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Ashes to Ashes
by Lillian Stewart Carl
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Mystery
Copyright © 2000
ISBN
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Grateful acknowledgement is made to Strathmore Music and Film Services for permission to reprint lyrics from “Ferry Me Over” by Andy M. Stewart, copyright 1986
OCTOBER
Chapter One
The castle’s turrets rose like a beckoning hand above a crimson sea of maple leaves. Rebecca would have missed the exit from the interstate if it hadn’t been for that stone imperative, a seventeenth century Scottish castle springing from the soil of central Ohio like a burp in time and space. The incongruity was both engaging and unsettling.
Two miles of narrow asphalt corrugated by the wheels of farm equipment brought Rebecca to a cast-iron gate in a stone wall. A board creaking from a signpost proclaimed “Dun Iain”. She wrestled her Toyota into the driveway and stopped. The gate was open. They’d told the man from the museum her date of arrival. Good. It wasn’t polite to arrive unannounced.
To arrive here at all was a victory of exasperation over comfort. Rebecca’s stomach trembled with the same blend of anticipation and anxiety she’d feel when Ray teased her into jumping off the high diving board. But he hadn’t teased her into coming here. That had been her own idea, whether he liked it or not. They were just engaged, not married. Rebecca tightened her jaw, quelled her stomach, and accelerated up the driveway.
The castle was impressively picturesque at the end of its avenue of trees. Its builder, John Forbes, had studied his prototypes well. The Scottish stately homes that had been on the tour Rebecca and Ray had taken last year— Scone, Glamis, Blair— had all been entered through avenues of trees.
Only this avenue was of Canadian maples that flamed like torches in the crisp October afternoon.
The trees parted. The castle loomed over her like a megalith at Stonehenge. Rebecca drove cautiously over the gravel of the parking area and stopped beside a red Nova with a rental agency sticker on the bumper. Her car exhaled a cloud of exhaust and subsided. It would have to be replaced soon, with money she didn’t have and wouldn’t be getting here.
“So,” Ray had said. “You’re spending part of the fall semester sorting junk at some two bit San Simeon for nothing more than room, board, and a pittance from the executor? Just what are you trying to prove, Kitten?”
As if they both didn’t know. When she’d left her engagement ring with him, for safekeeping, of course, Ray had looked at her with the hurt appeal of a puppy put out for the night.
Rebecca thrust the car keys into her purse, threw open the door, leaped out, and slammed it shut with a much harder push than was necessary. A butterscotch and white cat, sunning himself on a low wall beside the parking area, regarded her with sardonic detachment. Dun Iain’s scattered windows peered down at her, multiple eyes sparkling in a sly and secretive humor.
She’d stewed over Ray all the way from Missouri, and gabbled endlessly about him to Jan during her quick visit in Putnam, just across the highway. “Something you’d like to recommend?” she asked the cat. He closed his eyes in the feline equivalent of a shrug. You’re here. That’s a start.
“Right,” said Rebecca. The breeze fanned the heat from her cheeks.
She might have come a hundred miles from Putnam and the interstate; the only sound was of the crimson leaves shuffling in the wind, and the distant hum of an airplane. She squinted into the brilliance of the sky. There it was, a tiny insect toiling eastward. Something about the echo of those distant engines on a fall day was unbearably poignant; her heart swelled with longing for— for something. Decision, probably.
Her eye followed the plane until it vanished behind the castle. A fairy tale castle, the State of Ohio guidebooks would say. But Dun Iain was a large house, only suggesting an L-shaped medieval keep.
The walls were beige harl, a kind of pebbly stucco, tinted pink by the maple leaves which surrounded them. They leaped in one sheer expanse from the ground to the fifth story, where they blossomed not into toothed parapets but into turrets and dormers. Atop them jostled chimneys and cupolas, which were in turn elbowed aside by a platform with a balustrade. Its severe right angles failed to intimidate the subtle curves of the rest of the building.
