“I wrote to a Michael Campbell, yes.”
“Sure, the international art thief bumps off the old professor and takes his identity,” she groaned. “Michael knows his history too well to be an imposter, for one thing.”
“He’s a foreigner… ” Eric stopped short at Rebecca’s frown.
“Then we should give him the benefit of the doubt. I have.”
“Oh, I see that you have,” Eric said softly. “How did he manage to convince you of his sincerity?”
Rebecca turned her back on him, planted her hands in her pockets, pulled her head like a turtle into her collar, and looked out across the lawn behind the house. A few scraggly flower beds showed where once had been a formal garden. Surely she wasn’t defending Michael just because he liked the maudlin old songs. “Like I said last night,” she answered, grasping at some reason, any reason. “Intuition. He can be pretty obnoxious, but he just doesn’t seem to be any more a criminal than anyone else around here. And it’s not fair to pick on him because he’s not an American.”
The wind wept and wailed. Rebecca shivered, her entire body clenched like a fist; she’d contradicted him, now he wouldn’t like her anymore.
“You’re right,” Eric said, and she spun back around. His stern, arrogant mask cracked into a rueful grimace. The wind tousled the dark strands of hair across his brow, making him look less formidable. “Keep reminding me that I can act pretty obnoxious, too. There’re hazards to having been trained in adversarial relationships.”
“Oh,” said Rebecca. “I see.”
“I suppose a real international art thief would expect a better return on his efforts than some old bric a brac from a Victorian folly.”
“Unless the stories about treasure are true, and the mazer was taken just for an appetizer.”
Eric stiffened. A tiny flame flickered deep in his eyes. “Rebecca, I worked for James Forbes for three years. If there were anything to that treasure rumor don’t you think I’d know about it?”
She contemplated that flame. “Would you? Or are you denying the existence of a treasure because you’re hurt he wouldn’t tell you about it?”
He stared at her the same way Lansdale had stared at Michael. She could almost hear the gates opening and closing in his mind, computing comprehension.
“Who does know about it?” she went on. “Phil? Steve? Warren? What better cover than being the sheriff? What if Dorothy didn’t think her legacy was enough payment for all her work? How do I know you don’t have some scam going to rake off more than your fair share of the Forbes money?”
She stood with her mouth open, the damp, earthy wind scouring her teeth. My God. She’d actually said it. She snapped her mouth shut— too late, damn it— and waited for the deluge of contempt.
The flame in Eric’s eyes sparked and went out. He threw his head back and laughed. “You’re the devious one, aren’t you? Should we, just for the sake of argument, assume there is a treasure of some kind? Should we suspect everyone, even ourselves, of being after it?”
“Probably,” she replied. She felt as if she’d picked up a brick and found it to be papier-mache.
Still laughing, he opened his arms. She went into them. His jacket was freezing; shocked by her own boldness, she opened and dived beneath it to embrace the warmth of his shirt. His mouth wasn’t cold at all. Amazing, she managed to think, how comforting a hug and a kiss could be.
“Did James ever say that the place was haunted?” she asked at last, when Eric’s warm breath migrated to her ear.
“He was convinced of it. I’ll admit I never believed him. None of the ghosts ever performed for me.” He drew away, brows puckered. “Do you believe there are ghosts here?”
“I’m not sure. Michael has seen and heard some of the same things I have— if you’ll accept the consensus of a couple of social scientists, not parapsychologists.”
Eric shook his head, confused, she judged, and irritated at being confused. “Look, Rebecca, if you’re scared to stay here, maybe you could stay with your friend in town.”
“No, if I’m going to work here I need to be here. I’m not going to run away just because the place makes me a little nervous.”
He clasped her even more tightly. “But what if there’s real danger?”
“It’s probably dangerous standing up here! What isn’t dangerous? Driving on the freeway, eating pesticide-laced food… .”
A catcall wavered on the wind. Eric and Rebecca looked at each other, then over the balustrade to the ground. Far below Steve leaned out of the pickup, hooting some thankfully muffled remark as he started the engine.
