I had moved into Hammersleigh House three days before. Great-uncle Patrick had died of heart failure a few months ago at the age of ninety-two and it was a surprise to the whole Pembrooke family when we found out he had left Hammersleigh House to me. Since the Pembrooke family numbers in the hundreds in the town of Blackshore alone, there was a lot of surprise to go around.
Uncle Patrick’s wife died early in their marriage without giving him an heir and he never married again, so we all thought he would leave his entire estate to the eldest male relative. That was my father, Kevin Pembrooke, until his death in a hunting accident seven years ago. We assumed Cousin Nathan would be next in line for the inheritance. After all, Nathan was a successful financial consultant in Toronto, very much the corporate type.
We were partly right. When the will was read, Nathan walked away with Uncle Patrick’s business concerns and investments.
“Hammersleigh House,” the lawyer stated, “is bequeathed to Lyris Pembrooke.”
Me.
In his will, Uncle Patrick stated that he knew I would cherish and protect Hammersleigh House and all it contained. I promised to do my best, although I knew nothing about caring for such a valuable estate. I loved antique houses and furnishings, though, and I had to believe my uncle knew what he was doing.
There was still a lot of rumbling from the family about my inheritance.
“Lyris, the will is valid and binding and there are no grounds to challenge it,” the lawyer, John Brixton, informed me. “So move in and enjoy Hammersleigh. It’s yours.”
Easy for him to say. He didn’t have to face the black looks and pursed lips I encountered every day on the streets, in church or at my job at the Blackshore Power Commission. I mean it, the Pembrookes were everywhere. At least my mother and brother, David, were happy for me.
However, Uncle Patrick’s will was not without a string of clauses. Some good, some not so much. For instance, one clause prevented me from selling Hammersleigh House or any of its contents for twenty-five years, so it was a good thing I loved the house, because I was stuck with it. The will also established a trust that paid the maintenance and repair costs for Hammersleigh. This included the wages of casual help to keep the grounds and gardens in pristine order and the cost of the cleaning team that came in weekly. The trust also paid for a housekeeper and Conklin.
I guess this Trust business made me more of a caretaker than an owner, but on the upside, I didn’t have to worry about saving for a new roof or electrical upgrades. Best of all, I didn’t have to clean the place.
Conklin and I were the sole occupants of Hammersleigh House, unless you counted Jacqueline, the hell-poodle, which I didn’t. And if my first two nights in residence were filled with dark silences, well, I would get used to it.
I continued the yoga stress-relieving breathing. Four breaths in, hold for four, four breaths out, hold for four, then repeat. The ticking of the clock was soft, soothing now, and too quiet to mask the sound of footsteps that came to rest beside me. Rescue was at hand.
I looked up. “Hi, Conklin.”
Conklin wore his off-duty apparel, consisting of a pair of faded brown corduroys and a weathered beige jacket over a snow-white polo sweater, which exactly matched his thick shock of hair.
We were in the middle of a July heat wave—outside, it was at least thirty-five degrees Celsius. I was wearing shorts and the briefest tank top I owned, and until I’d discovered the box, I had been sweating buckets in the tower room. Now I was shivering.
I guess I should explain Conklin since he played such a central role in my new life at Hammersleigh House, kind of like an unwelcome conscience I might ignore at times, but couldn’t shake loose.
Strange as it may seem in this day and age, Conklin was my butler. First, he was Uncle Patrick’s butler. Then Uncle Patrick left him to me in his will. Or, to be precise, Conklin was given the option of staying on at Hammersleigh or retiring. He decided I couldn’t possibly get along without him.
Unfortunately, he was right.
Conklin had served Uncle Patrick for more than fifty years and knew Hammersleigh’s every whim and whimsy. He knew who to call when a section of stone lintel developed a miniscule crack. He knew what to do when one of the ancient plants in the rose garden contracted black spot. He knew where to get the special beeswax polish that was used on Hammersleigh’s woodwork. He knew the name of the contractor who annually checked the stone gargoyles on each corner of the house to ensure they didn’t fall off.