The roofs were a dark greenish gray. Eriskay slate, Rebecca remembered, imported at horrendous expense. Authenticity at all costs, even to the shot holes concealed by grinning gargoyles in the stonework at the base of each turret. A magnificently quixotic, defiantly eccentric structure, Dun Iain, less Camelot than Alice in Wonderland.
A fairy tale, she told herself. The innocent gloss of some fairy tales couldn’t hide the surreal twisting of the ordinary, the dark obsession, which lay beneath. Even the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland had once terrified her, the red queen shouting “Off with her head!” while Alice can’t wake up from her dream turned nightmare.
The airplane was gone. A cold gust of wind sang through the trees. Rebecca shivered and turned briskly to tidying up the car. From the trunk she took her suitcases and the sacks of food. If the man from the museum was like all men, he’d been living on nitrate-laced bologna on white bread and chemical-doused sweet rolls. From the back seat she took the jug of apple cider purchased at a roadside stand; hopefully it wasn’t contaminated with salmonella or whatever bug caused food poisoning. Biology wasn’t her field.
She scooped the Burger King wrappers from the floor where Jan’s children, despite their mother’s admonitions, had let them fall. Not for the first time she tried to feel condescension toward her former roommate, who had dropped out of college to marry. Not for the first time she failed.
Locking the car, Rebecca hoisted her packages and crunched over the gravel toward Dun Iain. The only apparent door was set in a bulge at the internal angle of the building’s “L”. It was a massive affair of wooden slabs and iron braces that looked ready to repel invaders at any moment.
Someone was looking out a window above and to one side of the door. Rebecca couldn’t produce a friendly wave with her arms full, so she tilted her head with a smile of greeting. But as soon as she focused on the window the shape was gone, plucked away into the shadowed interior, leaving her with a quick impression of a tall, thin figure and a pale face.
Well, if that was the way Dr. what’s his name Campbell of the Museum was going to be to his new colleague… . An agonized shriek shattered the stillness. The cat dematerialized in a puff of fur. Rebecca’s heart plummeted into her stomach. Her feet did a quick jig on the gravel— run away, no, run forward. She dropped the suitcases, laid down the sacks, and sprinted for the door, her purse on its shoulder strap flying behind her.
The door was heavy. She threw her entire weight against the wood and it yielded without the hideous screech she’d have expected. She took two bounds into the interior and stopped, blinking in the abrupt musty dimness. There, dim light spilled down a staircase.
Another high-pitched shriek thinned into hysteria. Rebecca stumbled past a massive shape that only resolved itself in her mind’s eye into an open coffin, its occupant’s hands folded in prayer, when she was already on the bottom step of the staircase. What kind of place was this, anyway! She raced up the steps and into a wide doorway.
She burst past a carved screen into the Great Hall of the castle and collided with the end of a table. The room was small, as halls went, but large
enough to contain her entire efficiency apartment. A vast hearth and mantel opened on her left. To her right were the smeared panes of a window glinting in the light of a wrought iron chandelier.
Something was wheezing, half strangled. She spun around. Above her, on a wooden musician’s gallery, a tall, slender man stood arguing with a decrepit set of bagpipes. Rebecca deflated with a wheeze of her own.
The pipes were winning the argument. The man blew mightily into the mouthpiece and squeezed the bag of faded tartan under his arm. The instrument emitted another squeal of indignation, like a woman goosed by a sailor.
“Thou unravished bride of quietness?” suggested Rebecca giddily.
The man jerked as though jolted by an electric shock. His face blanched and snapped toward her voice; his eyes bulged. The pipes in his suddenly flaccid arms whistled in a long exhalation like a gramophone record running down.
Now she’d scared him in turn. Nothing like starting off on the wrong foot. Rebecca tried a smile somewhat less broad than the Cheshire cat’s. “Ah, excuse me— I’m Rebecca Reid. I guess you must be… ” She dredged frantically and his first name plopped onto her tongue. “… Michael Campbell from the British Museum.”
