The Haunted Season (16 page)

A further major indicator was that Elka Garth had gotten the bean in her slice of cake during the Twelfth Night party at the Village Hall, and Adam Birch had gotten the pea. These were major portents to those in the know. The pair had thus been crowned queen and king for the evening, and glasses of wassail had been lifted high, and speculation that they might one day become an item ran rife. It was a development of which the villagers much approved.

A further bonus to this budding relationship seemed to be that it helped Elka get her son, Clayton, sorted. Strangely enough, from the moment Elka had stopped focusing on Clayton, wringing her hands over his many moral lapses, he had begun taking stock of himself. He weaned himself off the minor drugs that had almost certainly been a part of his leisure activities, and started taking a course in Monkslip-super-Mare on holistic medicine. He had become a habitué of Awena's Goddessspell shop, and a regular at Tara Raine's yoga classes. It was, Elka had been heard to say, like getting her son back: like seeing someone washed clean of the mud that had obscured his face from her for years.

The pairing of Elka and Adam, quickly christened Elkadam, seem preordained somehow, particularly since they had played Cupid with Max and Awena (Maxena) in their courtship days. Maybe the dart “backfired” a bit, thought Suzanna now, and got aimed at them, as well. What do they call it—blowback? Yes. Served them right, and it could not happen to a nicer couple.

If only her lover, Umberto, could be caught in the same tender trap …

She got them all through the meeting somehow, managing to convince a satisfyingly large number of women to persuade their husbands to help set up the booths. “Remember,” she said, “Stonehenge was built one megalith at a time. We can do this.” At which exhortation, Chanel nodded approvingly, wondering if she could adapt it for a chapter of her book.

Despite the murder up at the mansion, the duck race for charity must go on, she reminded her listeners. Suzanna corralled a few “volunteers” and began to describe how each mechanical duck must be labeled with a number tagged to the name of its sponsor. Individual sponsors paid ten pounds sterling to participate; “corporate” sponsors—shop owners—paid fifty. Sponsorships were down this year, and Suzanna began to say that heads would roll for this, and caught herself just in time.

The minds of her audience began to wander; they were looking forward to the refreshments. But when she mentioned Bill Travis as the man she had put in charge of the race, there came a small gasp from somewhere among the women—an audible intake of breath, possibly from more than one source. Suzanna, who had had a good look at Travis, could understand why. A hunk of burning love if ever there was one. But she scanned the faces before her and could not see whose pulse it was that had quickened at the very mention of his name. Surely not plain little Nancy Braddock, who wouldn't say boo to a ghost and was miles out of Travis's league anyway, in Suzanna's assessment. Confidently smoothing her pencil skirt over Spanxified hips, she thought she herself was very much in the running, if his smile and body language as she had explained to him the rules of the duck race were any indication.

Eventually, she brought the meeting to a close. There was the usual crush of people toward the table at the back of the room—such a crush, Suzanna barely noticed that Destiny, the new curate at St. Edwold's, had made her appearance at last, pushed now into the center of the throng of arms reaching for the peanut butter biscuits. Better, thought Suzanna, late than never. She strode over to welcome Destiny—really, what sort of name was that?—and accept any apologies due. It was as well to stay on the good side of the clergy. You never knew when you might need a blessing.

 

Chapter 12

NOAH'S ARK

Max called Awena before leaving Staincross Minster for home. He relayed what Elspeth Muir had said about Peregrine's being adopted.

“Ah,” she had said. “That explains some of the rumors.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, he doesn't really look like any of them. Father nor mother. The rather mean village tittle-tattle should not be repeated, but it does get around.”

He should have known, Awena was not one to pass along unsubstantiated gossip.

“What do you know of the family? You've been here much longer than I have.”

“Not much, really. Only hearsay. Old tales about how the son was supposed to have been in hospital but emerged as hale and hearty as you please, and far too big for the age they claimed he was. Nothing that amounted to fact, you see. Just silly conjecture. You know how people can be. Especially since the family was seldom around and had not made itself popular, there was a lot of room for speculation.”

