by Mary Bowers
To complete the tableau, Ryan came up from behind me, bare-chested and barefoot, with low-riding pajama bottoms slung around his hips. He ducked his head a little, looking closely into my eyes. “Are you all right?”
I didn’t answer.
In front of us, Julie’s voice was harsh and extremely un-ghostly. “We are employees,” she said, facing Oliver. She shook Ed off and faced us all down like a cornered lioness. “We are not servants.”
“What were you doing in my room?” Ryan asked me. Asked me! I blinked and stared.
“That wasn’t me!” I told him. “Ask her what she was doing in your room. It was Julie.” It struck me even then that he might be working up a plausible story, pretending a woman had burst into his room at midnight without his knowledge, and he didn’t even know who she was. As if.
Ryan looked at Julie and requested information in a way that was needlessly profane.
My sentiments exactly, I thought.
In response, Julie composed herself and sat down on the overstuffed chair beside her.
“Get your ass out of that chair and tell us what the hell you’ve been up to,” Elizabeth said, “And you,” she added, looking at her brother. “Watch your language in front of my son.”
Young Horace coolly looked at Julie and repeated his Uncle Ryan’s question verbatim.
“Knock it off, kid,” Oliver said to him, and the room was called to order.
In the silence that followed, Maxine and Fawn came around the gallery railing together and stood looking at all of us.
“Oliver,” Maxine said, “if you must pursue this idiocy, could you possibly do it without waking up the ENTIRE HOUSEHOLD? And what have you got hanging around your neck?” she added, coming closer.
Ed started to explain what an EMF meter does, but his words dribbled off lamely when Maxine snapped around and glared at him.
“Julie, what is the reason for this?” Fawn said, seeing how her secretary was dressed. Actually not dressed.
Julie had stood when commanded to, and seemed completely unashamed in the wispy white negligee that hid absolutely no detail of her anatomy. Seeing this, Elizabeth ordered her son to bed, and for once in his life, he obeyed without making any wisecracks.
“I was with Ryan,” Julie said, lifting her chin defiantly.
“The hell you were!” Oliver said.
I looked at Ryan, who was standing stock-still, gaping like an idiot. He looked at me, the classic, falsely accused man.
“She was not,” he gasped.
“We caught her coming out of your room,” Ed said, fooling with his glasses but sounding very sure of his facts.
“She wasn’t in my room!” Ryan said.
“We may as well tell them,” Julie said.
“Tell them what?” Ryan asked desperately.
“I’ve known since we were all here last Christmas that this would happen between us, Ryan. Now it’s happened. There’s no point in denying it. They caught us. And I, for one, am glad.”
Ryan gaped at her stupidly. “Are you insane?”
I stood beside him wishing he could be more convincing, because I really, really wanted to believe him.
Trying to regain some of his dignity, Ryan composed himself and said, “That woman is lying. I’m going back to bed.”
But Oliver stepped out and stopped him.
“I think you have some explaining to do, young man.”
Ryan turned to where Julie had been standing, but she was already walking away. Maxine strode after her, caught her by her bare arm, turned her and grabbed the other arm, forcing her to face her.
“You’re fired,” she said. “Pack your things. You’re leaving tonight.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Julie said cooly. “You can’t fire me. You’re not my employer. Your sister is.”
Apparently nobody had ever defied Maxine before, because when Julie turned to walk away, Maxine let her go. Then she turned to Fawn.
“She’s your secretary. You fire her. See that she’s gone by morning.”
“Don’t be silly,” Fawn said sleepily. Of all those present, she seemed to be the least concerned. “She’s been with me for twenty years. I’ll go talk to her. I’m sure there’s been a misunderstanding.”
“Are you going to fire her or not?” Maxine demanded.
“Of course not.”
“Your own son!” She turned away from Fawn and looked to Oliver as her last resort. “Aren’t you going to do anything? Our family’s honor is at stake. Do you think our grandfather would have allowed our father to consort with the chambermaids?”