Rebecca blushed, her face burning against the cold leather covering Eric’s shoulder. Eric’s eyes narrowly followed the pickup along the driveway and into the trees. “Sorry,” he said when the vehicle had disappeared. “This is hardly the time or the place, is it?”
He was implying there would be a time and place. “I never made a public spectacle of myself before. I’m having all sorts of new experiences.”
“Like being in danger.” He helped her back through the trapdoor.
Rebecca made a mental note to ask Phil to fix the broken windows. Leaking rain wouldn’t help the plaster ceilings, that was for sure.
The ballroom seemed oddly close and quiet after the airy platform, except for a cold draft. The window that had slipped when Rebecca leaned against it was partially open again. She shut it and checked the locking lever, even though it would probably open itself again as soon as they were gone. She returned to Eric’s side, grateful for his presence.
“Rebecca,” he said, guiding her past the storerooms to the back stairway, “last night you offered to keep an eye on things here. Is that offer still good?”
“Of course.”
He planted a grateful kiss on her nose. “If you say Campbell knows his business, then he does. Just— well— make sure everything’s on the up and up. You have the historical expertise. You’ll know if something’s wrong.”
Rebecca smirked into her coat collar. So Dorothy thought Eric liked his women decorative. And here he was complimenting her intelligence.
Michael was alone in the Hall, looking over a carbon of the sheriff’s report. He glanced around, his jaundiced eye making a silent comment on Rebecca’s pink cheeks. No lipstick, she told him silently. No smudges. Nyah.
Michael scooted back his chair and stretched elaborately before Eric’s scrutiny. “The sheriff’s gone to see if he can find the broken chair. We were wonderin’ if you’d happen to know where the key to the mausoleum is. Lansdale hasn’t seen it since James’s funeral.”
“It’s in the Chippendale secretary in the study,” replied Eric. “Would you like me to show you?”
Michael waved toward the door. Eric strolled off. As Rebecca passed the staircase the locksmith called, “Ma’am?” She changed course toward him.
“I can’t remove the mechanism of the old lock without leaving a hole in the door. I’ve disabled it, though. And the new lock is all fixed.”
Rebecca checked it over. It was a sturdy bolt that could be slipped back from the inside, but that, if closed, could only be opened from the outside with a key. She took the four keys the man handed her and hung them beside the door. “Did Mr. Adler pay you?” she asked.
“Sure. Gave me a check when he came by the store this morning.”
Voices echoed down the staircase, Eric’s intense velvet semimonotone contrasting with Michael’s rhythmic swing and sway, like the hem of a kilt. Both tones were crisp with exaggerated courtesy. “Thank you,” Rebecca told the locksmith.
As he was going out the door Lansdale came in. “I can’t find that chair in the shed,” he announced, hanging that key, too, by the door. “Phil must’ve taken it away with him. James usually let him have broken things. Are you sure it was deliberately sawed through?”
“No,” Rebecca admitted. “And no one else saw it, either.”
Eric and Michael appeared at the foot of the stairs. Eri
c held out his hand. “I’m sorry I implied you were suspect number one. I’m responsible for the place, you understand.”
Michael looked from Eric to Rebecca and back as if unsure whether this was some kind of trap. Rebecca shook her head— if Eric was not quite as smooth as he pretended, neither was Michael as prickly. Michael shook Eric’s hand and said, “Oh aye, I understand. You’re just earnin’ your screw.”
Eric gaped incredulously. Lansdale stopped writing and started wheezing. Rebecca, wavering between mortification and hysteria, said brightly, “Here the word is salary, Michael. Pay packet. Wages.”
Michael, his complexion ruddier than usual, backpedaled toward the kitchen. “I’ll fix some tea, shall I? We still have work to do the day.”
“Please,” Rebecca called after him. Since the stones of the floor weren’t going to swallow her, she brazened it out and grinned sheepishly. Eric, slightly cross-eyed, muttered something about work in town, since he was here anyway, and escaped out the door.
Rebecca realized Lansdale was waiting for her to sign the report. She signed. The sheriff settled his hat on his head and zipped up his jacket. “Miss Reid, if you have any more problems, you let me know.”
