by Tamara Berry
I plaster a smile on my face and turn to him, determined not to show any of the anxiety I’m feeling. He knows, though. He caught me tiptoeing down the stairs in the early light of dawn to hang the axe back up and has been watching me with a strange light in his eyes ever since.
“I’m going to explore the countryside and gather some herbs,” I say with a cheerfulness I’m far from feeling. “Xavier has been awfully quiet since the police removed the bones yesterday, so I’d like to make a summoning draught and see if we can encourage him a little.”
“Ooh, a summoning draught?” Rachel turns to me with interest. “What goes in that?”
“It depends on the spell.” I scramble to think of which herbalist-friendly weeds I’m most likely to encounter on the walk over to the village. I’m less interested in draughts and more interested in paying a few visits in town, so the less time I have to spend foraging in the wilderness, the better. “Dandelion roots are good at drawing out spirits. I’ll mix it with some mallow and rowan berries to strengthen its energy.”
“Berries? Mallow?” Cal scratches his chin doubtfully. “That sounds like a recipe, not a spell. Will we have to eat it?”
“Only if you want to summon Xavier to inhabit your body.”
Nicholas covers a laugh with a cough. “I suggest we stick with the food we have for now. At this rate, we’ll have enough in the deep freezer to see us through to the end of the month.”
“A whole month?” Vivian releases a moan and eyes the sideboard with increased loathing. “That’s it. I’m having Thomas take the knocker off the door the second he returns.”
At the mention of Thomas, my interest perks. Most of the family is too preoccupied with their own thoughts to notice—Rachel is busy stuffing garlic knots down one sleeve of her sweater, Cal is glancing at his body in contemplation of its being taken over by a wayward spirit, and Fern has taken to examining her nails with interest—but Nicholas watches me with an intensity bordering on the uncomfortable.
“Where are you really going, Madame Eleanor?” he asks as he walks me out of the dining room.
“I told you,” I reply, my shoulders stiff. “To gather herbs.”
“Yes, and I’m sure you’ll manage to stuff a few dandelions in your pockets on your way to lend authenticity to your lie, but that’s not what I was asking. How did you sleep, by the way? You’re looking very refreshed this morning. Murder must agree with you.”
I glare at him. I look like I slept with my head under a sink, and he knows it. Even putting in my usual heavy coil of braids was too much to contemplate this morning, so I have my hair pulled back in a ribbon instead, the dark strands falling to my waist like a waterfall.
“If you must know, I was up most of the night in case Xavier stopped by again.”
“And did he?”
I speak without thinking. “No, not this time. I wonder . . .”
“Yes?” he prods.
Too late, I realize my error. I’d been about to say that I wonder if the person visiting my room at night was the mustachioed man, meaning that any and all nocturnal wanderings are now at an end. I don’t know why he would have wanted to scare me away with thumps and fake notes, but it would explain why last night was so quiet.
“I wonder if we’ve seen the last of him,” I say with an attempt at serenity. “I guess we’d better hope my summoning draught works.”
“I guess we’d better. But that isn’t what you were going to say.” Nicholas reaches out and takes one of my long locks between his fingers, twirling it as if in rapt contemplation. No part of him is actually touching me—not my bodily person, anyway—but the gesture feels warm, intimate.
It feels good.
“Yes, it is.” I jerk away from him—and from that sensation. The path to warm intimacy isn’t one I tread with anything but trepidation. Especially where a man as stubbornly mysterious as this one is concerned. “And for the record, I’d like to know how well-rested you’d look after an experience like mine. I don’t know how many dead bodies you’ve landed on top of, but it’s highly traumatic. It’s a wonder I’m able to function at all.”
“Of course,” he says. “You poor thing. I’m sure your restless night was nothing more than nerves.”
“It was,” I say and because it seems pertinent, if not entirely truthful, “I wouldn’t lie to you, Nicholas.”
