had tried to make conversation, about the mural, about the weath
er, about the food, but neither Kelly nor Betsy could muster up more than a few words. Eventually even Kendra fell silent.

Back in her room Kelly had stayed up long into the night, waiting for his footsteps outside her door or for his gentle knock. When she woke up alone with the sun streaming in through the windows and the curtains dancing in the breeze, she tried to convince herself that she wasn’t disappointed. She told herself over and over that the hard rock in her chest where her heart used to be would fade before breakfast. She tried to console herself with the fact that she had at least not had any strange dreams or compulsions, but lying to
oneself is tough before the morning’s first cup of coffee and the peace Kelly had found in her dreamless sleep was too thin to provide much solace.

Kelly had been alone a long time, however, almost as long as she could remember. She reminded herself ruthlessly that she was used to it. By the time she willed herself to slide out from under the comforter and put her feet on the floor, she’d decid
ed that waking up alone one more morning probably wouldn’t kill her. It only felt like it would right now.

She showered quickly and dressed in her usual uniform of faded jeans and a man’s dress shirt bought from a rack at a sec
ond-hand clothing store. She gazed at herself in the bathroom mirror as she buttoned up the fly of her jeans. What had she expected anyway? No promises had been made. No vows. No protestations of undying love. All Harrison had confessed to was the very common desires of a man who’d been alone a long time, too.

When Kelly had kissed him back in the closed and shut
tered side of the Manor, she hadn’t expected or asked for more. She knew exactly who she was and what her position was in this house and in this relationship. So why, she asked herself, why exactly was she moping around now? So what if Harrison had been more tender and more passionate than any dream lover or fantasy man she’d ever conjured? What difference did it make that when he’d moaned her name while he was tangled in her arms, her limbs, her very core, she’d felt like her heart would burst with the flood of emotions that had surged forth?

Nothing had changed. She was still a muralist, here to see a commission through to its end and he was still what he was. Her boss, at least for the moment.

Liar, she called herself. The ache in her heart told her that everything had changed. She had done the stupidest and most self-destructive thing she could possibly have done. She’d fallen in love.

She wanted no part of it. Had certainly never been looking for it. But there it was. Admitting it, at least to herself, made the whole picture come clear. Like putting the last touch of a highlight on a round globe, acknowledging what she really felt toward Harrison made her present circumstances jump off the canvas of her emotions with a reality that shocked her.

She opened the door to her room to head to the kitchen, so preoccupied in her own thoughts that she practically ran over Jenkins, who was easing down the hall with a large and very awkward cardboard package.

“Good to see you’re up, miss,” he said.

“What have you got there?” Kelly circled around him. Jenkins rested the package up against her doorframe. “Replacement glass for your cheval mirror. Came in this morning on the early ferry. Okay if I install it now?”

“Be my guest. I was on my way downstairs for breakfast. After that I’ll be in Betsy’s room all morning. Take your time.”

“Thanks, but it won’t take but a few minutes.” Jenkins slipped his cap off his head and scratched at his forehead. “Any idea how the old one got broken?”

Kelly shook her head. “Not a clue.”

“Strange thing. I’ve never seen a mirror break like that. You’d have thought that if something hit it hard enough to shatter it so, it would’ve damaged the backing, too. But the backing’s fine. Not a mark on it. It’s almost as if the crazy thing exploded from the inside out.”

Kelly felt a flicker of apprehension course through her. “Exploded?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Jenkins nodded. “Like it shattered from the inside out.” Jenkins picked the package back up and sidled into Kelly’s room, giving her a nod on the way.

Kelly rounded the corner to head to the stairs slowly, turn
ing over what Jenkins had said in her mind. How could a mirror explode from the inside? Of course, she still hadn’t figured out how a letter could form in one either.

She still hadn’t resolved that little mystery when she returned to her room later that night to gaze into the newly installed mirror. She hadn’t had much of a chance to really pon
der it anyway. Kelly was near the end of the mural and she found herself working more furiously than she ever had before. She always enjoyed this stage of a project. Every brushstroke was critical. Each one added something special to the image— a certain roundness to a wheel, a sparkle in an eye, a glinting highlight on a lock of hair. Betsy had brought Kelly her lunch on a tray and then her dinner, too, even though Dora had stood in the doorway to the room and clucked with disapproval. Kelly couldn’t help it, she hadn’t wanted to set her brush down even to go the bathroom—which it seemed like she had to do every other minute.

It was just as well, Kelly thought, plopping herself down on her bed. According to Betsy, Harrison had not come to dinner tonight either. Kelly wasn’t sure she could have faced another evening making small talk with Kendra while they both watched the door to see if he would come through it.

Kelly rubbed her eyes hard enough to make stars explode behind her closed lids. Her eyes were dry and hot from staring at the mural, and the day of reaching and straining over the big wall had left a knot of tension between her shoulders that wouldn’t release. She ran a tub full of too-hot water and slipped gingerly into it a few inches at a time. As she soaked, the kinks in her muscles began to relax, but unfortunately the walls in her mind began to slip as well.

She had expected it, she reminded herself. She had always known that whatever was going on between Harrison and her
self didn’t have a future. Kelly only wished she’d known it would end this abruptly. She slid farther down into the water, welcoming the painful sting of the heat on her shoulders and neck. The tears that finally began to drip from her half-closed eyes were bitter and salty as they leaked into the steaming water and vanished. She had fought them back all day and had no more energy left for the battle. It seemed appropriate to have them disappear completely as they fell. When all was said and done, they wouldn’t matter to anyone but her. No tears she could shed would change anything that had happened or was about to happen. For whatever reason, Harrison had tired of her or of their dalliance and was gone.