Max thought, Awena would have been a very young woman, newly arrived in the village and busy establishing her shop, when the young lord came on the scene. So what she knew would be hearsay not only at secondhand but from a long time ago.

He thought, Who else in the village would know the family at all well? And the name that came to mind was Noah Caraway, purveyor of fine antiques.

*   *   *

A marble gray sky held the promise of rain as Max parked the Land Rover in Vicarage Road. Noah waved to him from his shop, almost as if he'd been waiting for Max to arrive. Max ambled over to the Old Vicarage, now home to Noah's Ark Antiques.

As Max came into the shop, Noah was busy polishing antique silver, using, as he explained, a mixture of baking soda and vinegar.

“No chemicals. It ruins silver.”

“Good to know. The only silver I'm ever likely to own is my mother's tea set, which I hope very much she will give away to someone else before the time comes.”

“I hear you,” said Noah. “It's work, but worth it. Sorry about the duck race this year, by the way. His round face creased in an expression of concern, like a worried man in the moon. “I simply got the dates mixed up, and when I realized, it was too late to scratch my plans. And now … it's all a bit awkward, isn't it?”

Yes, with Lord Baaden-Boomethistle's death, it was difficult to say what might happen. Perhaps the whole thing still would have to be canceled, despite the best efforts of Suzanna and the WI. What a shame, thought Max. On so many levels, what a shame.

Max was never sure if he were interrupting Noah in the middle of something important, or if he were giving him something to do. Noah sat surrounded by the luxurious and opulent trappings of his trade, the very picture of a potentate with reams of time at his disposal. But someone had to dust and polish, and someone had to catalog, and someone had at least to pretend to be running the shop. Even though Noah, by his own admission, found it difficult to part with any of his treasures, which were, in theory at least, on sale. He didn't have to sell so much as a teaspoon, of course; he was quite wealthy as it was. The truth was, Noah collected beautiful things because he loved beautiful things and there was no more room in his house to hold them all.

Max looked around the shop, with its furniture, lamps, and sets of glassware and dinnerware, each item lovingly curated and displayed. His eyes alighted on a pile of thin paper, brown and curling at the edges with age. It looked to be an old typescript done on an early machine.

“What's this?”

“I'm transcribing an old diary with a view to publishing it,” Noah told him. “I found it in a desk I bought from the estate of the widow Barnes. It's my contribution to the Writers' Square, which I recently joined. Frank said he'd help me get it published.”

Ah. Frank Cuthbert—Nether Monkslip's single claim to literary fame. Well, notoriety, more like. For what Frank really wrote were potboilers disguised as history. According to Awena, who was a member of the Square, which met regularly at the the Onlie Begetter, Frank was working on a sequel to his book, a development the members of the group viewed with a sort of resigned horror. Especially given the revelations about the village's ties to a miraculous object in a nearby nunnery, Max joined them in feeling trepidation as to what the Great Author was up to now.

For, to the astonishment of all, Frank's
Wherefore Nether Monkslip
had made the best-seller lists. What was basically a glorified pamphlet had been seized on by Arthurian legend enthusiasts, crackpot historians, and assorted fans of village life. There was talk now of interest from the BBC—talk started by Frank, to be sure. All that was known for certain was that Frank was frequently interrupted during meetings of the group by calls from his publicist.

Adam Birch, the bookshop's owner, had been spurred by Frank's success to finish his own novel, and was often to be seen working by lamplight at the window of his shop, scribbling at a furious pace.

Frank had taken to wearing a scarf year-round as part of his authorly persona, and a velour tracksuit of dark green—his “good luck” writing outfit, like something worn by an off-duty Robin Hood. He was often seen typing away at the Coffee Pot, taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi, or at the Horseshoe, reviewing fresh pages over a pint, a red pencil at hand, his steady progress only occasionally slowed by a tiny cloud of self-doubt.