“Thank you. I will.” Rebecca shook his hand, her fingers disappearing into his voluminous grasp, and then he, too, was gone.
Eric waited by his car, equilibrium restored. He said, “The key’s in the secretary. I guess it’s safe there. If anyone breaks into the mausoleum we’ll know we have a bunch of weirdos on our hands.”
“True enough.” Just as they turned to look at the tomb a fluff of butterscotch and white emerged from the dovecote and settled down to wash its paws. Rebecca laughed. “I bet that’s great mouse territory.”
Eric shuddered. He leaned over and gave her a perfunctory kiss, missing her mouth by an inch. “I’ll be back out on Monday to look through some papers, if you don’t mind. Sorry to have to rush off.” He was in the car, the door locked, the window rolled up, almost before he finished speaking.
She watched with affectionate exasperation as the Volvo zoomed past the mausoleum and vanished. Why, she asked herself, doesn’t he just admit he’s afraid of cats and have done with it? But no, he wouldn’t, would he? Endearing, to know he had more than one chink in his burnished armor.
She looked up the dizzying height of the castle, to the platform where they’d stood looking like the lurid cover of a paperback romance. She laughed at the absurdity of it all, and went back inside laughing, to the warm kitchen where the teakettle was whistling merrily.
Chapter Ten
Michael was slicing cheese onto pieces of bread arranged on a cookie sheet. Rebecca’s laughter withered into a rueful grimace. “I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt: that comment to Eric didn’t come out like you intended.”
He slipped the cookie sheet under the broiler, poured boiling water into the teapot, and didn’t look at her. “After all the American books and films I’ve seen you’d think I’d remember just what the four-letter words are. And there he was apologizin’, too. Made me look a proper twit.”
“Freudian slip?” she inquired dryly.
“Oh aye.” His voice was strangled by amusement or contrition or both, she couldn’t tell. “Mind you, that comment about things gone missin’ from the inventories was very instructive.”
“Michael Campbell, you are incorrigible.”
“It’s a national trait,” he assured her. “Sit down.”
Rebecca took off her coat and sat down. He plunked sandwiches and tea onto the table. The slice of tomato sunk into the hot cheese of her sandwich looked like a red smiley face. She smiled. “It’s a shame we can’t work in here all the time. It’s the warmest room in the house.”
“The house is no so bad,” replied Michael, joining her at the table.
“You’re used to a cold climate. A good thing Dun Iain isn’t in Texas. 110 degrees in August— you’d shrivel up and die.”
He rolled his eyes in horror and gulped scalding tea. “You’re from there?”
“I’m not from anywhere, really. My dad’s a machinist, and was always chasing the pot of gold at the end of the lathe. Never found it, though. He and my mother are in Florida now.”
“Florida. Disney World. When I first got here, I told Dorothy I’d be drivin’ down to Disney World for the afternoon. She laughed at me. Then she told me how far it was.”
Rebecca grinned. “To an American a hundred years is a long time. To a Britisher a hundred miles is a long way.”
“Just that,” Michael replied with his own dazzling grin.
When the dishes were empty, Rebecca began clearing them away. “I’m not so sure anymore,” she said, thinking aloud, “that there isn’t something in those rumors of treasure.”
Michael, caught halfway between seated and standing positions, finished straightening as if his joints had suddenly rusted. “You’re gettin’ carried away by that again?”
Rebecca stood balancing the plates, suppressing an impulse to hurl one at his head. Every time she was ready to take him at face value, he turned another version of that patronizing face. And she had defended him to Eric. “Even if there isn’t a treasure, someone— Phil, Dorothy, someone— believes there is.”
“No necessarily.” Michael started running water into the sink, accompanied by a robust squeeze of the detergent bottle. Suds billowed. “Whoever’s been creepin’ about probably doesn’t have such a nice, tidy motive. And there’s no law sayin’ it has to be someone we’ve met, either!”
Damn him, he had a point there. “All right, Dun Iain’s really an ancient cult center and everyone within a hundred mile radius is a Satanist and Darnley is their familiar.”