Michael closed his eyes for a moment, allowing the natural glow of the Scot to return to his face. He laid the bagpipes down, disappeared, and reemerged through the wooden screen. Wiping his hands on a T-shirt which read, “Disarm today, dat arm tomorrow”, he seized her hand, shook it perfunctorily, and dropped it. His mouth emitted an unintelligible string of diphthongs and glottal stops.
This was more than embarrassing, it was positively mortifying. Rebecca’s smile expired. Michael waited patiently, head cocked to the side, one side of his mouth tucked in a grimace that offered no assistance. Then, with a rush, some synapse in the back of Rebecca’s brain wrenched the sounds into words: “From the National Museums of Scotland. And there’s nae need tae go creepin’ aboot the hoose like that.”
“I wasn’t creeping,” Rebecca protested. “You saw me from the window, you knew I was here.”
“Oh aye?” His blue eyes widened and then narrowed, as if surprise gave way to cunning. He turned away, his shoulders moving in something between a shiver and a shrug.
He had to have rushed downstairs from the window and snatched up the pipes as soon as he’d seen her. He must be very shy. Or ill mannered. Unless… . “Is there someone else here? The housekeeper?”
“She’ll no be in until the morn. There’s no one else here.” He stood, hands braced on the carved back of a chair, looking at a spiral notebook laid on the table amid a scattering of dishes and bric a brac. His fingers were interesting, long and lean, but his back was singularly uncommunicative. Rebecca peeked around him to see a page filled with neat columns of words and figures preceded by the script “L”s of pound signs.
Rebecca plowed doggedly on into the silence. “I’m from Dover College in Missouri. I answered the advertisement in the Journal of British Studies placed by the State of Ohio.”
“Who’ll be takin’ the house in January whether I’ve finished skimmin’ the cream or no.”
You’ve skimmed the cream? Rebecca’s head tilted inquisitively. Each burred “r” in young Dr. Campbell’s voice was a tiny buzz saw; obviously he resented the state thrusting an assistant on him. Maybe he was one of those paranoid types afraid some other scholar would steal his academic thunder. And yet he was simply taking inventory.
Maybe he thought she was there to check up on what he chose to take back to Scotland, as if he couldn’t be trusted to be fair and honest. She said in her most professional voice, “I exchanged letters with Mr. Adler, James Forbes’s executor. I’ve studied up on Dun Iain and both the Forbeses, father and son. I’ll be getting my own doctorate in British history as soon as I finish my dissertation, so I’m qualified to help you skim the cream, as you say.”
Michael released the chair, slapped shut the notebook, and turned back to her. A glance no doubt identical to the one he’d use to appraise a letter or a vase took in her stockings, sweater, and tartan skirt— an ersatz tartan, at that— the careful makeup and shoulder-length brown hair that was lovely but pathetically impractical.
So I like to look nice! Rebecca spoke more tartly than she’d intended. “Mr. Adler assured me I could do my own research while I— we— catalog the artifacts. There’s no better collection of Scottish historical artifacts on this side of the Atlantic. I know how to work, don’t worry. I supplemented my scholarships slinging hash at a Steak and Ale.”
Michael’s eyes glazed. That bit of slang was apparently beyond him, and he wasn’t about to ask what it meant. “Of course there’re no better collections. Forbes was a glorified thief, preyin’ on the poverty of the old families and plunderin’ the birthright of Scotland.”
Typical man— when in doubt, attack. “The laws on the exportation of antiquities weren’t as strict seventy or eighty years ago. If some of the old families had to sell the contents of their attics to feed, clothe and educate their children, maybe they thought they got the better end of the deal.”
“Thirty pieces of silver for the history of Scotland?”
“Which has been dirtied by a bunch of bloody Yanks?” Rebecca asked. “That history belongs to us, too, you know. My great-grandfather Reid left Ayrshire a hundred years ago because he couldn’t support his family in Scotland the Brave.” She cut herself off with a swallow and inspected the dusty toes of her shoes. Hard to believe that was her own voice being so rude to a foreigner, even a contentious one.