“Our family’s young bucks have been after the chambermaids for generations. At least these days, the girls can quit if they don’t like it. As far as I’m concerned, this is between Ryan, Fawn and that girl of hers.”
“Incredible!” Maxine said. She raised an index finger, making a last stand. “And only old goats and imbeciles still call grown women ‘girls.’ You may very well be both.” With that, she swept up the aisle to her bedroom on the other side of the gallery.
Oliver was actually chuckling. “Quaint little notion, protecting the family honor.”
I looked down into the great hall and realized that I could no longer make out the bust of Horace at all. His glow-in-the-dark quality had faded. Somebody might have been worried about the family honor, even the bloodline, but I wasn’t about to mention it.
Once we heard Maxine’s bedroom door slam, Oliver turned to Ryan and said, “If you must play the fool, young man, do it in your own apartment, not in the family residence with the whole pack of them sleeping all around you. Carry on with the woman if you must; she doesn’t live far from us in New York. But keep it out of the public view. And for God’s sake, don’t marry her! She’s trash.”
“I don’t even like her,” Ryan said with rising desperation, but Oliver had already turned and gone into the first room at the top of the stairs. He slammed the door behind him.
Ryan staggered down the hall, went inside his room and quietly closed the door.
* * * * *
“Well, that was a debacle,” Ed said when we’d gotten back to his room.
“We seem to have stirred up more skeletons in the closets than ghosts in the attic,” I said, letting myself drop down flat on his bed. It was a first-quality mattress. I didn’t even bounce.
He faced me. “Do you think that’s why Oliver hired us in the first place? Exposing those . . . .” He gestured futilely. “Shenanigans?”
I sat up. “He doesn’t even seem to really care. And why on earth would he do it this way?”
“I don’t know. People seem to think ghost hunts are funny. Or at least fun. Maybe it was an excuse to have witnesses present and roaming the house at night so he could catch them. It doesn’t make sense to me, but Oliver Moon is an eccentric person. Maybe it makes sense to him.”
“Ed, you need some sleep. You’re not thinking straight. If you want to prove somebody’s having an affair, you hire a private eye, not a ghost hunter, and you can get it done for a lot less than he’s paying us. No, I don’t think Oliver knew anything at all about Ryan and Julie.”
“It looked to me as if Ryan himself didn’t know anything about Ryan and Julie. What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. Poor Jeralyn! I can only imagine the smug way Julie is going to tell her about all this, and she’s going to get to her before Ryan does. The poor kid isn’t going to know what to think. Let’s go to bed. Maybe this will all make sense in the morning.” I got up to leave the room, but when I turned to say good night, he was gearing up and getting ready to follow me.
“What are you doing? I think the ghost hunt is a bust, at least for tonight.”
“That’s right. I guess Bastet was correct when she decided not to participate.”
I was holding the open door in my hand, and I pushed it shut. “What do you mean by that?”
“Whatever we’re doing, she doesn’t think we’re on the right t
rack yet. Maybe I should save my heavy resources for when she decides to join us.” He glanced at the Sensitainer, which he’d put next to the bed and was apparently using as a night stand.
“So you’re still going on with this ‘experiment?’”
“Of course. The affair may explain some of the strange goings-on at night, but it doesn’t explain everything. Oliver isn’t sensitive, like you. He feels something, but he doesn’t know what it is. You’ve picked up more vibrations in the short time you’ve been here than he has since Christmas. That, and the fact that Bastet isn’t interested in what we’re doing makes me think we need to dig much deeper. We’re not even close yet. And besides, I made a solemn promise.”
“You what? Oh! That pledge to stand by Oliver all night long so the shadow people don’t get him? I think that’s off, at least for tonight.”
“You go to bed. He said he’d haunt me.” He gave me a crooked grin. “I’m the one who believes in ghosts, remember? I can’t to take the chance.”
So he escorted me to my room and said goodnight, then went down to the second floor gallery and pulled one of the chairs over to the door to Oliver’s bedroom and sat up in it all night long.
