Her knees buckled and deposited her onto the couch, wet clothes and all. She took off her glasses, vaguely surprised they were still on her face, and mopped at them with a tissue. When she put them back on she saw that the books were still in order and the dishes still gleamed in the drainer. Except for admitting the cat, the police team had come and gone invisibly. So far, only the mysterious nocturnal visitor and the ghosts had left any hints of their presence. Perhaps last night’s visitor was one of the ghosts. Or perhaps he or she was only too corporeal, and had tonight been behind the wheel of a car. Oh God, oh God.
Alasdair descended the staircase, walked straight to the kitchen, and ran water into the tea kettle. They might be alone at last, but what he’d ask next would not be personal but professional. Had she seen anything? She collected the bits and pieces of imagery clinging like lint to her memory. No, she’d seen only the thick gray air and the tail lights of the car winking as it disappeared into the distance. Which, considering the range of visibility, wasn’t all that distant.
Aha. “The lights. The car that almost hit us didn’t have its headlights on. I saw the tail lights come on right after it passed.”
“I’m thinking it did hit you.” Alasdair spooned tea into the pot. “Driving without lights, were they? They were after hitting you, then.”
“Well, no—they could have left the lighted parking lot and not realized their lights weren’t on. They could have had too much to drink. In fact, that’s probably the explanation, right there. It was an accident.”
“Then they’d have been better off stopping and rendering aid.”
“Maybe they didn’t realize they, um, hit us. Maybe they did, and were scared, and weren’t thinking straight. It was an accident, wasn’t it?”
Alasdair committed himself to nothing more than pouring boiling water into the pot.
Jean pulled her jacket more tightly across her chest. The room was cold. She was cold, damp, chilled through and through. And not only physically. She could feel her psyche contracting into a ball, like an armadillo showing only its scales. Not that she’d seen many live armadillos, just armadillo bodies lying alongside a road, creased with tire tracks . . . It was an accident.
Alasdair’s strong hands were extending a mug of tea toward her. She took it, carefully, so it wouldn’t slop into her lap. Its warmth was almost painful against her chilled fingers, but the fragrant steam wafting upward, caressing her face, and her grimace loosened.
Alasdair switched on the anachronistic but welcome electric fire. He paused by the chair to offer Mandrake a quick ear-scratch. The cat tilted his head into Alasdair’s hand, smirking, then blinked in disdain when Alasdair broke off the contact and walked back to the couch and Jean.
Given a less fraught occasion, Jean would have smiled—Alasdair probably knew the secret cat passwords, he was so feline in mood and movement himself. But now, now she didn’t.
He stood next to the couch, arms crossed, looming protectively. “Drink your tea.”
She almost returned, You can stop fussing over me now, but he didn’t deserve that. Obediently, she forced the cup between her teeth and drank. The hot liquid oozed downward into the fist of her stomach. Not that she was going to rekindle any glow. Third time was not the charm.
“I shouldn’t have sat you down outside the police van,” Alasdair said. “I shouldn’t have let Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all see you talking with me.”
“Why not talk to me in front of everyone? There’s always been an unholy alliance of reporters and police. And our association last month is a matter of public record. Heck, I told Kirsty I was working with you, just to salve my conscience. This isn’t your fault.”
His face was still carefully blank. “Last time I let you work with me and you found yourself in danger.”
“Last time I volunteered to work with you.”
“Who came to whom doesn’t matter.”
Yes it does, Jean thought. The day with its exposures and denials had been long and embarrassing enough without him becoming paternalistic.
“This time,” he said, “you’re away to Edinburgh the morn. Away from this.”
“No way.”
“Jean . . .”
“I mean, yeah, I know, it wouldn’t look good on your record having a colleague . . .” She bit her tongue before it said the word die. That came too close to the territory occupied by Sawyer’s insult at the police station, reminding Alasdair of the tragic situation with his former partner. Which had earned him a promotion into this solitary responsibility, where passersby were less likely to smell the rotting albatross hanging around his neck.
He didn’t reply, but snowflakes began to settle on his expression.
