Ashes to Ashes

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “How old would you say this girl is— early twenties?” Rebecca took the photo. The dark eyes gazed impassively, almost resentfully, out at her. “Unless Athena was a child prodigy cook, she would’ve had to be at least in her thirties when this picture was taken. 1920’s, isn’t it?”

  “Aye, that’s flapper era, a’ right. Not that she looks as if she has much o’ a taste for flappin’. Do you suppose she’s the Gemmells’ daughter?”

  “That’s it! James was sweet on her, but since she was the servant’s girl, John didn’t allow them to marry, and so she married someone else and he kept this picture all his life and never married himself!”

  Michael pried her fingers from the photo and put it and the account sheet back in the diary. “Save it for your book,” he told her.

  Rebecca laughed. The hedge clippers stopped abruptly and a thunderous hammering reverberated through the house. Michael and Rebecca started for the front door, only to encounter Dorothy already there. They exchanged a quick look— how long had she been in the entry listening to them talk? Not that they had anything to hide. But her insistence on having a finger in every conversational pie was more than a little irritating.

  And the housekeeper was holding one of the extra keys that had been dangling from the hook beside the door ever since the lock had been changed. Rebecca grimaced; they’d already been over that.

  Dorothy threw open the door to reveal the stocky form of Warren Lansdale outlined against the sunshine outside. Over his shoulder Rebecca caught a glimpse of Steve Pruitt warily eyeing the squad car. Not surprising that he hadn’t enjoyed his ride to the Putnam Police Department, Heather beside him and his earring tucked away in Lansdale’s pocket.

  “Good morning,” said the sheriff, his affable smile breaking through the underbrush covering his mouth. “Sorry to interrupt your work.”

  “They were taking a coffee break,” Dorothy said. Her glasses glinted with reflected sunlight, and Rebecca couldn’t see her expression.

  “Mrs Garst,” she said, “you won’t be needing a key. Someone will always be here to let you in.”

  “I’ve worked here for thirty years,” replied Dorothy, as much to the air as to Rebecca. “A lot longer than some people have. I’ve always had a key. Just like the world today, the experienced workers get no respect.”

  Rebecca looked appealingly at Michael. It would take someone with a lot more brass than she to remind Dorothy that since no one but Michael and Rebecca herself had had keys, no one had broken in. But Michael, his brass suddenly tarnished, turned and clicked shut the door of the lumber room as if its being open a crack were of earthshaking importance.

  “It’s not that, Dorothy,” Lansdale said, stepping into the breach. “It has to do with the division of the property, and the insurance, and James’s will. Just legal red tape. You know, Eric explained it to you.”

  How clever! Rebecca thought. At the magic name, Dorothy’s sour expression grew sugary, like oversweetened lemonade. She handed Rebecca the key. “Oh, of course. Not for us mere mortals, is it, to understand the law? Here, honey, you make sure Mr. Adler knows the key is safe.”

  Michael had been practicing his response-to-Eric poker face for some time now. He didn’t turn a hair at that statement.

  “Thank you,” Rebecca told the older woman, and slipped the key into the pocket of her jeans. This time she would hide it.

  Dorothy exuded an aroma of hair spray, stale cigarette smoke and alcohol. “I already gave the other key to Phil,” she continued. “You’d better go up and get it. If I can’t have one, neither can he.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Rebecca.

  “I don’t need to be standing around here passing the time of day.” Dorothy started up the staircase, carrying herself as though she were a porcelain vase that might break. Rebecca glanced after her curiously.

  Warren hung his hat on Queen Mary’s toes. Leaving the door open, Rebecca and Michael escorted him into the kitchen, seated him at the table, and offered him a soft drink. Michael opened a can of Coke, tossed an ice cube into a glass, poured. Rebecca took can and glass out of his hands, filled the glass with ice, handed them with a napkin to Warren. Michael put on his “Americans are crazy” expression and perched on the end of the cabinet. Warren eyed Michael’s “Disarm Today” T-shirt, assumed his “Europeans are nuts” face, moved aside the mausoleum key, and nodded his thanks to Rebecca.