The flicker of his eyelashes is the only indication he gives that he doesn’t believe a word out of my mouth. “I know you wouldn’t,” he says with the smile that contains only mockery. “After all, if a man can’t trust his paid psychic, who can he trust?”
Chapter 15
“Oh, yeah. That’s the guy from the other day.” The young man from the museum nods over the drawing. “Except his mustache was more—”
“Yes, twirly. I know.” Impatience makes my voice terse, so I temper it with, “I tried to get Rachel to trim it back a little, but this was as good as we could manage. Please. It’s important. I need you to try very hard to remember anything this man said or did while he was here.”
My request appears to fly right over his head. His floppy hair, this time flattened under the weight of his oversized headphones, shifts to reveal one heavily made-up eye. “Rachel?” he asks, his voice sharp.
“Um. Yes?”
“You mean Rachel Hartford? From up at the castle?”
The question is a rhetorical one. From the way his expression changes, transforming him from a caricature of a teenage boy to a living, breathing, hormonal one, it’s clear there’s only one Rachel in his world. With an intensity bordering on the ridiculous, he studies the picture anew, his hand tracing the line of the man’s cheekbones.
“She drew this?” he breathes. “Really?”
I hold back a sigh, once again feeling much older than my twenty-eight years. “She sure did, Lothario.”
He looks away from the picture long enough to throw me a puzzled look. “My name’s Benji.”
I don’t bother to explain the reference. His bobbing Adam’s apple and starry-eyed rapture are all I need to tell me that anything short of Rachel walking through the door with a box of gold hearts isn’t likely to penetrate the lovesick fog of his brain.
Ah, young love. So sweet, so innocent, so . . . easy to manipulate.
“So you’re Benji,” I say with all the air of one pulling a worrisome pebble out of her shoe. “That explains it.”
At this, his spine almost approaches a vertical state. “She mentioned me?”
I don’t answer, opting instead to tap on the paper, my blood-red fingernail glinting. “She and I are working together to try to discover what we can about this man. I know you said you don’t keep any records, but do you recall anything about his visit? The exhibits he looked at? What he found the most interesting?”
Benji, for all his lazy teenage habits, is no fool. “Is Rachel waiting outside? Didn’t she want to come in with you?”
“Well, she did want to,” I say with a casual disregard for the truth, “but she chickened out at the last second.”
“Chickened out?”
“Yes. I think she was feeling shy.”
A slow, toothy grin moves across his face. “Shy?”
“She said something about needing to pick up a stack of magazines at the newsstand instead. Which is weird, because the Hartfords have several subscriptions delivered.”
His grin deepens, and a blush steals across his sharp cheekbones. I should feel terrible for leading him on this way, and a small part of me does, but a larger part doesn’t. After all, I’m only doing the exact same thing I do to people every day: give them hope, promise them something more than the banality of the real world.
Hope, for all its false promises, is a powerful motivator. Benji’s next words prove it.
“He basically did the same thing as you,” he says and points at the stairs. “Came in. Paid his fee. Snooped through the Hartford files. He seemed pretty interested in that fusty old bible.”
T
he one with the missing page. “Oh? Was he?”
“Yeah. It’s weird. No one’s been down to look at that stuff in months, and then both of you showed up in the same week. What’s in there that’s so interesting? It’s nothing but names and birthdays.”
“I like names and birthdays,” I say. “Especially when they belong to people I know.”
He shrugs, but with a heightened color that indicates he’s flipped through the pages on his own search at least once.
“Weird, though, that the page with Rachel’s name wasn’t in there,” I add and wait to see his reaction.
It’s everything I hope it will be. His first instinct, to deny having been creeping on an old family bible, is quashed down under a stronger force: curiosity.
“What are you talking about?” he asks. “Of course that page is in there. At least, it was—”
“Yes?” I urge. “When did you last see it?”
“A while ago.” His eyes—or eye, rather, since one is still hidden under his flattened hair—doesn’t quite meet mine. “I only looked that one time.”
