by Rebecca York
Her tongue flicked across her lips and his attention riveted to the small feminine gesture.
Did she believe that story about the ghost?
Maybe it was best if she did. He’d been drawn to her in the darkness of the night, taken liberties with her. Now he was thinking that he should leave her be. For her sake. Perhaps for his, too. Because the questions she’d asked him had been disturbing, and he wasn’t prepared to deal with them. Not yet. Maybe never.
BREE MOISTENED her dry lips, thinking that she couldn’t believe this outrageous conversation, even though she’d heard it with her own ears. “Stop,” she told Nola. “What are you trying to do?”
“Am I doing something?” Nola feigned innocence.
Then the sound of small feet hurrying along the wooden floor in the hall captured Bree’s attention.
Moments later Dinah stepped through the door, her face slightly flushed, her gaze going immediately to Bree. She was still clutching the stuffed kitty that she’d been holding the night before. “I thought you might be gone,” she said, her voice slightly breathless.
“Of course I’m here. I’m going to be your teacher. I wouldn’t just leave.”
The child nodded. “Did you have a good night?”
Bree stared into the little girl’s anxious face. The question was startlingly similar to the one Nola had asked, and for a terrible moment, Bree was afraid that Dinah had heard the conversation. Would she have understood it? Bree didn’t know. And at the moment, she didn’t want to find out.
Taking the question at face value, she answered, “I was so tired, I went right to sleep.” Then, switching the subject away from herself, she asked, “So what do you like for breakfast?”
Dinah glanced at Bree’s bowl. “Can I have cereal?”
“Of course. Let me help you.” Bree half expected Nola to object, but the woman only sat sipping her tea.
As if she knew the child had arrived, Mrs. Martindale bustled in again, a big smile on her face. “Good morning to you,” she chirped. “You look like a ray of sunshine.”
In response to the housekeeper’s greeting, Dinah’s face lit up. “Good morning to you!” she returned.
Bree watched the woman and the child. Obviously they enjoyed each other’s company. Probably Mrs. Martindale’s friendship was helping the little girl cope with life here.
The housekeeper turned to her. “I’ve been giving Dinah some lessons to do. Of course I’m not a teacher, but I thought I could help her keep up with her studies.”
“Yes, that’s good.” Bree turned to the little girl. “After breakfast you can show me what work you’ve been doing. Would you like to do that?”
“Yes.”
The housekeeper took away the dirty dishes, then exited the room.
Bree heard Nola make a harrumphing noise. Pushing back her chair, she stood and said, “Well, you two seem to be getting along so well, I assume you’ll be having dinner in the schoolroom.”
“That would be fine,” Bree said.
“One thing you should know. Don’t turn your back on her,” Nola said as she marched out of the room.
Chapter Six
Bree turned quickly, her gaze going to the little girl.
For a moment she caught an expression on the child’s face that chilled her. Then the look was gone.
“I’d like my cereal now,” Dinah said, her cat clamped under her arm as she moved to the buffet. It was high for her, and she stood on tiptoes to reach for the cereal box.
Bree crossed the room. “Let me help you.” She set up Dinah at the table with a bowl of cereal and a glass of juice.
Bree watched the little girl hunch over her breakfast. She wanted to ask what Nola had meant by that cautionary comment. If Bree wasn’t mistaken, it sounded as if the woman was deliberately trying to drive a wedge between her and the girl. Or had something bad really happened? Something it was important to know.
Picking up her cup, she went back to the cart and busied herself fixing more tea.
She hoped she looked calm, though her insides were jittery. She’d suddenly thought about a story she’d read in an English literature course in college, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. The similarities to her own situation were startling. It was about a woman who’d been hired as a governess to two parentless children. The boy and girl had seemed nice at first, but then it turned out that they’d been corrupted by a previous governess and her lover whose ghosts came back to haunt the children.
With a shudder, Bree ordered herself to put the tale out of her mind. It was just a ghost story meant to be disturbing, and it had nothing to do with her—and nothing to do with Dinah.
When she turned, she found the child watching her. She forced a smile. “As soon as you’re finished, you can show me the way to the schoolroom and we can see what you’ve been doing.”
When Dinah finished breakfast, they retraced the route Bree had taken in the morning, climbing the stairs and then walking down the hall past Bree’s room to a door that was just around another corner.
As she crossed the threshold, Dinah turned on the light. It was as though they’d stepped into an old-fashioned, one-room schoolhouse, with blackboards, several dark, wooden, desk-and-chair combinations and a teacher’s desk at the front.
Bree walked to the desk and looked through the neatly stacked books and papers. “What are you doing in math?” she asked.
“Addition,” Dinah answered promptly, as though eager to be of help.
It felt strange to be in this classroom with only one pupil, Bree thought as she found a sheet with suitable problems and handed them to the girl. “Why don’t you do some of these while I look over the materials Miss Carpenter left. Do you have a pencil?”
“Yes.”
For the next half hour, while her student worked on the addition problems, Bree studied lesson plans.
But the hair on the back of her neck kept prickling and she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her—just as she was watching Dinah.
