Dust to Dust

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “No way. We’re supposed to be a team, remember?” Michael shot her a skeptical glance, but didn’t contradict her. The hotel door was open. “Did some late guest not lock it? Or did our prowler help himself to a key?”

  “We’ll find oot,” replied Michael grimly. “I’ve had enough of this jiggery-pokery.”

  They hurried up the staircase and tried to ease through the fire doors, but they were so heavy they creaked and swished. Rebecca and Michael groped up the shadowy staircase to the landing outside the attic. The door was open. The room was dark. Rebecca flicked the switch.

  The ceiling lights threw boxes, trunks, and old furniture into sharp relief. Michael stepped inside. Rebecca waited outside, straining her ears, trying to look everywhere at once. She heard another patter of rain on the roof, and the wind in the trees, and Michael’s footsteps. He pounced behind a dresser and emerged shrugging from the other side.

  “No one’s here,” he said. “No one’s here noo. Look.” He pointed to a large wooden crate. The top was open, nails still protruding from it. The velvets and flounces of century-old clothes spilled from it onto the floor. Several musty leather-bound books lay among them. Michael picked them up and piled them to one side. “Can the gowk no read? It’s labeled ‘Elizabeth Kerr’, no ‘Mary Pringle’.”

  Somewhere in the dim corridors behind Rebecca’s back a door clicked. Her heart jumped into her throat. A patch of white slithered along the floor… . Oh. She smiled. It was Guinevere’s white breast and paws.

  Her smile withered. The cat was stalking something. Michael and Rebecca tiptoed down the staircase from the landing and stepped slowly along the hallway below.

  The cat crouched in front of a door designated “Ladies” at the head of the main staircase. Her tail twitched. From her throat came a low growling hiss, like a small steam engine on the verge of explosion. Another shape a few feet away was Lancelot, hunched and bristling, puzzled by Guinevere’s mood and not liking a bit of it.

  Someone’s in the bathroom, Rebecca told herself. Michael’s jaw twitched. Two steps away from the door, with Michael’s hand already extended, Rebecca put her weight on her right foot and beneath the carpet a floorboard squealed like a set of pipes.

  The door flew open. Pain exploded in Rebecca’s shoulder and her glasses flew off her face. She staggered backward as a pale shape lunged from the black interior of the room. Michael shouted and grabbed. Something glinted. Cats shrieked. Michael fell, saving himself from tumbling down the stairs by a frantic grasp of the banister. Footsteps raced away. Doors slammed. Voices bellowed for silence.

  Rebecca recovered her balance and rushed forward. Something crunched under her foot. Her glasses. Never mind them.

  Michael was still clutching the banister, his forehead against the wood, exploring the possibilities of profanity in a thorough listing from A to Zed. Rebecca skidded to a stop beside him. The arm of his sweatshirt was stained dark… . It was stained with blood. “My God!” she gasped.

  She seized his arm and pulled it up into the air so vigorously he cried out. “It’s nae sae bad as a’ that, dinna pull it off, woman!” She ignored him, groped for the pulse point, found it and pressed her hand into it.

  Someone was thumping down the hall toward them. Rebecca looked up and saw a blurry Nora, nightgown hitched up, armed with a skillet. The woolly shape behind her was Laurence wielding a cricket bat. “Who’s there?” Laurence demanded.

  “Not the U.S. Cavalry, I’m afraid,” Rebecca answered.

  “My God,” said Nora. The skillet clanged to the floor.

  “Right embarrassin’,” Michael said with a wan smile, “tae be stabbed wi’ your own dagger. And my pipe-pumpin’ arm, tae boot.”

  Laurence galloped down the stairs, calling for Grant, for Mackenzie, for medics. The two cats, whiskers bristling, crawled out from under a chair and proceeded to lick themselves down, as though a bath could get rid of the sickly scent of blood.

  1

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  This was as close to a hallucinatory experience as Rebecca ever wanted to come. Her myopia intensified the sway of the car into the lurch of a carnival ride. Glittering blobs along the road were the eyes of startled sheep. Two passing police cars were blue comets, the wah-wah of their sirens a textbook example of the Doppler effect. Grant’s face, illuminated by the dashboard lights, peered worriedly from the rearview mirror.

