The Haunted Season (18 page)

“Tyranny shot through with bribery and sarcasm,” said Max. “Yes.”

“Well, as I say, I was late anyway. Traffic leaving Monkslip-super-Mare was a snarl. So the meeting was just breaking up into a scrimmage for the refreshments table. I overheard a woman talking and I recognized the voice, you see. That's what did it—stopped me in my tracks, it did. She sort of brushed past me, part of a knot of women heading for the back of the room. I had stepped aside to let them pass.

“I heard this woman talking, and I was sort of transported back to another time when I heard a disembodied voice talking—the same voice.
The same voice,
Max. And at first I could not remember who, what, why—it was just this nagging feeling. Like when you try to remember a song or lyric, you know?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“So. I heard the voice just as the meeting was breaking up and I could not figure out in the surge of bodies who it was who had been speaking. I'm not tall enough to see over a crowd is the problem. They were all talking a mile to the minute. Someone said the butler at the hall had shifty eyes, and someone else said she'd trust her life to that butler, and shame on anyone who suspected him. Anyway, if this one woman in the crowd had not said ‘suspected' in a particular way—‘I always sus
pec
ted,' she said—I might not have picked up on it. I'm very good with voices and accents, you know—part of my stage training from when I was an undergraduate. It was a low voice, a Lauren Bacall voice.”

“But you couldn't see who it was.”

She shook her head. “A
low
voice,” she repeated. “It might almost have been one of the men come to pick up his wife from the meeting. They'd all started to pour in by then, grabbing a share of the refreshments while they were at it.”

“Okay. And this is important
why
?”

“Hold on. I'm getting to that.”

And she related to him the conversation she had overheard in the steam room that day just before she took up her duties at St. Edwold's. Word for word, as much as she could remember.

“I'd never have paid much attention, but they said ‘Nether Monkslip,' or one of them did, and of course I came wide-awake.”

So she'd been drowsy, nodding off in the heat of the room. Still, there was no reason to discount what she thought she'd heard.

“They talked about
Strangers on a Train
?”

“That's right. But it was brought into the conversation more as if to say, ‘Isn't it a shame we can't do a switch?' Rather than to say, ‘Let's do a switch, what do you say.' If you follow.”

Max asked her to repeat the conversation again, word for word, as much as she could remember.

“I can't be sure of a lot of it,” Destiny said. “For example, when one of them said, ‘They all do, once the courtship is over,' the other one said, ‘Not yet. I don't believe that.' Which doesn't really make sense.”

“Might it have been ‘And yet, I don't believe that'?”

She shook her head. “Maybe … Sorry, Max, I just can't be sure.”

“And whom was this phantom woman talking to?”

“That's the part I don't know, either! But given what's happened, what are the chances it wasn't Lady Baaden-Boomethistle?”

“Was Lady B-B at the meeting?”

“Almost certainly not. I asked Suzanna afterward, although it seemed unlikely to me she'd be there, given she's recently been widowed.”

“The names of those present would be in the meeting minutes.”

“Yes.” She nodded. “Or at least the members who sent regrets, so those who were present could be extrapolated from that.”

“How many were there?”

“There must have been thirty-five or forty women. When the men started to arrive—say fifty people.”

She paused, thinking. The logs had burned so long, they'd acquired the look of snakeskin and would soon crumble into the hearth. Max, following her gaze, stood and replenished the wood.

“But it couldn't have been a man,” she told him. “A man trying to get anywhere near that sauna would have been shot on sight. If you'd ever seen the Ladies' University Club, you'd know I'm right.”

How maddening it was, not to be sure which of the two women she'd overheard was which. They'd have been easier to identify with their clothes on, somehow, clothes being very distinguishing. But the combination of the steam and the ubiquitous white towels on their heads and wrapped around their middles had rendered them anonymous.

She recalled the looks of shock or surprise from the other women when she'd put on her collar in the changing room. Yes, clothes were very distinguishing indeed.

“And she didn't recognize you from the steam room? The woman at the WI meeting?”

Destiny shook her head slowly.

“Are you sure? This could be important.” He didn't want to say, “your life could be at risk,” but he was thinking it.

“If I couldn't see her, I doubt she could have seen me in that crowded Village Hall—remember, I was swamped by a sea of people all taller than I am. I didn't think she saw me in the steam room, either. I was sitting on a lower shelf, beneath them, my back to the wall, with only my legs and feet sticking out.”

Max thought for a moment. “Is it possible they knew you were there? That they were hoping you'd overhear?” It seemed a long shot, unless for some perverse reason the women had wanted to play games and send her on a wild-goose chase. But perhaps what was simply idle talk had later gelled into reality—into a real murder plot. In part because they'd assumed they were anonymous, voices rising as if out of the steam—that even if overheard, no one could ever trace who they were.

“That is was staged somehow?” Destiny asked. “Well … It's just possible, I suppose. But they are awfully good actresses, if so. And when they realized I could overhear, they shushed up very quickly.”

“They
could
be good actresses. That's what a good actress would do.”

“Oh, really? Well, wait until you hear this.” She settled her empty teacup on the table in front of her and leaned in conspiratorially.

“There's more?”

“There's more,” Destiny said.

And she told him of her near-miss accident, how she was nearly run over when she stepped off the curb near St. James's Square. How it had happened so fast, she didn't see the make of car and couldn't even be sure of its color.

So maybe she had not been as invisible in the steam room as she'd thought.

Maybe someone had followed her from the club. They'd have had to lie in wait to seize their chance—not easy to do on crowded London streets, small wonder they'd missed.

They must have been very worried about what she might have overheard.

Aloud she said, “But what bothers me about that is this: how could they know I had any connection to Nether Monkslip?”

Max was thinking a quick peek in the guest registry at the club might have clued them in.

