by Wendy Webb
A dish fell out of Harriet’s hand and shattered on the tile floor.
“Oh!” she cried. “How clumsy! I’ll just clean it up.” She reached down and began picking up the pieces. “Dash it all, it was one of the good dishes.”
I noticed a broom standing in the corner and hopped up to get it. “Don’t touch the shards,” I said to her, sweeping them into a pile. “Do you have a dustpan?”
She crossed the room and opened a door revealing a cleaning closet with all manner of implements and grabbed a dustpan. I swept the shards into it while she held it.
“Well, that was uncalled for,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the shards as she deposited them into the trash. “Those were antique dishes. They belonged to Mr. Dare’s mother.”
“I shouldn’t have come in here to distract you,” I said.
“Not your fault,” she said. “I’m to blame. I’ll let Mr. Baines know. Maybe he can find a replacement. He loves that eBay. You’d be surprised what you can find there.”
She popped a cleaning packet into the dishwasher, pushed the door shut, and turned it on. “Now, if you don’t need anything else, miss, I think I’ll be off. Mr. Baines and I like to watch a police drama that’s starting in a few minutes. I’m sure he’ll be in his recliner waiting for me.” She chuckled at the thought of it.
She hurried out the kitchen door and was halfway down the lawn before I realized she hadn’t answered my question.
I stood in the empty kitchen listening to the dishwasher whir, wishing my mind would go into high gear, too. Now I had another piece of the puzzle—Harriet’s avoidance of my question about Temperance Dare.
I went through the kitchen door and out onto the lawn. Maybe I could catch up with the group. I was in no mood to go back to my suite alone. I had been by myself here at Cliffside the whole while, and I had to admit that it was nice to have some conversation and company, even though I didn’t really belong with them.
Since Henry was here to paint the garden, maybe that’s where they were headed. But when I got there, they were nowhere in sight. Had they gone down to the lakeshore? I walked across the lawn to the path Nate and I had taken during Miss Penny’s wake, and then it struck me that I hadn’t seen him since then. I had been meaning to find my way to his house, but in the flurry of everything, I hadn’t gotten around to it.
I turned on my heel and headed the opposite way. I’d find him now, if he was at home. Maybe he knew something about Temperance. According to the journal, his father was the doctor when she was at Cliffside as a patient. I wasn’t sure how those timelines matched up, though. At the very least, maybe he could shed some light on this whole thing.
I walked for about ten minutes or so across the lawn, and there, just beyond a rise near the forest’s edge, stood a large, white house with a porch running across its entire front. I had found it! And on the porch swing, there sat Nate Davidson, white coat and all. He waved.
I trotted across the lawn and up the steps. “Hi!” I said to him. “I have just committed a cardinal sin—the unauthorized stop-by.”
He grinned. “The unauthorized stop-by,” he said. “You have indeed committed it. In retaliation, I’m afraid I’m going to have to offer you a glass of wine.”
“Do your worst,” I said, settling into an Adirondack chair and crossing my legs. “I brought it on myself.”
He disappeared into the house and returned in a minute with a glass of wine and a beer in a frosty mug.
“It’s my policy to keep wine on hand, just in case a pretty woman stops by,” he said, handing me the glass and taking a seat next to me.
I flushed at the compliment. “I think that’s a fine policy,” I said. “One might even call it a motto.”
“Or a creed,” he said, sipping his beer. “It helps if one knows a pretty woman’s wine preference, which one does.”
“It does help,” I said, raising my glass. “This is a fine wine.”
“And finer company,” he said, lifting his glass to me in return. “I hereby authorize all of your future stop-bys.”
“That’s a bold action,” I said.
“That’s what they call me,” he said. “Bold.”
We sat, smiling at each other, for a bit.
“How are things?” he said, breaking the silence. “The fellows arrived.”
“They did, indeed,” I said. “And things are fine, if mysterious.”
“Mysterious? How so?”
I took a deep breath and told him everything, from Miss Penny’s secret playroom—an homage to the past—to my theories that she had brought some, if not all, of us to Cliffside for a reason, to Brynn’s idea about Temperance, and finally to the most perplexing thing of all—why, if she had gone to so much trouble to bring at least some of us here, would she kill herself before she had a chance to carry out whatever it was she was planning? It didn’t make any sense.
He didn’t say anything for a few moments but seemed to be digesting what I had said.
“I don’t mind telling you that the dollhouse business gives me the creeps,” he said, finally.
“Me, too,” I said. “What do you think, though? She said she had left me a puzzle to solve, and I feel like pieces are scattered all over the place. I was hoping you might be able to help me put some of them together.”
“Ah,” he said. “An ulterior-motive-filled unauthorized stop-by.”
“Is there any other kind?”
“In that case, you might be forced to accept another glass of wine.”
I looked down into my empty glass and shrugged. “If I must.”
He pushed himself up, took my glass, and returned a moment later with it and another beer.
“I was just stalling for time,” he said.
“I expected no less from you.”
He laughed, settling back into his chair. “That’s one formidable can of worms you’ve got on your hands.”