  It had been Grant and Laurence who’d swathed Michael’s arm in gauze bandages. “It’s no so bad,” he’d kept insisting, “there’s nae need tae mummify me!” By the volume of his complaints Rebecca estimated not only that he was going to survive but also how badly he was hurting. She’d bundled him into Grant’s car without getting her contact lenses from the cottage or acknowledging any of the vague shapes seething up and down the sidewalk.

  Michael’s head lay on her shoulder, his right arm wrapped her waist, his hurt arm rested in her lap. Shadow and pain pared his features to a minimum. His long, limber mouth, parted on a ragged breath, was startlingly vulnerable, and his brows were knotted, making him look aged beyond his years. His forehead as she smoothed his hair felt clammy. She tugged the hotel comforter around him.

  His eyes opened with a blue spark. “Can you no offer a bit o’ artificial respiration?”

  “Michael Campbell, you are incorrigible.”

  “I should hope so… .” She cut off his response with a kiss. Grant’s face in the mirror softened.

  Rebecca’s heart was still hammering. That had been too damn close a call. She envisioned a Michael-shaped void in her consciousness, forever haunted by words left unsaid and doubts unresolved.

  “I’m all right,” he said again.

  “You’d better be.” She’d often wondered whether she had much of a nurturing instinct. Now she knew. She relaxed her grip before she choked him.

  Melrose flashed past. Grant took the Abbotsford roundabout on two wheels. Bright lights spilled onto the pavement—Galashiels at last. Faceless figures pulled Michael from her arms, laid him on a stretcher, and wheeled him away. “I’ll find the car park,” said Grant. Rebecca blundered into a hallway and stood rotating the shoulder knocked and bruised by the opening door.

  Someone thrust a clipboard into her hands. A pen appeared in the blur of her peripheral vision. Name: Campbell, Michael Ian. Date of Birth: August 3, 1959. Sex: She almost wrote, “when appropriate”, then looked up.

  She thought she recognized that pen. “What’s all this in aid of?” asked Detective Sergeant Devlin.

  Only now, in the glare, did Rebecca see her gold Missouri sweatshirt mottled with red and brown stains. The floor moved beneath her feet. Devlin grasped her arm, released it at her cry of pain, and whisked a plastic chair behind her as her knees gave way. Oh, Michael, why is this happening to us? Tears spilled from her eyes and burned down her cheeks.

  Rebecca groped in her pocket and found a tissue, telling herself sternly, she was not going to help the situation by crying. Devlin vanished and returned with a squishy cardboard cup of hot tea. She drank, pushed back her hair, and thanked him. “I guess you’d like to know what happened.”

  He pulled out another pen and sat down beside her. “All Laurence said when he rang was that you’d surprised someone in the attic.”

  “Yeah, we did that, all right. We should’ve backed off when we couldn’t find the police. We should’ve done a bed check to see who was missing. But, dammit, we were mad, we were afraid they’d get away.” She was still mad, trembling with fear and anger both—not the least at not even knowing what pronoun to use.

  Devlin shook his head over the ineptness of civilians. “You couldn’t tell who it was, I take it.”

  “Everything happened too fast. I just saw a white shape. I have no idea of height or weight. No face, even, just shadow. But it wasn’t Grant’s transparent ghost—it knocked me back with the door, stabbed Michael, and almost threw him down the stairs.” She took a deep breath. Starting from the time she woke up w
orried about the missing page, she progressed in a more or less orderly fashion to the appearance of the Bairds.

  “And no constables on duty? Well, Mackenzie’ll be sortin’ them out.” Devlin’s smile was that of a crocodile relishing a victim.

  A body loomed behind Devlin, and a masculine voice said, “We’ll be needing the completed forms, Miss.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Rebecca produced something almost legible and handed over the clipboard. “Is he all right?”

  “Right as rain,” replied the blur. “The cut’s one of those long gashes that bleeds like hell but isn’t really bad. He needed a few stitches at the puncture end, where the knife first went in.” With left forearm and right forefinger the figure mimed an upward thrust. Rebecca shuddered.

  “Check her out, too,” Devlin said. “Her shoulder’s hurt.”

  “Half a minute.” The blur faded into the background and reappeared with a wheelchair. “Pop in.”

  “I walked this far,” Rebecca protested, and for her efforts received another clipboard. Name, rank—she could check Miss, Mrs. or Ms., but there was no space for Dr.