In short, Conklin knew everything and I needed him. Technically, he worked for me, but since I didn’t pay him, he was pretty much a free agent. I think he disapproved of me and my inheritance.
There he stood with Jacqueline at his side.
“Madam?”
I had a lot of explaining to do. I searched for the words to tell him about the box upstairs.
“Madam, are you hurt?” He bent down and tugged on my arm.
I sighed. I weighed only a hundred and twenty-two pounds, but that’s still beyond the capacity of one senior citizen to handle. I yanked my arm away.
He captured it again. “What happened, Madam? Please, speak to me.” He made comforting noises to reassure me. He glanced from my face to the antelope’s and back again.
Jacqueline planted her body within inches of my ear and barked.
“Shut up.”
Since “shut up” and “get off the furniture” were the only two phrases I ever directed at her, she couldn’t pretend not to understand. The racket subsided, but she sat down close to my face. I kept one eye on her, since she had a fondness for biting.
Conklin looked at my injured toe. The ream of scarlet toilet paper trailed from it, like a bloody banner of surrender. “Madam, you seem to have injured yourself. I will call 911.”
“No ambulance, fire truck or rescue vehicle will be necessary. Would you please call Marc Allaire and tell him to come over right away? Right now. Tell him it is business and I need him.” Conklin was a very literal man. I found it helped to be specific.
“Shall I tell him it’s an emergency, Madam?”
“You can tell him it’s very serious. However, no sirens or backup are required.”
While Conklin was making the call from the cramped telephone closet under the staircase, I pulled myself up onto the bottom step and sat there, thinking. After a minute, I got to my feet, shuffled to the door and opened it to wait for Marc’s arrival.
“Madam, Chief Allaire said to let you know he will be here immediately. I advised him you appeared to be slightly injured, but did not require medical attention at this time. I hope that was correct.”
“Perfect, Conklin. Thank you.”
“I hope you haven’t been attacked, Madam.”
I sure wished he would stop calling me Madam. I was beginning to feel like the owner of a massage parlour. I had already asked him to call me Lyris or Miss Lyris even. He just looked appalled at the idea and would have none of it. Yet he insisted I call him Conklin, though everyone else called him either Mr. Conklin or Arthur.
“No, Conklin, I haven’t been attacked.” I was tired all of a sudden.
My bones craved heat and I sat down in the sun. My mind drifted to the tower room. To the box. And its secret.
What could have happened so long ago to end in such tragedy? A terrible act―an evil act―had been committed in this house.
Selfishly, I wished the box had withheld its secret for another sixty-eight years.
CHAPTER 3
During daytime hours, Hammersleigh’s gates were set wide open at the end of the long driveway. Inside the house, a button in the electrical panel set into the wall by the front door controlled a mechanism that locked the gates every night and opened them again in the mornings.
I thought the practice was a waste of time. Sure, the house was equipped with other security devices such as motion detectors, but locking the front gates when only a six-foot wrought-iron fence surrounded the rest of the property seemed absurd. There had bee
n several break-ins around Blackshore in the past month, and there I was, sleeping in lonesome splendour on the second floor, while Conklin slept…somewhere else in the house. I had no idea where. Hammersleigh House was full of valuable objects protected by a psychotic poodle, an aged butler and one confirmed coward.
Lights flashing, but siren muted, Marc’s cruiser careened around the gates and sped up the driveway, skidding to a stop ten feet from the steps where I was sitting. I stood up and waited for Marc to reach me, the bottoms of my bare feet burning from the heat of the limestone.
I had hoped to have a word alone with Marc without Conklin listening in—Conklin was not a young man, and I was afraid of shocking him into an anxiety attack or cardiac arrest—but it was not going to happen. Conklin and Jacqueline came out of the house and hovered nearby. I couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting one of them.
Marc jumped out of the cruiser and ran up the steps to meet me. I wasn’t able to read his expression behind the mirrored sunglasses, but the well-shaped lips were set a little more firmly than usual.
