The Haunted Season (17 page)

The site Noah was describing—near the prehistoric stone menhirs—had been rumored for centuries to be haunted, as haunted as the lake at Totleigh Hall. It was a legend that had gained traction since a villager, most sadly and unnecessary, had died up there not long ago.

“Show me,” said Max.

Noah opened the old-fashioned walk-in safe and led Max inside. He put a cardboard box on top of a table and with a ta-da gesture stepped away to let Max have a look.

Max was no expert in antiquities, but at a glance it seemed to him a treasure trove indeed.

“I've not attempted to clean the dirt and mud off of it. I'm leaving that for the experts. I just left it all in the same box Tom and Tildy Ann dragged in here.”

“Any theories on what it is and how it got there?”

“It has to be loot from the time of the Reformation. Things the monks at the abbey tried to save from destruction. Nice to see they got away with it. If they'd been caught…” Noah made a slicing gesture against his throat. There seems to be a lot of that going around, thought Max. “Oh! Sorry,” Noah said. “That was in poor taste, given what's going on up at Totleigh Hall. It's just been on my mind, you know.”

Max, still trying to make out the contours of the gleaming treasure, waved away the apology. Even given the centuries of grime, he could see these were beautifully crafted artifacts, valuable not just for their gold but as works of art. Each seemed also to be embedded with precious stones and jewels. The statue of Mary was carved out of stone and was a little over a foot high. She held an image of a tiny Christ Child in her arms and around her neck was a cross on a gold chain that glimmered as it caught the light of the overhead lamp in the vault. Are those diamonds? Max wondered. If so, the value of the trove was probably incalculable.

“That's garnet there,” Noah said, pointing. “And around the base of the chalice, those are pearls. The condition of everything is remarkable, considering.”

Did this have anything to do with that reappearing face in the church? It seemed impossible it did not. It was almost as if the … the
holiness,
the sacredness of the place was emerging from the ground, making itself felt. The sanctity that seemed to encompass the whole of Nether Monkslip.

Max recalled the map he had discovered at Monkbury Abbey. Carved in stone in bas-relief, it hung suspended by two golden chains from the base of a painting—a depiction of what the nuns called The Face. Nether Monkslip, most improbably, had appeared on this map, indicated by a star. Max had concluded it was a sort of treasure map, his own village, many miles from Monkbury Abbey, the key to some hidden puzzle—a puzzle he was only now beginning to fathom.

His heart sank. Once word of this newest find got out, the size of the masses already crowding St. Edwold's Church seeking a miracle cure would only grow by leaps and bounds. Good news, in a way, to reignite the hopes of the faithful. But wouldn't it also bring the treasure hunters? The religious maniacs? The just-plain crazies?

“There seems,” said Noah, with admirable understatement, “to be a lot going on in our little village.” He said it in such a disapproving tone, Max felt compelled to say, “Well, don't look at me.” But the truth was, all this—well, this
fuss
—had started with his, Max's, arrival in the village.

Fuss, meaning murder.

And miracles, rumors of.

“What,” Max asked him, “do you make of the situation at Totleigh Hall?”

“What do I make of it? I've no theories, if that's what you mean.”

Max imagined it wouldn't do to say he was full up with theories and that what he was really after was gossip.

Noah seemed to read his mind. “I suppose you and the police already know,” he continued, “so I'll not be spreading tales, but the present Lady Baaden-Boomethistle—well, she is rumored to be rather free with her favors.”

“What exactly are you saying, Noah?”

Noah tore his eyes away from the box of treasures to look up at him. “There has been talk for some time she's been having an affair with one of the grooms over there. Or maybe it's the estate manager. All very Lady Chatterley, you know. Well, who would be surprised if she were? Lord Baaden-Boomethistle is an old tyrant, and she's—well, you've seen her.”

“Hmm.”

“And of course Peregrine. Well. He may have been found under a cabbage leaf, for all I know, but it would appear he was not born into that family. At least, that's another rumor that's gone round. But until the lord was murdered, well, everyone felt it was best kept under wraps. A local matter, a family matter, you do see. And really none of our business. Now … well, now it's agreed that it's gone beyond being a family matter.”