  “I take it,” said Michael, “that if you’d had any news about the mazer you’d have said so by now.”

  “That’s right. Afraid it’s still missing. The Putnam police took out a warrant and searched both the Pruitts’ and Heather Hines’s houses. Sandra, her stepmother, had hysterics. But the mazer wasn’t there. Neither was any dope.”

  Rebecca almost wished she hadn’t told the sheriff about smelling marijuana on Steve, but she’d figured if she was coming clean, she might as well come spotless. “They haven’t broken up the mazer, have they?” she asked, sitting down beside him.

  “We wondered if they meant to sell it for scrap. But Chief Velasco in Putnam agrees with me— it’s not that Steve and Heather are too dumb to know what to do with it, but too smart to take it to begin with. Especially Heather. You wouldn’t know to look at her, but she’s got more than air between her ears. She’s still in school, and on the honor roll.”

  Lansdale stroked his moustache. “I’ve known these kids since they were babies. Pretty wild, yes. But they have no records. And Heather’s only sixteen, a minor. Without finding the mazer actually on them, all we could do was slap them on the hands for tearing up your room, Miss Reid. Even if they’ve never really come up with much reason for picking on you. Maybe they had no reason— your room was there, like Mount Everest. My advice is to stop worrying about Steve and Heather and start looking for someone else.”

  Rebecca nodded. “Yeah, I know. There were two sets of malefactors in the house that night. That story is just unlikely enough to be likely.”

  “And there I was takin’ a snooze in the sittin’ room,” Michael moaned.

  Warren glanced speculatively at him. So it had occurred to him, too, that Michael might have taken the mazer himself. Just likely enough to be unlikely. “Surely you’ve decided to let Ray off the hook,” said Rebecca.

  “Well,” Lansdale said apologetically, “you never can tell what someone will do when their emotions get in a tangle.” He peered into his glass. Michael eyed the ceiling.

  Rebecca hid her frown by getting up and pouring more hot water into the teapot. God, she hated airing her if not dirty at least slightly smudged linen in public. She hated having smudged linen to air. Michael and Warren had to be exchanging one of those knowing masculine looks behind her back. She wouldn’t be surprised if even Darnley was smirking. She turned. Darnley was gone. Michael was swinging his feet back and forth like a child. Warren was inspecting the mausoleum key.

  “I’m just an innocent bystander,” Rebecca said, more testily than either man deserved. “Someone wants to get their hands on the artifacts, that’s all. Money’s a better motive than… ” She almost said “sex”, but swallowed the word in the nick of time. “… coming in from left field with all these theories about Ray,” she concluded awkwardly.

  Michael looked at her with his favorite analytical expression, as though she were a bacterium on a slide and he were peering at her through a microscope, safely removed from return inspection. “Left field?” he queried.

  She explained the baseball analogy.

  “I’m a Glasgow Rangers fan myself,” he said. “Football— er— soccer.”

  Lansdale laughed. “Yes, I think we are going to have to eliminate Dr. Kocurek as a suspect. Have you heard from him recently?”

  Despite her following up their conversation at Jan’s house with a letter, Ray still fondly believed he could win her back. Rebecca felt as if she’d stepped on bubble gum in July. “Another sentimental greeting card last weekend. The most recent batch of flowers I gave Jan to
take to Golden Age. I haven’t talked to him, no.”

  “Has he gotten any more postcards?”

  “Not that he told me. Just the three ‘Visit Ohio’ cards last month, typewritten, signed with a fair approximation of my signature. He did send them on to you.”

  “Oh yes. He was very helpful, putting them in a cardboard-lined photograph mailer and everything.”

  “The package was postmarked Dover, was it?” Michael asked. Rebecca shot him an indignant glare, which he turned with a shrug.

  “Yes,” said Warren, “it was. And all of the cards were postmarked Putnam. I think we’ve pretty well proved he was never here, ever since we found that drifter Mrs. Sorenson saw outside the mall. He did look a lot like Dr. Kocurek, I’ll admit.”

