Jenny, armed now with clipboard and trowel, stepped down into the trench. Mark glanced nostalgically at her T-shirt. “Carpe Diem” it read. “Seize the Day”. Yeah, he thought, we did.
“I’m going to send the students who’re working here,” she said, “to start another trench in an area that was covered by the houses and shops. This structure will be a bugger to sort out—we’ll have to peel it away stratum by stratum. And that’s not an imperial ‘we’.”
The students were pecking at a collapsed brick wall a few yards away. Quietly Mark asked Jenny, “You think the Cross is here?”
She quirked an eyebrow at him.
“This structure has been Osborne property since it was built,” he explained. “What we’re uncovering doesn’t agree with the documentation—does that signify inefficiency or secrecy? Why expand the trench to an open-area excavation? Why exclude the amateur diggers?”
“Right.” With a soothing “down, boy” gesture, Jenny turned to inspect the fricasee of garden tools. Her trowel delicately separated a blackened axe head from a gap-toothed rake. “I’ve tapped on every wall, sounded every floor, tested every ceiling in the house. I didn’t find any secret doors in the wainscoting or any hidden passages behind a fireplace.”
“Or behind the grandfather clock?”
She grimaced. “When I took a shufti Saturday night, the pendulum was swinging again. I thought I heard footsteps on the first floor Sunday morning, but I didn’t look.”
“Ghosts? Or trespassers?”
“Or my own guilty conscience?” Jenny looked toward the house. Dolores’s Cadillac was parked beside Osborne’s veranda, flanked by Kenneth’s Lexus and the Wards’ BMW. The sunlight radiated in waves from each waxed finish, almost incinerating the carpenter’s truck nearby. “Carrion crows, the lot of them, picking over Arthur’s bones. And Nathan’s. And my mother’s.”
“They seem to hate each other,” said Mark. “And yet they stick together. Maybe no one else will claim them. Not that you have to. I’ll tell you what I told Hilary yesterday: We can’t choose our relatives. Blood is most emphatically not thicker than water.”
Jenny’s tense expression relaxed a little.
Encouraged, Mark continued, “I don’t see how the Coburgs are going to find the Cross when you couldn’t. Of course, they might have that carpenter in there dismantling the place.”
“It’s their house.” Jenny stood and called to the students. “Here, gather round. I want you lot to start a new trench over there. Preston, if you’d be so kind…”
Mark watched her stride through the dust and dandelions. If the Cross had been in the garage, it had burned, too. She knew that. No need to point it out to her.
So Jenny was “safe”, was she? Hilary’s insight made Mark shift uneasily, his knees crunching. If it weren’t for Nathan’s death—and Jenny’s startling disclosures—Jenny would’ve been a delightful and uncomplicated encounter. They would still be friends, sharing the secret smiles of people with money in the bank.
Mark had told Hilary he loved her. He’d done what he could to mend matters. As for the matter of Nathan’s death, he didn’t see a blasted thing he could do. Someone had either murdered Nathan with cruel and deliberate malice aforethought, or had brushed him aside from some plot as casually as swatting a fly. Just as someone had brushed Felicia aside? No, that was too much of a coincidence. Mark voted for malice.
He’d had nightmares Saturday and Sunday nights, distorted visions of Hilary lying bloodied, eyes staring sightlessly, in Jenny’s bed. Adult versions of the dreams he’d had as a child, he decided. And yet whatever the killer’s motive, it had nothing to do with Hilary.
Preston detoured to the tool shed for pegs, string, and measuring rods. “What started the fire in the garage, do you remember?”
Mark remembered. “A defective space heater. It was pretty chilly that night. March 22. It was a hot fire. They must’ve been storing paint or insecticides or something out here.” He scraped at the cremated remains of a shovel; its metal scoop was warped, its handle a long strip of carbon which collapsed at his touch. He glanced around, but Jenny hadn’t noticed.
“What else would you put in a garage?” Preston walked over to Jenny’s designated spot and drove a peg into the ground.