Clearly they'd all been discussing it, at length. Max should have realized—sometimes he felt all he had to do to solve a crime was hang about Elka's tea shop. “How and when did this particular rumor get started?” Max knew the village grapevine too well. It was correct half the time. But one never knew which half.

“The gap in time became evident right away,” said Noah. “I mean, the timing for the pregnancy of the first Lady B-B did not add up. We could all count to nine months as well as the next person. I remember it well. A six-month old, at least, was brought home and passed off as newborn. Biggest sumo wrestler of a newborn you ever saw. Villagers assumed it was to cover up an out-of-wedlock conception, an affair, something of the sort.”

“And Lord Baaden-Boomethistle, ever the gallant, conspired in this deception to protect his wife, and to adopt an unknown man's child as his own?”

“I know, I know. It doesn't sound much like something he'd do, does it?”

“No, it does not.” And now he was dead. He and his first wife both. There was possibly no one alive who knew the whole truth.

Except maybe Peregrine, the giant newborn, who had been too small to remember.

*   *   *

At the Writers' Square later that evening, the aspiring authors agreed not to talk about the murder. “
We're here to work!
” they reminded one another repeatedly.

Of course they spent the next two hours talking of nothing but, arriving at no conclusions except that the butler almost certainly did not do it, and that Suzanna might try her hand at an erotic crime novel based on the case.

“Too much of a cliché,” said Frank. “The butler, I mean.”

For once, the rest agreed with him. The good money was on Lady B-B, but the rumor mill had already discovered she had an alibi.

“She had to have been with that hunky estate manager,” insisted Suzanna.

“Nope. Too easy for them to alibi each other. Too suspicious, I mean,” Frank replied sagely.

How annoying, thought Suzanna: He was almost certainly right.

“She was with a friend—an entire family in Monkslip-super-Mare. No way she could have done it, and no way they'd all lie for her.”

No one asked where Frank got his information, but undoubtedly it was from his wife, who plied the local bobby by stocking his favorite French wines in her shop.

So undoubtedly Frank was right.

Suzanna crossed her legs and studied one pointed toe of her new Louboutins.

Most
annoying.

 

Chapter 13

DESTINY REMEMBERS

“I just heard the news.”

Destiny, in full curate regalia, bustled into the vicarage study, her cassock ballooning behind her. Max had noticed it was the women who liked wearing cassocks, more so than the men. Perhaps because their right to wear them had been so hard-won.

His mind still grappling with the implications of Noah's newfound treasure horde, Max wondered what particularly struck Destiny as newsy at the moment.

“I've been in Monkslip-super-Mare, checking supplies for Bowls for Souls,” she said. “I have family there, so I stayed over—as I told you I was going to.” Max nodded. “And I come back to this … this incredible story.” The “Why didn't you tell me?” was implied but not spoken.

The village grapevine had exploded with the news while Destiny had been away, but of course she was not yet plugged into Miss Pitchford's network. That would come in time; anyone at the center of village life, like a curate, would be central to the Pitchford mission of disinformation and misdirection, but for now Destiny was still the newcomer, still being monitored and assessed. She remained, in other words, a topic of conversation, not its conduit.

“Totleigh Hall, you mean?” Max asked.

“Of course Totleigh Hall,” she said with measured emphasis. “How often do you have a murder around here? What else could I be talking about?”

“Well, actually…” Max hesitated. He wanted his new curate to be happy here, not frightened out of her wits. “It doesn't happen all that often.”

“It doesn't—” Good Lord.
It doesn't
happen all
that often
? “Max, listen: I have something to tell you. Something that might be relevant to the death of Lord Baaden-Boomethistle.”

“Pull up a chair by the fire. Tea?”

*   *   *

“The thing is, I know at least one of the players in this drama. It's just that I don't know who it is I know.”