We both know his words to be a lie, but neither one of us mentions it. Instead, I lean over the desk the way I imagine Inspector Piper might, should he ever decide to take up an actual investigation.
“Think, Benji. Have you been down there since the mustachioed man was here? Can you tell me for sure if you’ve seen Rachel’s page since then?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “I mean, it’s not like I check every day. I’m not . . . weird or anything. I swear.”
“But it was there recently? Within the last month?”
“Maybe. Yes.” Sweat breaks out on his upper lip. I feel almost cruel, grilling the poor boy, but this is the closest I’ve come to an actual clue yet. I’m not giving it up so easily. “Yes, within the last month. I was down there dusting and just happened to notice,” he adds defensively.
“And can you tell me exactly what was on that page?”
He seems slightly bewildered. “I already said. Names and birthdays. For Rachel and her mum and uncle and stuff.”
“Can you remember if there was anyone named Xavier listed on it?”
“No.”
“No, you can’t remember, or no, there was no mention of that name?”
“No, there was no mention of that name.” For the first time, Benji looks at me with an air of suspicion—an air of suspicion I admittedly deserve. From a legal standpoint, there’s no reason why he should tell me anything he doesn’t want to. “That’s kind of a funny name nowadays, isn’t it?”
Since there’s every chance I’ll need Benji’s help again, I decide to ease up. “Benji’s kind of a funny name, too,” I say in a friendly tone that acts as though the past five minutes never happened. “Is it short for something? Benjamin?”
“Yeah.” He blinks. “How did you know?”
“A lucky guess.” I tug the drawing from under his fingers. “And just so I’m clear—the mustachioed guy didn’t do anything else while he was here? He only looked at the bible and left?”
I have the impression Benji would like to keep the drawing with him as a keepsake, but it’s my only copy. Technically, I should head straight to Inspector Piper with both it and Benji’s confession of having seen the man before, but I’m hesitant to hand it over to someone who takes me as seriously as a hangnail.
“That’s it,” Benji confirms. “Well, and maybe he glanced at a few other records, but I didn’t follow him around the museum. People don’t like to be bothered.”
People also don’t like to be murdered, but look what happens anyway.
“There’s one more thing you can help me with,” I say, even though Benji didn’t offer and my lie about Rachel being too shy to come inside appears to be wearing off. “I’m hoping to find a little more information about the history of the local population. Not just the Hartford family, but everyone. Things that might mention community marriages, births, deaths, that sort of thing.”
“Xavier?” Benji guesses.
“Yes, but I’m not sure about the dates when he’d have been alive. It could be a window of several hundred years. I was hoping there might be a way to narrow the search.”
“Narrow the search?” he echoes.
“Yes. Do you have anyone on staff who might be able to help me with that?”
He blinks at me and casts a look around the room, as if expecting someone able to answer my questions to pop out of the woodwork. Predictably, we’re both disappointed.
“Sorry, lady, but what you’re looking for isn’t in the village museum.”
“It isn’t?”
Benji shakes his head and hooks a thumb over his shoulder. “For official parish records like that, there’s only one place to go.”
My heart begins a slow, sinking descent to the floor. I know the exact place he’s talking about, and it’s literally the last place I want to go.
“What you need is to visit the church.”
* * *
“So, basically, they’re all torn between thinking I’m a murderer and thinking I made the body up in the first place,” I say into my phone. “I can’t decide which is worse. Being a murderer, obviously, but you know what I mean. How can an entire human being disappear like that?”
“Ellie.”
My brother’s warning tone is impossible to ignore, which is why I rush on. I have a pretty good idea of what comes next—his dire warnings and I-told-you-sos—and my desire to hear them is only slightly less than my desire to visit the local vicar. “And the worst part is that I don’t have any of my equipment. Any footage that might have helped me solve this thing is gone, and it’s not like they carry replacement parts at the local pub. Which, by the way, is the only thing besides a gas station and a vintage tea shop this place offers by way of entertainment.”