Mark sat back on his haunches. The ruined garage-carriage house had been bulldozed after it burned, leaving a twelve-to-eighteen inch stratum of intact foundation and carbonized debris beneath a layer of dirt and gravel which the students had sliced through in the first two weeks of the dig, and which Jenny was now starting to clear away entirely. The Coburgs had covered the building like a cat covering its waste; why bother to rebuild when Dolores was moving them out anyway?
A car door slammed. Rosalind Zapata crunched through the debris toward the dig. On any other woman her skirt, blouse, and jacket would have looked casual. She might as well be wearing a uniform with a badge on the pocket and a gun holstered at her hip. Behind her, Frank Yeager leaned against an unmarked car, all too obviously working backup.
“Jenny?” Zapata called. “You called this morning, said you had a photograph for me?”
“All right,” Preston said to the students’ bugged-out eyes, “let’s start digging.” He set the example by whistling “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho”, his shovel scooping and emptying industriously.
The students followed suit, but their ears almost rotated backward, they focused so intently on Jenny and Zapata.
Jenny took a photograph from her clipboard. “There are precious few snaps of Felicia in the house, mind you, but I did find this in a magazine in the tower room. Arthur must’ve been remembering the good old days.”
Mark sidled around to where he could see the picture. Yes, the tiny, resolute blonde was Felicia. And it certainly looked as if the sweater she was wearing was the same one Nathan had been clutching as he died. Zapata turned the picture over. The back was inscribed “Tyler Rose Festival, September 1974”. “Six months before she died. Hm.”
Mark waited for some revelation to follow that “hm”, but none came. Instead, Zapata put the photo in her jacket pocket and took out Mark’s Swiss Army knife. “Here you go. It’s clean.”
“Have you tested Travis’s clasp knife?”
Although Zapata was a head shorter than he was, she still managed to look down her nose at him. “Yes. Nothing.”
“Well, they all have alibis.”
“So they do. We have photographs showing Dolores, Sharon, Kenneth, and Vasarian at the charity ball. And there was some controversy at the Cutting Horse Stakes that had to be resolved with an instant replay camera, so we have pictures of Travis, too.”
“Hilary was in Indiana,” said Jenny. “Mark and I vouch for each other.”
“Jenny!” Mark complained.
“Most homicides are committed by an acquaintance of the victim,” Jenny retorted, “Isn’t that so, Detective?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Mark asked, “Are you making any headway?”
“This isn’t my only case.”
He rather liked her proprietary my. “But the Chief is leaning on you, isn’t he? Socially prominent family and all that.”
Zapata was a lady. She only looked disgusted, she didn’t spit in the dirt. “I spoke to Jacob Sikora, Nathan’s father, about Felicia’s letter. Which we didn’t find either in Nathan’s office or his house, by the way—it’s vanished along with the Ripper material. Anyway, Jacob remembers the squabble over the ring. It was English garnet, used to belong to Felicia’s grandmother. Arthur swore he’d lost it, and Dolores swore she’d never seen it.”
“A garnet ring?” Jenny demanded. “My mother had an antique garnet ring. I first saw it in her jewelry box—it must’ve been right after Arthur gave her the push.”
“Do you still have it?”
“No. It wasn’t among her effects. I last saw it….” She stopped, contemplating the pastel colors of the city fast ripening to emerald green. “I last saw it on holiday
from university, perhaps 1974.”
“Felicia was murdered in 1975,” said Mark.
“Is there a connection?” Zapata asked him with such labored courtesy it became sarcasm.
He could see himself like a struggling swimmer in the depths of her dark eyes. “It might be worth pursuing.”
“That’s for me to decide.” Her tone distinctly told him not to worry his handsome little head about that.
Mark turned on his heel and climbed back down into the trench. She sure had a low tolerance for suspects. Male suspects, especially.
Speaking of which, Kenneth Coburg was ambling across the lawn toward the dig, trailing his tweed jacket over his shoulder like a fashion model. His wide, flower-emblazoned tie added to the effect, but his saturnine expression didn’t. He looked like a sulky child forced to attend a cotillion.