  By the time she’d been poked, prodded, x-rayed and medicated her head was filled with moths and her stomach with lead. She emerged from the curtained cubicle with little ambition beyond taking a bath and burning the bloodstained sweatshirt.

  Michael was waiting with Devlin and Grant. His face was greenish-pallid beneath the reddish stubble on his cheeks, and his hand emerging from bandage and sling was shaking. At her glance he clenched his fist to stop the trembling and managed an anemic smile. “How’s it goin’, hen?”

  “I’m turning black and blue, but nothing’s broken. And you?”

  “They said I could play the pipes at the Festival, if I behave mysel’.”

  “No more chasin’ either ghosts or criminals,” warned Devlin.

  Grant said, “Let’s be gettin’ back home.”

  Michael and Rebecca flopped, groaning, into the back seat of the car while Devlin climbed in beside Grant. Dawn crept up the sky, so clean and pure Rebecca wondered if a loud noise would cause it to shatter, and the delicate roses and lavenders break away to reveal permanent night behind. Back in Rudesburn she and Michael plodded past assorted worried faces and collapsed in the cottage.

  Rebecca started awake more than once at Michael’s mumbling outcries, and at last struggled from her bed to his. His face was now flushed rather than pale. He stared foggily up at her. “What day is it?”

  “Still Tuesday. Nightmares?”

  “Time to get up,” he replied, admitting nothing.

  They tried to embrace. His left arm and her left shoulder were too sore for more than a quick inclination toward each other, like two puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit. She opened her mouth, swallowed what felt like glue, tried again. “Giving you up for a philosophical principle is one thing. Having you—permanently gone—that’s something else again.”

  He stroked her cheek with his fingertip. “No good lettin’ that bluidy bastard make our decisions for us, is it? We’re fighters, the both of us; no wonder compromise comes so hard.”

  “I’m not so sure it’s as simple as compromise, Michael.”

  “Naething’s simple.” He levered her gently aside and went to bathe.

  They arrived at the excavation just in time for elevenses. Nora rushed over with tea and shortbread. Everyone else was ranged along the stump of the wall, the sunshine defining a variety of weary expressions. Probably no one had slept much after the one a.m. alarm.

  Jerry said, “Hell of a way to get out of a morning’s work.”

  “That it is,” Michael agreed.

  “Are you all right?” asked Mackenzie. He handed Devlin back his notebook. Several other voices expressed concern.

  “We’ll live, thanks,” Rebecca replied.

  A weak smile moved like a sine wave through the group. Everyone started talking at once, pretending nothing was wrong. “Psychic vibrations are difficult to interpret,” Adele said to Dennis.” I sensed a masculine aura close to Anne, but misunderstood whose it was.” Dennis brushed crumbs from his Star Trek T-shirt and glanced suspiciously at Jerry.

  Tony crumbled shortbread onto a column drum, trying to entice a couple of sparrows to take the food from his hand. “I’d get the milk off the stoop and find the cream gone. So I got up early, ready to shy a brick at the neighbor’s cat. But birds had learned to perch on the bottle and peck through the foil. Dead brilliant.”

  Elaine looked from Adele to Rebecca to Mackenzie, her red mouth crumpled tightly.

  Mark said to Hilary, “Thousands of bats live beneath the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin. You can sit in the top floor bar at the Hyatt and watch them come swarming out at sunset… .” His voice died away and he shot a sharp glance beyond Hilary to Tony and Elaine.

  “Can you order garlic with your drink?” Hilary asked, her laugh as forced as a beauty queen’s smile.

  Jerry walked by Elaine and muttered something under his breath. She colored and slapped a camera bag shut. Tony sent Jerry a sharp sideways glance. Nora collected the cups as though one of them was poisoned and she wasn’t sure which.

  By this time a gallon or so of tea was making tidal pools in Rebecca’s stomach. She sat down beside Mackenzie while Michael sat beside Devlin; separated, as usual, by the police. “The inventory may not necessarily be in the attic,” she said. “And just because the inventory is missing doesn’t mean the treasure’s still here.”

  “All Pringle knew,” added Michael, “is that she didna have it. But that was sixty years after Anne.”