And I lay awake for a long time, wondering if I was being disloyal for not telling Ed about the way I’d looked into the great hall from the gallery and seen the bust appearing to be animated.
Chapter 10
Breakfast was on the terrace.
It was a whole new day, and when I realized that twenty-four hours earlier I had just been leaving home to come to this place, I couldn’t believe it. This week was going to drag by like a couple of years.
Bastet never came back to me in the night, and when I got down to the kitchen I saw her sitting on the floor next to the panel that hid Maxine’s stairway. She had been fed, and the dirty bowl was sitting next to her. She was behaving herself, apparently, idly observing the food preparation, and nobody seemed to mind her being there. When I came in, she looked at me, staring like she does sometimes.
Charlotte told me good morning and got a plate out of a cabinet. “You don’t eat meat, right?” she said.
“Actually, you’re right. It’s nice of you to notice. Most people don’t.”
“We have two breakfast casseroles – one with eggs, cheese and ham, and one with just eggs and cheese. Toast?”
“If it’s no trouble.”
Jeralyn was leaning against another counter, and without saying anything she got a cup of coffee and added cream, just the way I like it. When she gave it to me I thanked her and had a good look at her face. She knew. Poor kid.
I wanted to tell her I believed Ryan, and that Julie seemed like just the kind of wanton woman who would throw herself around men’s bedrooms in the middle of the night, but that would have been bringing the whole thing out into the open, and I didn’t want to.
So instead, I asked her, “Where is everybody?”
She was setting my breakfast plate and coffee on a tray for me, with silverware and a small glass of orange juice. While she did this, she pointed to a door leading into the staff dining room. “Go through there. There’s a door on the other side of that room leading to the terrace. Everybody who’s up is out there. Have you been on the terrace yet? No? It’s beautiful.”
“Are you coming? I’ll wait for you.”
“No, I have to help Charlotte. Little Horace and Elizabeth aren’t up yet, and Maxine called a little while ago on the house phone and told Charlotte to bring her breakfast up. She’s going to have breakfast on her balcony. I’ll help her carry, then stay here a while until everybody is up and fed.”
Charlotte came up behind her and gave her arm an affectionate rub. “She’s such a big help.”
I smiled. “She’s always been a good kid. One of the best volunteers I ever had. Thank you for taking care of Bastet, by the way. She seems to have decided life in a castle suits her just fine. I feel like I’ve been left in the dust. Has she been following you around?”
“She’s been wonderful,” Jeralyn said in a rush, and I realized that she’d needed the non-judgmental, I-don’t-need-to-know-what’s-wrong-I-just-want-to-help, emotional support that you can only get from animals. She looked like she was just this side of a crying jag, and I decided to be extra careful not to say anything to upset her further.
It began to feel like we were at a wake. Charlotte knew, too. I couldn’t even ask why Julie wasn’t helping, because that would have brought up the other thing, and I didn’t want to go anywhere near it.
So I picked up my tray, thanked them both, and headed for the dining room and the terrace beyond.
It was a bright, breezy, fresh day, and the sun was staring right at us. I hadn’t brought my sunglasses, so I sat down at a large iron table with my back to the east, facing the castle. Behind me, a sweeping stretch of railing with thick stone balusters encircled the huge pavilion, reaching past the corners of the castle on both sides.
It was past the time of the morning when the seabirds fight for their breakfast, so we didn’t have to listen to their racket, but the ocean slapping at the rocks was something new to me. I’m used to being on a sandy beach, where the waves come sliding in and then drawing back much more sedately. The waves here hit the rocks head-on, as if they hadn’t expected them to be there, and it was an altogether noisier situation. We all had to raise our voices to be heard.
I had been half-afraid that Julie would be there, looking radiant, but she wasn’t. It was just Ed and Oliver, and they seemed friendlier that morning. I wondered if Oliver appreciated Ed’s vigil outside his door, or even knew about it, but I decided not to bring it up.