Jenny’s shoulders straightened, running out her cannon. Mark propped one foot on the edge of the trench and draped his forearm across his thigh. In the driveway Yeager took a couple of steps forward. A mutter ran through the female segment of the student population, but Kenneth wasn’t shopping today. “Good morning, Rosalind,” he said. “Jenny. Mark.” For a moment Mark expected Kenneth to throw him his jacket and ask for it to be pressed. “My mother tells me you delivered the ivory figurine to the museum.”
“Yes,” Zapata replied. “It’s quite safe.”
Hilary had it, Mark told himself. It couldn’t be safer.
“And that you found my sister’s hair on Nathan’s jacket.”
“It might be her hair. It might not.”
“The little bitch was…” Ken’s lips and teeth formed the “f” and then abandoned it. “…having an affair with Nathan, and she’s got a hell of a temper—my eardrums are permanently damaged from growing up with her screaming—but she’s too much of a wimp to have stabbed him or anything.”
“Or anything?” Zapata asked.
Kenneth turned to Jenny. “As for my long-lost sister, you’ll forgive me if I don’t throw myself on you in transports of joy.”
“You would’ve been only too pleased to throw yourself on me last week.”
Kenneth’s face hardened, freezer-burned. He glanced at Mark. Mark looked blandly back, tapping his leg with the trowel. That was the best he could do without a buck’s antlers, or a cock’s spurs, or the bladder capacity of a tomcat.
Kenneth slowly shook out his jacket, put it on, and assumed his best board room manner. “Jenny, how much longer do you think the excavation will take? We’d like to start working on at least one end of Victoria Square—this one, closest to the house.”
“I’m going to do an open area excavation of the garage,” she replied. “It’s a superb example for the students of destruction stratigraphy, especially when we consider how much documentation we have to back up the physical evidence. It might take three weeks or more, depending.”
She’s fudging, Mark thought. But then, she’s in competition with Vasarian for the Cross. With the Coburgs, too, since they now know Arthur had it here forty years ago.
“The Foundation,” Kenneth said, “contracted for an archaeological survey lasting no longer than five weeks. If it goes longer than that….”
“You’ll find me in violation of contract and give me the chop?”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions. After all, you are family.”
Jenny’s expression seemed to hover between a whoop of laughter and a gag reflex.
Zapata said evenly, “Don’t worry, I’m sure the notoriety of the house will be bringing in customers for years to come.” She didn’t need to add, You don’t have any contracts with me.
With a mocking little bow, more like an impression of Vasarian than an imitation, Kenneth turned and strolled back toward the house. Several figures left the veranda and sorted themselves into cars; Travis and Sharon hurriedly, as though escaping school before they could be given detentions, and Dolores with a neck-craning inspection of the dig and of Ken’s advancing figure in which curiosity warred with contempt. She climbed into her Cadillac and drove so closely by Yeager that he had to flatten himself against his car.
The maroon BMW passed with room to spare, Travis and Sharon invisible behind their tinted windows. Eyes narrowed, Zapata stalked back to the car, took the wheel, and disappeared toward downtown.
“No Vasarian,” mused Jenny.
“Napping in his coffin in the Coburgs’ basement,” Mark returned. “You did check Osborne’s basement, didn’t you?”
“No trapdoors. No whips and chains, either.” With an exasperated snort, Jenny returned to the students.
Before long it was lunch time. Mark went home, ate a microwave pizza, considered calling Hilary, and rejected that notion. By the time he returned to the dig, the day was growing cooler, a flock of cumulus clouds crowding up the sky from the west like sheep blocking a Scottish highway.
He saw that Jenny was sitting on the back porch, contemplating a printout, while Graymalkin sunned herself on the step. At the edge of the garage trench, Preston put away the camera, produced the drawing board, and glanced warily upward. “Harold Taft said it’s going to rain tonight, and since he’s been predicting the weather here since I was knee-high to a horned toad, I believe him.”
“Don’t see horned toads any more,” said Mark. “Pesticides got ‘em.” Students were milling around in the garden trench. Amy called excitedly, “Look, look, we found bones! Should we call the police?”
What? Mark sprinted to the trench with Preston on his heels. Jenny was still bent over the printout, too far away to have heard.