I wondered what I looked like. Not good, I suspected. Blood-caked hands and foot, dust-streaked clothes, and God only knew what state my hair was in. Or my face. I dragged the back of my wrist down my cheek, hoping to remove a few sweat streaks. I probably still looked like three-day-old road kill.
Our relationship was new, and sometimes I wondered why Marc was interested in me. Perhaps he enjoyed enigmas. He once said I resembled a Madonna, until I opened my mouth. I wished I’d asked him what he meant―not the mouth part; I got that. But with almost black hair, dark brown eyes and olive skin that tanned from April’s first sunbeam, I sure didn’t look like any Madonna. And my breasts, while perfectly adequate for most purposes, would disappear from sight under the folds of a saintly robe. So far, though, I liked pretty much everything about Marc. He was hot-looking and had no major fault I could find, unless a penchant for organization and order could cause me problems down the road. His person, vehicle, office, home, yard—everything was neat and clean. And don’t bother laying your sweater over a chair. It will be hung up as soon as your arm is out of the sleeve.
My ex-husband, Dennis Malinski, was a neat-freak in a different way. While Marc would hang up your sweater with a smile and help you put it back on later, Dennis would just look at it and seethe, then throw it out the back door into the fishpond. I lost a few good sweaters that way. And one Christmas turkey, but that’s another story.
“So where’s the emergency? You haven’t been robbed, have you?” Marc took off his sunglasses and I saw the grey eyes were concerned, not angry. He touched my arm and looked me over.
I snapped an accusing glance at Conklin, but the snitch refused to meet my eyes.
“Not yet. It isn’t an emergency as such, Marc.” And it wasn’t. The contents of the box had been in the tower room for more than sixty years.
“Lyris, I left the mayor and two councillors sitting in my office with a petition signed by almost four hundred citizens. They want more police patrols at night throughout the whole of Bruce County, and I don’t have the manpower. I had to tell them I was called out on an emergency. How did you get hurt?”
I figured I’d better not mention that one of the signatures on the petition was mine. Hey, I was a home owner too. “Sorry, this honestly is serious. And I dropped a moose on my foot and fell down the stairs. I’m fine though.”
His eyes flickered, but he didn’t mention my injury again. That’s another thing I liked about him—he didn’t fuss.
“Come upstairs with me and I’ll show you what I found.” I looked at Conklin. He and Jacqueline were still standing close behind me, sighing and snuffling respectively. Maybe I could lose them on the way up.
“Well, after you then. I hope this is important. I should get back to the mayor and his squabbling councillors.”
“Don’t trip on the antelope there.” I led the way up the mahogany staircase, Marc behind me and Conklin and Jacqueline trailing along at the end.
“I believe that’s a wildebeest. Where are you taking me?”
“It’s an antelope. It says so on the plaque. We’re going to the tower room.”
Marc glanced back at the antelope, then followed me along the length of the hallway. I stopped with my hand on the knob. The hand was shaking a little and I gripped tighter.
“It’s in here.” I threw open the door.
At first glance, the room looked like it had been finger-painted by a mob of angry preschoolers. There were round red drops on the floor, and the handprints on the wall around the hidden door opening were drying and turning brownish. Marc and Conklin looked at each other, then at my toe. The moose rested beside the demilune table.
Impatient to get this over with, I tapped my good foot and indicated the box in the middle of the floor and the newspapers scattered close by. Before my momentary lapse of consciousness, I must have let the cloth drop back into place, so it was not possible to see inside the box. Marc turned and looked at me with a questioning eye.
“Something in this box? You better show me.”
I glanced at Conklin. He was sticking close to my side. Well, I just hoped he had a strong heart. Jacqueline growled low in her throat and backed away. I pushed her out of the room, and for once, she didn’t protest. She lay down flat in the hall a few yards from the door.
I found I couldn’t let Marc look in the box without warning him. He may have seen a lot of gruesome sights during his career, but I was betting this would be a first for him. I just wanted to get the words out and done with. “It’s little Tommy.”