As Suzanna Winship said, it seemed to be asking a lot of them to listen to a goddamn sequel, particularly when Frank's first book was still fresh in everyone's mind. Suzanna had high hopes for the time-travel romance she was now writing, although the others had encouraged her to try her hand at erotica, which seemed to be selling well lately. (“Why should I write it? I've lived it” was her reply.) But she would distract the group with real-life tales of the glow-in-the-dark underwear she wore, to some avail, for Umberto, an unrepentant workaholic. (There was a lovely new chocolatier in the village who was giving Suzanna cause for concern. The woman and Umberto had so much in common, like food. Suzanna, uncharacteristically, felt at a disadvantage.)

Overriding protests, Frank would regale them with as many as three or four chapters at a time of his WIP. (WIP, he explained condescendingly, stood for work in progress.) In addition to the scarf, he had taken to carrying a pipe about with him, and this he would wave around, punching the air with the stem for emphasis as he read. Suzanna privately hoped he would set the scarf on fire, but somehow it never happened. What with the beard and the scarf and the rose-tinted glasses, it was as if he were channeling Hemingway but had gotten a few of the details wrong, like the velour. He'd just begun offering writing workshops, driving all about the countryside in his Aston Martin to sprinkle literary fairy dust on aspiring authors.

His wife, who ran La Maison Bleue, was still fuming about the author biography that was appearing on his dust jacket copy: “Frank Cuthbert lives with his wife Lucie, a bichon frise, and two cats in Nether Monkslip.” Lucie had quickly grown tired of the ribbing about being a dog. And she did not believe Frank's protestations that he had not been consulted about the jacket copy, although Max believed him. No one would dream of consulting a pedant like Frank on a point of comma placement or grammar.

“It's quite interesting,” said Noah, indicating his typescript find. “And I enjoy transcribing. I'm not really a writer, you know. Not like Awena. Now, I believe she's really onto something with her recipes and folk remedies. They're all doing something quite original. Even the Major.”

“Yes, I know. Awena fills me in.” Major Batton-Smythe, who was writing a military history, would arrive at the meetings of the Writers' Square with an enormous sheaf of pages, all cross-indexed and color-coded, the important pages (most of them, apparently) indicated by colorful tabs bought from the office-supply store in Monkslip-super-Mare. How many usable pages of manuscript his fastidious methods produced was debatable, but no one could deny the sheer volume of pages alone was impressive.

“Have you heard the latest rumors, Father Max?” Noah asked him now.

“Erm,” said Max, wondering which of several dozen rumors swirling around the village at any given time Noah might have in mind.

“You haven't heard, then! A statue of the Virgin Mary has been found buried up on Hawk Crest, in Nunswood. Just past the menhirs. It's a beautiful piece of stonework, wrapped in an embroidered cloth—probably an altar cloth. The cloth is falling to dust now, of course. The statue was part of a treasure trove: a golden chalice, a paten, an altar cross, and so on. They brought it here for safekeeping—because I have a safe big enough to secure it for the time being and they understood what they were looking at was rare and valuable. Big discussions are afoot now as to who it belongs to—or should that be whom? Anyway, there must be a finder's fee that the village will be entitled to, don't you think?”

“That rather depends on who found it, don't you think?”

“It was Tom. Little Tom Hooser.”

“He was up there by himself, I suppose. He's too young for that climb—it's dangerous.”

“I think so, too. Anyway, he went to fetch his sister when he saw what he'd got. The pair of them kept the find from their mother, which is just as well. She's useless in any situation requiring, well, intelligent thought or action. You know how it is with those children.”

Yes, and it absolutely figures, thought Max, that Tom would be the one to find such a treasure. The young boy roamed around unsupervised half the time. If it weren't for his slightly older, very bossy sister, Tildy Ann, he'd have had no upbringing at all. Max let them both hang about the vicarage after school, doing homework while their mother pretended to housekeep.

It figured on a different level, too. It was Tom who had first noticed the mysterious face that kept appearing on the St. Edwold's Church wall—the face that still resisted all attempts to obliterate it. Max wondered if vinegar and baking soda would work, the way it did on silver tarnish. He, the sexton, and the church handyman had tried everything else.