Those sprawling spider-legged streaks at the bottom of the trench were the decayed roots of rosebushes; having planted numerous roses for Lucia, Mark was intimately acquainted with the species. Among the roots were several cylindrical chalky brown lumps. Mark poked at one with his trowel. Various hot breaths made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
He laughed. “Ossified garden hose. The heat of the fire probably dried it out. Although most hoses will eventually desiccate if left out over the summer in this climate. Plot it on your chart, then bag it.”
Muttering in disappointment, the students went back to work. Preston exhaled in relief. Jenny and Graymalkin were looking curiously at him; Mark went to clue them in.
“That’s all we need, isn’t it?” Jenny asked. “Another body.”Graymalkin fastidiously washed her paws and went back to sleep.
By quitting time the sheeplike clouds had turned to wolves, crowding the sky with black misshapen bodies, growling with thunder. The students sped to their cars in a cold, rain-scented wind. Mark and Preston staked the plastic over the excavated areas while Jenny fussed over the ruins of the garage, muttering incantations against wind and water erosion. Whatever artifacts were hidden there had been safer beneath the ground.
The carpenter’s truck followed Preston’s import down the driveway and onto York Boulevard, barely missing Hilary’s Caprice turning in. She and Preston exchanged waves. The carpenter offered her an apologetic salute.
Her car stopped, but she didn’t get out. She can’t be nervous about facing me or Jenny, Mark thought. No matter what her internal barometric pressure, Hilary was almost always externally calm. He admired that, and yet, at the same time, it annoyed him. If she could shout at Ben the way she’d shouted at him, she might finally heal. But Ben had intended to hurt her. Shouting was inadequate.
“I’ll put on the kettle,” said Jenny, “if you and Hilary want a cuppa.”
“Thanks,” Mark told her.
Jenny trudged toward the house. Hilary was still sitting in the car. Mark thought about pressing his nose against the window and making faces at her, but when he saw her hands clenched on the steering wheel and her tight, pinched mouth, he decided against it. He opened the door. “Take off your coat and stay a while.”
“Oh, hi,” she said, as if she hadn’t expected to find him there. “How are you?”
“Fair to middling,”
&nb
sp; “Oh.”
Mark helped her out of the car, retrieved and gave her her car keys, and shut the door. It was like manipulating a doll. “The Coburgs had a carpenter out here today, looking for the Cross, I guess. But Jenny thinks it’s in the excavation.”
Hilary sent a searching glance across the dig. The clear plastic sheets, mottled with dirt, puffed as fitfully up and down in the wind as though the ground breathed.
Now what? Mark asked himself.
The wind whipped her hair back from her face, and her supple body bent like a reed in the blast. Mark braced her with an arm around her shoulders and told her about Zapata’s visit, the picture of the sweater, and the garnet ring.
She nodded. “That’s not all, Mark. That’s far from all.”
A gust of wind turned the leaves of the live oaks inside out. Raindrops hit Hilary and Mark like buckshot. They climbed back into her car and slammed the doors. A streak of lightning bifurcated the clouds, thunder rattled the windows, and rain pounded down on the roof. It was like sitting in a car wash, the world blurred behind a noisy cascade of water.
Mark asked, “What’s wrong?”
“I looked at the Regensfeld artifacts today,” Hilary said, her usually melodious voice dull and flat. “They’re not the same. Someone’s made a group of forgeries and left them in place of the real ones.”
Mark’s jaw dropped, and his eyes bulged. In the back of his mind one tiny voice said, what the hell, while another said, of course.
“Whoever did it must’ve killed Nathan. Maybe he found out. Maybe he wouldn’t help. Maybe…” Hilary slapped the steering wheel in a gesture of mingled rage and frustration. “…maybe he was helping them.”
Mark managed to close his mouth. “Are you sure they’re fakes? What tests did you do?”
She turned on him, eyes blazing. He ducked. But she wasn’t angry with him. “How can I do tests? I don’t dare. Either someone who’s in on the plot will notice, or someone who isn’t will accuse me of overstepping my authority—whichever, the word will get back to the killer.”
Garden of Thorns Page 23