It wasn’t all about him, the reasonable part of her mind told her. He was worried for her because he cared for her. She probably was in danger. The irrational part of her mind, the part that was still palpitating, shoved the reasonable part aside. “If someone is trying to get me because I’m helping you out, that implies I know something that could be dangerous to that someone. And I don’t.”
“You might not know what you’re knowing, Jean. Someone nicked your notebook and an hour later you’re hit by a car. You might could have been killed.”
“Maybe I only misplaced the book. Maybe it was taken by a casual pickpocket.” She’d tried those rationales already. They were even less likely to work now. He was right, and that just made her more stubborn. “Maybe the crazy driver was trying to get Roger, trying again to stop the expedition. I just happened to be there. What if he thought Roger was walking with Tracy? She and I are about the same size, well, without her shoes. But whoever it was couldn’t have seen her shoes anyway.”
“If someone was having a go at Roger, then it was no accident, was it?” Alasdair’s frosty expression was taking on a crust, the crisp layer of ice atop a drift of snow.
Jean knew that at any moment she’d break through and be in it up to her neck. But she heard her voice keep on talking. “This is exactly what I was afraid would happen. What if I put myself in danger, what if I put someone else in danger, what if I . . .” She left the met you again twisting gently in the chill air. “Don’t waste your time giving me an engraved invitation to bug out. It’s too late for that. I’m here. I’m part of the case. I have to find out what the hell is going on. I’m not going to run away. I’m not . . .”
Alasdair finished her sentence for her. “Doing what I’m telling you to do. I’m that great a threat to you, am I?”
And she couldn’t fool him. He graciously granted her permission to follow his orders and then admitted he knew exactly how she’d react to such noblesse oblige. Maybe that shared look hadn’t meant much after all.
“I’ll have a constable outside for the night, so you can have some sleep,” Alasdair said, retreating toward the vestibule. At the velvet curtain he paused to send her a formal, almost stern, backwards glance. Then he was gone, the door shut so silently behind him the sleeping cat didn’t twitch a whisker.
She wished he’d just gone ahead and slammed it so hard pictures fell off the walls and a rudely-awakened Mandrake shuffled off one of his lives. Gulping down the rest of her tea—it had cooled just enough in Alasdair’s blizzard blast that she didn’t burn her mouth—Jean stamped halfway up the stairs. At that point a vicious twinge in her knee brought her to a dead stop.
Gasping, she hung onto the banister and wondered if the pain was in her knee so much as in the foot she’d just shot. Damn Alasdair! Why hadn’t he sat down on the couch beside her instead of looming? Yes, he’d intended to convey professional protectiveness. No, he hadn’t intended to patronize her. Yes, he’d realized too late how she was reading his concern. No, he hadn’t deserved what she’d said.
She remembered Roger and Tracy glowering at each other over their tea. A crisis was just as likely to separate a couple as bring them together. At least Roger and Tracy were a couple. She and Alasdair were simply a mutual threat, it seemed. They could so easily h
ave taken the accident or attempt on her life or whatever the hell it was as an excuse to further their detente. But no.
Now he'd hunker down in his emotional keep and pull up his drawbridge. The next time she approached with a flag of truce, he’d pour not boiling oil but ice water through the murder holes. Damn it all anyway.
Favoring her knee, swearing less at it than at herself and Alasdair combined, Jean hobbled into the upper hall. Where the erstwhile locked door stood wide open. Odd, how the police team had left the door open when they’d been so careful to leave everything else undisturbed. Still, here was her chance.
Reaching into the shadowed room, she fumbled for, found, and flicked on the light switch, and only then realized what she’d done. If savaging Alasdair meant she would be freed from her fear of the dark, she’d just go on and be afraid of the dark, thanks anyway.
From the shadows leaped the shapes of three dilapidated cardboard boxes, a couple of framed paintings, a little table with one broken leg, and a set of dining chairs with beautifully carved backs but seat cushions in tatters. Jean was looking at exactly what Iris and then Kirsty had said was in the room, old family stuff.