I looked at him, hoping he would offer a quasi-plausible explanation for it all.
He seemed to sense what I was thinking. “You know, Norrie, I’m just a simple country doctor,” he said. “I’m no Sam Spade. You’re the reporter—what do you think?”
“I think you know a whole lot more than you’re saying, Mr. Country Doctor.”
“That’s Doctor Country Doctor, if you please,” he said, grinning.
“Seriously, though, you live here and have for your whole life,” I said. “How does all of this strike you?”
He leaned back in his chair and was silent for a moment, choosing his words carefully. “Cliffside is a strange and mysterious place, Norrie,” he said, finally. “It always has been. Things happen here that just don’t happen elsewhere.”
I thought about everything that had happened to me since I’d arrived and knew he was right.
“That said, though, I agree with you that all of these puzzle pieces don’t fit together,” he said. “Maybe that’s because they’re not supposed to. Maybe it’s all just one big, random coincidence. Maybe it’s just as her suicide note said, she was tired, and, having finally found a ‘worthy successor,’ she did what she had wanted to do since her father and sister died. She joined them.”
“Had she always felt that way, do you know?”
He shook his head. “It’s hard to say. But I do believe she carried a sense of guilt with her after they died. And she missed Milly terribly. It’s amazing she had the strength to carry on after losing her. They were so close, they were almost like one person. You never saw one without the other.”
I thought about Miss Penny’s room, a shrine to their childhoods.
“It’s hard to lose any family member,” I said, “but losing a sister who was that close must have been devastating.”
“It was,” he said. “I’m surprised it took this long for her to swallow a bottle of pills.”
“About the other sister,” I said. “Temperance. What do you know of that? Is what Brynn said true?”
He sipped on his beer. “Well, I k
now there was a Temperance, and I know that, despite her name, she was a hell-raiser.”
“Did Miss Penny tell you stories about her?”
He shook his head. “She never talked about her. Neither did Milly or their father.”
“Then how do you know?”
“My dad,” he said. “He had a lot of stories about her.”
“Is it true about her being a patient at Cliffside?”
He nodded. “That’s true, yes. Temperance was a patient here. But the bit about her not having TB—that’s fiction. She was a very sick little girl.” He stopped for a moment and then went on. “According to my dad.”
“So, he was the doctor here when she was a patient?”
“He was,” Nate said.
“And the part about Temperance being evil, Chester putting her in here to kill her, and a nurse finally finishing the job?”
Nate’s eyes grew dark. “The nurses here were the finest around. Every one of them, world-class professionals. None would have ever done anything like that, even if Chester Dare himself ordered her to.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. His story didn’t quite ring true for me. It felt like he knew more than he was telling me. But, then again, he had heard this story secondhand from his father, who would never admit his complicity in a murder to his son. Nobody would, unless it was a deathbed confession. But it didn’t seem to be the case here.
Maybe Nate was right. Maybe this was all just one big, strange coincidence, fanned by my crime reporter’s imagination. I had been missing my work, puzzling out mysteries. Maybe I had invented one for myself here. And the question of Temperance might be one I’d never answer.
He leaned forward in his chair and put a hand on my knee. “The thing is, Norrie, maybe Penelope did engineer it so you and all of the fellows in this session were here at the same time, for some reason known only to her. Whatever that reason was, it died with her. So, does it really matter anymore? What I mean is, it’s not like she can carry out whatever it was that she was planning—if there was anything planned.”
I exhaled. He was right, of course. Whatever little game Penelope Dare had been playing with us, it didn’t matter anymore. She was gone.
CHAPTER 19
Darkness had fallen by the time I walked from Nate’s house back across the lawn toward Cliffside. He had offered to walk with me, but even though I would’ve liked his company, thoughts were swirling through my mind, and I felt like a good walk might help sort them out. There was something nagging at me about my conversation with Nate, but I couldn’t put my finger on what, exactly, it was. An odd sense of unfinished business? A lingering question? I wasn’t sure. I only knew there was something.
It wasn’t until later, when I was upstairs in my suite getting ready for bed, that it hit me. The suicide note. How had he known she’d written about being tired and just wanting to join her father and sister, having found a “worthy successor”? The only people to read it were Harriet, the police, and me. As I washed my face and brushed my teeth, I reasoned that he must have talked to one of them. Still, it was odd that he knew the exact phrasing—“worthy successor.” I made a mental note to ask him about it the next day and crawled into bed.
As I drifted off, I tried to think of more pleasant things. I really was pleased that everything had gone off without a hitch during the fellows’ first day. Maybe this job wouldn’t be so hard after all.
I awoke to the sound of screaming. Was I dreaming? But no, there it was again. My room was pitch black—the sky had evidently clouded up again, obscuring the stars and moon that usually illuminated my room at night. I quickly felt around for the light switch, threw on my robe, and flung my door open, hitting the switch in the hallway as I did so.
I saw Brynn hurrying down the hallway toward my room. Her face was ashen.
“Was that you screaming?” I asked her.
One by one, doors opened, and heads poked out into the hall. “What’s the matter?” someone said. “What’s going on?” said another.