Was Troy nearby, in a spot where he could observe them without being seen? Or was somebody else checking up on the schoolroom?
She got up and walked across the polished floor, pretending to inspect the pictures of birds and animals on the bulletin board. She saw no obvious peepholes—or hidden cameras, for that matter. But that didn’t mean anything. There could be a microphone in the light fixture, for all she knew.
A small noise made her head turn. Dinah was looking at her.
“Yes?”
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
“Sure. You don’t have to ask my permission. You can just get up and leave when you have to.”
Dinah nodded and slipped out of her seat, taking Alice with her.
Actually, she’d handed Bree an opportunity to snoop around. During the ten minutes she was alone in the room, she tried to make a more thorough inspection of the walls, the fixtures and the floor, but she found nothing.
Dinah returned and went back to work.
The next time she and the girl both looked up, Bree smiled and said, “Shall we have recess? Would you like to go for a walk?”
Dinah looked surprised, but she nodded in agreement then said, “But I’m not supposed to go near the cliffs. Daddy says the edges can be unstable.”
“Unstable. That’s a big word. Do you know what it means?”
“It means pieces could fall off, and you could fall with them. See, the waves can come up high sometimes and eat away at the dirt. But you don’t know it because you can’t see the ocean side.”
“Well, you do know a lot about it!”
The child glowed with the compliment.
“Thank you for warning me. Can you show me a way out of the house besides the front door?”
Dinah picked up her stuffed animal, then led Bree down a back stairway to a door that opened into the garden. Bree recognized a few of the plants—azaleas and rhododendrons—with a few blooms.
Some beds wer
e weedy. Others had obviously been tended recently. Paving stones wound through the flower beds, then gave way to a gravel path that paralleled the cliff. In the background was a stand of large pine trees— some with broken branches leaning on the ground.
They passed a section of well-tended rosebushes and she paused beside a pinwheel-shaped pink blossom. “Do you know what these are?”
“Some of the Heritage roses. They come from old houses around here. Daddy got them at the botanical garden.”
“Oh.”
“Daddy likes to garden,” Dinah volunteered.
“What other plants does he have besides the roses?”
“We have a very fine collection of heathers and heaths,” Dinah answered, obviously repeating what she’d heard a grown-up say.
“You know a lot about the garden,” Bree marveled. “More than I ever did.”
“Daddy taught me. We have Pacific Coast irises, but they’re not blooming now. And fuchsias and California poppies and all kinds of ferns.”
The child seemed more animated than at any other time. She must love this garden—perhaps because it represented a connection to her father.
To keep the focus on Troy, Bree asked, “Did your daddy read you Alice in Wonderland?”
The child’s eyes widened. “How do you know?”
“Well, Alice has a cat named Dinah. I was wondering if that was why you named your kitty Alice?”
“Yes. Daddy thought it was a nice twist,” the girl said, and Bree could hear Troy’s turn of phrase in the comment.
“I was really disappointed that your daddy wasn’t here to meet me. When was the last time you saw him?” Bree asked softly.
The girl scuffed a foot against the gravel of the path. “I can’t remember.”
The answer sounded like an evasion.
“Did he seem worried about something? Upset?”
Dinah shook her head, and Bree was pretty sure the child was hiding something. She wanted to press for information, but at the same time she understood children pretty well and she sensed the little girl’s fragility. She was under a lot of strain living here, and Bree didn’t want to make it seem as though the new teacher had come here to ask a lot of personal questions.
In the next moment the child changed the subject abruptly. “Nola told you I was bad,” she said in a small voice. “I don’t want you to think I’m bad.”
“I don’t!” Bree answered instantly. “But…do you know what you did to make her mad?”
Silently, Dinah looked down at the tips of her shoes. She heaved a little sigh. “She thinks I threw a dish over the stair railing.” Her voice went high and strained. “She thinks I did it on purpose because I wanted to hurt her. But I didn’t drop it on purpose—honest. It slipped out of my fingers when I was leaning over to see who was there and it crashed on the hall floor.”
“And she yelled at you?”
“Yes!” The answer quavered out on a muffled sob. Tears glistened in her eyes, but she managed to hold them back, and Bree wondered what it must be like for a child to feel as if she had to hide her emotions.
“I’m here to help you,” she said softly. “I’m not just your teacher. I’m your friend. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
Dinah nodded.
“So is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“I…guess not,” the little girl answered, and Bree suspected there was more she could have said, but that everything wasn’t going to come out at once.
“Okay. Then maybe we should go back to the classroom and get a little more done. You can read to me out of your reading book.”
They spent the rest of the morning at work. Then Mrs. Martindale came up to say that lunch was ready.
They all trooped down to the kitchen, where the housekeeper had set out chicken salad sandwiches and bowls of cut-up fruit.
As she ate her sandwich, Bree felt torn. She’d established a rapport with Dinah, and she wanted to keep up the momentum. On the other hand, she had an equally important job—finding out what had happened to the girl’s father.
So after lunch she declared an afternoon break, saying she was jet-lagged and needed to rest.
