The wind shrieked outside. Pellets of rain spattered against the windows. Perhaps Mark could hear the limbs of the oaks and the branches of the azaleas thrashing, perhaps not. At least he couldn’t hear the ticking of the clock. He set the empty bottle on the counter. The food containers were still stacked on the table. He threw them away. The photograph of the Coburgs gazed up at him.
Again Jenny rotated her shoulders and rubbed her neck. “All Souls’ Day,” she said, looking at the Dia de los Muertos figurine. “Is this bare your soul night, do you think?”
Let’s get naked, Mark almost replied, but instead gave a noncommittal grunt.
“I had an ulterior motive in asking you here tonight,” Jenny went on. Behind her back Mark drew himself to attention. “I have seen and heard things in the house. Footsteps in the upper hall, notes played on the piano. And that damnable clock. I’ve asked, but no one admits to winding it. It was Felicia’s, did you know that?”
“No.” Mark slumped against the cabinet, asking himself what he’d expected her to say, for heaven’s sake.
“The first night of the dig, when you drove by and saw lights in the windows—I lied, Mark, that wasn’t me. Since then, I’ve seen lights three times. I’ve waked up thinking someone was looking at me as I slept, but there’s never been anyone there. I’ve felt a presence, not in the parlor, oddly enough, but in the study. And Graymalkin seems to see things.”
“Cats do.”
“Then, earlier this evening when I was making my usual recce, I saw the ghost. On the main staircase. Very pale, dressed in the full skirts and bonnet of a Victorian woman.”
The hair rose on the nape of Mark’s neck. “Don’t tell me Kenneth was right—his grandmother really is haunting the place.”
“I don’t know. I saw the shape, and I scarpered back here, locked the door, and called you like the worst coward. But that’s all it was, a shape, not a presence. I know one tends to see wee Nessies on the way home from the pub, but this is the first drink I’ve had since the reception.”
“You don’t have to rationalize anything to me,” Mark told her. “There was a ghost at Rudesburn last summer—I tried my darnedest to deny it, but I couldn’t. Supposedly a soul will linger to finish something or to guard something or for vengeance. With the two murders and the suicide here…. Well, I’ve been scared of this place for years, myself.” Odd, how the second time he admitted that wasn’t nearly as wrenching as the first.
“Thank you,” said Jenny, her alto voice deepening to an even lower register. “I do appreciate that.”
Mark looked again toward the blank face of the connecting door. Graymalkin was gone. Osborne’s formal rooms were pitch-black. What could the little cat see there, in the dark? Anything more than shrouded furniture and dilapidated gimcracks? The house lurked beyond the door like a thief waiting to jump out and shout, “Your money or your life!”
The wind filled the already cool kitchen with sneaky little drafts. The fire was dying down, yellow flame subsiding to dull orange ripples above a forlorn pile of charcoal. The wine in Jenny’s hand shone like a ruby, reflecting the firelight. A twinkling ruby; her hand was shaking.
So a skeptical, take-charge individual like Jenny could be unnerved by things going bump in the night. Mark’s own fears of Osborne stemmed less from the place’s history than from the disruptions of his own life, and he wondered what wounds Jenny was protecting in the depth of her eyes.
She drank down the wine, set the empty glass on the mantel, and rubbed the back of her neck. Her accent, Mark thought, had thickened under the benign influence of the wine. The various British dialects made his own sound like the flat whine of a buzz saw. They were expressed with such resonance in the mouth and vigor in the lips and tongue…. The image of those body parts at work exploded in the pit of his stomach and sent a wave of warmth into his face. Get a bellyful of wine and melancholy, he sighed to himself, and the intellect takes a hike.
He hiked across the room and started to massage Jenny’s neck and shoulders. Her tendons hummed like the strings of his guitar. “You’re working too hard,” he said.
“Probably. That feels good.” She leaned into his touch.
A mild woodsy scent emanated from her hair, perfume distilled from the golden green glades of an English forest. Although she was almost as tall as he, Mark didn’t have to crane forward to see down the front of her shirt; the top two buttons were unfastened, and the fabric gaped above the valley between her breasts. At that vision his breath caught in his throat, and his hands stopped on either side of her neck.