Richard materialized—I hadn’t noticed him coming down the hallway from his suite—and put a hand on Brynn’s shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked her.
She looked at me with wild, terror-filled eyes. “Somebody was in my room.”
The group gathered around us. “What do you mean somebody was in your room?” Cassandra said, cinching the belt on her blue satin robe. “Didn’t you have your door locked?”
“Of course I had it locked,” Brynn snapped at her. She turned to me and took my hand, and I could feel that she was physically shaking. “Come and see.”
She led me to her suite, the others following behind. The door was standing open, the light on. She pointed to the study. “In there,” she whispered. “Look.”
I started to cross the room toward the study, but Richard took my arm. “Let me go first,” he said and then turned to the others. “You all stay here. Just in case.”
He and I moved into the study, and both of us let out a gasp. On the desk, the old, weathered journal sat open, its pages ripped out and strewn all over the desktop, the chair, and the floor.
I turned to Brynn. By this time, Henry was standing with her, a protective arm around her shoulders. “You didn’t do this yourself, obviously?”
“Obviously,” she said. “Look closer. Look at the individual pages.”
I picked one up and then dropped it again, as though it had burned my fingers. Scrawled across the journal entry on the page, in black ink, were the words: Lies Lies Lies Lies. And there it was on the other pages, written over and over again.
“Holy Jesus,” Richard said, his voice low. “Who would do something like this?”
Brynn turned her face into Henry’s chest rather than look at that scene any longer. I could see her shoulders shaking. He rubbed her back and cooed, “There, there, my dear. There, there.”
“Okay, listen,” I said, trying to take charge, my voice a bit louder than I had intended it to be. “Brynn, I need to know exactly what happened.”
No response. “Brynn,” I said, taking her arm. “Turn around and tell us what happened. You’re safe now. We’re all here.”
She did as she was told, and I led her out of the study and into her bedroom. She crawled into her bed and sat propped against the pillows. As the others gathered around her, she took a tissue and dabbed at her eyes.
“There’s not much to tell,” she said. “I fell asleep right away when I went to bed, but I woke up in the middle of the night. After lying here tossing and turning for a bit, I thought I might as well just get up and start working. But when I got to the desk, I saw”—she flailed an arm toward the study—“that!” She let out a strangled cry. “Somebody was in my room while I was sleeping!”
I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach wondering who, or what, that “somebody” might have been. But I wasn’t about to tell any of them what I had seen and heard and felt since coming to Cliffside.
I perched next to her on the edge of the bed. “Okay, this is a silly question, but I have to ask it. You’re sure it wasn’t like that when you went to bed? That would be a simpler explanation—somebody got in here while we were all downstairs at dinner, or afterward.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “But it was dark, and I didn’t turn on the light in the study.”
“And what time was that, about?” I asked her. I hadn’t seen her at all after coming home from Nate’s.
She glanced quickly at Henry Dalton and then back at me. “It was after midnight,” she said.
Even in the midst of this, I had to stifle a grin. Miss Penny had warned me about fellows scurrying from room to room in the middle of the night. It certainly hadn’t taken them long.
I surveyed the other faces in the room, as I had learned to do during my years of crime reporting. Nobody looked guilty. “Did anybody hear anything between midnight and now?” I asked them. “Any movement in the hallway, someone coming or going?”
“The only thing I heard was the screaming,” Richard said, running a hand through his hair. “It woke me out of a dead sleep.”
“Cassandra?” I asked. “What about you?”
She winced. “I did hear something, but I hate to even mention it,” she said.
I stood up. “What was it?”
“I’m not sure if I was dreaming,” she said. “But I heard . . .” She sighed. “I know it’s going to sound crazy, but I thought I heard laughter out in the hallway.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Earlier. Probably around eleven,” she said.
“Were any of you in the hallway then?” I asked the group.
Everyone shook their heads.
“Like I said, I’m not sure if I was dreaming or not,” Cassandra went on. “It was one of those things where I wasn’t entirely awake or asleep but sort of floating in between. I didn’t think too much of it at the time, but now . . .”
“Now, what?” I asked her.
“I know it sounds crazy, but I could swear it was the sound of children laughing,” she said.
My stomach seized up. I had heard that same thing, many times, since coming to Cliffside. But I wasn’t about to admit it to all of these people.
“There are no children here, are there?” Henry piped up.
“No,” I said. “You might have been dreaming, Cassandra, or you might have heard something outside that sounded like laughter. An animal. I don’t know.”
“Well, an animal didn’t destroy my journal,” Brynn said, her fear giving way to anger. “Aside from the creep factor of somebody being in here while I was asleep, it’s a priceless family heirloom. Now it’s ruined. I could sue you.”
“Well—” I began, but Richard broke in.
“I suggest you calm down,” he said, fixing a stern gaze at Brynn. “Eleanor has been nothing but helpful to you, and to all of us, since we arrived. We just need to focus on who did this, and why.”
“We can answer that by you answering the question—who has keys to our rooms?” Brynn spat out at me.