  Rebecca nodded. Giving Ray’s picture to the police had been the low water mark of her month. When she’d gotten it back she’d burned it, full of remorse for ever suspecting him.

  “The first card did predict the vandalism and the theft,” the sheriff went on, “but the other two were frankly imaginary. One said there’d been a fire, the other something about more thefts.”

  “Who around here would have your signature to copy?” Michael asked.

  “I wrote to Eric about coming here. I’ve been writing to Jan and Peter for years. I even wrote James Forbes after I first learned about Dun Iain, asking for information. Even though he never answered, my letter could still be here somewhere.”

  Warren made water rings across the table with the bottom of his glass.

  “And someone could have found one of your letters to the Sorensons in the trash, for example.”

  “Dorothy said something about Slash tearing open garbage bags. But to take a letter from the trash argues an awful lot of premeditation, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to think,” said Michael darkly. “You thought some things had really been stolen, Sheriff. What about Dorothy?”

  Lansdale made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t worry about Dorothy. Her bark’s a lot worse than her bite.”

  “The cards, then?” asked Rebecca.

  “We don’t know that who took the mazer had anything to do with the cards.”

  “Occam’s razor,” muttered Michael. At the sheriff’s puzzled look he explained, “The simplest explanation is the most likely— the same person did both the theft and the cards.”

  Warren drained his glass, the ice cubes tinkling together. He delicately wiped his moustache. Rebecca’s dress turned slowly in the draft. The place always has a draft, she thought. Funny little breezes licking the back of her hypersensitive neck.

  Steve sauntered in the door. The only indication that he was aware of the three pairs of eyes watching him was his exaggeratedly relaxed walk. He got a glass, ran water in it, drank, sauntered out.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Reid,” said Warren as Steve’s footsteps passed through the entry and out the front door. “I know this has been real upsetting for you. But until something else happens, we’re just going to have to leave it where we are now. Not that anything else should happen. Chances are you’ll be able to finish out your work in peace and quiet.”

  “I hope so,” said Rebecca.

  Michael leaped down and headed for the door. “Speakin’ of which, all I’ve done the day is turn out some cabinets.”

  “I’d better be going, too,” Warren said. “Keep me posted.” Rebecca escorted him to the door and stood watching him drive away.

  The sunlight of the cool Indian summer morning was so rich she could almost gather it in her hands. She’d have to collect Michael and go for another walk. On yesterday’s jaunt into the woods they’d found an old mill; after exploring that for an hour she’d had to wash her Nikes. But all Michael had had to do, grinning condescendingly, was hose down his wellies.

  Steve was raking the drifts of sodden red leaves into piles on the lawn. If Rebecca squinted she could make out the interstate, the cars moving pricks of light beyond the bare branches of the trees. Odd, how at night the headlights from the farm road outside the gates would reflect on the dovecote. She’d seen it several times now.

  Darnley prowled through the bare sticks tufted with an occasional orange petal that had been the marigolds. Slash sniffed around the mausoleum. Wouldn’t it be nice to be an animal, Rebecca thought, and have no worries?

  Slash spotted Darnley, emitted a bass woof, and churned his long legs into a gallop. Darnley jumped straight up, spun in midair, and streaked for the house. Rebecca danced out of his way. On second thought, she told herself, at least she wasn’t in peril of her life. She slammed the door in Slash’s face, locked it, and went back into the kitchen for her dress.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rebecca took her dress to her room and collected her own spiral notebook filled with notes and sketches. If she didn’t have the Erskine letter, she could at least study Mary’s needlework, letters from contemporaries, and Rizzio’s guitar with its odd harmonic of memory. Her dissertation wasn’t on the letter specifically, after all, but on the Queen of Scots’ role in 16th century politics. And yet she needed bells and whistles, like the proof of King James’s ancestry one way or the other.

  Michael was sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the large fourth floor bedroom, leafing through a photograph album. The shorter strands of his hair framed his face that in contemplation seemed less sharply angled; the longer strands lay with deceptive softness over the neckband of his shirt.