“Ellie.”
His tone is even harder this time around, so I stop in front of the cute stonework cottage that lies about halfway between Castle Hartford and the village. Unlike the castle, everything about the cottage is neat and tidy and well cared for, with creeping vines artfully outlining each window and lingering crocuses showing off the last of their blooms in the side garden. An actual garden instead of just a mud pit.
It’s not the village church. Despite Benji’s helpful suggestion, I’ve made Thomas’s cottage my destination instead. I tried to go to the church, I really did, and even asked for directions from a grizzled old man in a threadbare suit who made the sign of the cross when I walked to his side of the street. But religious institutions and I aren’t the best of friends in the general order of things. Add the theft of important holy relics into the mix, and our friendship becomes downright terminal.
“If you’re going to tell me that I’m in over my head, there’s no need. I’m well aware of it. But I kind of have to solve the mystery now. I’m out ten thousand dollars with my broken equipment. If I walk away now, I have no chance of recovering it.”
“Would you stop babbling for five seconds and listen?” Liam demands. “I don’t care about your stupid job. I’m calling because of Winnie.”
Winnie.
With that one word, my heart turns to molten lead in my chest, hot and heavy and robbing the breath from my lungs. Even though nothing around me changes, no breeze or flutter of wings, not even a cloud passing over the sun, I feel as though I’m racing through a tunnel.
“She’s dead?” I ask, my voice wavering.
The pause that follows this remark doesn’t bring either comfort or clarity—two things I could drastically use right now.
“Liam? Talk to me. What happened? And when? I don’t believe you. She doesn’t feel dead.”
“That’s because she isn’t.” He hesitates. “Yet.”
“I think I need to sit down,” I mutter, more to myself than Liam. My legs feel shaky and my arms weak. I cast my glance around, hoping to alight on a bench or a lawn chair or something to hold the suddenly catastrophic weight on my shoulders, but Thomas’s l
awn is too tidy.
Even though no welcoming lights fill the windows and no smoking chimney shows signs of life within, I try the front door. It snicks open to reveal an interior that’s as cozy and welcoming as Castle Hartford is cavernous and crumbling. A cursory glance shows me that no one is home—a thing I’m far too preoccupied at the moment to worry too much about.
I sink to the floor, my back pressed against a wainscoted wall.
“Ellie?” Liam asks. “Are you still there?”
“I’m here,” I say, my voice faint even to my own ears. “You can tell me now.”
His sigh sounds a thousand years old.
“Like a Band-Aid,” I instruct him. “Get it over with.”
“There is no Band-Aid for this one,” he mutters, but manages to find the words anyway. “I woke up to a message on my phone from Happy Acres. Apparently, Winnie slipped into a deeper coma yesterday. They have her on a breathing tube.”
“A breathing tube?” Of all the horrors my sister has endured, being plugged in and wired was the one thing Liam and I both agreed we’d never force on her. It’s too painful for all of us. “But we signed a DNR.”
“I know. But that nurse you like, the one who usually takes care of her—”
“Peggy,” I interrupt.
“Yeah, that’s it. Peggy.” Liam draws a deep breath. I wait, tracing the patterned outline of the wood planks with my forefinger. “She was with her at the time. She says Winnie woke up right before it happened.”
My finger stops over a rough spot in the floor. “What? She woke up?”
And I wasn’t there? I didn’t get to say good-bye, hello, the thousands of things I still want to tell her?
“For just a second, yes. According to their report, she opened her eyes and started searching the room, looking for something. She stopped when she reached that nurse—Peggy—and said a few words.” Liam’s voice wavers. “She asked for you specifically. She said tell Ellie right before falling into a seizure.”
The urge to smash up all of Thomas’s lovely cottage takes overwhelming hold of me. I suddenly wish I was in the armory up at the castle. Although it’s more of a hall than a room, it’s filled with rusted bits of weaponry that would clatter and shatter in ways highly satisfactory to my current mood.