Ed had been indulging in one of his lectures, and Oliver had been listening, nodding, faintly smiling and drinking the last of his coffee. He had finished his breakfast.
I was just about to say something when a noise overhead made me look up.
There were two balconies coming out of rooms on the second floor above us, with matching semi-circular stone railings. Maxine’s gray head popped over the railing of the one on the north side and looked down upon us.
“Good morning,” I called, as the men turned to look up.
She retracted herself without acknowledging me, and I just barely heard her say, “Take it back into the bedroom. I’ll eat in there.”
Oliver turned back and looked past me to the shining ocean. “She made Charlotte carry her breakfast tray up those spiral stairs?”
“Jeralyn helped her.”
“No way to help much on those narrow stairs. Grandfather intended that staircase for his own use only. You can barely turn around on one of those steps.”
“I think somebody said last night that there used to be a dumbwaiter?”
He shook his head. “It only ran from the old kitchen up to the butler’s pantry. Extending it to the master suite would have worked, schematically, but it would have been expensive. Since Maxine would have been the only one to benefit from it, I told her if she wanted it, she could pay for it. Instead, she had the shaft sealed. Stubborn old bat.”
Ed said, “It seems she doesn’t make much money on her books. Perhaps she couldn’t afford it.”
“Don’t you believe it. She’s got plenty of money, and nothing to spend it on. The upkeep of the castle is provided for by the estate. She could have had a dumbwaiter if she wanted one. She’d rather take a stand against me, and the only one hurt by it is the cook, so she couldn’t care less.”
Above us, I heard the balcony door slam.
Oliver shook his head. “So at night after the Coxes went home, if she wanted a midnight snack, she had to come down to the kitchen and carry it up herself, or eat it in the kitchen. And when there is no one for her to dine with, she has the cook bring her meals up, breakfast, lunch and dinner, and eats up there all by herself. Writes her books up there. Sleeps up there, calls the cook and butler and gives them orders up there, has Charlotte come running. What a life!”
“Why doesn’t she take her me
als with Charlotte in the dining room when she’s alone in the house?” I asked.
He stared. “Dine with one of the servants? Surely you jest!”
We laughed because we were expected to. It wasn’t very funny, though.
“No,” he went on, “she used to be all alone here when Charlotte used to go home to her husband at night. That was before the Coxes, but that couple didn’t sleep in either. Charlotte’s husband died three years ago, and since then she’s had her own bedroom upstairs here, but heaven forbid Maxine should let her sleep on the same floor as the family! No, Charlotte has her bedroom on the backside of the third floor, where the servants have always slept, and if Maxine has an emergency in the night and can’t get to the house phone, she’ll never be able to hear her. Even with Charlotte here, my sister lives her life alone. And with four full floors of castle to roam, she spends ninety-nine per cent of her life within the same suite of rooms, working on her horrible books and then taking herself to bed to dream about God knows what. It’s a wonder she doesn’t go around the bend.”
Fawn came onto the terrace with a cup of coffee in one hand and a small plate in the other. She came to the table on silent feet, smiling gently. She hadn’t come up in the roster when Charlotte had listed the people who weren’t up yet, and when I hadn’t seen her on the terrace, I hadn’t wondered about her. I had forgotten her. She seemed to be the kind of woman people frequently forgot. But when I looked at her more closely, I realized she was by far the most attractive of the three siblings. In fact, she was beautiful.
She had a neat head of pure white hair, simply and beautifully cut in an easy-care style, good for every occasion from a day at home to a Washington gala. She had her father’s turquoise eyes, and smooth, clear skin. Her hands were well-kept and quietly manicured, but they showed her age: her knuckles were knotty and her fingers were thick, and the backs of her hands were sprinkled with age spots that she didn’t bother to hide. She was wearing a simple cotton sundress with a lightweight pink sweater thrown around her shoulders and simple walking sandals on her feet. She had been wearing the same sandals the day before with a darker-colored outfit, but they were a neutral color, and went with anything.