Jenny turned her head so that first her cheek and then her lips were against his hand. Delicately she kissed each finger, caressed the nails with her tongue, then drew each fingertip in turn into her mouth.
With an effort Mark kept his knees from buckling. He didn’t quite recognize his own voice, it was so hoarse. “Jenny, is that an invitation?”
“It’s a request,” she murmured, her breath bathing the palm of his hand, her shoulders not quite pressing against his chest.
“Would you still respect me in the morning?”
“In the morning I’ll pretend nothing happened. And whether anything does is up to you, Mark.” She slipped away from his hands, turned in his arms, and looked at him with that uncompromising gaze that in the last two weeks he’d come to know and respect. “I’ll be in the bedroom. If you’d like to join me, you’d be very welcome. If you’d prefer to go back to your flat, go on. No recriminations, no burning sparks, no ashes either way, I promise you that.”
Mark opened his mouth, found nothing in it, closed it again. His head swiveled to follow Jenny as she paced across the kitchen and disappeared into the bedroom.
He touched his damp fingertips to his lips. It was suddenly very warm in the kitchen, warm enough, he thought, to melt the resolve of a much stronger man than he. At his shoulder Lucia’s little skeletons dug on. “The grave,” Mark quoted under his breath, “is a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.” The flesh might be transitory, but it was damnably insistent.
He started toward the bedroom and stopped. That chair at the table was where Hilary had sat a week ago tonight. He could see her there now, looking up at him with eager affection, the scent of roses clinging to her delicate body. Roses with thorns, like the brambles surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Sleep, he said to his mental image. Sleep, and heal, and soon I’ll wake you with a kiss.
He imagined her laying her head on her arms, closing her eyes, sighing like a weary child. Anyone who would hurt that exquisite creature should be hanged, drawn, and quartered…. He wasn’t hurting her. This was a parenthesis in his life that had nothing to do with her. “I’ll be right back,” he said to his fantasy Hilary. “I promise, I’ll be right back.”
Mark turned off the kitchen lights, plunging the room into amber-tinted gloom. The bedroom was lit by a small lamp on a bedside table. Jenny’s clothes lay over a chair by the dresser—she’d been that sure he’d come. Jenny herself lay in the bed, the Navajo blanket mounded over her body.
Mark sat down beside her. “You called?”
“Oh yes, I’m afraid so.” She reached a well-toned arm from the covers and pulled him down to her. Her lips were firm and soft at once, and her limber British tongue tasted of deep woods, ginger, and grapes.
He struggled to maintain the kiss and take off his shoes at the same time—the laces were in a knot—no, there they went, the twin thuds on the floor barely audible above the wind. Sleet was hitting the windows now, its gravelly sound deceptively gentle.
Jenny’s capable hands helped him wriggle out of his sweatshirt and jeans. The room was icy cold, the bed beneath the covers warm, and Jenny’s body just as sumptuous as he’d imagined. Mark jettisoned rational thought and abandoned himself to her embrace.
Nothing ambivalent about Jenny. Once she’d made her decision she savored it, concentrating on Mark as she’d concentrate on uncovering a priceless artifact. She
knew what she wanted and how to get it—her whispered directions tickled his ears. Enthusiastically he complied; if anyone annoyed him, it was a woman who equated lovemaking with mind-reading and expected him to know instinctively what turned her on.
Jenny’s knowledge of male responsiveness inspired Mark to make his own requests. He luxuriated in her body, inhaling it, tasting it, playing the changing rhythms of her breath. The wind, the sleet, the mutter of the house and its surrounding trees retreated to a distant dimension well beyond the creaking of the bed. Hiding in Jenny, he was safe.
At last Mark rolled his eyes back into their sockets and looked down at Jenny’s sweaty, slightly stunned face. The lines beside her mouth and eyes had been deepened by her efforts, so thin was the boundary between pain and pleasure. Her eyes were guarded again, retreating from that moment of surrender. But her smile was no less genuine for being cautious. “Thank you,” she said.