“When you signed into the club, what forwarding address did you use for mail or things left behind?”

“Oh, I see what you mean. Nether Monkslip.”

“It's possible they saw that. Or that they overheard a conversation of yours while you were in the club library or at dinner.”

She thought back.

“I suppose.”

But, thought Max, it didn't matter where she was from. If they realized someone in the steam room had overheard a burgeoning murder plot, they would have recognized that person was a threat. That person would have to be eliminated, wherever she was from.

And if one of the women had followed Destiny out … The wonder was that there had been no attempt on her life in all these months. Perhaps the fact she'd never told anyone what she'd overheard had assured her safety. Until now.

“It was a dark color is all I can tell you,” she was saying. “I was flat on my face. Not so long ago, there would have been a different explanation for that. But I was stone-cold sober.”

Max nodded his understanding. Destiny was an alcoholic, a fact she had shared with Max when the whole issue of being his curate had come up. Although she had been sober for years, it was still a crucial fact of her life.

“I've come to believe the reasons I drank aren't important,” she had told him. “Which is a good thing, because I don't know what the reasons are or were. It was—it is—the centerpiece of my life. If you take me on, you have a right to know. I can only promise you that I wrestle with this demon every day and so far, I'm winning.”

“How are you so sure?” Max had asked her. “
Alcoholic
: That's a difficult word to apply. A harsh word to apply to yourself.” An AA group met weekly in the Village Hall, but it was full of people from Monkslip-super-Mare. They wanted to be truly anonymous and so were willing to make the drive to help ensure it.

She had laughed. “Oh, there were little clues. For one thing, I had bottles hidden all over the house, and I lived alone. We need a new word for crazy. After hours of therapy, it was decided I was trying to hide the problem
even from myself,
a behavior Freudian in its obviousness. Or obvious in its Freudianness. Whatever. Everything about it was interfering with my life. I couldn't think beyond when I could have my next drink. It was measured sorrow—sorrow measured out in the number of empty bottles put out in the rubbish bin each week. A good week was only one bottle of my favorite whiskey. A bad week—well.

“So one day I joined a group, and I found I was far from alone. And I wasn't crazy. And I wasn't lost, not anymore.”

The one thing she had learned from those meetings was that treating yourself well was the only key to being of help to anyone else. And it was the desire to help others that drove her. It was often said that the best comparison was being on a plane when the oxygen masks were deployed. You made sure your own mask was on before trying to help anyone else. Otherwise, you were all going to go down.

She had told Max all this, knowing she was still a risk. One day at a time, she was still a risk who might embarrass him in the highly political world of the Anglican Communion.

Max had not hesitated. He'd said, “The position calls for a human being, not a saint. Saints are of no use to me. People of compassion and hard-earned wisdom are.”

Max said now, smiling, “So, even stone-cold sober, and even though you were nearly run over, you didn't make the connection with what you'd overheard?”

“No. Would you? Drivers in London are insane. Much worse than ever they used to be.”

“Would you recognize
both
voices if you heard them again?”

She nodded her head, but doubtfully.

“They were plummy, upper-class voices is all I can say. Throaty and somehow privileged voices, if that makes any sense. Thick as cream, but rather braying—you know what I mean. One younger and one maybe slightly older, at a guess, but not
old.
”

“Do you think it was a woman connected with Totleigh Hall?”

“Had to be, don't you think? Knowing what we know now,” Destiny replied. “Unless there's been another murder in Nether Monkslip I know nothing about.”

Max shook his head and smiled bleakly. “Not recently.”

“But it's really too bizarre to imagine, isn't it? They could use Totleigh Hall to film a remake of
Brideshead Revisited.
All grandeur and gilt-edged glory. But you're thinking one of the women must have been the wife. Lady B-B. I've never met her, so no—no idea.”

“But if you heard her voice?” Max thought nothing could be easier than to arrange a meeting. But if Lady Baaden-Boomethistle really were a deranged killer, what kind of danger would he be letting Destiny in for, then? Possibly a spot of prearranged eavesdropping was called for.… Destiny hidden behind a tapestry or within a stall in the stables … But he was forgetting: Cotton had told him Bree had a clear alibi, with multiple witnesses to prove it. The anxiety that had gripped him relaxed its hold, but only for a moment. Alibis could be faked; witnesses could be bribed.

“Maybe I'd recognize her voice,” Destiny was saying. “It's been so long—I doubt my testimony would stand up in court, but at least
I'd
know. It was just a fluke I recognized the voice in all the hubbub at the meeting. Worse luck I couldn't on either occasion see to whom the voice was attached.”

She paused, pushing back her thick auburn hair with both hands. She wore it chopped short at the neck, as if she'd taken the scissors to it herself. She would push the curls back when she was beset by a problem, which created a most unfortunate mushroom-cloud effect: Einstein on the verge of a great discovery. Today she had applied gel in a last-ditch effort at controlling what the moist sea air creeping in from the coast would destroy. The result looked somehow inflammable.

“I am reminded of a similar situation,” she told him, “in the village where I grew up. A widower who owned a small chain of shops married a much younger woman. Since he was considered to be a catch, there was a certain amount of talk, particularly among the ladies who had tried and failed to catch him. He had a son, a bit of a layabout, who didn't adjust well to the new situation, as so often is the case. As seems to be the case there at Totleigh Hall—I have heard the stepmother and the son don't get along at all. It is easy to think in clichés—older man, younger woman. The son in my village was sure the new wife was after the money. Gasping to get her hands on the pearls and the silverware. Nothing could have been further from this woman's—Betty's—true north. She was not interested in
things.
That is what people were too hidebound to see. She and her husband had fallen in love—she respected him enormously, perhaps as a father figure, but whatever. And that really was all there was to it.”