Back in her room, Bree pulled out her suitcase and stopped dead as she looked at the contents. Everything was approximately where she had put it, yet she couldn’t help thinking that somebody had searched her things.
Who had been in here?
It would be dangerous to dismiss anyone in the house out of hand. Not even the housekeeper, who seemed nice. She couldn’t even omit Troy. One thing was sure: some sexy man was on the loose. Either Troy or a man nobody was talking about. Another thought snuck up on her and she went very still. Lord, could that have been the ghost who’d come to her bed last night? she wondered, suddenly unable to discount Nola’s story. No! Either that had been Troy or somebody pretending to be him.
She deliberately pulled her mind away from the ghost and back to the rifled suitcase. The only resident of Ravencrest she could eliminate as being in her room that morning was Dinah. The girl had been with her the whole time. Mentally stopping short, Bree revised that observation. The child hadn’t been with her every minute. She’d asked to go to the bathroom, and she’d been gone for ten minutes.
Bree grimaced. She hated suspecting a youngster. But the thought wouldn’t go away.
She stared at the clothing for several moments, then removed it so she could get at the bottom of the suitcase. The lining had a special compartment where she’d slipped a few papers.
Opening the Velcro-fastened seam, she pulled out a flat envelope, then extracted the map that Helen had sent her. It showed the floor plan of the house with various rooms marked. The schoolroom was on it. So was Troy’s room—a master suite with a bedroom, sitting room, palatial bath and enough closet space for an archduke.
First, she studied the map, then folded it and tucked it into her pocket before getting out something else she might need—the little tool kit disguised as a manicure set.
Equipped now for prowling, she left her room and headed for the back stairs that Dinah had shown her. She had almost reached them when Graves stepped around a corner, pulling her up short. Her heart leaped into her throat.
He gave her a considering look. “Where are you going?”
“Um, to my classroom,” she improvised.
“You’re going the wrong way. It’s back there.” He gestured with his hand.
“Yes, thanks. This house is so confusing.”
She felt his eyes on her as she backtracked along the hall. That had been close. Maybe she’d better save her snooping expedition for another day—when she’d retrieved her gun.
AFTER WAITING SEVERAL minutes, she retraced her steps to the kitchen and found Mrs. Martindale washing dishes. She hesitated, wondering if it was safe to ask some questions about Troy and Dinah and the Sterlings. Since she obviously liked Dinah, the housekeeper might be a good source of information. But could she be trusted not to repeat any questions to the Sterlings?
Starting cautiously, Bree said, “I was glad to see that you have such a good relationship with Dinah.”
“She’s a sweet little mite.”
“And so mature for her age.”
Mrs. Martindale rinsed out a large pot and set it in the dish drainer. “I think she grew up fast when her mother died.”
“What about her father?”
“What about him?”
“Does she get much support from him?”
“He’s not in shape to give anyone emotional support at the moment, poor man.”
“Yes. Mrs. Sterling said he had a nervous breakdown.”
The housekeeper sighed. “He took it hard when his wife died. I think he never got over that. But I don’t really feel comfortable talking about my employer.”
“Yes, I understand. I really came here to ask if you know where I can find a flashlight.”
The housekeeper’s gaze turned appraising. “Why do you need one?”
> “The light’s burned out in my closet,” Bree lied again. “And I can’t see to put in a new one.”
“Then take a bulb with you, too.”
“Yes, thanks.”
“Just bring me back the flashlight. I like to know where it is, in case we have a power failure.”
“Do you have them frequently?” Bree asked.
“Now and again,” the housekeeper answered, opening one of the cabinets and producing the requested item.
“Okay. Thanks. I’ll give the flashlight back to you at dinner. In the schoolroom, right?”
“At six-thirty.”
Bree thanked Mrs. Martindale again, thinking that the woman was either a loyal employee or she had her own reasons for keeping silent about Troy.
When Bree returned to her room, the first thing she did was make sure the closet was empty. Then she checked the bathroom and looked under the bed. When she was sure she was alone, she reentered the closet, unscrewed the bulb, cracked it with the heel of her shoe and dumped it in the trash. After replacing it with the new one, she found the panel that led to the passageway and worked the mechanism. Moments later she was staring down the dark tunnel that led away from her room.
This time she retraced her steps carefully, shining the light on the floor, the walls and even the ceiling. When she judged she was getting close to the place where Troy had saved her from falling, she kept the light focused downward so that she’d be sure to see the chasm in time.
Turning the corner, she found it easily, a shudder racking her as she felt the cold drifting up from the pit. Cautiously she moved toward the edge, inspecting the floor.
The gun could have gone over the edge, but she hadn’t heard it fall down there. It was more likely up here. Though she searched for several minutes, she found no sign of the weapon.
Was it in the pit, after all, or had somebody come through here and scooped it up? Who? And how had they gotten in here?
She shone her light along the ledge she’d walked the night before. Now that she could see it better, it looked awfully narrow. The thought of going back there held little appeal. But while she had the light, maybe she could figure out where Troy had disappeared. She inched along the walkway again, breathing a sigh when she made it to the other side.