“Thank you.” Mark knew his own smile was dazed to the point of goofiness, but he didn’t care. He was in suspended animation, above the house, above the storm, in a cocoon of warmth and security found as much in the depths of the brain as in the depths of the body.
His back puckered in the chill of the room. Reluctantly he extricated himself and collapsed at Jenny’s side. She rose, pulled the covers up from the foot of the bed, spread them over him, and vanished into the shadows. Quiet splashings came from the bathroom.
Mark’s eyes barely focused on the bedside clock. What a perfect example of relativity—he would’ve sworn he’d been in that bed all night, but the clock read ten-thirty.
A snapshot in a metal frame sat beside the clock. A little girl with crisp dark hair—Jenny as a six-year-old, Mark guessed—stood beside a woman. Pamela wore the mantle of single motherhood with great dignity, the arch of her plucked brows as steadfast as the doorway of a Norman church, the waves of her blond hair set as firmly as those of the plaster saint she’d manifestly not been. Two cats sat at the feet of mother and child, gazing in deep suspicion at the camera.
The picture blurred. Mark sank into the pillow, inspecting the insides of his eyelids, listening to the sleet scratching the windows. Pretty smart, he thought drowsily, to leave his van in the garage, not only out of the weather but away from prying eyes. Not that anyone in his right mind would be out on a night like this. As for tomorrow morning—Jenny might enjoy an encore, or she might expect him to politely take his leave. Tomorrow he would face Hilary, sated as he was with another woman, his lips still moist with grapes and ginger. But Hilary would never know.
Jenny turned off the light and slipped beneath the covers beside him. Her skin was cold as marble. He tucked her into the curve of his body, warming her, and slid smoothly into oblivion.
*
In his dream, Mark wandered through a forest alive with ginger-flavored sunlight. A stream at his feet sparkled like wine, blood-red…. No, he wasn’t in a forest, but in the turret room of Osborne House, the gold and green of its windows muted and something sickly sweet clogging his nose.
Someone was watching him. Mark woke up with a start and lay disoriented, blinking into the darkness. The sleet had stopped, the wind had died down. The silence was so profound he could hear the air thrumming like a cello in his ears, accentuated by a faint pulse that was either his own heartbeat or the tick of the clock in the front hall. A woman’s body stirred uneasily beside him. “Hilary?”
“No. Sorry.” Jenny sat up. A cold draft shattered Mark’s cocoon. “It’s gone midnight. Graymalkin, what’re you on about?”
The cat crouched at the foot of the bed, fur spiky, looking like a Brillo pad with ears and a tail. A faint musky odor clung to her. Her yellow eyes were fixed as balefully on Mark and Jenny as though they had snatched away her food bowl.
Mark, too, sat up. The chill of the room seeped down his spine. Jenny turned on the bedside lamp. “Here, kittlin.” The cat made a noise part growl and part whine. Abruptly she withdrew a paw from beneath her body, licked at it, and made a face.
Jenny captured the little creature and dragged her, still grumbling, toward the head of the bed. Graymalkin’s usually pink pads were smudged with russet brown. “What the…?” The cat turned up the volume, her grumble becoming a yowl. All four legs flailing, she leaped from the bed and dived beneath it.
Jenny recoiled against Mark. He put out an arm to steady her. In the lamplight her hands where she had grasped the cat’s paws were smeared red. The cold tracing his spine plunged inward, freezing his viscera. No, his mind protested, no, no.
“Someone’s slagging me off,” said Jenny. “Gormless fool. I’ll sort him out.” The bed heaved as she grabbed for her clothes.
Maybe it was a practical joke. Stifling an inner voice—don’t go look—Mark clambered toward his own clothing.
In the kitchen the fire had died to sullen embers. Jenny turned on the lights, seized her flashlight from the table, and unlocked the connecting door. Mark stayed close beside her past the yawning doors of the pantries and into the dining room.
The beam of the flashlight picked out the chandelier, its cobwebs like gossamer, the massive table squatting below. In the music room the chairs stood in rows before the piano, a phantom audience for a phantom recital. The rictus grin of the ivory keyboard flashed and died in the moving light. In the entrance hall the pendulum of the clock swished back and forth, back and forth, gleaming as Jenny waved the shaft of light across its face. The ornate hands indicated twelve-thirty.