  Dorothy was in the fifth floor bedroom fluffing the haunted pillow so forcefully she must’ve been trying to exorcise the impression of Elspeth’s body. On the sixth floor Phil was replacing a bit of wood paneling that had shrunk away from the bricks of the fireplace. “I’ll paint it tomorrow,” he told Rebecca. “By January it should blend right in.”

  “Looks great,” she told him. And, with a deep breath, “Mr. Pruitt, I’m afraid Dorothy wasn’t supposed to give you a key to the front door.”

  He blinked at her, giving her no help.

  “What with all the legal considerations,” she blundered on, “only Michael and I can have keys. So if I could have yours back again, please.”

  Wordlessly Phil pulled a key chain from his pocket and detached the door key. Dangling from the chain was a plastic photo holder displaying a picture of a chubby-faced baby and a woman with the straight, parted hair of the late sixties. The mysterious Mrs. Pruitt and Steve, no doubt. “Thank you,” Rebecca said, and put the key into her pocket with the one she’d wrested from Dorothy.

  “Miss Reid,” Phil began. He glanced at his worn workboots, jangling the key chain. “Miss Reid, was that the sheriff downstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “Has he found that fancy cup thing yet?”

  Rebecca took a step backward; he should’ve been staring resentfully at her. She’d called the police down on his son and a search party into his home. “No,” she said, and added, “Warren doesn’t think Steve took it.”

  “He didn’t. But if the boy needs to make some restitution for what he did to your room… . “Phil ducked again, embarrassed but forcing himself to see it through.

  Rebecca visualized Washington with his little hatchet, “Papa, I cannot tell a lie.”

  “No,” she said. “That’s all over and done with.”

  He looked up. Those basset hound eyes made her feel like he’d caught her pushing old ladies into gutters and stealing candy from babies. “He was just playing a prank. He and his little friend— they didn’t mean no harm. Kids will be kids, you know. He wouldn’t hurt no one. He didn’t saw through that chair. I showed it to the officers who came to the house.” He stopped for breath, an entire paragraph of speech almost too much for him.

  “It’s all over and done with,” she repeated, wishing desperately for something she could say that would comfort the man.

  Unless Phil was acting, burbled that irritatingly analytical part of her mind. He could be attacking with pathos before he could be attacked with facts. Maybe he
was plotting with Steve, or with Dorothy, or with little green men from Mars. “Thank you,” Rebecca said, and rushed for the staircase.

  Dorothy was arranging the cut-glass bottles. Michael hadn’t budged. Rebecca returned to the kitchen, gave the broth a quick stir, and pulled the laundry from the dryer. She put the door keys in the drawer beneath the phone.

  The diaries sat on the table. If she stopped to read them, on the off chance they mentioned the Erskine letter, she wouldn’t be working on anything else. If Michael found the letter he’d give it to her, if only so he could strut his knowledge.

  There was the book with the photograph and the ledger sheet. There was the one that contained the scrap in James’s handwriting she had found in the desk: “— ever problem you are having you have brought upon yourself. I cannot help you any more than I already have. Your threats are… ”

  What was not there was the key to the mausoleum.

  Rebecca stood, her hands on her hips, staring at the tabletop. She bent and studied the floor. Neither offered any answers. Warren had been looking at the key. Michael had left the room first. She’d shut the door behind Warren and had seen both Phil and Dorothy upstairs. Steve had only been in the kitchen when they were there, too, and that was the only time the front door had been left open all day. She hadn’t the foggiest idea whether the key had been there when she came in to get her dress.

  Michael might have taken the key. So might Warren. But why? Eric had said, “If anyone breaks into the mausoleum, we’ll know we have a bunch of weirdos on our hands.”

  Rebecca shoved the chairs against the table. First thing to do was to ask Michael. Then— well, she’d already included Warren on her list of suspects, just on general principles. For all she knew Dorothy and Warren were really Heather’s parents, or were conspiring to sell her into white slavery, or had manufactured both Heather and Steve in some basement laboratory.