Both men continued to look at me.
“You know, little Tommy Pembrooke.”
They still showed no reaction.
“At least you must remember,” I said to Conklin. “It was during the war. They never found him.”
“Which war would this be, Madam?”
“Lord love a duck. World War II, of course. You were here then, weren’t you? How could you forget something like that?”
“Madam, during the War, I was overseas. My employment at Hammersleigh House did not commence until 1948.”
“Oh, I didn’t know.” The way he felt about Hammersleigh, I figured he had been born under a hydrangea bush in the back garden. “You must have heard about little Tommy. Everyone in Blackshore knows. It’s a legend.”
“Wait,” Marc said, “I remember now. He was here for a family reunion and disappeared one night. I came across the file in our archives a few years ago. The case is still open, although the file has never been appended.”
Conklin cleared his throat. “The affair is coming back to me also, Madam. I did hear about it from staff who were employed at Hammersleigh House many years ago. It was a fascinating story as well as a sad one. Poor child, I believe he was just an infant.”
“Two months from his second birthday. The house and grounds were searched over and over. Finally, the police decided to call it a kidnapping. They said someone entered the house in the middle of the night and took him.”
Marc leaned over and poked at the top of the box with a finger. I shuddered and moved closer to Conklin.
“The federal authorities were contacted,” Marc said, “but in those days they had no accurate tracking system for missing children, and no trace of the Pembrooke child was ever found. Did you come across some newspaper accounts here?”
“Marc, you aren’t listening to me. Tommy is in this box. Don’t you get it? He never left the house. He’s been here all along.”
Beside me, I could feel Conklin stiffen. “Madam, are you sure? The child disappeared over sixty years ago. It does not seem possible that he would still be recognizable.” His faded blue eyes were sad. “Perhaps you have found the skeleton of someone’s pet, a cat or a puppy?”
A pet. I ignored him and turned to Marc. “Look in the box. I may not be a forensic specialist, but take one look and then tell me I’m wrong. And it’s no skeleton.”
Marc took a
pair of black latex gloves out of his pocket and pulled them on. He dropped to one knee and sorted through the newspapers, picking up each sheet by the corner with the tips of his thumb and forefinger and looking at it before replacing it on the floor. When all the papers were piled in a neat stack beside the box, he inspected the cloth without touching it. Now that I saw it again, I realized it was the remnant of a blanket. As Marc lifted it, the faded satin binding fell away from the soft blue material. A baby’s blanket.
A feeling of sorrow swept over me and I brushed at my eyes. For a moment I imagined I saw a toddler running toward me on the grass at Hammersleigh, his tiny hands clutching a yellow cloth bunny...
Marc placed the blanket on the pile of papers and I kept my eyes on his face, not wanting to see the tiny body again.
Marc leaned toward the box. He recoiled and rocked back on his heels. Then, he stood up and backed away.
Conklin made a move to step forward and I clutched at his sleeve. He gently disengaged himself. “Madam, I was in the medical corps. I am no stranger to death, even in its more unpleasant forms.”
After a moment’s consideration of the box’s contents, Conklin plucked at the neck of his sweater with trembling fingers and spoke to Marc. “How could this have happened, Chief Allaire? I don’t believe I have ever seen anything like this before.”
Marc looked in the closet. “The temperature and humidity must have been just right for the length of time it takes a body to dehydrate. And air current is a factor too. That looks like a ventilation pipe that’s rusted apart running up the back of the closet. It isn’t a large body and the desiccation process would have been quick. And the child did disappear during the summer.”
That was rather more information than I needed.
He reached into the box and lifted out a stuffed toy, a rabbit that might once have been yellow. I moved uneasily and shrugged off the tingle between my shoulders.
Marc replaced the toy. He stood up, removed his gloves, and motioned us to go ahead of him into the hall. He closed the door of the tower room and took me by the elbow.
Cheat the Hangman Page 2