Kelly slid still further into the water, letting it lap at her chin. Slowly, the tears stopped and she washed them from her face before stepping from the tub. She felt so exhausted she was sure that she’d only have to fall into the bed and go instantly to sleep.

Two hours later, however, Kelly was still staring at the glowing numbers on her bedside clock. Oh, well, wrong again. It wasn’t that she wasn’t tired, but every creak in the hallway outside her door had her sitting bolt upright in her bed hoping Harrison was about to walk through her door, wishing that the excuses he’d made to Dora and Betsy about business keeping him tied up all day were true, wanting to be wrong about why he was staying away from her.

After another hour of pillow punching, blanket twisting and general tossing and turning, Kelly gave up and got out of bed. She splashed some water on her face and was brushing out her hair when a noise in the hallway froze her in her spot. This noise was different than the groans of the old house as it settled in the cool night air that had kept her jumpy before. This noise was definitely a footstep.

Kelly watched her door, willing it to open, but the footsteps slowly passed by. She rushed over, hand on the knob starting to twist, before caution slowed her down. The last time she’d followed a strange noise out into the hallway in the middle of the night she’d ended up with an awful lot of bruises to show for it. Her hand touched the bruises that still marred the side of her face. Her flying stair descent wasn’t exactly an act she wanted to repeat.

On the other hand, this wasn’t the same strange scratch and thump she’d heard in the hallway before. These were definite footsteps. Sure. Steady. Even. Harrison. They had to be. She’d listened for them outside her door enough nights to recognize his step, hadn’t she? Again, Kelly hesitated before twisting the knob and opening the door. If he didn’t want to see her any
more, what good would it do to chase him around this big old house in the middle of the night? No, that only led to more heartache.

Kelly sighed as she backed away from the door. She wasn’t entirely sure that her heart could actually ache any more than it did right now. She curled up on the bed, knees pulled up to her chin. She hugged herself tightly and clenched her eyes closed against another onslaught of tears. Finally she went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. Slowly, the near
ly physical wave of heart sickness passed. She returned to her bed and relaxed a little. Unfurling, she set her hands down behind her on the pillow.

Immediately she snatched them back up. Her hand had touched something. Something thick and smooth and nearly flesh-like. After her heart stopped pounding she realized what it was.

Three more gardenia petals lying on her pillow.

Christ, Kelly thought, she’d only been out of the room for a moment or two when she’d washed her face. How could they have gotten there?

Then she remembered the footsteps.

Harrison? Kelly had been sure they’d been his footsteps, but why on earth would he have left them?

She drew a deep breath. There was only one way to find out.

She grabbed a pair of leggings from a chair and pulled them on and marched out the door to her room.

Her hand didn’t hesitate once on the knob.

Out in the hallway, Kelly charged out toward the rotunda in the direction she was sure the footsteps had gone. Once there, she gazed at the yawning maw of the arched doorway to the closed east wing of the house. Shadows fluttered on top of shadows. The hair stood on the back of Kelly’s neck. Part of her wanted desperately to run back to her room, lock the door and pretend none of this had ever happened, but she knew she couldn’t. If Harrison had left those petals on her pillow as some sort of message to her, she had to know what it was. She owed her heart that much.

Steeling herself against her fear and steering well clear of the top of the stairs, she entered the east wing.

Even with moonlight flooding in the tall windows, Kelly’s way through the maze of furniture was far from clear. She tripped over a rolled rug that was nothing more than a shadow in the darkness even after she knew where it was, stubbed her toe on a dresser with protruding legs and bruised her leg painfully on the corner of an end table. Still she went on, doggedly sure for no reason that she could quite name, that she would find Harrison here.

And when she did, she wished she hadn’t.

Harrison stood by Betsy’s makeshift tent. Uncovered before him was the life-size portrait of Elizabeth that had hung in the study. His face was a mask of agony that nearly took Kelly’s breath away with its naked pain.

He stared at Elizabeth’s image with such intensity as if he was willing her to speak and when she didn’t, he spoke to her.

In a cracked voice, ragged with anguish, he said, “How could you leave me like this?”

The three gardenia petals crushed in Kelly’s fist fell to the floor as she fled.

***

Harrison looked into the sweet, smiling painted face of his dead wife. What was the line from that book? Something like beauty, brains and breeding, but unlike that hapless hero, Harrison had thought he had so much more. Why hadn’t he known? What kind of fool was he?

And what about Kelly? Shouldn’t he have been able to tell that her interest in him was feigned? That her passion was nothing more than an act designed to insinuate herself closer to him, to distract him, perhaps to spy on him? Good god, he really was a fool, wasn’t he?

He wondered, staring at Elizabeth, what it was about him that actually made him unlovable. Without the trappings of money and power, would he have been able to find a woman to love him? Or was there actually something down at his core that would have made that impossible no matter what station in life he had been born into?

Despair twisted at his gut. He remembered the time that he had been happy. When he thought he could be loved and still had it in his own heart to love. He had thought, foolishly he now knew, that he had a shot of returning to that with Kelly. The cruelty of her deception was nothing when compared with Elizabeth’s, but it still cut him to the quick. Without meaning to, without wanting to, he spoke aloud to the smiling painted face in front of him.

***

Kelly raced back to her room, closing the door behind her and leaning against it as if the hounds of hell were chasing her down the halls. But the walls closed in on her now, making her feel cramped and claustrophobic instead of safe and cozy. She left for the warm sanctuary of Dora Jenkins’ kitchen and a hot cup of tea.