A long dark shape lay on the carpet in the front parlor. Jenny stopped in the doorway, light puddled at her feet. Mark heard her inhale to speak, and then exhale in a moan, her anger draining into fear. His stomach felt like a clenched fist. Please let it be a joke. Please.
The air was still, thick with musky organic odors. Mark set his hand on top of Jenny’s and lifted the flashlight. The beam revealed a pair of feet in running shoes, toes turned up and slightly out. Then khaki pants legs smeared with russet. Then a leather jacket, plackets open wide around a glistening, spongy red mass.
Mark’s face went tingling cold. He gulped, quelling a surge of nausea. Jenny’s hand trembled. “Bloody hell,” she murmured. “Oh, bloody sodding hell.”
A pair of glasses lay just beyond an outstretched right hand. The formerly white collar of a rugby shirt shone wetly crimson. Above it was the face of Nathan Sikora, eyes wide with uncomprehending shock, mouth open on a cry whose echo still seemed to hang in the air, stirring the curtains, raising dust from the rug, drawing the hair on the back of Mark’s neck tautly erect.
But beneath Nathan’s body the carpet was sodden, its dust laid. Photographs lay strewn across it. A multitude of faces looked up—Coburgs of every age and description, a young Lucia, a blond woman with plucked brows, chauffeurs and businessmen and cowboys in wide hats. In the crook of Nathan’s left arm was a pink sweater splattered with reddish-brown smudges.
His eyes were as glazed as those in the photographs, no longer human. That gaping mouth had laughed with Hilary at the reception. Those inert hands had handed around chocolate chip cookies.
“Who could do such a thing?” whispered Jenny.
Mark choked out. “God, why?”
They retreated to the entrance hall, juggling the flashlight between them so that shadows swooped like birds of prey across the paneling and disappeared into the dark at the top of the stairs. “We’ll have to have the police,” Jenny said grimly.
“Yes.”
“You should go. Now. I’ll say you weren’t here.”
Mark saw himself fleeing into the cold, clean, outside air. He thought longingly of his apartment, with its familiar books and models, Hilary’s picture on his dresser…. She was coming back today. “No lies,” he said. “It’ll all come out in the end anyway, and lying just makes it cheap. It wasn’t cheap, Jenny.”
For a long moment her eyes searched his. Then she looked away, withdrawing into some private place that even in their most passionate moment he had never reached
. “Right.”
Each relentless tick-tock of the clock was a sledgehammer blow against Mark’s head. Nathan. Hilary. Jenny. Not cheap, no. Love and death were never anything but hideously expensive.
He and Jenny walked back to the kitchen through the dense shadows of Osborne House.
Chapter Ten
The television set angled out from the wall, seemingly suspended in mid-air. Hilary craned her neck to look up at it. “…Dallas/Fort Worth area,” said the announcer, “with the cold front hitting about six p.m. Our Friday night weather here in central Indiana isn’t as startling.”
Hilary visualized the kitchen at Osborne, Jenny pouring tea, Graymalkin dozing in a picturesque pose, Mark playing his guitar. Her eyes smarted in the glare of fluorescent light. She leaned over the blast of the radiator and pulled aside a corner of the curtain. The view was of a dark parking lot, not a huge live oak tree. Last Sunday in Mark’s apartment the air had been filled with the warm sweet scent of roses. The hospital room smelled of disinfectant. Hilary tasted it in the back of her throat, as though a shocked parent had washed out her mouth with it.
Her father’s voice interrupted the drone of the weatherman. “What’s this boyfriend of yours do again?”
“He’s an archaeologist. In graduate school.”
“Living on some kind of university grant? About time he settled down to a real job. Maybe I can find him a place in Research and Development.”
“He’s perfectly happy working on his Ph.D., Daddy.”
“If he’s going to be supporting my daughter, he needs to do it right.”
Hilary’s jaw had been clenched for forty-eight hours and ached all the way into her ears. You don’t have to buy Mark off, she thought. She said, “We’re just friends. Besides which, I’m supporting myself now.”
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