The room was, however, large enough for a single bedroom. Maybe Iris was aware of the ghost and didn’t want to stampede any guests. Maybe she simply needed the storage space. The room had never been renovated. Large areas of the floorboards were free of varnish and deeply scratched. The swirls of the plaster ceiling were stained as though by candle soot. The sprigged wallpaper was faded and tattered. Like the velvet in the glass case in the library revealing the shapes of vanished antiquities, slightly darker rectangles showed where pictures had once hung—the framed Nessie photos that were now downstairs, perhaps?
Jean stepped further into the room. The air was still and cold and smelled of wet dog combined with something sweet. Wrinkling her nose, she tilted the two paintings toward the light. Neither was an original Van Gogh or a stolen Rembrandt, more’s the pity.
One was a portrait of a young woman. Jean recognized Eileen, although this painting was earlier than the photo in the library, before circumstances had whetted her features. Her pose was a graceful curve from her bowed head with its stylish bobbed hair to her dropped shoulder to the rosebud dangling from her listless hand. Her Art Deco earrings were interlaced silver-nubbled ribbons studded with either gems or glass. The dreamy smile on her averted face suggested she was considering some secret fancy beyond the frame of the picture.
Was that what Ambrose had seen in her, a Mona Lisa to his Leonardo, the embodiment of his romantic fantasies—over and beyond her financial expectations, that is?
The other painting was a copy of one of those turgid Victorian domestic scenes that had hit the bottom of contemporary taste so hard they were probably about to bounce back into popularity. Jean let the paintings and their dingy frames fall back into place and opened one of the cardboard boxes to reveal an ancient set of encyclopedias. Aha, here was the source of the musty smell. Gagging, she folded the top of the box back down and opened the other boxes.
One held what looked like dusty old needlework curtains or bed hangings, half eaten-away by time and mice, exuding an odor that reminded Jean of over-ripe roses . . . She sneezed. Quickly she glanced into the third box to find tissue-wrapped dishes. Not fine Chinese porcelain, just ordinary earthenware. Perhaps these were the dishes from which Ambrose and Eileen had taken their tea in the summerhouse.
Whatever, there was nothing in the room that rose to the level of personal papers. She hoped the police crew had unpacked the boxes, because the only way she was going to do it was if the Holy Grail was hidden beneath those curtains, and her particular brand of ESP didn’t run to homing in on sacred relics.
Just as Jean turned toward the door, she noticed a yellowed square of cardboard lying beneath one of the chairs. She picked it up. Ah, here was another trace of the police search—the dust was just as thick beneath it as anywhere else on the floor.
She turned the cardboard over to see a faded photo of Ambrose and Eileen dressed in wedding garments, posing in front of a man wearing clerical garb. Each tea-colored photo-face was very stiff and correct, as though trying out for a dictionary illustration of the word “propriety.”
Jean’s first thought was to wonder what the minister had thought of Ambrose’s arcane tendencies. Her second was to note that while Ambrose and the minister were the same height, Eileen’s white-veiled head didn’t even reach her groom’s shoulder. She must have been tiny, shorter than Jean herself, perhaps only five feet tall. Her face was so smooth and unlined, lacking the topography that years would carve, that in the glare of the photographer’s lights it faded almost to invisibility. Ambrose’s horse-length face, however, was so craggy that the shadows painted it starkly, making him look older than he had been—about thirty-five, if Jean remembered correctly. Eileen had not survived to be thirty-five.
Jean set the photo down on the chair, wondering why it wasn’t in the house. Maybe Iris didn’t know it was here? But she had to know that her mother’s portrait was here.
Shutting the door to the no-longer-mysterious room, Jean grabbed her night clothes and proceeded to the bathroom. She felt bruised all over, but didn’t actually find any black and blue patches except for around her knee. Not even on her upper arm, where Alasdair had grasped her like a cat a kitten, gently between bone-crunching jaws. She hated to think what Roger looked like. But envisioning Roger naked, with or without bruises, was not on her list of priorities.