“Maybe it’s an alien invasion,” Michael countered, “and the place is filled with bug-eyed monsters in invisible space suits.”
No ploy she had ever learned for dealing with a man worked with this one. And they called women unpredictable! Rebecca tramped upstairs, collected the sticky cider cups, carried them back down and slipped them into the sink. “I’m going to work in the study,” she announced.
“I’ve one more cabinet in the Hall. What time is your friend expectin’ us?” Michael slopped dishes in and out of the sink so briskly soap bubbles swirled around him.
The man could cook and wash dishes. Truly mind-boggling. “Be ready at five-thirty,” Rebecca told him, and left.
She opened the front door. Sure enough, Darnley was waiting on the doorstep. He yawned, showing every indication he was doing her a favor by coming inside. “I’m beginning to understand,” Rebecca said to Queen Mary’s marble face, “why James named the cat after one of your husbands. Men!”
Forget about Michael. Forget about Eric, tempting as it was to indulge in a daydream or two. She hadn’t yet written Ray. Not that there’d be any point in writing a letter today, it wouldn’t go out until Monday. And there was work to do.
Rebecca collected a notebook from the Hall and saluted the suit of armor in the study. It was supposedly Charles I’s Dutch-made jousting attire, but without provenance Michael had had to leave it to the state. The first thing she saw on the secretary was the huge, ornate mausoleum key. She took it into the prophet’s chamber, opened the desk, chose a diary at random, and thrust the key inside. It caught on something.
Rebecca pulled out the entire book. The serrations of the key were hung on a photograph of a young woman taken sometime in the 1920s, judging by her bobbed and waved hair. Although she had a pretty, if rather plain, face, there was a discontented curve to the painted mouth that reminded Rebecca of Dorothy. Although Dorothy, she calculated quickly, probably hadn’t even been born when this picture was taken. The eyes were different, anyway, large and dark and oddly furtive. Had the girl sneaked out to have her hair cut despite her parents’ wishes, the typical adolescent rebellion of the period?
She turned over the thick cardboard. On the back was the stamp of a Columbus photography studio and a faded pencil scrawl. “Gem
mell”, she thought it said. A last name only. Some lady friend of James’s? A relative? She scanned the page in the diary where the picture had been. It was an account of Warren Harding’s election in 1920. No help there.
Rebecca tucked the picture and the key inside the book and returned them to the drawer. She added “Windows below platform” to the list of repairs she was making for Phil. Back in the study, she pulled a chair up to the secretary and went to work.
A portfolio of illuminated medieval manuscripts would repay preservation. Several Roman coins rattled in an old cigar box, neatly labeled “Ardoch Roman Fort”. A flint arrowhead might be prehistoric.
Darnley leaped into her lap and thrust his tail up her nose. She did a record-breaking sitting high jump and then, ashamed of herself, patted the enticingly purring creature until he settled down on her lap, snagging her jeans with his claws.
A Neolithic chert axe head. A copy of The New Yorker, wartime edition 1944. A rolled strip of Aubusson tapestry. “Okay,” said Rebecca, “where’s the rest of it?”
Her voice boomed in the afternoon silence. Darnley looked up at her disapprovingly. Despite herself, she glanced over her shoulder at the empty doorway. Nothing. She might as well be alone in the castle with the cat and the spattering sounds of her frying nerves.
There was a medieval “healing stone”, a ball of dark quartz mounted in tarnished silver. Rebecca held it up, watching the mysterious play of light and shadow in its depths. Superstition, she told herself. It couldn’t really heal a hangnail. Although strange things happened in your mind if you believed— whatever. She thrust the stone into the back of the desk and checked it off the inventory. The cat’s sleeping weight was putting her legs to sleep.
More books, more papers. No Erskine letter. She considered a Caithness Glass paperweight, a modern version of the translucent healing stone, but the museum could buy itself a hundred of those. The room was warm, and the cat was purring as he slept. Rebecca’s eyelids went down for the third time.
She was suddenly yanked into wakefulness by the sound of footsteps. Darnley leaped from her lap, his claws stabbing into her thigh. She gasped. She was awake, all right.
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