She glanced back up to see those brave Scottish eyes sparking not with anger but with a humor as sharp and dry as single-malt whiskey. “And today the old families can’t even sell their birthright. They have to make Disneylands out of their homes. People who a hundred years ago would never have been allowed in the back gate now stand gawpin’ over the Countess of Strathmore’s knickers. You have to be independently wealthy to live in Scotland the now— all the jobs are in soddin’ great factories in Birmingham and Manchester.”
Rebecca, having enjoyed the Countess of Strathmore’s antique underpants, couldn’t resist adding, “In England.”
“Among the Sassenachs,” he returned. “Chance would be a fine thing.”
She assumed that remark was meant as sarcasm, something along the line of “that’ll be the day”, and offered him a grin of complicity. “Sassenach”, huh? The word was more or less Gaelic for “southerner”, but had come to be a derogatory epithet for “English”. No wonder Michael had flared at her when she’d inadvertently assigned him to an English museum; he was a patriot, working for a pittance for his country. Such idealism was refreshing.
The angle of his chin repelled her grin. He scooped impatiently at the strands of hair falling across his forehead. His hair was also brown, shorter on the top and sides than in the back, where it reached the neckband of his shirt. The style was part intellectual, part rock star, part uncivilized Highland chieftain. Rebecca wondered whether he’d had it cut that way on purpose or whether he’d been the victim of a schizophrenic barber.
“Well then,” Michael said, “I’ll help you wi’ your cases. It’s time for tea.” He strolled to the door and clicked off the chandelier.
Twilight surged into the room. The windows, although large, admitted only a thin brassy gleam. The chairs and table, the fireplace and gallery, became only quick sketches of objects, without substance, like shapes in a dream. “Thank you,” Rebecca said to her erstwhile colleague, but he was already out of the room. With a shrug, she followed.
From a solitary bulb in the ceiling of the landing a few watts of light trickled down the steps, causing the oblong shape in the shadowed pit of the entrance hall to phosphoresce. Michael started down two steps at a time. Rebecca walked more slowly, asking, “What is that?”
“What?” He turned at the foot of the stair.
“That… ” She couldn’t say coffin, it couldn’t be that. “That box there,” she ended lamely.<
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“This?” He found another switch. The shape coalesced into a white marble sarcophagus topped by the effigy of a woman, her cap, gown, and steepled hands finely detailed. Michael bowed, his hands sketching an elaborate flourish. “May I present Her Majesty, Mary, Queen of Scots? Poor, lovely, romantic, stupid Mary. I thought you said you’d studied Forbes and Dun Iain.”
“I have,” Rebecca returned. She knew that the elder Forbes had been besotted by the tragic story of Mary Stuart, and that he’d had a half-size replica of her tomb in Westminster Abbey carved of white marble. “I just didn’t know he kept his toy sarcophagus in his front hall.”
Another quick glint of humor, and Michael went striding across the parking area. Stupid Mary? A fine sentiment for a patriot. Rebecca spared a quick look at the marble face. Supposedly it had been modeled on Mary’s death mask; its serene half-smile suggested the queen had welcomed death, however gruesome. Off with her head indeed!
Rebecca hurried out the door and almost collided with Michael coming back in. “Get your pokes,” he said.
She rescued her sacks of groceries. The bronze evening sunlight, filtered through the maples, swam with russet dust-motes. The farm road was out of sight beyond the trees. Next to the house was a clapboard and shingle shed, and across the dark green lawn, not far from the driveway, was a dovecote, a low rounded structure perforated by stone lattices.
“I need to be lockin’ up the now,” Michael called.
“All right, I’m coming.” Rebecca checked to make sure her car was locked. She barely made it back inside before he swung the door shut with a crash and brandished a ridiculously large iron key. “I suppose,” she said, swept against a set of flags furled at Mary’s regal feet, “the really valuable things in Dun Iain don’t look valuable. You know, all that glitters isn’t gold.”
He shot her a sharp and suspicious glance. She raised her brows indignantly; come on, that remark hardly expressed criminal intentions! “Kitchen’s in there,” he said, jerking his head toward a door to the left of the staircase, and he rammed the key into a massive lock.
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