She wondered what Eileen had thought on her wedding night. Although people wouldn’t necessarily get naked even for that occasion, not in an era ending even as Ambrose climbed into bed with his young and winsome wife.
Jean stepped into the shower cubicle and turned on the hot water. Oh my, yes—she hadn’t realized how cold she was until the hot water sluiced over her shoulders and down her back. You couldn’t beat a hot shower or bath for pure sensuality.
Not that her own wedding night had been particularly sensual. She and Brad had been so young, they’d never enlisted in the sexual revolution, and so went into battle with less than basic training, book-learning only. Which was more than an upper-class girl like Eileen probably had. Ambrose, now, he’d been a soldier. And Gordon Fraser had said Ambrose was too much like Crowley when it came to women. Jean couldn’t see Ambrose with groupies, but you never knew.
Even she, when she’d been young and a prisoner of her own nervous system, had found Brad’s still waters appealing. Comforting, in a way. Safe. Then she’d realized his still waters not only didn’t run deep, they didn’t run at all. Ghosts? Monsters in the loch? Yes, dear, if you say so. Pass the salt.
The years in Brad’s damping field had layered her nerves with insulation. During the lawsuit she’d used that insulation for survival, then realized she was looking at no more than surviving for the rest of her life. And now, thanks to fate and Alasdair Cameron, she was pressed up against the window of her own personality, watching trains going round and round, and jack-in-the-boxes leaping upward, and drums drumming and pipers piping and even that partridge sitting in a pear tree pulling its own feathers out. Be careful what you ask for.
She’d asked to find herself. Maybe “herself” included Alasdair, whose waters ran deep and fast indeed beneath his shell . . . . Don’t go there, she told herself. And she answered, It’s too late for that, too. She and Alasdair were destined to go there and back again, although what would happen then she couldn’t imagine. Or could, rather. That was the problem. The scenario was playing out the way she—the way both of them—had both feared and anticipated.
Jean let the stream of hot water wash away any remaining mud and soothe the bruises and aches. Let it erode the rough corners of her own ego. If it wasn’t about Alasdair, it wasn’t about her, either. Ridiculous, that she’d find a potential lover more threatening than a letter-sending, boat-exploding, attack-driving criminal.
Suddenly she felt claustrophobic. The cubicle seem
ed like a coffin. Turning off the water, she stepped out, grabbed a towel, and congratulated herself for taking a shower without imitating any classic Hitchcock scenarios.
Lotion, hair-dryer, flannel nightgown, thick socks, a terry-cloth robe, and she was shocked to see the bedside clock showing ten-thirty p.m. Surely it was three or four a.m. Sunday morning. But no, Saturday went on, and on, and on. Or could have been cut as short as her life, less than two hours ago.
Once again practicing denial, Jean collected her laptop and carryall, bundled up the duvet from the bed, and headed for the stairs. She more wired than tired. She might as well read the transcripts. That would give her an excuse to call Alasdair tomorrow and eat some crow, feathers and all . . .
She stopped dead in the center of the hall. Hadn’t she closed the door to the mystery room? It was standing open, the shapes inside looking like stoop-shouldered gnomes in the darkness. She managed to reach around the armload of duvet without scraping her nettle-stung hand and pull the door shut. The latch clicked into place. Check.
Not one other sound disturbed the chilly stillness of the house. Okay, Jean thought, and limped on toward the stairs wondering just how many doors she’d closed recently, and if any of them were likely to open back up.
Chapter Twenty
Between her stiff, sore knee and the duvet, she had to negotiate her way carefully down the steep staircase. Maybe Eileen had met her fate on the stairs, maybe not, but Jean didn’t intend to join her in the fourth dimension and ask.
Between the soothing aura of the electric fire and the soothing aura of the sleeping cat, the living room was almost hot. Just as Jean dumped her things on the couch, her twitching ears picked up the sound of voices. She tiptoed to the window and peeked out between the closed drapes. Alasdair’s constable was confronting the Ducketts. “. . . just wanted to see if she needs anything,” Patti was saying.
The Murder Hole Page 19