  Mackenzie’s eyes were charcoal, burning beneath a layer of ashes. He said quietly, “We have a sodding efficient killer, with gumption to match.”

  “Who’s not reluctant to kill again,” put in Devlin.

  Jerry’s bellow of “Back to work!” broke the silence. He charged through the transept door with all the finesse of a rhinoceros. Mark and Dennis followed. Hilary seized her drawing board, and she and Adele walked toward the infirmary. Tony hoisted his cameras, and Elaine picked up a bag.

  “Who left the hotel door unlocked?” asked Michael.

  “Bob Jenkins,” answered Mackenzie. “He said he was properly soused last night, and judging from his sniveling this morning, he was.”

  “He has an alibi at a pub in Melrose,” Devlin added. “Ought to do him for drunk drivin’.”

  “He’s about the only reporter still around,” Rebecca said.

  Mackenzie focused on Tony and Elaine as they set up a tripod by the footbridge. “They have alibis for each other, although Tony and Jerry were on the pavement exchanging insults when I got here. Hilary said Adele is up and down all night anyway; in other words, they can’t speak for each other. Mark and Dennis swear they were both in bed when the balloon went up. And the constables, who were supposedly on guard, were chasing something white over here at the priory. I suggested they reconsider their tactics.”

  Rebecca hoped the hapless bobbies had survived Mackenzie’s suggestion.

  He was using first names, which was not a good sign. His lips were set tightly together. His burning eyes moved from the camera crew to a group of searchers returning lead-footed and empty-handed to the Craft Centre. She asked, “And where is Michael’s sgian dubh? Where are the dragon brooch and the signet ring?”

  “There’s a lot of countryside around Rudesburn,” Devlin replied.

  Mackenzie got up and paced away. With a half-shrug toward Michael and Rebecca, Devlin followed. A tour bus stopped in Jedburgh Street. The whipper-in herded everyone past the perimeter wall, no doubt expounding on unsolved mysteries and spectral nuns.

  By lunchtime the police had once again been through the drawers, in the closets, and under the beds at the cottage. The mail was arranged on the dining room table. Rebecca glanced narrowly at it—no, it hadn’t been opened.

  Her letter from home came with a snapshot of a niece’s birthday party. Adele had another letter from the ashr
am. Hilary had a note in pink paper covered with cat stickers. Michael had a postcard from Maddy, a photo of a stately home. Saturday at Chatsworth Hall, she wrote in a clear, rounded script. The boys loved the ducks. Hello, Rebecca. “Hi,” Rebecca said to the card.

  She sleepwalked through the afternoon, working purely on instinct, but tossed and turned all that night. She’d always thought Michael, with his bravura haircut and casual clothes, looked closer to twenty than thirty, but by Wednesday morning he looked forty, his face pleated with pain and uncertainty. She saw with a horrified glance in the mirror that she looked like her own grandmother.

  Laurence brought the tea for elevenses, Mackenzie at his heels, and announced that the lock to the attic had been changed and Mackenzie had the only key. The Chief Inspector looked narrowly at them all, firing shots across their bows. Everyone quailed, looking up, down, into the distance, anywhere but at Mackenzie. There would henceforth be a guard assigned to the hotel lobby as well as the street outside, Laurence continued. Still no one shouted, “Curses, foiled again.” The news that Devlin and Mackenzie themselves were moving into the hotel was anticlimactic.

  Laurence went to contend with the three tour buses expected for lunch. Tony muttered something about room service. Jerry rubbed his hands together in anticipation of such a big audience, only to have his footlights extinguished by a severe look from Mackenzie.

  Judging by the door-to-door progress of the police, they were once again interrogating everyone within a mile of Rudesburn. Mackenzie himself, Devlin in tow, spent the afternoon clambering over Battle Law; Tony photographed their stockbroker suits in altercation with the odd gorse branch. Jerry and Elaine skirmished like border clans. Hilary and Adele squabbled over a plastered wall—it had arcane symbols on it, said Adele, and Hilary insisted they were leaf and bird designs. Rebecca made peace and took a hike toward the church before she gave in to the urge to spank them both.

  She found that Jerry had had no choice but to assign Michael computer duty, although he made it clear that Michael had deliberately gotten himself stabbed just to slow down the pace of work. They were making headway, though; almost six feet of the cut blocks of the crypt stairwell were visible.