They were settled over a nice cuppa, the fire burning low, just warm enough to chase away the October chill. Destiny's gaze drifted to the rowing oar Max had hung atop the seascape over the fireplace. He had rowed as an undergraduate at Oxford, but St. Barney's, where he'd done his graduate study, did not have a rowing team—at least not officially. The sort of manic roughhousing in rented or borrowed skulls didn't count—those thrilling weekend displays of machismo and show-offmanship.

How I miss it all, thought Destiny. The last-minute revisions; the moments of sheer terror as the clock struck midnight, wondering how I'd ever pass my exams; the bitter cold of my little room at the top of the college, a cold that seeped into the bone with a promise to stay forever. She had been certain she'd learn firsthand the meaning of chilblains if she didn't graduate soon.

How little I appreciated it while I was there. It was
grand.

Most of all, she missed the hours spent in the Bodleian, turning the pages of some old leather-bound book and reveling in the rustling sound made by its stiff, thick pages, imagining the hands that had turned the same pages centuries before. Time would never stretch before and behind her as endlessly as it had then.

She and Max had been theology students together at St. Barnabas House—she an undergraduate, if a “mature” one, and Max a graduate student. She had gone on to graduate study herself, and to ordination as a priest in the Anglican Communion.

The Major persisted in calling Destiny “a Vicarette,” a fact of which Destiny was aware despite Max's desperate attempts to keep it from her. She was resigned to that sort of thing, suspecting that any attempts to correct the old soldier or drag him into the twenty-first century were doomed to failure.

It was at Oxford over a pint (for him) and a club soda (for her) at the White Horse pub, next to Blackwell's, that Max had asked her how she had come by such a name.

“My parents were hippies, and highly impractical hippies at that, pure-minded and well-meaning. Wonderful people, if a bit vague in the parenting department. I don't think they realized that when I grew up, people would think I was a porn star.”

She looked across at Max now, this preposterously handsome priest, the man she had known way back when. Unlike herself, Max had had a perpetual star beside his name, in everyone's book. She had never kidded herself that he would give her a second glance, not in a romantic way, although hundreds more in his orbit had not seemed to be as practical. Prince Harry had nothing on Max in the chick-magnet department. He had, however, adopted her as a trusted confidante, and this in itself had astonished her. It amazed her even more to come to realize Max was prone to most of the same self-doubts as any mortal. Who was he, Max would wonder aloud over those drinks in the White Horse, to dare to think God had called him? Had some special plan for him? Was he quite mad to think it?

Now here he was years later, sitting in his own cozy vicarage, married to the marvelous Awena, a woman who stayed on her own spiritual path while remaining completely in harmony with her husband's beliefs. Max, the proud father of Owen, that smashing baby born with his mother's eerie, preternatural gaze and a full head of shaggy dark hair like his father's. He is a child destined for great things, thought Destiny, who seemed to share with Awena an affinity for being able to glimpse a sacred world beyond the veil, and for being perpetually alert to signs and portents. It was
there,
that other side: she knew it, she could feel it, and on days when she was feeling replete and happy and at one with the world, she could almost see the Presence that helped guide and protect her.

“Why don't you start at the beginning,” Max suggested, dragging her attention back to this world, which held, truth be told, little interest for such as Destiny. Awena was completely practical and down-to-earth by comparison, a rare combination of bohemian laissez-faire and transcendent awareness of the metaphysical world.

“That's a good idea,” she said, “except that there are at least two beginnings. I'll start with where I was when I overheard a conversation that, if nothing else, proves this murder was brewing for a long time. At least since the spring.”

Max leaned forward, nodding encouragingly. He took a sip of tea to mask his impatience. Destiny was a solid-gold person, and whatever she had to say might be important. It often took her a while to get to the point—her sermons were exhibit A—but get there she did.

“I went to the Women's Institute meeting on my return, you see,” she told him. “In the Village Hall—their usual monthly meeting. Although I was late getting there, Suzanna had especially asked me to attend. She said it would be a good chance for the other women to get to know me better, since undoubtedly some of their projects for charity would overlap with church missions. When I got there, though, what they were really doing was talking among themselves about the murder—of course. Suzanna was rather stridently trying to keep it together. I take it that is part of Suzanna's management style.”